Designing Sexual Communication Tools for and with Transgender and Queer Youth

Sexual communication is critical to having healthy relationships and addressing sexual health inequities, but there are barriers to openly sharing clear information with one’s partner(s), especially for transgender and queer youth. Technology-based interventions offer strategies for mediating sexual communication; however, sexual communication literature is overly focused on contraceptive use, and little work has explored how to identify effective strategies through community-based participatory research. We therefore describe a multi-year design partnership with a youth advisory board made up of 18 United States-based transgender and queer youth that yielded two technology-based sexual communication tools. Desire Dialogues facilitates reflection and preparation to discuss one’s sexual boundaries with potential partners, and the Intimate Disclosure Toolkit guides users who wish to disclose personal information with others. By documenting our community- and value-driven design process, we identify participatory challenges, five design principles, and an agenda for future research that can guide the next generation of technology-based sexual communication tools.