4 ms·

They claim they are able to detect gender which according to the relevant Canadian government website https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html https://cihr-irsc.gc.

by chx 5y ago

They claim they are able to detect gender which according to the relevant Canadian government website https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html > Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, expressions and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people First it's not some hamfisted mixup of sex and gender: > Terefore, this feld may contain a mixture of NHS recorded gender and self-reported gender. Genetic sex in the UK Biobank was determined And yet: > Predicting gender from fundus photos, previously inconceivable to those who spent their careers looking at retinas, also withstood external validation on an independent dataset of patients with different baseline demographics Although not likely to be clinically useful, this finding hints at the future potential of deep learning for the discovery of novel associations through unbiased modelling of high-dimensional data. If we had a way to detect trans children, for sure that would be clinically useful! Edit: as always, thanks for the downvotes, but please also educate me where I am wrong.

Blikkentrekker 5y ago
Language belongs to everyone. Some specialists in their field make a distinction between “sex” and “gender”; others for instance do between “speed” and “velocity”, or “weight” and “mass”, vernacular, and in many fields, they are respective synonyms. Most technical terms start as lay terms in a language that are then given a more technical meaning, often pulling two synonyms apart in the process. On the note of “children”; I tried scanning the result for whether the machine can distinguish before puberty, which would be even more spectacular, but I couldn't find it in the article. — there is significant debate as to what extent non-genital sex characteristics exist before puberty, as the difference is often so small that they could easily be attributed purely to environmental or social factors.
- chx 5y ago
  The vernacular, in this case, is obsolete. It needs to catch up. Sex and gender while often happens to be the same are not at all the same thing and we need to speak up against confusing the two for the sake of our trans friends.
  - spankyspangler 5y ago
    I disagree. I think rather that people need to be tolerant and accepting of different peoples' definitions of words.
    - chx 5y ago
      No, that is past, we need to do better. Tolerance has its places but sex and gender not being the same is not controversial any more. It's not like mass vs weight which is mostly of interest to physicist. We are talking about real people. Truly, there's no place for this any more. We need to do better. Tolerance is necessary to accept people not like us and but erasing their very existence by using certain words is not tolerance. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/26/gender-reveal-party-pioneer-regrets-trend https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/26/gender-revea... https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/gender-reveal-celebrations-for-babies-help-explain-transphobia.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/gender-reveal-celeb... > the gender-reveal phenomenon pulls off a rousing counter-progressive two-for-one: weapons-grade reinforcement of oppressive gender norms (sorry, feminists!) and blunt-force refusal of the idea that sex assigned at birth does not necessarily equate with gender identity (sorry, trans-rights movement!). This is how the vernacular gets weaponized.
      - spankyspangler 5y ago
        I disagree. We need to do better with tolerance and acceptance. Preaching these things when it benefits a favored point of view and then rejecting them when it comes to others is actually the definition of weaponizing, and it does more harm and causes everyone to be intolerant.
        chx 5y ago
        What exactly do you want me to accept? Transphobia? Make no mistake: when you confound sex and gender that's what you are fueling. One half of the USA is busy enacting transphobic laws, we must not fuel that agenda. We can not just accept behavior singing "tolerance". That's not how this works. Tolerance means we respect every human being equally and it does not mean that any opinion denying that needs to be tolerated. https://medium.com/thoughts-economics-politics-sustainability/why-intolerance-should-not-be-tolerated-d1bc92228dec https://medium.com/thoughts-economics-politics-sustainabilit...
_Nat_ 5y ago
They're claiming that they can predict sex, not gender. The study does comment on a trans case in their validation-set, which of 1,287 images, had 1 image for someone whose genetic-sex and reported-sex didn't match. For that 1 image, the algorithm's prediction corresponded to the genetic-sex rather than the reported-sex. > Genetic sex was discordant from reported sex in one validation set image, and this image was incorrectly predicted by the model; that is the model predicted sex consistent with genetic sex in this case (Table S1). Table S1 can be seen in the Supplementary Information linked near the bottom of [the article](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89743-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89743-x). It really doesn't show much data though. --- As for the excerpt you quoted about predicting gender, the authors were writing about the claims from [a different (and pay-wall'd) study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0210-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0210-5).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
DanBC 5y ago
> > Terefore, this feld may contain a mixture of NHS recorded gender and self-reported gender. Genetic sex in the UK Biobank was determined NHS recorded gender can be self reported. https://pcse.england.nhs.uk/help/registrations/adoption-and-gender-re-assignment-processes/?keyword=A+transgender+patient+registered+at+our+practice+would+like+to+change+their+registered+name.+Do+they+need+to+provide+evidence+of+a+name+change+in+order+for+us+to+do+this%3f https://pcse.england.nhs.uk/help/registrations/adoption-and-...

by chx 5y ago

Blikkentrekker 5y ago

Language belongs to everyone. Some specialists in their field make a distinction between “sex” and “gender”; others for instance do between “speed” and “velocity”, or “weight” and “mass”, vernacular, and in many fields, they are respective synonyms. Most technical terms start as lay terms in a language that are then given a more technical meaning, often pulling two synonyms apart in the process. On the note of “children”; I tried scanning the result for whether the machine can distinguish before puberty, which would be even more spectacular, but I couldn't find it in the article. — there is significant debate as to what extent non-genital sex characteristics exist before puberty, as the difference is often so small that they could easily be attributed purely to environmental or social factors.

chx 5y ago
The vernacular, in this case, is obsolete. It needs to catch up. Sex and gender while often happens to be the same are not at all the same thing and we need to speak up against confusing the two for the sake of our trans friends.
- spankyspangler 5y ago
  I disagree. I think rather that people need to be tolerant and accepting of different peoples' definitions of words.
  - chx 5y ago
    No, that is past, we need to do better. Tolerance has its places but sex and gender not being the same is not controversial any more. It's not like mass vs weight which is mostly of interest to physicist. We are talking about real people. Truly, there's no place for this any more. We need to do better. Tolerance is necessary to accept people not like us and but erasing their very existence by using certain words is not tolerance. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/26/gender-reveal-party-pioneer-regrets-trend https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/26/gender-revea... https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/gender-reveal-celebrations-for-babies-help-explain-transphobia.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/gender-reveal-celeb... > the gender-reveal phenomenon pulls off a rousing counter-progressive two-for-one: weapons-grade reinforcement of oppressive gender norms (sorry, feminists!) and blunt-force refusal of the idea that sex assigned at birth does not necessarily equate with gender identity (sorry, trans-rights movement!). This is how the vernacular gets weaponized.
    - spankyspangler 5y ago
      I disagree. We need to do better with tolerance and acceptance. Preaching these things when it benefits a favored point of view and then rejecting them when it comes to others is actually the definition of weaponizing, and it does more harm and causes everyone to be intolerant.
      - chx 5y ago
        What exactly do you want me to accept? Transphobia? Make no mistake: when you confound sex and gender that's what you are fueling. One half of the USA is busy enacting transphobic laws, we must not fuel that agenda. We can not just accept behavior singing "tolerance". That's not how this works. Tolerance means we respect every human being equally and it does not mean that any opinion denying that needs to be tolerated. https://medium.com/thoughts-economics-politics-sustainability/why-intolerance-should-not-be-tolerated-d1bc92228dec https://medium.com/thoughts-economics-politics-sustainabilit...

_Nat_ 5y ago

They're claiming that they can predict sex, not gender. The study does comment on a trans case in their validation-set, which of 1,287 images, had 1 image for someone whose genetic-sex and reported-sex didn't match. For that 1 image, the algorithm's prediction corresponded to the genetic-sex rather than the reported-sex. > Genetic sex was discordant from reported sex in one validation set image, and this image was incorrectly predicted by the model; that is the model predicted sex consistent with genetic sex in this case (Table S1). Table S1 can be seen in the Supplementary Information linked near the bottom of [the article](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89743-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89743-x). It really doesn't show much data though. --- As for the excerpt you quoted about predicting gender, the authors were writing about the claims from [a different (and pay-wall'd) study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0210-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0210-5).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

DanBC 5y ago

> > Terefore, this feld may contain a mixture of NHS recorded gender and self-reported gender. Genetic sex in the UK Biobank was determined NHS recorded gender can be self reported. https://pcse.england.nhs.uk/help/registrations/adoption-and-gender-re-assignment-processes/?keyword=A+transgender+patient+registered+at+our+practice+would+like+to+change+their+registered+name.+Do+they+need+to+provide+evidence+of+a+name+change+in+order+for+us+to+do+this%3f https://pcse.england.nhs.uk/help/registrations/adoption-and-...