Rainbow Trap: How Inclusive Approaches to Data Still Box Us In

Across data practices and systems, some LGBTQ lives and experience are now counted. But what did these communities need to give up in order to be included?

Is our current suite of inclusive counting machines capable of reflecting the full diversity of people’s experiences – or continuing to erase those who sit outside a predefined list of gender, sexes and sexualities?

Join researcher and writer Kevin Guyan to explore ideas from his new book Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Categories and the Dangers of Inclusion.

Through a tour of six different systems – stretching from hate crime reporting to dating apps – the book highlights how the promise of inclusion requires LGBTQ people to locate themselves in an ever-growing list of classifications, categories and labels.

This requirement to be classified catches us all in a rainbow trap – determining what LGBTQ lives are valued and what queer futures are possible.

Dr Kevin Guyan is a writer and researcher whose work explores the intersection of data and identity. He is the author of Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) and Queer Data: Using Gender, Sex and Sexuality for Action (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). Kevin is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Gender + Sexuality Data Lab.

Where? Humanities Bridgeford Street - G6. The University of Manchester.

When? Tuesday 25 November, 1.30 pm.

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Host or Publisher Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences