How the Computer Taught Us to See

The span between 1973 and 1981 marks a number of significant changes in computer history, medical history, and queer and transgender (trans) history in the United States: the development of the earliest object-oriented graphical user interfaces used in the Xerox Alto computer prototype and its commercial successor the Xerox Star; the development and publication of the third revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (or DSM-III), used by physicians for medical diagnosis, which more than doubled its number of diagnostic categories from the DSM-II; and finally, the removal of “Sexual Orientation Disturbance (Homosexuality)” from the DSM and the addition of a new diagnosis, “Gender Identity Disorder” (now “Gender Dysphoria”), in the DSM-III. This article performs a horizontal cut across time to place medical history, queer and trans history, and computer history side by side, looking closely at how changes in the visualization and datafication of medical diagnosis developed alongside the ways computers were imagined into visual, screen-based technologies that recapitulate the same racialized and gendered logics of medical surveillance and thus of the state: that seeing something is the same as understanding its nature. We must think of software history as medical history, and computer history as queer and trans history. Intimately connecting these threads of trans history, trans of color critique, medical history, and computer history is the invisibility of mediation and the normalization of power that occurs as the result of it: the mediation of the visuality of the computer's graphical user interface; the mediation of medical diagnosis as the conversion of embodied experience into so-called medical fact; and the mediation of bureaucratic documentation that reduces human life into data points, digestible and computable en masse by institutions and by computers.