In the last couple of months, we’ve covered efforts to rig science to support selected social justice aims — citation justice, for example, and suppression of embarrassing data. A new one is being mooted now: data activism:

Here’s the Abstract from an open-access paper at Big Data & Society:

Amidst proliferating threats to trans rights, transgender activists are using data and data activism to advocate for and to protect trans communities. This transgender-led study asks “How do trans activists use data in their activism?” We interviewed 16 activists engaged in trans community care: from community healthcare to media production to policy making, our participants are making and using data about trans people to serve and support trans communities. Our findings reveal that participants use tactical approaches to data and data science that were consistent with existing data activist literature and contemporary approaches to data refusal. However, what emerged were more than sets of tactics — our participants described ways of knowing with and about data that are grounded in their experiences of (racialized, disabled, aging, queer) transness. Taken together, we consider these ways of knowing to be a trans data epistemology. Drawing on literature from trans theory, data activism, critical data studies, philosophy, and critical social theory we offer a narrative of trans people as creators of knowledge, data-based and otherwise, undergirded by four pillars of a trans data epistemology: categories are provisional and productive, data can be a tool of community care, community well-being is more important than “accurate” data, and data makes us visible to institutions.

Stevens, N., & Doğan, A. L. (2025). Trans data epistemologies: Transgender ways of knowing with data. Big Data & Society, 12(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251381694 (Original work published 2025)

The punch line is, of course, the last one: “community well-being is more important than “accurate” data, and data makes us visible to institutions.”

Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who was Canceled for insisting that humans are sex binary, comments at Reality’s Last Stand,

Now, a new peer-reviewed article in Big Data & Society breaks new ground by openly arguing that lying with data is not only acceptable but morally required when it comes to transgender issues …

The paper, titled “Trans Data Epistemologies: Transgender Ways of Knowing with Data,” was written by Nikko Stevens, an assistant professor of statistical and data sciences at Smith College, and Amelia Lee Doğan, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington and research affiliate with MIT’s Data + Feminism Lab. What makes this paper truly remarkable is how the authors openly admit that “truth” in their work takes a back seat to politics.

“‘Data Activism’ and the Death of Truth, November 3, 2025

Following the approach of philosopher Nancy Pearcey, this paper perhaps best seen as an instance of post-modernism triumphing over modernism and wearing science as a skin suit. There is no point in even asking whether science will benefit as a result.