Excluded by default: The hostile design of binary gender as state-algorithmic infrastructures

Defaults are powerful. They are designed to seem apodictic, objective, and often hide in plain sight as seemingly 'natural'. Binary gender classification within nation state systems is no different. In such way, what is hostile about these state identification systems when they are designed to only inhabit the idea of the gender binary as the singular, default mode of life? How are trans bodies coded under the design of such state technologies? How do these identification systems, in accordance with colonial imaginaries of the gender binary, represent a state precariousness that exclude trans people by default from their design and become increasingly embedded with algorithmic modes of verification and surveillance? In posing these questions, this presentation focuses on a forthcoming book chapter 'Excluded by Default: Binary Gender Infrastructures as Algorithmic Design Hostility' to be published in Hostility by Design: How Technology Loses its Innocence, Bristol University Press, edited by Sally Wyatt in December 2026. It examines the case of the personal identification number, the Danish CPR-number, as an example of such hostile binary design that is encoded into the foundation of the digitalised Danish welfare state with unexpected, yet systematic ramifications for trans lives who do not conform to this binary notion of liveability. This work thus unveils the stealthy, dangerous hostility underlying cisnormative design of technologies and its exclusionary interactions with colonial legacies of state infrastructures as they implicate trans lives situated within the nexus of sex/gender systems, nation state policies, and algorithmic infrastructures.