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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose facial bone structures are unacceptable to the app.

It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose skin color is unacceptable to the app.

It’s news that their definition of the gender “women” excludes women whose biological sex at birth is unacceptable to the app.

None of these criteria have any bearing whatsoever on gender. They’re saying “women” out loud, but what they’re trying to filter for in practice is “people who were sexed female-only at birth and meet a restrictive set of facial characteristics”. Women have a variety of biological sexes at birth (male, female, both, neither). Women have a variety of facial characteristics (feminine, masculine, androgynous, mixed). So it’s news that they’re trying to discriminate by redefining “women” to exclude some women.

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No, that's not the story. The story is that there is a social network for women who have excluded non-women. They have done this because on many occasions, biological males have joined their platform and have threatened their users.

They have chosen an imperfect solution to validate that their users are who they say they are, sure, but they have resorted to this measure to try to keep this space as their own.

We’ll see. The imperfection of their solution is certainly the surface story, but I suspect it’s meant to be a haven for TERF hate speech (not just a haven for all women) and won’t survive.

To flip in on its head. Would it be okay to have. A space for trans women only?

If that space defined “trans women” as only those who have completed both facial feminization surgery (with AI evaluation of their face bones) and required that they have completed vaginoplasty or vulvoplasty so that their genitals are sexed female, then no, it would be just as discriminatory to trans women as the app under discussion here is being to all women.

If this imaginary trans women space accepted all serious forms of presurgical or partial-surgical proof, such as a doctor’s letter or a hormone prescription or an orchiectomy or etc, then that would not be discriminatory and would be fine.

The core issue here is that this app is trying to enforce gender as purely a function of physical characteristics, denying altogether that gender is more complicated than that and is not guaranteed to be linked to any physical characteristics whatsoever. Their ”women only” definitions fail the transgender women test, the intersex test, and the “born female-sex athletes with high testosterone and masculine facial features” test.

Either they are blithely unaware of these complications, or they are unconcerned with them. That is, itself, newsworthy.

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