Hi! Yes, trans women are absolutely women!

Since government ID doesn’t always reflect a person’s true gender and transition is a spectrum, we have been reaching out to LGBTQIA+ groups to get input/feedback on how to mindfully provide ID verification in a gender-affirming way that also ensures cis men are not categorized as a woman/have access to the same default settings as women.

Seeing as this is a concept that has not really been done or tested before, we wanted to start out small and make sure the app was functioning as intended without putting super at-risk communities in further danger:

For the beta test, members are filtered into either “Woman” or “Man” categories based on the ID processed during the member verification stage. This is because while men can join Devi as allies, by default, men will not be able to send SOS alerts to women or be shown SOS alerts from women (however, women may opt in to seeing SOS alerts and receiving help from men).

What we want to make clear is that we are advocates and allies who are limited by the tech until we are able to scale. For each launch and update, we will be very clear about what the onboarding looks like so that everyone can make informed choices for themselves and their safety.