Brisbane Times
Penelope Debelle | August 6, 2007 - 9:32AM

"This was long before stranger danger online and it was perfectly acceptable to be talking to just random people," Boyd says. "I remember having this unbelievably candid conversation with this transsexual woman, and me not understanding any of this and here's this woman who, God only knows what she thought of me, just politely answered my very foolish questions. It was a very supportive space."

At Brown University she was drawn towards computer science, and after an undergraduate thesis on how 3-D computer systems used cues that were inherently sexist, she studied at the MIT Media Lab before moving to Amsterdam to learn more about ethnography and anthropology.