Managing Gender Change Information on Immutable Blockchain in Context of GDPR

Transgender community face serious socio-economic predicaments due to the discrepancy between their current gender expression and assigned gender identity at birth. Even though, a considerable amount work have been done to protect their basic human rights such as security, equality and social acceptance; trans people are still large victims of hate related crimes. With GDPR and other data protection laws and policies in place, now it is ever more important to protect the confidentiality of gender change information as well as to establish technical solutions that can prevent from inferring any sense of gender change from historical data. In this context, distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain present great opportunities for information integrity, security, privacy and access. However, at the same time provenance information extracted from immutable blockchain can be exploited to infer gender change. Addressing this paradox here we propose recommendations for managing gender change information in the blockchain environment in context of present sociopolitical, legislative and technical challenges associated with gender change.