I am occasionally informed that no trans people ever pass, because their physiology and bone structure will inevitably reveal what sex they were assigned at birth. So let’s play a game.
Here are ten ordinary people’s publicly available selfies. Five are trans, five are cis. I am not going to include sources yet, because I don’t want people to be able to look up which is which; sources will be included in the answer key. If one of these is your selfie and you’d rather I not use it, I am happy to remove it. In a few days, I will post an answer key.
I have filtered for picture quality (i.e. nothing where you can’t see the person’s face) but did not deliberately choose pictures where the trans people passed particularly well. One trans person included is pre-HRT. All pictures are of women because men, regardless of assigned sex at birth, are much less likely to take selfies.
Thing of Things 
Would be more realistic if it was 1 trans girl and 199 cis girls. The fact that trans people are so rare helps them blend in because our priors are very lopsided.
LikeLiked by 6 people
My priors have definitely changed after hanging out with a lot of rationalists, though.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Yeah, for this quiz since I know its 50/50 I would vote for a lot of people as trans who I normally wouldn’t expect to be trans. But I’m selecting the 5 least likely to be cis people.
LikeLike
I think first image is using a snapchat filter which feminized the face? Would look for a obviously unfiltered photo if possible
LikeLike
I have no idea what Snapchat filters look like.
LikeLike
I’ll show you on tumblr
LikeLike
The first image is also sideways, which makes holistic perception hard. Could you rotate it?
LikeLike
Ozy did say they hadn’t deliberately chosen pics where the trans people passed particularly well.
LikeLike
Sure, but generally speaking I suspect that many trans individuals who put photos out there choose photos they think project the gender they want others to see them as.
LikeLiked by 1 person
If we as a group guess correctly, that should still only be pretty weak evidence because the question “out of these ten women, which five are the most likely to be trans” is very different from “looking at this woman, independent of other women you may have seen, is she most likely cis or trans”.
LikeLiked by 2 people
me, taking this poll, repeatedly: ALL THESE PEOPLE ARE SO PRETTY HELP
LikeLiked by 13 people
AGREE
LikeLiked by 2 people
I wish the order of cis/trans didn’t change between polls.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Prediction: the distribution of that is random and is purely to mess with us.
LikeLike
The distribution is random, but it’s not to mess with you; WordPress defaults to randomizing the order of poll answers.
ETA: I believe I’ve fixed it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Obviously some trans people can pass, bur even for those that don’t in this set, if it wasn’t in the context of ‘50% of these people are trans’ I would have assumed they were slightly masculine looking women rather than trans women without other clues.
LikeLiked by 7 people
yeaaah, I voted for 5 people as trans, but if I had met them on the street with no extra knowledge I would definitely assume they were cis.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Since rot-13 is useless here, I’m going to encode cis as 0 and trans as 1.
In decimal, my guess is 307. I’d give no individual guess a certainty >70%.
P(Ozy has tricked us by posting selfies of 10 trans people): 10%
LikeLike
I’m pretty sure there’s at least one trick here, and that I fell for it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I did not do any tricks!
LikeLike
(If I were trans I don’t think I would be happy to discover a poll about a selfie of mine where a majority of people had voted that I do not pass well.)
LikeLike
The most obvious way of sexing the face is from the brow arch and forehead in profile. Very many people can pass as the opposite sex if you don’t see them in profile.
LikeLike
I feel like once people assert that *absolutely no* trans people pass, they can officially be counted dishonest. The more-interesting question is whether the passing rate is closer to 85% or 15% IMO.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Might it be a thing that the more trans people there are, and the more people are aware of the fact that trans people exist and interact with them, the more they might learn to differentiate between cis and trans people? I’d think that it’s basically as with race: All Caucasians look alike until you go live in Europe for a year.
In this case, the increasing awareness and publicity of trans people probably just makes “passing” harder. Not that I’d personally find meaning in the concept of “passing”.
LikeLike
I would imagine increased awareness of trans people makes passing harder even for cis women.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I voted but also some of my votes were based on style of dress (particularly which outfits seemed like Queer Culture TM outfits) and not what the actual faces looked like, if I had just been going off faces my answers would have probably been different
LikeLike
The main heuristic I ended up using was something like “does this person seem ‘basically normal’, a.k.a. ‘somewhat comparable to my prettier and more normal-seeming HS classmates'” vs “could I picture finding this person over the internet”. Obviously I am not sure if it is correct, and I am pretty sure the general intuitions I had were also rather biased in terms of ethnic features and such.
I will note that I could buy the premise that this gallery is of, say, 9 cis people and one trans person. Also, I’m faceblind, and I think one of the people in the gallery looks like a somewhat well-known internet personality maybe?
LikeLike
I am occasionally informed that no trans people ever pass, because their physiology and bone structure will inevitably reveal what sex they were assigned at birth.
I think it’s pretty obvious that (at least some) trans people can pass, but for those that are knowledgeable on the subject, is the determination of the sex of a skeleton by (pelvic) bone structure actually a legitimate science, or a pseudoscience like hair shaft and bite mark comparison?
LikeLike
there was supposed to be blockquote tags around the first paragraph.
LikeLike
It’s definitely legitimate. Like anything else, there is uncertainty in the process, but a quick scan of recent papers on sex determination from skeletal remains suggests a success rate of well over 90% in cases for which the population was known (due to differences in levels of skeletal robusticity and size, primarily). Probably closer to 95-98% using a combination of measures from the pelvis, skull, and other bones.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Characterizing passing as an intrinsic rather than extrinsic characteristic seems like an unhelpful approach. Like, I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to build a computer vision system that would beat any human at classifying cis vs trans people. So if someone is classified as cis by all humans, but the AI correctly classifies them as trans – do they pass or not?
And that doesn’t even get into the issue of humans varying massively in this ability. I recently spent 20 minutes arguing with Russian border control agents that my passport is mine, and the incorrect gender marker in it is not a result of “a technical mistake on the part of the organization that issued the passport”. Never mind bone structure or height or the pitch and resonance of the voice – they couldn’t clock me despite seeing my passport and having me literally saying “I’m trans” (well, technically I was saying “I’m changing my sex” in order for this statement to be accessible to them). But every once in a while I do get people staring at me really really closely on trains, which probably suggest that they could tell that something is off even from a cursory look.
LikeLiked by 5 people
I agree with the people who are challenging realism on the grounds that this is a forced-choice situation where we already know the distribution. I picked the 5 I thought were most likely to be trans, but in reality I would _maybe_ assume 1 was trans, and vaguely suspect a second one at most.
LikeLike
I also agree that my prior for women being trans is much higher in the rationalist community, and some other communities I hang out in, versus what is probably the population average.
I had the experience somewhat recently of meeting a woman in rationalist circles who I _faintly_ suspected might be trans (probability above baseline but no greater than 50%), but then concluding that she was not, and I had just let my priors creep up too high. Then she friended me on facebook, and I discovered that she was in fact trans! I suspect that in any space that doesn’t have a lot of queer people, she passes perfectly.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It feels very unethical to me to use people’s photos in this way without their consent. Did you have reason to believe that these women in particular wouldn’t mind you using their selfies in this way?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Really? This seems to me to be near the core of reasonable public commentary. The photos are made available publicly in a way that anyone may look at them for any reason without needing consent. Presumably (assuming they are from somewhere like instagram or facebook or etc..) it’s not unethical for me to link someone’s photo I ran across online today on my facebook post saying “Wow, I love that hair cut I think I’m going to get it.”
The choice to post publicly rather than using the relatively easy access controls on social media conveys a choice that the poster is fine if random people choose to look at their image or even link it in the example above.
So why should respectfully linking to those same images to discuss a matter of public concern be unethical if linking “Wow i love that haircut” isn’t?
—
I mean I agree it’s in some sense different so maybe there could be something here but I’d like to see a positive argument spelled about what makes it unethical (is it much more likely to be hurtful than we normally tolerate incidentally to discussion?) to be convinced.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It feels like an invasion of privacy to me. Sure, they’re photos that have been posted in a public setting. But that feels analogous to someone noticing that they can look into my house from the street, and spending ages staring in through the window critiquing my furniture. Yes, I let them do so by leaving the curtains open, but it’s still a creepy thing for someone to do.
What elevates this to unethical for me is that if someone is staring into my house, I’m likely to find out about it or there will be some other consequences (like my neighbours asking them what they’re doing). But in this case, short of these women reverse image searching their selfies (who does that?), they’re unlikely to find out, or might only find out years later. So if they’re unhappy with this and do see it as creepy, they might not find out in time to do anything about it.
In the “Wow I love that haircut” example, I think it would be fine to link to a friend, or repost to a small audience, because people are normally happier to be complimented than have their pictures studied for any other reason. But if it was going out to a large audience – such as a magazine taking people’s selfies and printing them as ‘great haircuts we saw online this week!’ without asking permission, I think that would also cross the line.
The fact that Ozy got the photos of trans women from a site where they encouraged feedback on whether they passed makes me feel better about this. I would feel a lot better if it turned out that the photos of cis women were similarly from a source where they invited close scrutiny.
LikeLike
Um. Seconding that WOW I WOULD NOT BE HAPPY TO DISCOVER MY SELFIE USED THIS WAY, particularly if a majority of people thought I didn’t pass. Not getting permission first seems like a dick move. Of course, I took the quiz, so I don’t really have a moral high ground here.
Also seconding that “which of these five people are trans” is quite different from “is this person trans” without that context.
LikeLike
The source for the trans pictures was a place where people posted pictures asking for honest feedback about whether or not they passed.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Are #2 and #4 not the same person? Am I just completely faceblind? The eye color looks different but hazel eyes do that. She/they have a very distinctive face shape.
LikeLiked by 1 person
For me the images for 2 and 4 are broken, so you might be on to something.
LikeLike
People don’t always look like selfies that they have presumably taken from their best angle etc. So I’d be wary of generalizing the results of this poll (whichever way it turns out) to “real life”.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I totally would’ve guessed ‘cis woman’ if I saw any of these pictures without knowing 50% were trans. On the other hand, I think I photograph ugly in 99% of cases and I can still find ‘pretty’ pictures of myself, so I know very well that one picture is not necessarily representative of how someone comes across in real life.
(Not that ‘cis/trans’ map to ‘ugly/pretty’ in any way, of course.)
LikeLike
Pingback: Do Some Trans People Pass? The Results | Thing of Things
There were a fair few that I think I clocked on account of ‘those boobs do not look real’.
But if I wasn’t being asked ‘is she trans’ I wouldn’t have jumped to that explanation for implants.
LikeLike
For the record, I want to throw another voice behind ‘it is probably bad to use people’s selfies for this kind of thing without their consent’. I agree that posting on r/transpassing is kind of signing up for this kind of thing, but posting on r/selfies isn’t. Sexists tell women they look manly in order to devalue them *all the time*, being anxious about whether you are Gendered Enough is not exclusively a trans thing, and I can imagine lots of people who would be hurt if pictures of them were taken out of non-gender-related contexts for a vote on whether they Adequately Perform Gender.
That is not my true rejection, because my true rejection is … one time I got curious and went to look at the *really bad* parts of the internet gender wars. And there were entire pages devoted to taking trans people’s selfies out of public trans-positive forums, and then ruthlessly mocking them. And also entire pages devoted to taking gendercrits’ selfies, insulting their ‘TERF bangs’, and captioning them with disturbingly elaborate fantasies about choking them to death with girldicks. Everyone involved in this is batshit, but they source pictures from a wide variety of places and lots of the people-getting-hurt are completely innocent.
My least favourite variation is the thing where people claim pictures of the Other Side so they can get the Enemy to do ~epic self owns~. Version 1: Trans person posts selfie, and gets lots of horrible harassment saying “you are a disgusting repulsive poopface and will never pass”, then reveals that the selfie is actually a picture of a TERF which they stole from her facebook. Clearly, this proves that the *real* disgusting repulsive poopfaces are TERFs, and anyone who says trans people don’t pass is lying because they hate trans people. Version 2: TERF posts selfie, and gets lots of horrible harassment saying “you are a disgusting repulsive poopface, clearly you are just an ugly worthless jealous of trans women’s beauty, also you look like a cis man which proves you are a misogynist oppressor”, then reveals that the selfie is actually stolen from a trans forum. Clearly, this proves that trans people are (by their own admission!) disgusting repulsive poopfaces who never pass, and anyone who claims to find trans people beautiful is lying for ally points.
All of that stuff is batshit stuff that happens in really really horrible subcultures and, like, everyone involved would be better off if they were banned from ever discussing gender on the internet ever again. If you want to go looking, I do not think the Batshit Awful Gender Wars internet is hard to find, just… probably don’t look, it’s bad.
So, like, I am fairly sure that what is happening *here* is fairly okay, because nobody in the vague vicinity of this blog is likely to behave the way Batshit Gender Wars people behave. I am so glad that most of the people I know are not even the slightest bit similar to the residents of Nuclear Disaster Zone Discourse Hell. I just can’t pinpoint what makes this definitely fine, except for a vague wave towards “but the people around here are nice, so nothing bad will happen and nobody will get harassed”.
Just, having observed the batshit gender wars internet of horribleness, the whole concept of anyone ever taking a photo of me and using it for anything gender-discourse-related, especially anything related to ‘guess which gender this person is to prove a point’, it…. makes me tense. Maybe it’s just one of those bad-brains-buttons-created-by-bad-experiences, and the solution is to stay away from things that press this button. It *does* feel sort of reasonable that the button gets pressed extra hard by taking pictures from please-compliment-my-selfie-I-need-validation contexts like r/selfies, and transferring them to discoursey contexts. People who post in please-compliment-my-selfie contexts are often sort of vulnerable people with low self esteem, and I would like a social norm against taking things from those contexts.
LikeLiked by 1 person
FWIW, I am keeping a close eye on the comments and will nuke any comments getting even remotely close to body-shaming anyone. That is flat-out not acceptable here in general, but certainly not on these posts. (I’ve only had to delete one so far, and even that was borderline.)
LikeLike
I wonder whether asking for consent for the photos to be used in this way would skew the sample too much.
LikeLike
Wow, about 35% of people think I am cis and I didn’t even started hrt or anything remotely medical yet..
LikeLike
I went through this and found myself confused as to if the box was for the image above or below. This might account for a lot of the inability to distinguish.
LikeLiked by 1 person