The study of communication and gender variance across cultures can be enhanced through collaboration with interpreters/translators. In the field of media and communication studies, trans and gender-diverse (TGD) researchers could bring their lived experience to a wider range of comparative cross-linguistic research with the aid of language interpreters. Using a distributed knowledge framework, an interpreter/translator can meet the needs of a cross-linguistic qualitative study, as I demonstrate with three vignettes from my own experience. Embracing distributed knowledge welcomes marginalized perspectives in scholarship and also encourages dominant-group researchers to seek out collaborators from the groups they study, such as TGD people. I conclude with a call for gender-just epistemologies, which disrupt normative assumptions about academic authority and recognize that a shared experience of gender divergence may do more to foster understanding, meaning-making, and respect for informants than does a shared linguistic background.
Aiden James Kosciesza (2026) studied this question.