By Jose Luis Guerrero Quiñones and Anna Puzio.
What if we could avoid (at least to some extent) doctors’ appointments? No more waiting times, no more moving around hospital floors. Who wouldn’t be happy to send someone else in their place for certain medical examinations? In the future, instead of undergoing a thorough physical examination, we could send our digital twin, which serves as a comprehensive representation of our body. Wait, a digital twin? What is that?
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a person’s body. Imagine a digital avatar that accurately represents your body and all the biological processes happening in it. Today, digital twins of hearts are already possible, but a digital twin of an entire body does not yet exist. Digital twins are a promising technology for healthcare because they enable more precise simulations of internal body functioning and promise personalized treatment. The hope is that they will make medical prevention and prediction possible with a higher precision than current alternatives. Instead of having to test a therapy on our own body first, it could be trialled on your digital twin. This could make certain medical visits easier and some treatments more precise.
Digital twins of patients are designed to provide a virtual representation of our bodies – digital twins of ourselves that could act as proxies in healthcare. This sounds promising, but there is a catch: But what if my twin is queer? What if my gender identity is in flux? Identity is not something fixed that can simply be captured by technology. We are constantly changing. Moreover, no physical or virtual representation can fully encapsulate a human being—their bodily experiences, childhood memories, emotions, relationships, and way of life. This is particularly true for trans persons, whose gender identity may be changing and does not conform to traditional gender norms. We argue that digital twin technology itself, as well as the way data is collected, shapes gender identity and, in this way, co-produces the transgender body.
Trans persons still face significant discrimination in healthcare, and are often overlooked in the development of new technologies. However, digital twins could also offer meaningful opportunities for trans individuals, such as testing hormone therapy or avoiding invasive examinations of sex organs. We need to ensure that the development of new medical technologies, such as digital twins, does not reproduce existing injustices in terms of access and use of healthcare services.
In our article “Digital twins for trans people in healthcare: queer, phenomenological and bioethical considerations”, we provide guidelines and further ideas on how digital twin technology could be effectively used for trans persons in healthcare.
Paper title: Digital twins for trans people in healthcare: queer, phenomenological and bioethical considerations
Authors: Jose Luis Guerrero Quiñones1, Anna Puzio2,3.
Affiliations:
1Department of Applied Philosophy and Ethics, Institute of Philosophy Czech Academy of Sciences, Praha, Czech Republic
2 Research programme Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, University of Twente, Philosophy, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, Enschede, The Netherlands;
3 Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Competing interests: None.
Social media accounts of post authors:
Jose Luis Guerrero Quiñones:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlguerreroq/
Anna Puzio:
https://bsky.app/profile/annapuzio.bsky.social
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-puzio-a64018198/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna-Puzio?ev=hdr_xprf