Kickstarting trans*: The crowdfunding of gender/sexual reassignment surgeries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The crowdfunding of gender/sexual reassignment (G/SRS) surgeries is a recent and controversial phenomenon on which there currently exists no academic commentary. This article considers three particular G/SRS crowdfunding campaigns with a focus on two primary elements: the aesthetic and commodified positions of trans* bodies, and the role of the potential backers, the crowds of crowdfunding. Both, I argue, are shaped by specific platform regulations as well as by broader social and political norms specific to and beyond trans* bodies. At stake in these distinctions are the extent to which trans* bodies are permitted to be defined as art and/or commodities, as well as the conditions under which backers are compelled (or not) to provide emotional, financial and political support for trans*-positive causes. Digital media, I conclude, is increasingly playing a role in defining, producing and challenging the modes of normativity that determine the livability of life for precarious subjects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".