this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The transphobe Chloe Cole won't be able to use it.

If bathroom laws pass, she will never be able to use a public bathroom.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Seems like wasted effort & resources....

The people on the apps should be able to manage their own activity.

As long as the greater society continues to conflate sex(ual)/genitalia[male, female, intersex/hermaphrodite] with gender(man, woman, trans man, trans woman, non-binary, etcetera) nothing will reach a mutal level of comprehension.

The plethora of false positives makes this technology flawed - the number of females who will be flagged as trans 😅..... the plethora of trans woman who will not get flagged....😅....

What a time to be alive.....

These apps are not created to make meaningful connections. It's to increase their profits and engagement. Apps have been around how long now, and we see a DECLINE in the quality of relationships not their improvement..

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The app will probably get false positives anyway.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It already did, I'm struggling to find the link (E: found it ), but Jenny Watson the woman who launched this shit was found to be like 98% likely to be "a man" by her own software (someone ran the photo of herself she used in the launch tweet)..

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

They literally tried this exact thing already and it accepted many trans women and refused many cis women.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

Even the TERFs are getting into AI grifts nowadays

[–] [email protected] 80 points 5 months ago (4 children)

First, from a purely technical perspective, there is absolutely no way this works properly, you just can’t recognize a trans person just by looking at his/her face, even if this was ethically okay (and this isn’t), it couldn’t work at all.

Second, the privacy nightmare that would be, every picture of everyone would be processed (and certainly stored forever for training the program) without the possibility to disable it ?

And finally, the obvious discrimination against trans people (I never encountered a trans person that wasn’t honest about it, so it’s even pointless to "detect" them)

To be honest I’m not in the LGBT community or anything, but this goes to far

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's marketing bullshit, in announcement they also said they used "heat signatures" from the photo to help determine if the person was trans lol

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago (1 children)

TERFs are obsessed with the idea that you can always tell.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think this goes too far morally, but technically - what you said, this doesn't work. It definitely won't for those of trans people who had their hormone balance sufficiently off since birth. Well, I don't know anything about hormones or human development, but I've read that the transition itself is usually a smaller part in addition to what has been already dealt by nature. And I've met a person once by whom I wouldn't tell (from appearance).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I’ve read that the transition itself is usually a smaller part in addition to what has been already dealt by nature

This is unfortunately not the case for most trans people. I think it's quite rare that a trans person would consistently be able to pass (=blend in) before HRT.

There are some trans people who are also intersex, which is the condition when one's biological sex (without medical intervention) doesn't fit neatly in either the male or female boxes. But most trans people aren't intersex and about half of intersex people aren't trans.

Edit: But I do agree with your main point, there's simply no way an app like this could identify trans people with the vast range of facial features humans have. It will both exclude many cis women and allow many trans women, as Giggle did a few years ago.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I never encountered a trans person that wasn’t honest about it

I guess you're not on dating apps?

Happened to me a lot. For some reason, especially while I was on my way to meet them. "Hey, by the way, is it okay if I have a penis?*

Look, I'm sorry, I'm not attracted to penises. So far I've only had one attempt to say it's transphobic to not want to have sex with them, but even for the others it's really shitty to lead someone on like that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

My sister is trans and she had to deal with that. She also made it extremely obvious that she was trans but she still got Neo Nazis.

She also got banned from a dating site for saying that she was only attracted to cis women.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

The consensus in the trans community is to let a potential partner know earlier, rather than later. It avoids the situation you've encountered. Some men also can react violently, when they find out, so it's quite a critical dilemma to them.

Unfortunately, not all follow that mindset. They also tend to bust out a lot, and so lead a lot of men on.

It's a bit like the scumbag dilemma women face. Very few men are scumbags, yet women encounter them regularly when dating. Most men try not to annoy the women they find attractive. They are careful in their approach mentality. This means they only make a few approaches (relatively). They also tend to pair off, and so exit the pool. Scumbags cast a wide net, and don't hang on to women for long. This means they make a LOT of approaches, and so annoy a vastly disproportionate number of women.

Basically most trans people try to be as polite and careful about it as possible. A few, unfortunately, can destroy the reputation of the rest by being scumbags about it, at least locally.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

conscientious

I think you mean consensus, general agreement.

Conscientious is an adjective applying to people, and it's a personality trait associated with acting responsibly and following one's conscience.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

My phone autocorrect has been ducking annoying recently.

Thanks for the heads up.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Oh trust me I was, I tested pretty much all of them 😂

the majority it was displayed directly in the bio, and the rest told me in the first or second message

I trust you but I can’t relate to your experience, I always encountered honest people (at least with this subject)

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago

Yeah man that won't work

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Hopefully Apple doesn’t allow this astroturfer crap on the appstore.

[–] [email protected] 217 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Not once have I encountered a trans person on a dating app who wasn't 100% transparent about it. Some even asked me after matching, "you're aware that I'm trans, right?" just to be sure.

There's no logical reason to falsely pretend to be cis on a dating app to get matches. If someone's cool about it then it's better to know up front, right? And if they're not, then you probably don't want to waste your time on them.

The "justification" for this app is just bigotry, plain and simple. Fuck TERFs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's absolutely happened to me. I also don't understand. Maybe the reasoning is, if they get me to invest enough time then maybe I'll suddenly be sexually attracted to penises? I don't know.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Having known multiple trans people and heard them talk about the arguments for and against early disclosure: Fear.

  1. They may not be public about their status, and fear exposure to family or coworkers seeing their public profile.

  2. They may fear harassment from transphobes. This could range from DM accusations of pedophilia to religious screeds to doxxing to death threats.

  3. They may be trying to avoid "chasers." There are some people for whom a trans body (particularly a transfem body) is a fetish, who don't actually care about the person inside. Plenty of transpeople don't appreciate that kind of attention.

  4. Fear of rejection. They may believe that nobody will respond if they're open about not being cis.

Also two less fear-related (and less common) possibilities:

  1. Ideology. To some people, specifying "transman" or "transwoman" reinforces a social distinction they find invalidating or don't accept. How many profiles have you seen that specify themselves as "cisman" or "ciswoman"? For these people, it's a way of rejecting cisgender normativity.

  2. Maybe they just aren't ready to talk about their genitals yet, or have their first conversation be about their surgical plans or history. Not only can get really repetitive having that be the first conversation with every single match, it means they don't get any of the information they're looking for about a potential partner until much later in the process and have to invest a lot of their own time up front. Just like you want the salient information you care about early on, so do they.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

#1

If you're not openly trans, then you really shouldn't be dating online because that's a risk.

#3

My sister was open about it and she got creepy Neo Nazis looking for Russian girlfriends.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Not once have I encountered a trans person on a dating app who wasn’t 100% transparent about it.

...that you know of. not defending bigots or bullying, but that statement doesn't make sense.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

I've been excluded more often for being bi than being trans in lesbian circles.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

This already happened a few years ago. Transphobic ciswomen got mad when the app identified them as trans.

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