Nobody Puts Redditor in a Binary: Digital Demography, Collective Identities, and Gender in a Subreddit Network

DOI

Prior work on transgender technology users in CSCW has primarily focused on how they interact with algorithms and communication technology, empirically identifying specific use cases and profiles, and speaking largely to the designers and developers of these platforms. This work has emphasized how trans people are excluded, harmed, and misrepresented in existing platforms, algorithms, and research methods. While these critiques are important, this paper explores what trans-inclusive quantitative methods could be by applying a participant- or user-driven approach. While the problem of trans-inclusive, -affirming, or -empowering research methods is not specifically a CSCW problem---as we directly confront by comparing and contrasting the perspectives of CSCW and conventional demography---we argue that a CSCW lens may be uniquely suited to addressing it. To this end, this paper makes several contributions: conceptually, we identify points of increasing convergence between conventional demographic research methods (and criticisms thereof) and CSCW, focusing on shared limitations surrounding how identity is handled in research; methodologically, we present a sketch of how these limitations might be addressed by using social network analysis to “triangulate” social identities while considering them relative and situated; empirically, we implement these methods in a case study of gender within the broader social context of Reddit and discuss the results.