To be seen
So many levels of meta that you can’t figure out what is being said:
I awoke this morning as I do every morning with a burning, unquenchable lust to be seen. Thankfully, what with it being Transgender Day of Visibility and all, I might finally have that need met.
You see what I mean. That sounds like self-mockery, but would the Guardian be publishing genuine self-mockery by a trans person? Does any trans person ever self-mock? Especially for wanting to be seen every god damn second?
I, personally, began my morning with a mantra: “I am seen. I am visible. I am here to represent.” I repeated this into my phone screen, its front-facing camera reflecting my face back to me, while still lying in bed, wrapped in the powder-pink weighted blanket I got for free last summer in a Pride sponsorship with Local Linens, the national bedding conglomerate that partnered with Amazon for an exclusive line of products.
Clearly self-mocking, surely, but…to what purpose? Aren’t we under strict orders to take all this with deadly seriousness?
My friend Xanthippe, a New York-based diversity and inclusion consultant who’s been working with Amazon
Oh come on – laying it on a bit thick don’t you think?
who’s been working with Amazon for the past couple of years to help them improve their facial recognition software so that it stops misgendering trans and nonbinary people, helped get me that deal. I’m so lucky to have the support of my community.
Rolling out of bed, I slipped on my fluffy, trans flag Ugg slides and ambled to my dresser where I retrieved an oversize black T-shirt made made by Macy Rodman, a musician here in Brooklyn and trans woman herself. If I was going to be seen today – think of it as me channeling Annette Bening in American Beauty, I will be seen today – it would only be right that I use my platform, ie, myself, to promote members of my community, yeah?
Consumerism, pop culture, insatiable narcissism, yes, we get it, but…
Lacing up my boots and donning my new favorite mask – a cloth one featuring a beaded portrait of Dr Rachel Levine, the first openly trans federal official confirmed by the Senate, that was hand-embroidered here in Brooklyn by a local trans ally – I set out to scrounge up the visibility I deserved at the coffee shop two blocks away.
…
Visibility is a fraught subject for many within the trans community, which itself is a very real thing and not a reductive myth of a fictive monolith perpetuated to make it easier for individuals to make sweeping, universal claims on behalf of the whole collective. “Trans visibility and recognition has skyrocketed,” wrote Alex V Green for BuzzFeed two years ago, “but Black and brown trans women are still dying. It doesn’t seem like a politics of visibility can really save the most vulnerable among us.”
…
Those are very good points, but what about me – the first openly trans woman to order an iced oat milk latte at my neighborhood coffee shop this morning? Surely, that’s significant – brave, even. That kind of representation is so important … right?
It was published on March 31 – maybe it was meant as April Fool hur hur but a mole at the Guardian jumped the gun.
But fail to indulge these types of trans cultists in their vanity and suffer their wrath. They are not benevolent.
It’s difficult to train face recognition to work with black people… it is absolutely impossible to stop it from “misgendering” someone.
Yeah, Poe’s Law is definitely in effect here.
Okay, now I’m curious. Why?
As I understand it it’s a sort of “garbage in, garbage out” problem. Unfortunately that’s nearly the limit of my understanding… so please put some salt on it before digesting.
It’s not difficult to train face recognition to work with black people. If you trained the machine learning systems with plenty of black and white faces, it would be fine with both.
However, most facial recognition software has historically been trained on mostly white people, so has a problem reacting to dark skin. It presumably didn’t occur to the people who trained the systems that some faces are not white.
There are lots of other examples of software that has taken on the racism of its trainers. For example, many police forces in the US (and some in the UK) use software to predict where crime is likely to happen (for the purposes of resource planning and management). It’s trained on historical data and since the police’s arrest records contain a racial bias toward arresting people who aren’t white, the software predicts that future crimes will occur in areas where the population is mostly non-white. And since the police are institutionally racist, they see this as ‘working’.
It could be classified as a GIGO problem, yes, but it’s better classified as Racism In Racism Out.
And don’t get me started on trying to use Alexa while being geordie.
I think the piece is a kind of satire. Not mocking trans people – it’s written by a deadly serious trans person – but intended to mock what they view their “opponents” theoretical views to be. This sometimes occurs in feminism – think the “I bathe in male tears” trope, or feminists joking that they’re witches, killing boners with the sound of their nagging voices. I’ve seen similar in the home birth community where a standard question of someone who has never considered home birth to a pregnant woman planning on having one is “but what will you do if something goes wrong?” Some of us, deeply tired of this question (because the answer is obvious – transfer to hospital), would deadpan to each other, usually, “well, stay at home and die, I guess”. Of course none of us did plan on any such thing, but the typical narrative is of crazies doing dangerous things, which, we weren’t.
Ah yes, that makes sense of it.
[…] a comment by latsot on To be […]
latsot @6,
Or Scots in an elevator.
I’ve encountered this before when arguing against people that insist trans women are being killed at an alarming rate. Yes, black trans women are being killed at a rate above that experienced by white trans women. Black trans women are black males, and they live in a nation where black males are the most likely sex/race demographic to be murdered. But the ninnies can’t stop seeing the black trans woman murder rate as an indicator of the general trans woman murder rate, despite acknowledging that the disparity exists with race being the determinant.
My understanding is that many of these murder victims are also prostitutes, which adds another level of risk not being factored into the equation. Despite the claims of TAs, these trans identified males are not being killed because the killers are reading tweets by gender critical feminists, and rich, white AGP men are not likely to share the risks of violence of the poor/black/trans/prostitutes whose horrifying statistics they simultaneously hide behind, and brandish as a weapon.
Also, when i open the article i see the publication date as April 1, so it is quite likely the publication date Adjusted to your time zone. Your time zone is what, 7 or 8 hours behind the uk?
A while back there was a whole series of articles about the racial bias of visual technologies:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition
Here’s a more recent one:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html
You can actually see this effect in the earliest black and white images in newspapers in the nineteenth century–I don’t remember if it’s mentioned in these articles, but these threatening images of Black people in the media were identified as contributing to the pre- and post-Civil War racial tensions.