CommentStreams:694f8cd5f8f85b0cf1aeaa38b561110c

Let me caveat my comment by saying I am quite unfamiliar with gender studies literature. I really appreciate how you rethink the aesthetics of trans lives as an entrypoint to examine algorithmic violence. That seems a very powerful take.

What particularly stood out for me as central is how "transness is fundamentally uncodeable." It made me think that, naively(!), one might counter such a claim by saying "you know, Facebook [or instert your favorite social network here] has a neat little select box for that with tens of options to choose from." Thus, they might claim transness is codable. It might be interesting to explicitly contrast such an understanding of how transness is currently algorithmically encoded (which is still in binary terms), with the uncodable transness you describe. Which, for me really resonates when you write "Transness embodies a particular kind of ‘in-betweenness’ that at once infiltrates the binary code, renders it futile as a technical neutrality or universal truth and effectuates distance to the reductionist algorithmic readability of humanness towards redefining what it means to be(come) human." I would love to hear more about this infiltration of binary code as a mode of resistance you point at here.

For example, one of the cases of gender essentialism you mobilise in the first paragraph is the rejection of trans faces by facial recognition systems. However, would the software be more fair if it actually detects trans faces? Put broadly (and perhaps rather rhetorically), is a critique of algorithmic violence a bug report that can be resolved or does it do something else? For me, this tension becomes very prominent in the work of Mimi Onuoha on Missing Datasets. As a non-expert reader, I believe describing a bit more of the concrete cases of algorithmic violence such as those that you touch upon in your intro (and like Onuoha does) -- thereby getting out of "the algorithmic" as a broad term, and situate your critique in a more concrete algorithmic space -- might make even more tangible how the aesthetics of trans lives provides an entry point into algorithms and the violence they enact.