The first five pictures were of cisgender women; the second five pictures were of transgender women.
(Yes, I’m lazy.)
The cisgender pictures are from r/selfie; the transgender pictures are from r/transpassing, a subreddit where people post pictures of themselves to see whether they pass. Both were from the most upvoted pictures of the last month. The trans girl who hadn’t taken HRT was #8, the second girl with a flower crown; an astonishing 37% of voters thought she was cisgender.
Of the five cisgender girls, two were conclusively identified as cisgender, while three had less than sixty percent of voters identify them as either cis or trans. In two cases, the voters leaned towards cisgender, while in one case, the voters leaned towards transgender. Of the five transgender girls, three were conclusively identified as transgender, one was conclusively identified as cisgender, and the remaining girl was not conclusively identified either way, although voters leaned towards her being transgender.
My initial predictions were wrong; I thought that people would be far more likely to misidentify transgender people as cisgender and vice versa than they actually were. In fact, with two exceptions (one cis and one trans), the lean of the vote was in the correct direction.
However, I found the lack of consensus striking. I defined “lack of consensus” as failing to get at least sixty percent of voters to agree on whether you’re cisgender or transgender; by this relatively narrow definition, four women’s pictures were unidentifiable. Using a broader definition, in which fewer than two-thirds of voters agree, six women’s pictures were unidentifiable as cisgender or transgender. As qualitative evidence, several commenters mentioned that, if they hadn’t known that five of the pictures were of trans women, they would have assumed all or nearly all the pictures were of cisgender women.
My interpretation of this data is that base rates matter. Many people– I would roughly guess about half the population– are not readily identifiable as cisgender or transgender if there’s a 50/50 chance that they’re cis or trans. However, in the real world, 99.7% of people are cisgender; for this reason, pretty much all ambiguous people are read as cisgender all the time.
What matters, of course, is not the actual base rate but the perceived base rate. Sophia Kovaleva commented on the original post:
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).
Of course, Russia is a very traditional and transphobic country, so the perceived base rate of trans people is extraordinarily low, perhaps zero. No amount of evidence would cause people to update in favor.
I myself have noticed that context matters. When I lived in a Southern state, I passed as male if I cut my hair, wore a button-down shirt, and didn’t talk very much– except when I went to anime conventions. Since many people crossplay at anime conventions, people didn’t expect that someone in male clothing would be male. Now that I live in San Francisco, I rarely pass: people expect butch women to exist. (Inexplicably, having green hair caused me to be read as male, until I started carrying around a baby a lot of the time, at which point people started reading me as female again. I have attempted to persuade my husband to wear a dress in an attempt to confuse people into gendering me as male, but no dice.)
This suggests an unfortunate tradeoff for transgender people. The feminist, trans-friendly places where being perceived as trans is least dangerous are exactly the places where it is most difficult for us to go stealth.
Am I completely nuts or are #2 and #4 two different photos of the same person? That’s what I thought the “trick” was. The facial structure and patterns of freckles seem extremely similar, although looking again, the eye color might be a bit different.
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They were both posted by “[deleted]”, which is some evidence that they’re the same person, but makes it hard to state conclusively.
This is why you shouldn’t let the mildly faceblind run things involving people’s faces. 🙂
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At very least it seems like a trick you *should* have used 🙂
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Nothing really gets deleted from the internet. But multi-GB archives are a right faff, and I’d feel bad about tracking down someone who’d deleted themself from Reddit.
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I used prominance-of-jawline as my estimating measure: I guessed roughly 50/50 right, so jawline doesn’t seem to be as reliable a secondary sexual characteristic as I thought. I figured I’d be roughly 70% right rather than 50%.
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My own jawline is fairly feminine, and I’m (probably) a trans woman who’s done nothing to medically transition, so I wonder if jawline prominence is a trait like digit ratio that correlates somewhat with gender identity…
(or people on transpassing tend to have done facial feminization surgery, or there’s selection bias, or what you said that jawline isn’t a reliable secondary sex trait, or …)
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“what % of americans are cis?”; response by the williams institute:
2011: 99.7% [ https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Gates-How-Many-People-LGBT-Apr-2011.pdf ]
2016: 99.4% [ http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/How-Many-Adults-Identify-as-Transgender-in-the-United-States.pdf ]
—
i initially made the same mistake when calculating how many sapphic women are trans
with recent stats: p(trans|sapphic)=p(sapphic|trans)*p(trans)/p(sapphic)=.67*.006/.034=.118->11.8% [ https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/167301013059/how-many-sapphic-women-are-trans ]
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” I have attempted to persuade my husband to wear a dress in an attempt to confuse people into gendering me as male, but no dice.”
Perhaps you can find a different man to accompany you while wearing a dress. It sounds like a worthwhile experiment.
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I suspected you might have used highly-upvoted selfies from Reddit or similar based on how pretty some of the images were.
That is probably be a confounder – the most-upvoted women on /r/selfie probably tend to be more “feminine” than the average woman (either on some fundamental bone-structure level, in social presentation, or whatever).
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If the overall average tended to get it right one has to wonder whether or not repeated exposure to an individual over time would lead to accumulating information in the same manner. One might even expect (especially since top voted pics on a transpassing forum are likely to be the best instances of the most passable trans individuals) that accumulating information over time would let people overcome even pretty severe base rate issues.
That’s not my intuition. My intuition is that trans people certainly can pass because most of us simply follow a few social cues on first interaction and don’t think about it again but just raising it as a possibility.
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I don’t know why you’re modeling crowds as being the same thing as individuals with more information. Each individual member of the crowd had the same information; I was not unleashing a new selfie for each voter. Crowds tend to outperform individuals because the random error cancels. If an individual acquires more information that doesn’t do anything to their random error.
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My prior on “Ozy is a rationalist, rationalists know how to do studies, so these pictures are definitely in a randomised order” was so high that I didn’t raise any other hypothesis to my attention. I lose Bayes points for underestimating your laziness. I do think this could be an actual confounder; I went to school, my brain was trained on quizzes where if I guessed B too many times in a row then that was kind of suspicious, and with this kind of subtle-signs type game it’s easy to end up going “okay, I haven’t guessed a single trans person yet, maybe I need to look more closely for potential cues” way before reaching picture #6.
Of course, if this were an attempt to suggest that all trans people definitely pass forever no exceptions, there are lots of things I would say about selection effects and the kind of people who post on r/transpassing and the difficulty of guessing from a single picture. However, this mostly seems to be an attempt to claim “at least some trans people have ever passed”, which is a pretty limited claim and opposed only by silly people who think they can clock Buck Angel as essentially feminine on sight. This does make me somewhat less inclined to worry about whether the methodology of the study was perfect.
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I suspect r/transpassing selects for early-transition people: one of the few bits of filtering I did was only including one pre-HRT trans woman, and most of the other women reported being on estrogen for at most a few years. So that would tend to underestimate how well trans people pass.
If I run a second game I will maybe ask for short videos from participants.
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Well, put me down as one of the silly people. then. Because I’ve seen the earlier photos of all shaved head, beard, muscle posing, wearing leather and cigar-smoking and being as I’m Manly Masculine Male as possible, and I’ve seen later ones of facial hair shaved off and older, and the later ones made me go “Well, that is definitely the face of a middle-aged woman”.
You can shave your head and grow a mustache but you can’t change the shape of your skull. I wonder if people who see the earlier photos have this mindset of “how can anyone think this is a woman and not a guy” fixed in mind, but haven’t seen some other photos where the person has aged and is not presenting as I’m Manly Masculine Male, Me as hard as possible?
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I have met Buck Angel in person and in person he comes off as a middle-aged gay man.
Human skulls aren’t that sexually dimorphic: experts can correctly classify human crania about seventy percent of the time, and presumably accuracy rates go down when the skull is covered with skin and when the person assessing it is a non-expert.
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One thing that does kind of bother me about “do trans people pass y/n” discourse is that it is inevitably, implicitly, about who counts as trans.
If you have a very narrow and exclusive definition of “trans”, such that people only count if they were recorded stealing their preferred-gender-parent’s clothing aged four and have been gargling hormones daily ever since, plus have had fifteen surgeries and been out for a century – then yeah, the vast majority of trans people pass astonishingly well. You could live with them for years and never know their asab.
If you have a broad and inclusive definition of “trans”, such that “I live as a man and am completely closeted because my family are transphobic, but a couple people on IRC call me ‘she’ and it makes me super happy, and sometimes when I’m home alone I lock my door and cry over pictures of girls I wish I looked like” is a valid experience which Counts As Being Trans… then the vast majority of trans people do not pass, like, at all. Like not even slightly. Like you wouldn’t even suspect them of being anything other than cis people of their asab.
When obnoxious people go around saying that trans people can never ever pass no exceptions, it’s pretty understandable that people want to respond, “oh YEAH? What about these STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL trans people who are indistinguishable from cis people?” and score an epic own. It just makes me wince a little bit for the people – the majority of trans people, if you’re using a broad inclusive definition of trans – who seriously are never going to pass, and who are kind of left out in the cold by a culture war fought between sides yelling “ALL TRANS PEOPLE ARE SUPERMODELS” vs “PASSING IS AGAINST THE LAWS OF PHYSICS”.
If you’d accidentally included a picture of me (or somebody like me), I would have fit in just fine. The people in that poll looked like me. (OK, wayyy better selfie skills, but same body type and face shape and hairstyle and whatever.) And it would’ve been easy enough to mistakenly label me a cis woman since I basically never attach a disclaimer to pictures of me saying “I Realise I Look Like I Have A Gender But I Am Actually Quite Confused On That Subject So Please Do Not Make Confident Claims About That Until Further Notice”.
And I am sort of darkly amused by the concept of someone being unable to distinguish a trans woman from me, and using this as evidence that trans people pass, on account of how I am obviously a Benchmark of True Womanhood. Unless they are claiming that I pass very excellently as a tightly closed closet, in which case thank you, I’m currently working on a *fantastic* impression of one of those creepy horror movie wardrobes that occasionally bangs its doors and throws coats at people.
I’m not seriously suggesting that any of the pictures you actually grabbed from r/selfies were closeted trans men, and honestly I sort of don’t know where I’m going with this. But I know trans men who look like that, too. I just feel sort of weird about the fact that if anyone ever *did* use a picture of me for a ~guess what gender this person is~ game, there is approximately zero chance that any of the options provided would be correct. 100% of people would vote for an incorrect option, and then everyone would go around congratulating themselves on improving their models about whether trans people pass. Which, to be honest, is kind of my fault for managing such a talented artistic portrayal of being extremely definitely cis for absolute certain.
I don’t even know, it’s late, how do people end long rambling comments these days
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I wonder if some of the confusion comes in through the way gender and sex are so tightly tied together, at least for the majority of people.
Because for all the “gender is not the same as sex, we’re not trying to say there is no such thing as biological sex” talk I see, there is still the habit of the usage about “assigned sex at birth” and not “assigned gender at birth”. Talking about “but intersex people exist!” doesn’t help here, because I have never seen any breakdown about “so what percentage of trans people are intersex and what percentage aren’t?”, and therefore I have no convincing reason to think “assigning X to female sex at birth due to genitals” is indeed a terribad way of doing things.
“I Realise I Look Like I Have A Gender But I Am Actually Quite Confused On That Subject So Please Do Not Make Confident Claims About That Until Further Notice”
How would you feel if it were changed to “you look like you have a sex” not “a gender”? That might not help much, if at all, but I do think this is why the question of passing gets confused: some people do look androgynous, whether they’re cis or not, and some people do look more like a particular sex, whether they’re cis or not.
So I’m going to propose that for the majority of us knuckle-dragging cis people, we match up who is and who is not ‘really’ trans and ‘really’ passing based on “okay, yeah, you look like a girl, I’m willing to believe that despite being born a boy you are sincere about being a girl” and in other cases it’s “who are you trying to fool, you plainly look male, even if you grow your hair and put on a dress and makeup all you will look like is a guy in a dress”?
Maybe people are correctly identifying sex but gender is a different kettle of fish, and the wars over “I am too trans, you have to take my word for it” when your sex is very evidently Blorp not Bloop, and you are not intersex or have any of the chromosomal condidtions so invoking that as an option doesn’t apply, is where all the wars get nasty.
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> One thing that does kind of bother me about “do trans people pass y/n” discourse is that it is inevitably, implicitly, about who counts as trans.
I don’t think this is really relevant? I don’t think anyone’s saying that trans people who don’t try to pass (whether through medical transition or clothes and whatnot) tend to pass; the relevant question is whether people who transition pass, in which case it doesn’t really matter why they transitioned or whether they count as “really trans” by any particular definition. Presumably if a cis man medically transitioned to female, he’d pass as female just as much as a trans woman would (unless there are traits that are relevant to passing that correspond to gender rather than sex; but if that were the case, I’d expect pre-transition and non-transitioning trans people to be recognized as the correct gender most of the time, which I’m pretty sure is not the case).
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>The feminist, trans-friendly places where being perceived as trans is least dangerous are exactly the places where it is most difficult for us to go stealth.
I’ve had a counter-experience. I befriended someone who I initially assumed was transitioning to female, but later learned was transitioning to male. The nebulous zones made possible by an accepting community allows for mistakes leaning in the desired direction. Not sure if that’s a plus, though?
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I think this was kind of poorly made. You should have picked cis people with masculine features… even a poor/bad selfie stands out in this selection since you’ve picked the top-rated female ones from r/selfie.. There are girls that are cis that look much more masculine than those TS girls. Should have picked some andro models in comparison… In a real life situation, all those girls pass very well… there is a chance that this will probably only feed their dysphoria although they are very passable… And yea I get it it’s from r/transpassing a place where people honestly tell people who pass, but still… the pictures were used in a different way… put a cis girl with either weird fashion style or manly features in here and people wouldn’t even think twice and vote her trans. The idea behind this was good, but the implementation was poorly made.
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