In the heyday of the British Welfare State, in the decades immediately following World War II, people's worth was assigned and quantified along heteronormative, gendered lines. Electronic computers implemented the policies that created the Welfare State, leading to some of the first examples of algorithmic bias along the lines of gender identity. This paper looks at how computers exacerbated existing discrimination and how transgender British citizens in particular fought back--forming a class of users that resisted how state technologies positioned their lives outside the operating parameters of newly-developing digital systems.
