When I started getting really excited about zero-knowledge technology, I began listing how it could improve my daily life. There are a bunch of « normal » use cases, but I have extras.

That’s because I’m transgender and, more specifically, non-binary.

I haven’t changed my sex marker or my name on my official documents, and I have no intention of doing so for a combination of safety, practicality, and personal reasons.

This means I have to face many shenanigans in many aspects of my life.

So, today, I wanted to write this more personal blog post. The context seems appropriate, too.

To me, the point of tech is to create a better world where everyone belongs and to offer the infrastructure that allows us to trust each other more.

Let’s discuss four simple ways in which zero-knowledge tech can improve the lives of trans people like me. Some of them are big; others are purely comfort.

I regularly visited my previous job’s Silicon Valley headquarters and always wasted a lot of energy during security checks; I’m not expecting the situation to get better now that I’m in crypto, with its love of conferences and events. (And to be clear, I love conferences and events! I just wish the travel was easier and that I could do more of it by train and other environmentally friendly travel modes.)

People call me « madam » based on my passport. It makes sense.

And there’s always the shitty moment when I know I have to show a passport that has information that I disagree with. No, this is not my name; yes, I’m showing you that name every time I take the Eurostar because I don’t have a choice.

In my case, I entirely pass as female, and people don’t do a double take on my passport. It’s only a matter of comfort, not of security, for me. For many trans people, it’s much worse than that. Lots of trans women have to « boymode » through travel, which comes with a high psychological cost; if they don’t boymode, then their safety is often at stake.

With a sufficiently accepted zk system for proof of passport, I could show evidence that:

1. I am French

2. I hold a United States visa without having to show everything else.

I went to a fancy business school, and I live in France. French employers can get pretty intense about diplomas and education, so your business school still matters ten years into your career (although Hylé has not been French on this aspect, which is fantastic).

If a potential employer were to ask me for proof of my qualifications, I’d probably push back as much as I could. My diploma uses my birth name, and I don’t want to share that with my hiring manager!

This ties into blind hiring and merit-based hiring in general. If I could send proof that I graduated from that program, then worked at this and that company, and that I also hold a given marketing certification without ever disclosing that I’m a trans person whose name isn’t the one on their ID, I’d very much like that. It would eliminate some bias on the recruiter’s side if they didn’t have that kind of information from the very beginning of the process and only had it after our first interaction.

In the end, I’d still need to provide my social security card and tax information, which both bear my legal name, to my employer, but that’s just one company — the one that I decided to commit to. (In a larger company, my hiring manager and teammates would never see that!)

There’s this law in France that says that you can’t really list « good » or « bad » doctors because a doctor is a doctor. So lists of trans-friendly doctors, or doctors to avoid at all costs, are usually well-hidden.

Or are they?

The nonprofit Fransgenre maintains the most famous and exhaustive list. To access the list, you have to request to join a Discord server. For this request, you’ll get several questions and will have to go through an extensive check, which includes video calls. Once you’re in… you get a link to a Google Spreadsheet and a recommendation to « please do not share. This list has to stay private, or we won’t get decent healthcare. »

Which, first of all, yikes. Wouldn’t it be great if doctors were actually just doctors? But no, they’re human, and they have opinions. Ew.

However, this also needs to be more secure. I can copy that link and throw it around anywhere I want.

I think many of us would feel much safer if access to the list was gated to a zk-proof that we’re in the Discord server. (There could be other checks that don’t require joining a semi-public server in a for-profit walled garden, but we have to start somewhere, and databases of trans people are never a good idea.)

Ok, this one is less universal, but it has been very annoying, so I figured I’d still share it.

So, here goes: my city offers sports courses, which are open to everyone who lives in said city and where pricing depends on your revenue. The idea is really cool, and all cities should offer that!

Since I love swimming, I signed up for a Wednesday class. Except when I signed up, since the city needed to know my tax bracket, it made me sign up with the unified French identity framework. That framework includes my exact revenue and… my birth name, duh.

So, when I came to the first session, the coach had all of our legal names on his list. I asked him to cross mine out and replace it with Alex. I didn’t even get into the whole trans thing because this is a swim class, and I don’t have time to explain transidentity to a PE student while wearing a women’s swimsuit. And also, sports are hard enough as they are, jeez! (The guy prints a new roll call every week, so I just gave up on that swimming class after 3 weeks because he forgot and called me my old name in front of everyone.)

I can’t believe I’m asking for something as simple as « Please let me submit my tax bracket and proof that I live in this city, but manually enter everything else ». And yet, here I am.

Zero-knowledge is excellent for privacy and security. But it also extends to everyday use cases where you can only ask for the actually necessary information and let everything else be filled by people in ways that you probably hadn’t realized would make their lives better. This is tied to privacy, but it’s mostly about making everyone’s life a bit better with no extra effort. And making people’s lives a bit better is precisely what Hylé wants to do!

(Cover image: Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. I don’t think the typo is on purpose. Yes, it bothers me.)