CS Conference Location and Inclusion

June 14, 2023

This week PLDI 2023, one of the top conferences in Programming Languages, and many other flagship conferences in computer science that are part of FCRC are being held in Orlando, Florida. One of my students mentioned to me that she had considered attending the conference. But she is a transgender woman, and Florida has passed laws that make traveling to Florida unsafe for trans people.

In Florida, trans people cannot use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity in any state or local government building, college, or school–and given the risk they would face in entering a bathroom that doesn’t correspond to their gender identity, in practice this means they have no options at all in those buildings. Laws allowing doctors to deny care based on “moral concerns,” and more specifically banning gender-affirming care may make trans people worry about what would happen to them in a medical emergency situation–whether they would be able to get the care they need at all, or retain access to their medications, from which a withdrawal could have immediate and severe consequences. Beyond laws with a direct effect on conference attendees, legal codes that enforce “Don’t Say Gay” in schools, restrict sports participation, or ban books create a poisonous environment for trans people in states like Florida.

I have generally pushed back on proposals to restrict the location of conferences based on political issues. One challenge is that almost any location has potential issues, whether it be related to politics, accessibility, or CO2 emissions. If we say that conferences can only be so that “typical attendees” don’t have to travel far, for example, we will never locate our top international conferences outside North America or Europe, which is very exclusionary to the rest of the world.

But I believe this issue is different–when we locate a conference in Florida, we are choosing a location where a part of our community is unwelcome and unsafe. It’s more than “making a statement” - people are being deliberately excluded from participation in our conferences when we locate them there, as expressed by a number of people in our community. Furthermore, there are many alternatives: even just within the United States, there are many states that are, in contrast to Florida, explicitly taking action to protect the rights of trans people (a recent example came when the Governor declared Maryland a “Trans Sanctuary State”).

The issue of attendee safety affects transgender people in this circumstance, but it is a more general principle. For example, while I do not think the ACM or IEEE should avoid states that restrict the right to choose abortion just because we disagree with their laws, when the laws become so severe that pregnant people fear to travel to the state, that is a reason to avoid locating conferences in those states.

My intent is not to criticize the organizers of PLDI and FCRC–binding contracts with hotels are signed many months (and often years) in advance of a conference, and changing the venue in response to laws passed within the last two months would be extraordinarily difficult and expensive, not to mention disruptive to other people’s plans to attend. I appreciate the efforts of the organizers to provide non-gendered, single-stall restrooms in the conference venues, among other steps toward inclusion. While helpful, however, these steps cannot erase the dangers faced by trans people in attending a conference in Florida. All things considered, the simple fact remains: locating conferences in anti-trans states excludes trans people, and this exclusion is unacceptable.

Ensuring that people from affected communities are involved in planning conferences is one way to help avoid this situation. Is your conference’s steering committee exclusively made up of ex-officio past conference organizers and SIG leaders? Is it therefore mostly cis straight white men? You should change that. For US locations, there are also resources tracking anti-trans laws that are passed or are being proposed.

I believe that going forward, the ACM, IEEE, and other organizations in Computer Science should not plan conferences in locations with laws that threaten the safety of the members of our community–whether transgender or otherwise. I call on leaders at SIGPLAN, the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and other conference sponsors to come together to discuss this issue and to create policies to ensure that all members of our community are safe and welcomed at our future events.

Jonathan Aldrich is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and a member of the ACM SIG Governing Board and the ACM Publications Board. The opinions expressed in this post are informed by these roles but are his alone. He gratefully acknowledges feedback from colleagues on earlier drafts of this post.