Embracing Trans Realities Adds Value to Innovation.
By: Perre L. Shelton
To begin, what is reality? In the context of this piece, reality is the behavioral, emotional, and linguistic outcome of ascribing meaning to the world around us. That is, a street light in the reality of a bird is perceived as a place to perch; for a human, it may be perceived as a form of safety at night. Even still, for a human who studies birds, a street light could be perceived as a contribution to light pollution that disrupts the migratory pattern of animals who are guided by their capacity to see the stars. Trans realities, like those of any demographic population, are diverse. Therefore, this piece should not be mistaken to say that there is a singular trans. reality to which others should subscribe. This piece is to suggest that trans. realities are different enough from the heteronormative cis-gender binary to develop our overall capacity to stretch our thinking beyond what is perceived as normal and “correct”.
The true spirit of innovation moves beyond popular convention, in order to redefine entire industries, economies, and social perceptions of the “right way”. Consider ride-sharing and home-sharing organizations who broke from conventional wisdom about vacation real-estate and public transportation. Some of the largest ride-sharing organizations don’t own a single vehicle, and some of the largest vacation housing organizations don’t own a single piece of property. It is valuable to an innovations team to be comprised of members that have cognitive patterns, which maintain the capacity to defy conventional wisdom in order to design products for elements of the human experience that mainstream society doesn’t yet fully understand. The value added is in that through the design processes which embrace the non-binary spectral approach to making sense of the world, development teams can unlock aspects of the human spirit with which, perhaps, we didn’t know we lived.
Also, if organizations hope to keep up with the shifting cultural paradigms through its production and operations, (that is, in order to offer products and services that reflect the cultural orientations of the people to which they intend to market), there is a need to embrace the social changes that are occurring throughout the world. By and large, and with much hard work from advocates, social justice change-makers, industry disrupters, and paradigm-shifters, trans. and gender non-conforming perspectives are emerging as more mainstream. Another, more academic, articulation of the trans. and gender non-conforming experience can be found here.
One highlight from that writing is to suggest that the trans. reality is not just useful for trans. people; it is also useful for non-trans. identifying people to be able to locate themselves on a larger spectrum of possibilities as opposed to locating oneself on an oversimplified binary that doesn’t do as well to capture the diverse breadth of the human experience. This is critical to the work of human-user interaction professionals because people do not bring their bodies and a generic set of cognitive processes to the interaction experience; they also bring their cultural and gendered experience as well. In fact, a complete discussion of what it means to bring one’s personality to the interaction experience would engage everything from human temperament, affective patterns, relational and social sense of self—all of which are implicated in one’s identity as trans. because gender in-and-of-itself is a biopsychosocial phenomenon for all people.
Further, the spirit of locating oneself within the trans. reality (instead of the common practice of asking trans. people to locate themselves on a gender-binary relational system), is part of a broader opportunity to see the possibility in other things in a similar fashion. That is to say, it is a different cognitive exercise to look at someone different than you and ask them to reduce their reality into one of two available categories, than it is to look at someone different than you and attempt to engage their reality as an extension of our shared humanity on a spectrum or set of spectra. It is precisely within this cognitive approach to understanding the world that could produce operational outcomes and product designs, which reflect the world as it is changing. Indeed, a world that is expanding in the ways that people identify should trigger an expansion in our thinking about the products and services with which those people desire to interact.
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