This is a great point.
The technology that excludes transwomen from the app is the clear warning that the app is populated exclusively for transphobes. It’s obviously wildly dangerous for a transwoman to be on the app.
The notion that AI is going to clock them is absurd AI hype. There’s no reason to expect AI to be capable of this kind of discernment, and that assumes you even had a training set. Where in the absolute fuck would someone find a training set like that?
Edit: I didn’t read the article. It seems it’s a lesbian dating app. Well, probably less dangerous for transwomen, but still not technically sound.
We sometimes have to clarify that LGBT+ folk aren’t particularly virtuous, just people, and like the rest of the population suffers from its own share of internal bigotry. The lesbian community is no exception.
Lesbians range from really rather bisexual to staunchly misandrist and there are different gatekeeping checkpoints, where some don’t count trans women as lesbians to others that don’t want to date a woman who’s ever been with a man (which makes for a really small dating pool).
But this kind of exclusion is not about who these women date, rather who they allow into their community and are allowed to come to their potlucks and tea parties. Generally communities that are progressive and have experienced external oppression and dehumanization are glad to be welcoming and inclusive. Mostly. And I think this includes the lesbian community.
From my experience. I’ll get to how that’s tricky.
I’ve found the lesbian circles I’ve engaged with have been even more inclusive than the general LGBT+ community. They’re actually really good about including bisexuals and trans women that are into women. However, this is partly due to the anthropic principle: Even though I’m enby I still have [M] on my state ID, look like a dude and have male parts, and have been completely forthright about this even in online circles (e.g. r/actuallesbians) where no-one would ever know I was really a cat. But this means that I don’t get invites to circles that are more restrictive, since I’d be high on the no-admittance list.
But inclusive lesbians are not super fond of less inclusive ones, especially since human sexuality can change over time. The closet has multiple doors, and when your best friend who invites you to all the get-togethers is a women-only transphobe second-wave feminist (this was a thing), and suddenly you’ve been taking an interest in a special guy, you’re going to keep your bi-curiosity hidden from your friend (or stop being friends). And as per the whole thing of coming out, the point of the LGBT+ community is being able to be who you are, and being accepted and validated.
So when I see a lesbians dating app that is intentionally looking to draw transphobes, it reminds me of those conservative dating apps to hook up men in the white power movement with trad-wife minded women, which is to say it’s good they’re over there and not trying to date people over here that they’re ultimately going to disappoint and hurt.
I’ve been excluded more often for being bi than being trans in lesbian circles.
I guarantee you that Facebook could build one.
Facebook couldn’t build a model that has 100% accuracy on if something is a dog or a cat, let alone if a woman is trans.
Especially since you oftentimes can’t tell at all from just a picture. There’s cis woman that look more like a man than some trans women.
Why do you guarantee that? It seems obviously wrong, on a technical level.
The point I’m making is that even if we take it as a given that a shrewd enough AI could correctly distinguish sex at birth – which I think is obviously impossible based on the appearances of many ciswomen and the nature of statistical prediction – you’d still need a training data set.
If the dataset has any erroneous input, that corrupts its ability, and the whole point of this exercise is trying to find passing transwomen. Why would anyone expect that training set of hundreds of thousands of supposed cis women wouldn’t have a few transwomen in it?
Because Facebook’s data practices, and how much was volunteered by users on there, means that for some percentage of trans users Facebook knows that they’re trans. And you also have a percentage of pregnancy photos uploaded, if someone identifies as a woman on Facebook, and has uploaded photos with a baby bump, she’s cis (or at least a pre-hatching trans person). And at one point in time, a lot of people just volunteered that info to Facebook.
Yeah, but the training set is nowhere near clean. That’s my point. “Close” is no where near good enough within this context,
Good point. I don’t want to date trans people, but I wouldn’t want to use an app that purposely excluded them. I’d rather occasionally have to go “oh sorry thanks for telling me” than restrict my dating pool to bigots.
