If that claim pushes the correct emotional buttons in their current & potential customers, then its accuracy is 99% irrelevant.
Amusing thought: If, when using dating apps to look for boyfriends, most trans women were found to strongly disfavor feminine-looking men - how would the current crop of trans-rights activists react?
On her Twitter account, Jenny Watson pasted some JSON output of a face detection service [1] which seems to match up with Luxand's web API [2].
She hasn't announced which product her app will end up using to distinguish female faces from male faces, but assuming it is Luxand's, they do make a similar statement on their website [3]:
> Luxand cloud has consistently demonstrated high accuracy in face detection, recognition, and attribute detection, exceeding 99% in many cases.
I'm also skeptical of this claim but in the end I don't think it will matter too much. Either it works as intended, providing an effective dating space for lesbians, or the app gets overrun by intrusive males, which is just more evidence that lesbian spaces are under threat by men who don't respect women's boundaries. Either way she makes her point.
That's all lesbians then. By definition, lesbians are female individuals who are homosexual, i.e. their sexual orientation is towards others of the same sex, which means that their dating pool consists only of other female individuals.
This excludes all transwomen, because - also by definition - transwomen are male.
That seems like a dicey proposition. While "gender critical lesbians" do exist, I believe that they are a smallish fraction. The position of most gay organizations is that trans women are women.
You don't have to date them, but you do that by saying "no trans women" in your profile. Excluding them would drive off as many lesbians as it attracted.
Further... trans people are still a tiny minority, well under 1%. So you're going to get hammered by the Base Rate Fallacy, excluding more cis women than correctly rejecting trans women. (Especially since trans women are going to self-select to not even try.)
The underlying source of this is the Daily Mail, a right-wing British newspaper. It sounds like it's trying to score some kind of political points with right wingers -- who are not exactly known to be a great target market for lesbians. This sounds like a poorly considered idea that is dead before it even gets started.
> You don't have to date them, but you do that by saying "no trans women" in your profile.
That would get your account banned on most dating apps, including the most popular one for "lesbian" dating.
e.g. this article [1] discusses the experience of a lesbian woman who did just that:
> Without the ability to filter out men, who could pick any identity they liked on the app, some female users took it upon themselves to signify that they were only interested in other women by adding it to their bio or including a photo with logos that signified exclusive same-sex attraction.
> These women found themselves quite literally forced off the app.
> Jen, a lesbian user known on Twitter as @cbucksrules, told Reduxx was suspended after adding "no trans women" to her bio on HER because she was exclusively same-sex attracted.
> Jen had joined HER in late 2021 looking for a female partner and assuming a lesbian dating app would be the place to go for such an endeavor. Finding a veritable smorgasbord of 5 o'clock shadows and head tilts, Jen attempted to ensure she would only be contacted by other female users.
> "I [wrote] in my bio what I would not consider the opposite sex as a partner nor a woman who was not a proud woman as we would not be compatible."
> Shortly after, Jen was suspended. She wrote to HER's customer service and asked why, and received a snarky response from an agent named "Devin" berating her for using "hateful language" in her bio, and asserting "trans women are women."
I remember seeing the reaction to this on Twitter. For the most part, it was actual lesbian women who were furious about HER banning users who politely stated in their profiles that they're not interested in dating males.
The bait-and-switch of inviting males to what was previously advertised as a lesbian dating space was of course already unpopular, but kicking actual lesbians off the platform for asserting their sexual orientation was what definitively crossed the line into a larger backlash.
It wasn't really anything much to do with conservatives / right-wingers, even if some of them did pass comment when word spread of how lesbian women were being treated by this app.
I'm not a woman, much less a lesbian, so I can't speak for them.
I do know that they are going to get stuck either way. It is undoubtedly true that people have the right to have preferences. Some preferences are taboo to state. You don't have to date black women, but there is no language to say that without running into a history that includes a lot of violence.
Lesbians date very differently from straight women, and I wouldn't presume to tell them their business. But it wouldn't surprise me if their best play was to forbid that kind of language, and just ask people to not accept offers they don't want.
Of course if there are men pretending to be trans women, that is a different story. Harassment is always wrong. In real life the number of men pretending to be trans women is small to the point of non-existent. Trolling is safer online, so they will have to moderate that the hard way.
Yes and I find it troubling that homosexuality is now in this category. That a lesbian will be reprimanded for stating she's not interested in males is an awfully regressive step back towards when same-sex sexual orientation had to be hidden away and closeted.
It's crazy that it even got to that stage. Men like this have no respect, they seem to think women saying "no" is some sort of challenge. And then use the law to force their will regardless. Hopefully the courts will put a stop to this nonsense.
15 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 35.1 ms ] threadBig ol' [citation needed] on that.
Amusing thought: If, when using dating apps to look for boyfriends, most trans women were found to strongly disfavor feminine-looking men - how would the current crop of trans-rights activists react?
She hasn't announced which product her app will end up using to distinguish female faces from male faces, but assuming it is Luxand's, they do make a similar statement on their website [3]:
> Luxand cloud has consistently demonstrated high accuracy in face detection, recognition, and attribute detection, exceeding 99% in many cases.
I'm also skeptical of this claim but in the end I don't think it will matter too much. Either it works as intended, providing an effective dating space for lesbians, or the app gets overrun by intrusive males, which is just more evidence that lesbian spaces are under threat by men who don't respect women's boundaries. Either way she makes her point.
[1] https://x.com/dnalerinrehtron/status/1798367224974950677
[2] https://luxand.cloud/face-detection-api
[3] https://luxand.cloud/face-recognition-blog/face-recognition-...
If it works as intended, it'll only be effective for lesbians who have no interest in dating trans women.
This excludes all transwomen, because - also by definition - transwomen are male.
You don't have to date them, but you do that by saying "no trans women" in your profile. Excluding them would drive off as many lesbians as it attracted.
Further... trans people are still a tiny minority, well under 1%. So you're going to get hammered by the Base Rate Fallacy, excluding more cis women than correctly rejecting trans women. (Especially since trans women are going to self-select to not even try.)
The underlying source of this is the Daily Mail, a right-wing British newspaper. It sounds like it's trying to score some kind of political points with right wingers -- who are not exactly known to be a great target market for lesbians. This sounds like a poorly considered idea that is dead before it even gets started.
That would get your account banned on most dating apps, including the most popular one for "lesbian" dating.
e.g. this article [1] discusses the experience of a lesbian woman who did just that:
> Without the ability to filter out men, who could pick any identity they liked on the app, some female users took it upon themselves to signify that they were only interested in other women by adding it to their bio or including a photo with logos that signified exclusive same-sex attraction.
> These women found themselves quite literally forced off the app.
> Jen, a lesbian user known on Twitter as @cbucksrules, told Reduxx was suspended after adding "no trans women" to her bio on HER because she was exclusively same-sex attracted.
> Jen had joined HER in late 2021 looking for a female partner and assuming a lesbian dating app would be the place to go for such an endeavor. Finding a veritable smorgasbord of 5 o'clock shadows and head tilts, Jen attempted to ensure she would only be contacted by other female users.
> "I [wrote] in my bio what I would not consider the opposite sex as a partner nor a woman who was not a proud woman as we would not be compatible."
> Shortly after, Jen was suspended. She wrote to HER's customer service and asked why, and received a snarky response from an agent named "Devin" berating her for using "hateful language" in her bio, and asserting "trans women are women."
[1] https://reduxx.info/from-her-to-him-the-downfall-of-a-lesbia...
I don't know why HER cared what right wingers thought of them.
The bait-and-switch of inviting males to what was previously advertised as a lesbian dating space was of course already unpopular, but kicking actual lesbians off the platform for asserting their sexual orientation was what definitively crossed the line into a larger backlash.
It wasn't really anything much to do with conservatives / right-wingers, even if some of them did pass comment when word spread of how lesbian women were being treated by this app.
I do know that they are going to get stuck either way. It is undoubtedly true that people have the right to have preferences. Some preferences are taboo to state. You don't have to date black women, but there is no language to say that without running into a history that includes a lot of violence.
Lesbians date very differently from straight women, and I wouldn't presume to tell them their business. But it wouldn't surprise me if their best play was to forbid that kind of language, and just ask people to not accept offers they don't want.
Of course if there are men pretending to be trans women, that is a different story. Harassment is always wrong. In real life the number of men pretending to be trans women is small to the point of non-existent. Trolling is safer online, so they will have to moderate that the hard way.
Yes and I find it troubling that homosexuality is now in this category. That a lesbian will be reprimanded for stating she's not interested in males is an awfully regressive step back towards when same-sex sexual orientation had to be hidden away and closeted.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/22/in-australia-a-wome...