There are now thousands of studies on how people use, experience, and are even changed by their use of dating and hookup apps (hereafter: dating apps). I read hundreds of these articles, reports, and white papers that focus on or mention lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans*, and sapphic (LBQT*S) experiences in order to design my imminently launching LBQT*S Dating and Hookup App research survey. In this research, I unsurprisingly found the following:

1. studies of “LGBTQ” people’s use of dating apps or studies about the experiences people from the LGBTQQIA2+ community tend to focus on gay men, almost exclusively assuming these men to be cisgender
2. studies of women almost exclusively assume their research participants are cisgender, and often assume they are or focus just on heterosexual women
3. dating app studies in general focus on the experiences of cisgender people, usually assuming that research paricipants identify as cisgender

In fact, a recent …

In late 1999, I signed myself up for my first dating site, the now long defunct PlanetOut. I landed in New York City thinking I’d never meet anyone that I wanted to talk to at a bar or a club—primarily because I’d spent the last four years in a women’s college where I conveniently met all of my dates and girlfriends in our dorms. Within a few weeks on the site, I made a date with a queer femme who told me she was taken by my description of myself as a tall butch deeply obsessed with the poetry of Frank O’Hara. But the woman who met me out front of the Strand Book Store was not a match for me. Our politics worked; our cultural aesthetics were a fail. I was in management consultant-style non-iron Brooks Brothers (sigh, oh baby Jack); she wore mixed faux tiger-zebra-cheetah prints and had …