Confirmation of Candidature - Candidate : Taz Clifford

In discourse around how trans people fit into modern society a focal point of inclusion and exclusion is in access to public bathrooms. Recent research has explored discourse around trans persons creating stress for cis gender bathroom users and the significant stress and health implications for trans persons who avoid public bathroom use due to the same discourse. This research will use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the stress evoked by sharing a public bathroom space with a variety of people, and in using a bathroom which is incongruent to one’s gender. Participants will walkthrough recordings of normative public bathroom use through a Virtual Reality (VR) headset while electroencephalogram (EEG) and other physiological data, such as electrocardiogram (ECG), are collected. Following the recordings, the participants will be debriefed and asked to complete a survey and a semi-structured interview. The EEG and biometric data will be assessed in the context of timepoints in the walkthrough where an affective change is expected, and the activity recorded will be compared to expected models of functional connectivity networks and heart rate variability of no stress, stress and phenomena such as threshold effects moving through doorways and mind wandering. The models will be drawn from the literature and developed from geometric eigenmodes, with the well-researched variable of heart rate variability providing a standard to confirm or question the EEG findings. The survey and interview data will be compared with the experimental results. These analyses will give a preliminary indication of the experience of stress in normative public bathroom use and when in an incongruent bathroom for their gender. This research forms the first step in building a body of work which has the potential to have a significant impact on designing bathrooms with equity and safety in mind.

For more information, please email the Graduate Research School or phone 0746 311088.