Although there are millions of transgender people in the world, a lack of information exists about their health issues. This issue has consequences for the medical field, which only has a nascent understanding of how to identify and meet this population's health-related needs. Social media sites like Twitter provide new opportunities for transgender people to overcome these barriers by sharing their personal health experiences. Our research employs a computational framework to collect tweets from self-identified transgender users, detect those that are health-related, and identify their information needs. This framework is significant because it provides a macro-scale perspective on an issue that lacks investigation at national or demographic levels. Our findings identified 54 distinct health-related topics that we grouped into 7 broader categories. Further, we found both linguistic and topical differences in the health-related information shared by transgender men (TM) as com-pared to transgender women (TW). These findings can help inform medical and policy-based strategies for health interventions within transgender communities. Also, our proposed approach can inform the development of computational strategies to identify the health-related information needs of other marginalized populations.

Tinder is rolling out new features to help its transgender users have a better experience in the app. Beginning Tuesday, the dating app will allow users to identify as genders other than male or female on their profile and choose whether they want their gender displayed on their profile. The company says the update will make it easier for transgender people to make connections within the app. Tinder is also taking new steps to tamp down on harassment on its platform, particularly harassment that targets the transgender community. With the update, launching Tuesday in the United States, Canada and UK, Tinder users are able to identify their gender using terms from the app's settings.

Since the popular dating app Tinder launched in 2012, new users have been given two options to describe themselves when they sign up: male or female. But that seemingly simple question presented a conundrum for people like Liz Busillo, a graphic designer in Philadelphia who identifies as agender--meaning Busillo identifies as neither a man, nor a woman. "I figured, I present in a way that's very feminine, so I'll just put down female and clarify in my profile," says Busillo, who uses the singular pronoun they. What ensued was a slew of negative interactions, mostly with straight men, including aggression, harassment, and someone reporting their profile for being "fake." Many other transgender and gender non-conforming Tinder users have reported similar experiences on a platform where gender was presumed to be as straightforward as swiping left or right.