Feminist Media Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfms20 Non-binary gender identity and algorithmicpsychometric marketing legibility Camilla Cannon To cite this article: Camilla Cannon (2021): Non-binary gender identity and algorithmicpsychometric marketing legibility, Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2021.1902367 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1902367 Published online: 24 Mar 2021. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 270 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfms20 FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1902367 Non-binary gender identity and algorithmic-psychometric marketing legibility Camilla Cannon American Studies, George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Recently, discussions of non-binary gender identity have been increasingly featured in U.S. American mainstream print media, particularly mass market magazines, advertising and business editorials, and marketing reports from consumer insight strategy groups. I present a threefold argument relating to this increase in non-binary gender visibility. First, I argue that the media depictions I examine portray non-binary gender identity as a more “authentic” gender identity than cisgender and binary transgender identities, a claim that encourages all consumers to engage in individualized consumptive patterns that transcend hegemonic gender categories in order to attain an authentically gendered self. I frame this media and marketing reification of the supposed affective and consumptive behaviors of non-binary individuals as a result of the parallel evolution of trans respectability politics, targeted marketing techniques, and aspirational economic subjecthood in the U.S. Second, I argue that the departure from these broad, hegemonic consumptive patterns that all consumers are encouraged to adopt enables the development of ever more fine-grained individual consumer data profiles within various algorithmic targeting marketing systems. Finally, I argue that the algorithmic legibility that such discourse encourages renders individuals more vulnerable to the many surveillance systems with which individualized commercial data profiles are often shared. Received 10 April 2019 Revised 18 January 2021 Accepted 25 February 2021 KEYWORDS Transgender; surveillance; algorithms; non-binary gender; trans visibility Introduction Recently, discussions of non-binary gender identity have been increasingly featured in U.S. American mainstream print media.1 These appear primarily in three kids of publications: mass market magazines such as Vogue, Teen Vogue, USAToday, and The New York Times; advertising and business editorial magazines such as Adweek and Forbes; and marketing reports from consumer insight strategy groups and trade publications. In this paper, I utilize insights from trans studies, feminist surveillance studies, and queer cultural history to make a threefold argument relating to this increase in non-binary gender visibility. First, I argue that the media depictions I examine portray non-binary gender identity as a more “authentic” gender identity than cisgender and binary transgender identities, suggesting that all consumers should engage in individualized consumptive patterns that transcend the broad categories of “men’s fashion” and “women’s fashion” in CONTACT Camilla Cannon ccannon@gwu.edu © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Camilla Cannon, 2108 G St NW, Washington, DC 20052 2 C. CANNON order to attain an authentically gendered self. I argue that this media and marketing reification of the supposed affective and consumptive behaviors of non-binary individuals can be understood as a result of the parallel evolution of trans respectability politics, targeted marketing techniques, and aspirational economic subjecthood in the U.S. Second, I argue that the departure from these broad, hegemonic consumptive patterns that all consumers are encouraged to adopt enables the development of ever more finegrained individual consumer data profiles within various algorithmic targeting marketing systems. Finally, I arrive at my ultimate concern, which is that this increased commercial algorithmic surveillance legibility of non-binary gender identity, as well as the algorithmic legibility that such discourse encourages all consumers to adopt, renders individuals more legible, and therefore more vulnerable, to the many surveillance systems with which individualized commercial data profiles are often shared. Many of these systems, including national security, financial monitoring, and healthcare surveillance, are welldocumented to have negative effects for transgender and non-binary individuals. Terminology By “non-binary gender identity,” I mean any gender identity that is not cisgender or binary transgender (ie, “transgender woman” or “transgender man.”) Various identities are subsumed by this umbrella, including non-binary, agender, genderqueer, two-spirit, genderfluid, and multigender. This is admittedly a reductive conflation of various discrete and historically rich gender identities; however, I do not choose this umbrella in order to endorse this conflation or make statements about the “truth” or legitimacy of gender identities. Rather, this term should be understood as shorthand for the largely cisgender media treatment of nonbinary gender; the articles and marketing reports I examine often perpetuate the idea that non-binary gender is an identity rather than a “legitimate” gender. The emphasis on identity rather than gender is an important component of the algorithmic-psychometric profiling tactics I discuss throughout the paper. Therefore, in the course of this article, “non-binary gender identity” should be understood to refer to the rhetorical facsimile of non-binary gender displayed by these media outlets rather than a reflection of how non-binary people understand themselves. In other words, I use the term not to refer to what non-binary gender is or what non-binary people themselves say non-binary gender is; rather, I am discussing the reductive and opportunistic use of the term by the media artifacts I examine, largely written by cisgender people. Methods In the following section, I will offer a brief survey of the rhetorical deployment of nonbinary gender identity in U.S. American popular marketing print media over approximately the last ten years. The discourse surrounding non-binary individuals that I’ll be examining here falls into three main categories: “explanatory” articles in popular magazines such as USA Today and The New York Times, which are typically aimed at an older audience and seek to introduce the concept, profiles of non-binary individuals, mainly models and spokespeople for beauty brands, in fashion-oriented magazines such as Vogue and Paper, and advertising editorials and marketing reports that discuss the FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 3 relevance of the increasing representation of non-binary individuals in relation to general marketing and surveillance-based targeted marketing strategies. In choosing articles and advertising editorials to include, I deliberately selected those from publications with large, mainstream audiences rather than niche, queer, and comparatively under-read media in order to highlight the prevailing narratives of non-binary gender identity in contemporary U.S. American discourse. These media are not to be understood as stand-ins or accurate representations of how non-binary people themselves view or articulate their gender, identity, and experience, nor as an exhaustive survey of the available print and online media discussing non-binary gender. A number of media outlets have emerged that center the voices of non-binary people themselves (most notably the online magazine them.), and these sources tend to provide more nuanced, first-hand, and less reductive accounts of non-binary identity. I examine the more mainstream and widely read discourse about non-binary gender identity in popular magazines, advertising editorials, and marketing reports—discourse typically written about non-binary people by cisgender people. Additionally, I do not mean to assign the negative material effects of the utilization of non-binary gender identity by media and surveillance systems discussed here to the individuals quoted in the articles discussed— prominent influencers such as Jacob Tobia for instance, who is quoted at various times in this article, have dedicated significant resources, attention, and activism towards combatting that very negative and opportunistic stereotypes and conceptualizations of nonbinary gender identity discussed below. It is imperative to remember that the profiles and articles featuring non-binary individuals examined here have been—by and large—conducted, written, and selectively edited by writers who are primarily cisgender. While there is a rich and deeply insightful online and print media culture created by non-binary people themselves that is wholly deserving of further scholarly analysis, such an analysis is outside the scope of this article. Additionally, while the discourse I examine here suggests an “embrace” and celebration of non-binary identity in popular and marketing discourse, I am examining a narrow and particular facet of the broader dialogue surrounding non-binary identity that is not reflective of the bodily, economic, and civic violence to which non-binary people are subjected. Non-binary individuals in the United States face disproportionate discrimination in employment and income (Harrison, et al 2012), income, national security and immigration (Lisa Skeen 2017), and various forms of civic and legal discrimination (Shawn Thomas. Meerkamper 2012). Binary transgender and non-binary people of color disproportionately suffer from these various forms of marginalization (Jamie M. Grant, Lisa A. Mottet and Justin Tanis 2011). These data belie the suggestion that a general “embrace” or “acceptance” of nonbinary gender identity is occurring in the United States. Media, marketing, and the millennial turn against binary gender Explanatory and fashion articles Explanatory articles geared toward explaining gender nonconformity to a popular audience usually appear in mainstream magazines such as USAToday, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. These articles typically present non-binary gender 4 C. CANNON identification as a novel, emergent phenomenon stemming from increased liberality and the waning of binary gender roles among post-millennium generations.2 The 2014 USA Today article says of members of post-millennium generations who are choosing to identify outside of traditional gender roles: “They’re young. They like things their way. They don’t like stereotypes and steer clear of conformity” (Sarah Jayson 2014). More recently, a 2018 New York Times article states that, for the coming generation, “notions of gender as traditionally constituted seem clunkier than a rotary phone” (Guy Trebay 2018). This type of language suggests that non-binary gender identification is undertaken by post-millennials as a result of changes in attitudes towards gender, perpetuating the idea that non-binary identity is an event rather than a “legitimate” gender identity. Non-binary individuals profiled in U.S. American fashion-oriented magazines are typically models or spokespeople for beauty brands. Non-binary models are described as innovators and pioneers, and their increasing representation is seen as “disruptive” in the profit-generating, Silicon Valley sense. A much-maligned 2017 Vogue magazine profile of Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik begins with an invocation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a novel in which a man wakes up to find that he has become a woman, and continues to inexplicably go “back and forth” from each sex throughout. The writer Maya Singer (2017) states that the novel “could easily be mistaken for a manifesto” by “the growing cohort of ‘fluid’ young people who, like Orlando, breezily crisscross the XX/XY divide.” Although neither Hadid nor Malik identify as trans or non-binary, the article suggests a connection between their gender-bending fashion choices and non-binary identity. This refusal to conform to binary gender expectations is portrayed as a generally applicable feature of millennial identity. In this and similar articles, less attention is paid to the unique characteristic of non-binary gender identity and more is placed on the ways in which nonbinary self-identification portends significant changes in broad consumptive patterns. Beyond transgender/the millennial turn The misrepresentation of non-binary identity in these media representations and marketing reports results from a cultural narrative of the millennial turn against binary gender. According to this narrative, post-millennium generations have not merely developed more nuanced views on gender but indeed have totally rejected the binary system of gender altogether. In her 2017 profile, Singer suggests that the belief that “gender is a more or less arbitrary distinction” has become as common-sensical to millennials as the belief that the Earth is round rather than flat (Maya Singer 2017). In this sense, non-binary gender identity is portrayed as a type of widespread intellectual and social revelation: the idea that all individuals fall into the categories of “man” or “woman” is reductive and damaging, and adherence to strict requirements of binary gender norms is no longer necessary. Non-binary individuals are not portrayed as a discrete group: unlike binary trans individuals, non-binary individuals are not members of a group that most of us will never belong to; rather, they are early adopters of what will eventually be the “commonsense” approach to gender. Non-binary individuals are the embodiment of a rhetorical claim that the rest of us, cisgender or not, have already come to accept. FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 5 Marketing reports and advertising Marketing reports and advertising editorials dealing with non-binary gender identity and the “millennial turn” more broadly tend to focus on two main claims: the business imperative of showing that a given company “gets it” and is on the “right side of history” through advertisements that feature of broader range of gender presentations and explicit promotion and featuring of non-binary influencers, and the unique potential of less dichotomized and increasingly “non-binary” marketing and product classification in order to develop increasingly granular and “intimate” individual marketing profiles based on a broad range of online surveillance and data mining. The first claim is a fairly straightforward one which echoes prior historical moments in which corporations have adjusted their language and representation to reflect changing societal attitudes regarding race, gender, sexuality, etc. The advocacy of non-binary representation as a means of developing more nuanced and granular consumer profiles, however, is more oblique at first glance, although largely detectable when placed within the context of targeted marketing psychometric data profile creation and the surveillance machinations that enable it. Broadly speaking, “targeted marketing” refers to the process by which marketers and advertisers tailor advertisements to particular individuals based on individual consumer data profiles. As we will trace below, the trajectory of targeted marketing is one of developing ever more fine-grained consumer profiles in order to maximize the efficiency of ad development and placement, beginning with broad target categories like “man”/ “woman,” “white”/“Black,” and “urban”/“suburban” and evolving into more segmented categorization such as “Black women with children” or “white women in cities.” While earlier targeted marketing techniques relied on basic demographic information such as age, assigned sex, and location, etc., contemporary targeted marketing systems are much more complex, typically relying on algorithmic targeted marketing systems that draw from vast amounts of surveillance data gleaned from individual users such as phone location data, internet browsing activity, purchase history, and social media engagement. The purpose of this more holistic gathering and assessment of individual personality traits is to create ever more-fine grained and future predicting individual consumer data profiles. In other words, by creating more “intimate” data profiles for individual consumers, targeted marketing systems are able to more accurate predict the future behavior of individual consumers. The more accurately future behavior is predicted, the more efficiently (and, therefore, lucratively) advertisers can decide where to place their ads, what type of ads to develop, and even how to construct user experience in a way that leads them to support, purchase, and develop “loyalty” towards particular brands. Shoshana Zuboff (2019, 199) describes this shift towards intimacy and individualization in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, arguing that “highly predictive, and therefore highly lucrative” data profiles must be plumbed from intimate patterns of the self. These supply operations are aimed at your personality, moods, and emotions, your lies and vulnerabilities. Every level of intimacy would have to be automatically captured and flattened into a tidal flow of data points for the factory conveyor belts that proceed toward manufactured certainty. 6 C. CANNON This emphasis on intimacy is mirrored in a number of marketing reports dealing with nonbinary gender identity. In the 2020 article “Marketing Beyond the Gender Binary,” marketers are counseled on the importance of integrating a more expansive understanding of gender in order to generate more nuanced, individualized, and “intimate” consumer data profiles: As data proliferate, marketers grow intimate with every desire of their customers and acquire the behavioral and attitudinal insights to hypercustomize products, services, and experiences . . . smart marketing is about harnessing the intelligence of data and analytics to build a brand that understands and serves the unique and individual needs of customers, no matter where they identify on the gender spectrum (Chatterjee and Monroe 2019). Crucially, the advice offered in this article is not solely about how to reach non-binary consumers themselves (although this, of course, would be a welcome development for marketers), but also about how to develop a deeper and more intimate relationship with all consumers, no matter their gender identity. When placed within the industry imperative for increasingly fine-grained consumer profiles, adopting an understanding of gender that transcends the clunky categories of “man” and “woman” is an indispensable development. Trans productivity and the labor of authenticity Overview In “Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive,” Dan Irving (2008) traces the ways in which prevailing arguments for trans inclusion have historically focused on the ability of trans people to either conform to or embody the ideal consumer-citizen of a given economic context, from the assimilatory calls of “transsympathetic” sexologists during the mid-twentieth century to the framing of wealthy, white, passing trans individuals as ideal employees in the current self-entrepreneurial neoliberal economy. I argue that these shifts in ideal transgender subjectivity mirror changing demands in targeted marketing and increasing the surveillance legibility of trans (and, eventually, non-binary) individuals in various commercial targeted marketing schemas. Ultimately, I argue that this increasing legibility renders trans and non-binary individuals more vulnerable to various other surveillance networks with which commercial targeted marketing data is often shared and becomes intertwined, including such seemingly disparate industries as credit monitoring, healthcare surveillance, and national security. As Sarah Banet-Weiser details in Authentic™ (Sarah Banet-Weiser 2012), “targeted marketing” as we know it today was not always the prevailing technique of advertising in the U.S. In the mid-twentieth century, companies relied on the assumption of a homogenous, mass consumer base and portrayed consumption of particular products as a means by which marginalized groups could “be ‘just like them’—white, middle-class suburbanites.” The construction of a mass consumer base “required a leveling of racial and gendered difference through the “objectivity” of purchasing power:(Banet-Weiser 2012, 26). This emphasis on aspirational assimilation and the leveling of difference is reflected in the prevailing arguments for trans inclusion of the time, in which sexologists considered “trans-sympathetic” argued that certain trans patients should be given access FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 7 to medical transition in order to maximize their ability to assimilate to dominant culture and most effectively contribute their labor power to the economy. In both the marketing and trans political trends of this time, we see an emphasis on individual and consumer illegibility within surveillance networks. In other words, ideal subjectivity for trans and non-trans individuals alike was defined by that extent to which one could manage to not stand out. This focus on surveillance illegibility contrasts sharply with the subsequent eras of both marketing strategy and trans politics, which trended towards legibility and self-expression. The assumption of a mass consumer base was replaced by the earliest form of what we would now recognize as “targeted marketing,” in which consumers were grouped not by homogenous categories like “man” or “woman,” but rather more fine-grained, multi-identity groups such as “black women in Southeast Texas” or “white men who make above 100,000 USD a year.” The primary motivation for this shift was, of course, profit: as John Cheney-Lippold 2017, 76) describes, marketers came to see “the glaring inefficiency of targeting only men—mainly because it resulted in a loss of revenue and a waste of advertising resources” and therefore developed more fine-grained marketing categories. Concurrent with the centering and celebration of multilayered identities in advertising is the rise of visibility politics in trans activism, in which mainstream organizations like the Human Rights Campaign encouraged individual trans people to be highly vocal about their identities by asserting that “the collective work of becoming visible” is what leads to legal protections and employment inclusion for transgender people (Emmanuel David 2017, 28). Being “out and proud” and “unapologetically ourselves” enables the further identification and crystallization of trans people as a discrete social group, and therefore more legible within the system of segmentation analysis marketing. Self-entrepreneurship and trans exceptionalism The shift in mainstream trans politics that followed the heyday of visibility is a subtle and yet deeply influential one. I argue that recent trends of “trans exceptionalism”—in which binary trans individuals are positioned as exceptionally good corporate “investments” due to the “resilience” and “grit” they have developed in response to oppression—coincide with the rise of the new economic-subjective ideal of self-entrepreneurship. I contend that this positioning of binary trans individuals as exceptional ideal economic subjects has been extended to non-binary individuals, albeit for slightly different reasons that are tied much more intimately to commercial surveillance legibility. The exceptionalism associated with both binary trans and non-binary individuals both encourage behaviors that render them optimally legible to our current targeted marketing surveillance paradigm, algorithmic-psychometric marketing. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault 2008, 225) argues that the project of American neoliberalism is to expand market logic and analysis into all aspects of human life, especially those formerly considered “non-economic.” To this end, individuals are encouraged to view themselves as self-entrepreneurs, solely responsible for wielding their own human capital in pursuit of wealth accumulation. Self-entrepreneurship is both a mode of self-understanding and an aspiration; the degree to which an individual can see themselves as a success is the degree to which the “self-enterprise” of their life has yielded profit. Self-entrepreneurship is a pervasive economic, social, and subjective 8 C. CANNON imperative that does not radiate from any one particular source, but rather permeates each aspect of our self-understanding. The advent of self-entrepreneurship is coincident with the marketing turn towards psychometric identification. Following the era of segmentation analysis targeted marketing, individual consumer profiles based on demographic categories (even segmented ones) were deemed less profit-rewarding than consumer profiles based on behavior. Consumers within a psychometric system are defined not by who they demographically “are” but by what they do. The activities, interests, and opinions (AIO) of a broad range of consumers are used to generate market segments defined not by shared demographic membership, but by shared self-understandings, emotional investments, and forms of cognition. The marketing strategy firm CB Insights advises its customers on the efficacy of psychometric marketing: For example, imagine trying to market a vegan protein bar. You could run a Facebook ad targeted at athletes and fitness enthusiasts, and maybe find some success. But by getting more granular, you could market to a segment of vegans who feel strongly about the mistreatment of animals, or to health-conscious people who feel guilty when they eat sugary energy bars (CB Insights 2018). Psychometric marketing is most successful when individuals engage in highly personalized, visible, and expansive online behavior and self-representation, as these are far better indicators of one’s emotional state and behavioral proclivities than purely demographic categories. In trans activism, the era of self-entrepreneurship has resulted in a shift towards trans exceptionalism. While trans activists have always stressed the employability and assimilability of trans individuals, trans individuals are now portrayed as not just “good enough” to warrant conclusion, but uniquely good sources of human capital for employers to “invest” in. Dan Irving quotes trans activist Stephen Whittle who, in a 2009 survey response, suggests that trans individuals may be particularly well-suited to corporate success because predominantly, the bright, articulate, and able transsexual people undergo gender role transition, rather than those less equipped . . . It may well the case being bright, articulate and able is an essential requirement to surviving the social stigma that still surrounds transsexualism and gives the best chance of being able to continue to earn a living’” (Dan Irving 2012). Irving positions Whittle’s statement as illustrative of a broader trend in trans discourse, in which the ability of trans individuals to overcome the difficulty of transition in a transphobic society is portrayed as “individual character traits, components of human capital, or property that one possesses” (2012, 160). In this sense, those trans individuals who “rise to the top” (by successfully transitioning on the job and, presumably, passing) necessarily possess the grit, determination, and resilience that are especially important properties of the successful self-entrepreneurial subject. Rather than previous arguments for inclusion that trans individuals were “good enough,” this new discourse positions trans individuals as even better “investments.” FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 9 Authenticity, consumptive self-construction, and non-binary exceptionalism Although we are still living in the era of self-entrepreneurship, I argue that the ideal economic subject is now a self-entrepreneur who engages in an ongoing process of consumptive self-creation in order to attain and express an “authentic” self. Where trans workers have been posited as ideal self-entrepreneurial subjects because of their grit and resilience, non-binary individuals are posited as ideal consumptive self-creators because of the perceived variability and optimally legible nature of their consumptive patterns. The rhetorical deployment of non-binary identity that I’ll be describing going forward represents a considerable expansion of the trans exceptionalism of the selfentrepreneurial era generally: rather than a discrete group with attractive selfentrepreneurial qualities, non-binary people are held up as ideal economic subjects whom cisgender people should strive to emulate. In this sense, the rhetorical deployment of non-binary identity is not actually aimed at non-binary people: rather, the primary audience is cisgender people, and the message they receive is that non-binary people are “pioneers” of a new and desirable form of aesthetic gender identity representation. Central to the promotion of the consumptive self-creative economic agent is the deployment of the contemporary concept of authenticity. Although “authenticity” is admittedly a thorny term, I am employing Sarah Banet-Weiser’s treatment of the term in Authentic™. According to Banet-Weiser, contemporary authenticity differs from classical authenticity because, while the former views authenticity as “solely an internal process,” the latter suggests that “in order to access one’s authentic self, one must be true to others. To be authentic to yourself, one must be true to others; it is about external gratification” (Banet-Weiser 2012, 80). The authenticity mandate identified by Banet-Weiser places significant moral weight on the accessibility and communication of the self to others. Because consumption is one of the primary means by which an individual can make their “true self” apparent to others, attainment of the moral good of authenticity is also contingent upon the ability to consume. The concept of authenticity figures prominently in popular and marketing discourse surrounding non-binary identity. A central suggestion is that for all individuals, our authentic selves necessarily reside outside of the bounds of the gender binary. This claim is built upon the idea that we are all, regardless of gender identity, submitted to a social process in which the assumptions and expectations of binary gender are inescapably and often violently imposed upon us. In a 2017 Refinery29 article, Jacob Tobia states: “my earliest self, my purest self, had an effortless and authentic and real relationship to their gender identity. I think the process of my life has been trying to get back to who I was when I was three years old. Trying to get back to who I was before all this shame was imposed upon me.” In the same article, non-binary trans “filmmaker, advocate, and artist” Dr. Joshua M. Ferguson states, “Over the last few years, I’ve been on a quest to reconnect with who I was when I was a child before I had to conform to the binary” (Chris Kaye 2017). Tobia and Ferguson both identify the imposition of binary gender as a rupturing event in their lives, before which they possessed an authentically gendered self and after which this self was “lost.” Non-binary gender identity expression is, in this configuration, a process of retrieval. Since we are all subjected to the gender binary whether we identify 10 C. CANNON as non-binary or not, it follows that we all separated from an authentic, necessarily nonbinary gendered self. In many ways, this configuration of non-binary gender authenticity differs greatly from historical and contemporary understandings of binary transgender authenticity. As Michael Michael Lovelock 2017 details, popular media representations of transgender women operate upon the premise that transgender people possess an authentically binarily gendered core, the realization of which is stymied by their unfortunate placement within a “wrong body.” The “long, and often painful, journeys to embody their authentic female identities” (Lovelock 2017, 683) that passing transgender women undergo position them as exceptionally authentic female subjects because of their supposed commitment to the idea that “one’s femininity must be perpetually ratified through the appropriate mobilization of consumer technologies” (2017, 680). In this conception, there remains only two genders, man and woman. Some individuals were born into “correctly” sexed bodies (cisgender people), while others were born into “incorrectly” sexed bodies (binary transgender people.) Ironically, it is the “wrong-body” individuals who can serve as mentors to the “right-body” individuals, as they have, by necessity, developed a mastery over the consumptive and aesthetic tools and techniques necessary to achieve “authentic” womanhood. Despite the contextual differences between nonbinary gender authenticity and binary transgender authenticity, both configurations share a common underlying message: all individuals possess an authentically gendered self, and realizing this authentically gendered self can be achieved only through particular patterns of consumption. In the context of the millennial turn against binary gender, the authentically gendered self necessarily resides outside the gender binary; therefore, the authentically gendered self can only be realized through consumptive patterns that buck traditional categories of “man” and “woman.” For instance, in a 2018 New York Times article, Jacob Tobia locates the realization that they had been severed from an authentically gendered self in an act of consumption: “I finally said to myself, ‘Damn it, I’m going to Dollar General to buy some cheap gold glitter polish and the brightest red lipstick I can find,’” Mx. Tobia said. “And, when the lip was on and the polish was dry, I had this moment where I realized it’s not that I’m exploring anything new here. I’m calling back an old part of myself” (Trebay 2018). In addition to a general discursive portrayal of non-binary identity realization through consumption, a number of product lines have recently emerged that identify their products in particular as means of authentic gender expression. In a 2018 Teen Vogue article about the launch of Fluide, a genderfluid makeup brand, co-founder and creative director Isabella Giancarlo told the magazine: “Fluide is about celebrating the infinite ways we express selfhood, gender, and identity . . . representing gender-inclusive beauty and self-expression opens up possibilities for all in how we look, who we are, and who we want to be. Fluide is here for joy, resilience, and radical selfexpression for all” (Suzannah Weiss 2018). Giancarlo’s statement is particularly illustrative of the ways in which consumption is positioned as a method of expression and realization of non-binary gender identities. Fluide’s products create the conditions of possibility for appearance (how we look); FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 11 selfhood (who we are); aspirational selfhood (who we want to be); and authenticity (radical self-expression.) If Giancarlo’s statement had ended at “how we look,” Fluide’s products would be positioned simply as tools for identity expression. However, by expanding the utility of Fluide to help us actualize “who we are” and “who we want to be,” the act of using products formerly understood to be for hegemonically gendered people in order to attain and maintain hegemonic gender expression is positioned as a creative, playful process by which we can return to an authentic, pre-gendered self. In encouraging the idea that we all have an authentic self to return to and that their products are the best means by which to complete this return, corporations are able to not only move into the niche (yet growing) market of non-binary identifying individuals, but also to cultivate a new consumptive approach among all individuals. Consumptive self-creation and algorithmic-psychometric legibility In We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves, Cheney-Lippold (2017) examines the ways in which algorithmic targeted marketing models deployed by corporations like Quantcast render consumers legible through the ascription of individual identities based not on demographic membership but on the aggregate of one’s online behavior. For instance, marketing algorithms assign gender based not on selfidentification nor one’s “official” gender; rather, one’s status as “man” or “woman” is determined by the extent to which their online behavior algorithmically conforms to the data categories “man” and “woman” (Cheney-Lippold 2017, 65) For instance, a gay 25year-old woman may be differentially coded in various targeted marketing databases as a straight 45-year-old woman or a gay 18-year-old man as a result of her aggregate browsing habits, purchase history, and ad clickthrough rates. Additionally, her algorithmic gender identity may shift based on both changes in her behavior and changes in the algorithmic coding of gender categories. The content of one’s algorithmic identity at any given time is based upon an instantaneous interpretation of a ceaseless stream of data from whatever of one’s personal platforms a given algorithmic marketing firm has access to—their phone, their browser, their Spotify listening history, their location. Although “algorithmic-psychometric” marketing may seem indistinguishable from “psychometric” marketing, these two modes of rendering consumer legibility are not the same. While the first iteration of psychometric identification was able to place individual consumers into highly specific non-demographic categories based on, among other things, emotional investments and self-understanding, (recall “healthconscious people who feel guilty when they eat sugary energy bars”), algorithmicpsychometric targeted marketing models succeed because of their ability to instantaneously and unceasingly interpret each individual consumer’s behavior in order to assign a unique and ever-evolving identity. In this sense, algorithmic-psychometric marketing is a refinement of psychometric marketing in the same way that psychometric marketing was a refinement of segment analysis marketing and segment analysis marketing was a refinement of mass-consumer marketing. As always, the trajectory is towards ever more fine-grained—and, therefore, evermore profit-rewarding—individual consumer identities. Algorithmic-psychometric targeted marketing systems thrive on large amounts of data and reflexivity. Cheney-Lippold quotes from Quantcast’s 2008 Methodology Overview, which boasts that the machine-learning model the company uses to infer user gender 12 C. CANNON “‘just gets smarter over time. As additional media assets and related exposures are continually added to the model, a ripple effect occurs. Real-time updates to the estimates are made not just to the added observations, but also to all relevant exposures and web assets’” (Cheney-Lippold 2017, 110). Quantcast’s gender inference model becomes more refined and—for market prediction purposes—more “accurate” in proportion to the amount of consumer data that is figured into its algorithmic analysis. Let’s say that on Monday at 5:00pm an individual is algorithmically categorized as “female” in Quantcast’s database and they visit CNN.com, a website algorithmically coded as “predominantly male.” The ripple effect of their visit will impact both the gender coding of CNN.com and the gender coding of them as a user—CNN.com may become slightly more “female” at the same time that the user become slightly more “male.” If many users algorithmically coded as female visit CNN.com at the same time that our user does, the website’s gender coding may switch to “predominantly female.” When our user visits CNN.com on Tuesday, then, they may become slightly more “female” once again. The ripple effects associated with their visit to CNN.com emanate from each individual Internet user every time their online behavior is recorded by Quantcast’s system, and their gender inference of model is strengthened with each. Algorithmic targeted marketing is a superior way to detect not only patterns in consumer’s purchasing history, but personality factors that drive those purchases. In a 2017 blog post, algorithmic targeted marketing firm simMachines advises marketers to remember that “in real life your customers are as granular” as the hyper-specific segments produced by algorithmic targeted marketing systems. Readers are encouraged to reflect on all the ways that they differ from other individual members of their demographic groups. Despite shared zip codes, income levels, and patronage of specific grocery stores, You probably have completely different music preferences, vacation history, domestic lives, and leisure activities. And even more importantly you have different motivations and interests in terms of why you purchase a product vs. why your neighbor purchases the same product. This granularity reveals what makes you unique (Emily Webber 2017). As this post illustrates, the profitability of individual consumer data comes from the points where the individual departs from the typical expectations of the group in which they are a member. These points of departure paint more “authentic” individual profiles that circumvent the blunt hammer of demographic marketing. By encouraging consumers to attain a greater degree of “freedom” and “authenticity” from binary gender expectations by diverging from expected purchase and genderexpressive behaviors, mainstream media representations of non-binary identity lead to a proliferation of individual points of incongruence with hegemonic expectations and, therefore, facilitate the assignment of increasingly fine-grained individual consumer identities. Non-compliance with binarily gendered purchase behaviors is often referred to in these media as “play.” Gender-neutral beauty brand Fluide, for instance, refers to their products as a way to practice “radical inventiveness,” and states that “to us, beauty is malleable, political, powerful, play. We are they. We are them. We are you. We are Fluide, makeup for him, her, them, everyone.” In the 2017 Vogue piece, Gigi Hadid reflects on her and her boyfriend’s practice of sharing their “female” and “male” clothing, stating that “It’s not about gender. It’s about, like, shapes. And what feels good on you that day. And FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 13 anyway, it’s fun to experiment” (Singer 2017). Fluide and Hadid both suggest that “authentic” gender representation necessitates a playful, experimental departure from predictable modes of self-expression through fashion. Within an algorithmicpsychometric system, however, playful and experimental purchasing patterns are not perceived as random and unintelligible, but rather as providing a proliferation of data points that can be coded into a highly specified consumer profile. In this sense, it is not the category-hopping, “non-hegemonic” consumer who jams the system of algorithmicpsychometric marketing, but the unexceptional, conformist consumer who never betrays a slice of profitable individuality. The more “free” we each feel to exit the clunky categories of “man” and “woman,” the more legible we become. Data commerce Numerous trans studies scholars have discussed the negative impact of this data-sharing for trans individuals in particular; Lars Z. Mackenzie 2017, for instance, examines the difficulty that transgender individuals who have undergone name changes face in accessing credit, while Dean Spade 2015 speaks of the deprivation of legal, economic, and social services from trans and non-binary individuals whose gender presentations and/or previously gendered lives are deemed illegible within the administrative systems that provide these services. While these authors examine the ways in which trans and nonbinary individuals’ assignment of illegibility within administrative and algorithmic surveillance systems perpetuates systemic harm within these systems, little research has been done as to the risks associated with trans and non-binary individuals’ increased legibility within algorithmic surveillance systems. Although I have demonstrated the profit motive behind the pop cultural emphasis on “out and proud” gender expression, I believe it is also important to recognize the affinity between algorithmic-psychometric legibility and surveillance systems commonly understand to do harm primarily through the assignment of illegibility, including financial surveillance, administrative surveillance, and healthcare surveillance. In this section, I will focus on the development and sale of individual medical “risk profiles” through a trans and non-binary lens, as I believe it is a particularly illustrative example of the oft-obscured affinity between pop culture incitements to gender-variant expression on social media platforms and other public digital spaces and surveillance systems with more obvious and well-documented negative effects on the lives of trans and non-binary individuals. My primary area of concern is the ways in which in the concept of non-binary identity is being used to further entrench systems of surveillance and compulsory legibility, particularly with respect to those algorithmic surveillance systems that negatively impact trans and non-binary individuals. While I focus on algorithmic targeted-marketing systems here, it is not this system in particular that causes me the most worry; rather, I am concerned with the various surveillance networks which purchase and integrate the findings of algorithmic targeted-marketing data profiles into their own systems. Although the legal history of data commerce is murky and complex, Congress’ 2017 repeal of Obama-era Federal Communications Commission guidelines limiting the ability of companies to sell individual consumer data has rendered the sale of most of the type of information collected by algorithmic targeted-marketing systems fair game. Data commerce is best understood not as a series of discrete transactions in which an individual’s data may end 14 C. CANNON up in two or three databases rather than one, but rather as an explosion of data porosity, in which each piece of personal data gleaned by an algorithmic surveillance targeted marketing system is likely to end up not only in another targeted marketing database, but also databases of other industries, whether it be financial monitoring, healthcare, national security, etc. One of the most lucrative markets to have arisen from the commerce and compilation of individual data profiles is “risk profile” generation. Risk profile generation firms use vast amounts of psychometric data to a similar end as algorithmic targeted marketing systems; both seek to predict future behavior. However, while targeted marketing systems seek to predict consumer behavior in order to maximize profits, risk profile generation firms claim to protect companies from “bad investments” by algorithmically determining how likely an individual is to default on a loan, be a bad employee, or even become addicted to opioids. Zuboff examines some recent successes in this new “surveillance-as-service” industry, including an app that instantly determines an individual’s creditworthiness using behavioral sources such as “texts, emails, GPS coordinates, social media posts, Facebook profiles, retail transactions, and communication patterns” (Zuboff 2019, 172) and a company that provides “risk reports” for employers and landlords about potential employees and tenants which mines an individual’s social media profiles, “including entire conversation threads and private messages,” in order to determine personality, financial stress level, and even “protected status information such as pregnancy and age” (Zuboff 2019, 172–3). Each of the industries listed here—housing, credit, and employment —have long, pre-digital histories of discriminating against individuals along axes of race, gender, sex, class, ability, religion, origin, citizenship status, and more. In 2019, it was reported that risk-management firm LexusNexis had developed and sold individual medical risk profiles to major health insurance agencies including Cigna and Optum. With the stated goal of helping doctors identify patients at particular risk of opioid addiction, LexusNexis mined “insurance claims, digital health records, housing records, and even information about a patient’s friends, family and roommates” (Mohana Ravindranath 2019). Although LexusNexis’ proprietary risk assessment software is purposely opaque, it is plausible that social media surveillance was one of the most effective avenues of obtaining information on an individual’s friends, family, and roommates. The granularity of LexusNexis’ approach to individual risk profiles shows an affinity with the goals of algorithmic-psychometric identification—to capture the previously “uncaptureable,” in the service highly individualized and effectively predictive data sets for all individuals. Although currently available information about LexusNexis’ system does not clarify the extent to which psychometric information is utilized in their current risk profiles, the porous and increasingly unregulated nature of data commerce means that algorithmic-psychometric data is an available resource, and the drive for ever more finegrained individual profile development across industries makes such data acquisition a beneficial asset. Although potential opioid abuse is the only purported “risk” that LexusNexus’ risk profiles currently aim to identify, insurance companies in possession of these profiles could use them to justify denial of coverage to individuals deemed “risky.” Insurance companies may be particularly loathe to provide coverage for trans and non-binary individuals due in part to the cost of potential gender-affirmative surgery. If LexusNexus or similar brokers do marry the financial, housing, and social surveillance networks at their FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 15 disposal with data profiles purchased from algorithmic targeted-marketing and other commercial surveillance systems, even individuals who have no official medical documentation of their trans or non-binary status may be “outed” by a number of digital traces, including binary trans and non-binary pronoun selection on social media including Facebook and dating apps; participation in trans-specific forums and Facebook groups; the individual clickthrough rate for articles from trans-positive websites; the frequency with which words such as “trans” and “non-binary” appear in search engine entries and social media posts, and, of course, online purchase history. The affinity between ostensibly “progressive” pop cultural depictions of non-binary gender identity and expression and LexusNexis’ particular brand of risk assignment is that the types of legibility encouraged by the former provides the prolific and highly individualized data that the latter feeds upon. Conclusion My intention in this paper is not to malign or discourage expressions of non-binary gender identity, whether these expressions take the form of aesthetic self-fashioning, online pronoun selection, or purchasing of differentially gendered products. Nor do I wish to suggest any causal link or responsibility on the part of non-binary individuals for the strengthening of harmful algorithmic surveillance networks or disavow the positive impacts of increasing and increasingly positive trans and non-binary representation in popular culture. Rather, I hope to demonstrate that a full examination of the relationship between changing cultural configurations of gender and the exponentially increasing utilization of surveillance networks in both our daily lives and large-scale administrative systems will require a bringing together of seemingly disparate disciplines, including trans studies, media studies, surveillance studies, and critical advertising studies. While many trans studies scholars have provided thorough and illuminating accounts of the ways in which administrative and algorithmic assumptions of binary gender cause trans and nonbinary individuals to be cast outside of social and economic systems as a result of their illegibility within such a system, a greater focus on the interconnectedness of various surveillance systems is needed to understand the similar and oft-obscured threat of algorithmic and administrative legibility. Although I have focused on pop culture and marketing legibility in this paper, there are many areas in which a more critical and interdisciplinary focus on the imperative to gender legibility can be examined, including the push for non-binary options on various government-issued documents, corporate inclusions of non-binary gender self-identification, and intensifying healthcare surveillance. Notes 1. There is an increasing amount of non-binary gender representation in a variety of non-print media, including television, film, and art. Some of these representations have been praised as respectful and nuanced portrayals of non-binary gender and individuals, and some have been criticized. While these media representations are increasingly influential and deserving of analysis, such an analysis is outside the scope of this article. 2. The term “post-millennium generations” refers to both the population typically referred to as “millennials” (those born between 1980–2000, with an emphasis on, in this case, “late millennials” born from 1990 onwards) and “Gen Z” (those born between 2000–2010) The media 16 C. CANNON discussed here use “millennial” and “Gen Z” sometimes distinctly and sometimes seemingly interchangeably. However, the general implication in these articles is that the “non-binary generation” begins with late millennials and extends to current adolescents and younger. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on contributor Camilla Cannon studies at the intersection of trans studies and surveillance studies. They live, read, and write in Washington, D.C. E-mail: ccannon@gwu.edu References Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2012. Authentic™. New York: New York University Press. CB Insights Technology Insights Platform (CBInsights). 2018. “What Is Psychometrics? Understanding the ‘Dark Arts’ of Marketing that Brought down Cambridge Analytica.” June 7. Accessed May 1, 2019. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/what-is-psychometrics/ Chatterjee, Dipanjan and and Nick Monroe. 2019. “Marketing Beyond the Gender Binary.” MIT Sloan Blogs. May 28. Accessed October 16, 2020. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/marketingbeyond-the-gender-binary/ Cheney-Lippold, John. 2017. We are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press. David, Emmanuel. 2017. “Capital T: Trans Visibility, Corporate Capitalism, and Commodity Culture.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4 (1): 28–44. doi:10.1215/23289252-3711517. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. New York City: Palgrave MacMillan. Grant, Jamie M., Lisa A. Mottet, and Justin Tanis. 2011. “Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.” Report by the National Black Justice Coalition. National Center for Transgender Equality, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Harrison, J., Grant, J., & Herman, J. L. 2012. “A Gender Not Listed Here: Genderqueers, Gender Rebels, and OtherWise in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey.” LGBTQ Public Policy Journal at the Harvard Kennedy School, 2(1): 13–24. Imbert, Fred. 2018. “Facebook Says It Gave Companies ‘One-time’ Access to User Data after Restricting Information in 2015.” CNBC, July 1. Accessed May 1 2019. 153–169. https://www. cnbc.com/2018/07/01/facebook-says-it-gave-companies-access-to-user-data-after-restricting-. html Irving, Dan. 2008. ”Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive.” Radical History Review 2008 (100): 38–59. doi:10.1215/01636545-2007-02 Irving, Dan. 2012. “Elusive Subjects: Notes on the Relationship between Critical Political Economy and Trans Studies.” In Anne Enke (Ed.), Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Jayson, Sarah. 2014. “Gender Loses Its Impact with the Young.” USA Today, June 21. Accessed September 1, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/21/gendermillennials-dormitories-sex/10573099/ Kaye, Chris. 2017. “This Is What It Means To Be Non-Binary.” Refinery 29, November 16. Accessed September 15, 2018. https://www.refinery29.com/2017/11/180899/what-is-non-binarymeaning? bucketed=true&bucketing_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F Lovelock, Michael. 2017. “Call Me Caitlyn: The Making and Making-over of the ‘Authentic’ Transgender Body in Anglo-American Popular Culture.” Journal of Gender Studies 26 (1): 675–687. doi:10.1080/09589236.2016.1155978. FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES 17 Mackenzie, Lars Z. 2017. ““The Afterlife of Data: Identity, Surveillance, and Capitalism in Trans Credit Reporting.”.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 4 (1): 45–60. doi:10.1215/23289252-3711529. Meerkamper, Shawn Thomas. 2012. “Contesting Sex Classification: The Need for Genderqueers as a Cognizable Class.” The Dukeminier Awards Journal of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law 1–23. Ravindranath, Mohana. 2019. “How Your Health Information Is Sold and Turned into ‘Risk Scores’.” February 3. Accessed May 5, 2019. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/03/health-risk-scores -opioid-abuse–1139978 Singer, Maya. 2017. “Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik Are Part of a New Generation Who Don't See Fashion as Gendered.” Vogue, July 13, 2017. Accessed September 3, 2019. https://www.vogue.com/ article/gigi-hadid-zayn-malik-august-2017-vogue-cover-breaking-gender-codes Skeen, Lisa. 2017. “Gender Identity Recognition at the Border and Beyond.” Open Society Foundations, April 5. Accessed May 5, 2019. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/ gender-identity-recognition-border-and-beyond Spade, Dean. 2015. Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Trebay, Guy. 2018. “For Capitalism, Every Social Leap Forward Is a Marketing Opportunity.” The New York Times, September 18. Accessed September 1, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/ 18/style/gender-non-binary-brand-marketing.html Webber, Emily. 2017. “5 Market Segmentation Problems that are about to Be Solved.” simMachines, December 20. Accessed June 1, 2018. https://simmachines.com/5-market-segmentationchallenges-solved Weiss, Suzannah. 2018. “Beauty Brand Fluide Addresses Gender Identity.” TeenVogue, February 21. Accessed April 25, 2018. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-fluide-addresses-genderidentity-supports-lgbtq-causes Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Hachette Book Group.