RHETORICAL ECOLOGY’S EFFECTS ON COMMUNITY HEALTH ORGANIZATION WEB DESIGN AND COMMUNICATION WITH THE TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY

Community health organizations serve marginalized communities with their health needs. One such community is the transgender community. This study compares the communication via community health organization websites with the transgender community regarding services offered of two different sites. One site located in Houston, Texas, and the other located in San Francisco, California. The sites are examined for accessibility, queer usability, and rhetorical content. The comparison utilizes a framework melding Richard Bucannon’s design rhetoric, Ramler’s queer usability, and Edbauer’s rhetorical ecology called Queer Rhetorical Design Ecology that says that design choices are rhetorical choices, and queer design accounts for marginalized users in the design phase. It is posited that the negative rhetorical ecology regarding transgender and gender non-conforming people in Texas, surrounding the Legacy site, acts as a limiting factor in the amount and style of communication the organization utilizes when it designed and redesigned its website. Likewise, a promoting factor is the result of the rhetorical ecology surrounding the San Francisco site which leads to a more robust design and more robust level of communication with the transgender community.