National
How I — a trans man — went undercover on a TERF dating site
Female-only app asserts lesbians must be ‘biologically female’
It turns out the “lesbian renaissance” only has 85 people.
No, I am not talking about the Renaissance as defined by Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, Bottoms, and Drive-Away Dolls. That Renaissance is well populated.
It’s the Renaissance defined by Jenny Watson, a lesbian and self-described TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) committed to the idea that lesbians can only be “biologically female.”
My number comes from Watson’s female-only lesbian and bisexual dating and community app, L Community, which took LGBTQ news and Twitter by storm last month when it claimed it could identify and exclude trans women to a rate of 99.89% accuracy using AI-powered “sex recognition software.”
As of Aug. 7, more than 60 days since launching, the website couldn’t even break 100 users.
After reading L Community’s definition of biological sex – “biological sex is firmly linked to distinct reproductive anatomies dedicated to producing sperm or eggs for reproduction” – I realized that I – a transmasculine person– fit the bill for “adult human female.”
So, I checked the box verifying that I was “biologically female,” snapped a picture of my face – and signed up for the dating app. I didn’t shave beforehand, so my testosterone-induced stubble remained in the picture. Chest photos were not required so my flat chest raised no alarms.
Not that any of that would have mattered, Watson is clear that her app can’t be trans-exclusive because “there are many biological women who identify as males and we would certainly welcome those women.”
I paid and was refunded the $12.75 to verify my identity. And I was ushered into the community, which was notably silent. The only content was from Watson. Posts include telling members the proper dating app portion was on its way via an invite-only basis and asking if anyone wanted to join a Zoom meet up since “our recent event had only 6 attendees.” Another user posted sporadic lesbian-themed memes.
I used my legal name to register, as the platform requested. Conveniently, I haven’t changed my name to Henry yet. At the same time, I reached out to Watson multiple times for comment under the name I publish under and use.
(To counter any claims of misrepresentation, my chosen and legal names are irrevocably tied together on the internet due to my brief time publishing with both. A cursory search of either name identifies both as associated with me).
In response to an initial email request for an interview, she wrote “To ensure our message is accurately conveyed, I would prefer to answer your questions via email,” and provided the background “L’App is designed to create a safe and respectful space exclusively for lesbians, utilising facial recognition technology to ensure that only biological females can sign up.”
Watson noted, “This innovation addresses specific concerns raised by many in our community regarding their dating experiences.”
When I followed up with specific questions, as requested, such as the number of active users or their approach to people using the singular “they” pronoun or how they plan to approach intersex individuals, Watson failed to respond in a five-day comment period. I extended that to 7 days out of courtesy, and heard nothing.
Ten days after I reached out with my questions, Watson asked for another week to respond. I provided her with a work-week deadline and never heard back.
Watson’s stances on the non-binary, intersex, and trans community are of public record, however.
Watson had previously described a queer, non-binary musician – who happens to be in a relationship with a man – as “a straight woman LARPing.” She tweeted in dismissal of the inclusion of non-binary and intersex people in lesbian bars and lesbian history.
In the same interview Watson said trans men were welcome on the app because they are actually women, Watson repeated that no trans woman could be a woman, to the surprise of the conservative interviewers who questioned if Watson’s conviction held “if they have gone through it, and they’re completely a woman now.” It, of course, being transition.
By the logic presented in the interview, trans men who pass as men, who have testosterone levels equal to that of a cisgender man, and who have received top and bottom surgery are eligible for participation in the community, but trans women who pass as women, have received top and bottom surgery, and have testosterone levels of a cisgender woman cannot.
Not that passing is something that every trans person wants, can do, or should be a necessity to gain respect or protection from discrimination.
Additionally, Watson’s app may not be open to cisgender women as well.
Watson was quick to tweet against Imane Khelif, the cisgender boxer whose gender was questioned by a coalition of far-right actors ranging from J.K. Rowling to J.D. Vance. (The only “proof” that Khelif has XY chromosomes comes from a highly discredited Russian sports organization).
The L Community website states that: “In humans, biological sex is firmly linked to distinct reproductive anatomies dedicated to producing sperm or eggs for reproduction. At birth, human reproductive anatomy is unmistakably male or female in over 99.98% of cases.” Meaning, that there are only .002% of people who are intersex.
This statistic is categorically incorrect. The Cleveland Clinic estimates that 2% of people worldwide are intersex. Other medical and advocacy organizations consistently argue that the number likely is 1.7%, drawing from the research of sex and gender biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling.
Where did Watson get that number? It is likely from Leonard Sax, a medical doctor and psychologist, who has argued that 0.018% of people are intersex. Sax has also argued that gender is biologically hardwired between females and males on numerous occasions, including on conservative talk shows and for the far-right think tank the Institute for Family Studies.
Even if Sax’s and Watson’s proposed statistic was correct, Watson and L Community offer no guidelines about the inclusion of intersex people, regardless of their gender identity. Watson’s derision of Khelif suggests intersex people may not be welcome in the community.
This is not the only case where Watson’s assertions may be faulty. Watson initially claimed that her AI-powered software only messed up 0.10% of the time. She provided no proof to verify the claim.
Recent peer-reviewed research from CU Boulder studied gender recognition accuracy in multiple softwares and found that gender recognition software accurately categorized cisgender women 98.3% of the time, meaning that it miscategorized cisgender women 0.17% of the time, or a little less than double what Watson’s app does.
Importantly, CU Boulder was examining some of the most advanced and well-supported models out there, looking at Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Clarifai programs. For those who don’t know Clarifai, it’s an AI-specific company that employs over 100 people. The rest need no introduction.
Not only is Watson working with a much smaller team — LinkedIn estimates 2-10 employees – Watson’s software also must account for the diversity of gendered appearances within the lesbian community, ranging from butch to femme, in addition to differentiating “biologically female” trans men from men and “biologically male” transwomen from women, meaning their software must be highly advanced.
The Boulder research team found that transgender men were categorized as women approximately 38% of the time and men the remaining 62% of the time, meaning they are incredibly hard to accurately categorize in either direction.
Dr. Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, one of the authors of the CU Boulder study, said, “A lot of people have this view that tech is somehow abstracted from human bias or human values, but it’s not in any capacity.” While Scheuerman knew the topic of my interview, we only spoke about his research, not about the app specifically.
Biometric AI and computer vision – how computers can identify objects or people – consistently shows bias against transgender individuals
Watson’s team manually verifies sex from submitted selfies using a script on the website which uses publicly available datasets and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Per UCLA, APIs help dictate how software works and share information. There are several publicly available gender differentiation APIs.
Scheuerman explains that, “at a broad level, most computer vision works by defining the categories which you want the system to recognize. In gender, this is often male or female.”
As Scheuerman’s research explains, large data sets of images, qualitatively labeled by people for specific characteristics like gender, can be trained to predict those qualities in future images.
Since the foundation of computer vision is human training, Scheuerman says, “these generative AI models, or these large foundation models, ideally can do anything you want them to do.”
Fundamentally, Watson’s model wants to differentiate between ciswomen and transwomen. Since existing computer models successfully read transwomen as women most (87.3% per Scheuerman) of the time, Watson likely needed to train her model specifically for its task.
The specifics of Watson’s model remain under wraps. But ostensibly to get the level of accuracy, Watson’s model must have been trained on photos of both transgender women and cisgender women, in addition to transmen. This raises questions of consent.
Where did Watson get the photos? Stock photo websites often include collections of transgender people available for republication, but some explicitly exclude their collections to be used in Machine learning or AI data, while others encourage it. Research has found that AI models often use copyrighted work as data to train models, regardless of if they have explicit permission.
That is even if Watson used stock photos. “Scraping” data from publicly available sources like social media is very common for AI training and research and has previously been used to target trans people.
For example, an investigation by Vice found that the University of North Carolina Wilmington scraped more than 1 million images of trans people from YouTube without permission to create a dataset to learn more about terrorism. An interesting research question, seeing as a highly disproportionate number of terrorists are not transgender.
Although we don’t know how Watson went about sourcing the data used to train her model, the broader question remains: What would models think about their photos being used in this way?
Shae Gardner, director of policy at LGBT Tech, who has worked in the field of tech policy and research for eight years, says, “While there has been zero transparency in how this app’s facial recognition system was trained, if it involved the non-consensual scraping and inclusion of images of transgender women, that constitutes a severe breach of privacy, trust, and consent.”
Gardner emphasizes that “developing a technology with the explicit goal of identifying members of a marginalized group raises significant ethical concerns. Openly stating an intention to use that technology to exclude said group confirms them.”
Scheuerman says that “a lot of people have this view that tech is somehow abstracted from human bias or human values, but it’s not in any capacity.”
He hopes that “the field of computer science would be more open to understanding these types of concepts [like equity and diversity] because they’re our responsibility and a moral responsibility. Plus, it’s actually valuable within the market.”
The politics of consent and AI are just beginning to be negotiated and already have led to multiple lawsuits.
The first trans-exclusionary lesbian app Giggle for Girls, started in 2019 by Sall Grover, is currently facing a lawsuit from a transwoman, Roxanne Tickle. The app shut down in August 2022 with 20,000 members. Grover’s Twitter bio says the app is under renovation and will be re-launched soon.
Grover and Watson used to be collaborators of sorts, having joined each other’s podcasts to hype up the small world of female-only dating entrepreneurs.
That collaboration seems to have soured as both are claiming to be the first trans-exclusionary dating app. Giggle started first, but Watson claims it did not begin to discuss dating – just finding community – until after L Community launched. Grover claims otherwise.
However, a dedication to in-person events is unique to Watson’s mission. She plans to open a bar in London for women — her definition — only. It will be a member’s only club, so the exclusion of transwomen is legal.
Watson recently hosted a counter event to London Pride, protesting trans and asexual inclusion at the event. Estimates Watson promotes put her event at 150 people. To put that into perspective, their event was under .005% of the size of London Pride.
These numbers are not surprising. A 2023 YouGov survey found that 84% of cisgender lesbians think of transgender people “very positively” or “fairly positively.” Another 13% don’t care (“neither positively nor negatively” and “fairly”). Only 3% felt “very negatively” about trans people.
The Her App, a trans-inclusive lesbian dating app, that has critiqued Watson and L Community, has more than 15 million users. Grover’s app before it shut down was 0.0013% the size of that. Watson’s app is .000005% the size of that.
Perhaps no comparison is more jarring to show that Watson and her followers are a stunning minority within the lesbian community.
National
Medical groups file lawsuit over Trump deletion of health information
Crucial datasets included LGBTQ, HIV resources
Nine private medical and public health advocacy organizations, including two from D.C., filed a lawsuit on May 20 in federal court in Seattle challenging what it calls the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s illegal deletion of dozens or more of its webpages containing health related information, including HIV information.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, names as defendants Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS itself, and several agencies operating under HHS and its directors, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration.
“This action challenges the widespread deletion of public health resources from federal agencies,” the lawsuit states. “Dozens (if not more) of taxpayer-funded webpages, databases, and other crucial resources have vanished since January 20, 2025, leaving doctors, nurses, researchers, and the public scrambling for information,” it says.
“These actions have undermined the longstanding, congressionally mandated regime; irreparably harmed Plaintiffs and others who rely on these federal resources; and put the nation’s public health infrastructure in unnecessary jeopardy,” the lawsuit continues.
It adds, “The removal of public health resources was apparently prompted by two recent executive orders – one focused on ‘gender ideology’ and the other targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’) programs. Defendants implemented these executive orders in a haphazard manner that resulted in the deletion (inadvertent or otherwise) of health-related websites and databases, including information related to pregnancy risks, public health datasets, information about opioid-use disorder, and many other valuable resources.”
The lawsuit does not mention that it was President Donald Trump who issued the two executive orders in question.
A White House spokesperson couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on the lawsuit.
While not mentioning Trump by name, the lawsuit names as defendants in addition to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., Matthew Buzzelli, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health; Martin Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; Thomas Engels, administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration; and Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.
The 44-page lawsuit complaint includes an addendum with a chart showing the titles or descriptions of 49 “affected resource” website pages that it says were deleted because of the executive orders. The chart shows that just four of the sites were restored after initially being deleted.
Of the 49 sites, 15 addressed LGBTQ-related health issues and six others addressed HIV issues, according to the chart.
“The unannounced and unprecedented deletion of these federal webpages and datasets came as a shock to the medical and scientific communities, which had come to rely on them to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, assist physicians and other clinicians in daily care, and inform the public about a wide range of healthcare issues,” the lawsuit states.
“Health professionals, nonprofit organizations, and state and local authorities used the websites and datasets daily in care for their patients, to provide resources to their communities, and promote public health,” it says.
Jose Zuniga, president and CEO of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC), one of the organizations that signed on as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement that the deleted information from the HHS websites “includes essential information about LGBTQ+ health, gender and reproductive rights, clinical trial data, Mpox and other vaccine guidance and HIV prevention resources.”
Zuniga added, “IAPAC champions evidence-based, data-informed HIV responses and we reject ideologically driven efforts that undermine public health and erase marginalized communities.”
Lisa Amore, a spokesperson for Whitman-Walker Health, D.C.’s largest LGBTQ supportive health services provider, also expressed concern about the potential impact of the HHS website deletions.
“As the region’s leader in HIV care and prevention, Whitman-Walker Health relies on scientific data to help us drive our resources and measure our successes,” Amore said in response to a request for comment from the Washington Blade.
“The District of Columbia has made great strides in the fight against HIV,” Amore said. “But the removal of public facing information from the HHS website makes our collective work much harder and will set HIV care and prevention backward,” she said.
The lawsuit calls on the court to issue a declaratory judgement that the “deletion of public health webpages and resources is unlawful and invalid” and to issue a preliminary or permanent injunction ordering government officials named as defendants in the lawsuit “to restore the public health webpages and resources that have been deleted and to maintain their web domains in accordance with their statutory duties.”
It also calls on the court to require defendant government officials to “file a status report with the Court within twenty-four hours of entry of a preliminary injunction, and at regular intervals, thereafter, confirming compliance with these orders.”
The health organizations that joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs include the Washington State Medical Association, Washington State Nurses Association, Washington Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Academy Health, Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, Fast-Track Cities Institute, International Association of Providers of AIDS Care, National LGBT Cancer Network, and Vermont Medical Society.
The Fast-Track Cities Institute and International Association of Providers of AIDS Care are based in D.C.
U.S. Federal Courts
Federal judge scraps trans-inclusive workplace discrimination protections
Ruling appears to contradict US Supreme Court precedent
Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas has struck down guidelines by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission designed to protect against workplace harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
The EEOC in April 2024 updated its guidelines to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), which determined that discrimination against transgender people constituted sex-based discrimination as proscribed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
To ensure compliance with the law, the agency recommended that employers honor their employees’ preferred pronouns while granting them access to bathrooms and allowing them to wear dress code-compliant clothing that aligns with their gender identities.
While the the guidelines are not legally binding, Kacsmaryk ruled that their issuance created “mandatory standards” exceeding the EEOC’s statutory authority that were “inconsistent with the text, history, and tradition of Title VII and recent Supreme Court precedent.”
“Title VII does not require employers or courts to blind themselves to the biological differences between men and women,” he wrote in the opinion.
The case, which was brought by the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, presents the greatest setback for LGBTQ inclusive workplace protections since President Donald Trump’s issuance of an executive order on the first day of his second term directing U.S. federal agencies to recognize only two genders as determined by birth sex.
Last month, top Democrats from both chambers of Congress reintroduced the Equality Act, which would codify LGBTQ-inclusive protections against discrimination into federal law, covering employment as well as areas like housing and jury service.
The White House
Trump travels to Middle East countries with death penalty for homosexuality
President traveled to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates
Homosexuality remains punishable by death in two of the three Middle East countries that President Donald Trump visited last week.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among the handful of countries in which anyone found guilty of engaging in consensual same-sex sexual relations could face the death penalty.
Trump was in Saudi Arabia from May 13-14. He traveled to Qatar on May 14.
“The law prohibited consensual same-sex sexual conduct between men but did not explicitly prohibit same-sex sexual relations between women,” notes the State Department’s 2023 human rights report, referring specifically to Qatar’s criminalization law. “The law was not systematically enforced. A man convicted of having consensual same-sex sexual relations could receive a sentence of seven years in prison. Under sharia, homosexuality was punishable by death; there were no reports of executions for this reason.”
Trump on May 15 arrived in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
The State Department’s 2023 human rights report notes the “penalty for individuals who engaged in ‘consensual sodomy with a man'” in the country “was a minimum prison sentence of six months if the individual’s partner or guardian filed a complaint.”
“There were no known reports of arrests or prosecutions for consensual same-sex sexual conduct. LGBTQI+ identity, real or perceived, could be deemed an act against ‘decency or public morality,’ but there were no reports during the year of persons prosecuted under these provisions,” reads the report.
The report notes Emirati law also criminalizes “men who dressed as women or entered a place designated for women while ‘disguised’ as a woman.” Anyone found guilty could face up to a year in prison and a fine of up to 10,000 dirhams ($2,722.60.)
Trump returned to the U.S. on May 16.
The White House notes Trump during the trip secured more than $2 trillion “in investment agreements with Middle Eastern nations ($200 billion with the United Arab Emirates, $600 billion with Saudi Arabia, and $1.2 trillion with Qatar) for a more safe and prosperous future.”
Former President Joe Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2022.
Saudi Arabia is scheduled to host the 2034 World Cup. The 2022 World Cup took place in Qatar.
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