in transitu is an ongoing performative photo project on Instagram about how algorithms understand gender.

Each week, I document my gender transition by uploading an image of my bare chest on Instagram. Since the platform doesn’t allow female nipples, the question is: when does my body fit the social media site’s definition of womanhood?

After running the project for 10 weeks, I decided to give my followers an additional insight into how gender classification algorithms work. While we await Instagram censorship, I provide results from various publicly available gender classification algorithms, e.g. by Microsoft, Amazon and the Alibaba-backed face++. This gives a continuous look into how computers attempt to classify human gender.

The project acts as a sort of reverse engineering of Instagram’s moderation protocols. In using my own transgender body, I show how inconsistent the inner workings of gender classification algorithms are, whether used for censorship or offered as a software service.

Through these discoveries, in transitu continues to bring new perspectives to discussions surrounding gender, “artificial intelligence”, algorithms, internet culture, and censorship.

All the images are taken in my own bedroom with my smartphone.