If you're on IG and TikTok regularly, it might be harder to tell. Pretty much everybody is using filters. Even heavy filters that basically change how you look aren't a breach of etiquette, since it's all 'just for fun'.

Agreed, I just don't see the problem here.

Even from the perspective of, "he's just doing this to get more clicks," who cares? I just don't see how it's a problem for him to present himself however he wants to present himself.

At some point for some people "digital avatar" became a dirty word, and I don't understand it. I don't think he owes anyone online his real-world face. He doesn't owe them some kind of disclaimer either. If people online are following him because they think they have some kind of parasocial relationship to a girl, that's a personal issue they should think about on their end. And in any case, everyone online already has a persona they project; I have a persona and a set of characteristics and attitudes I project when I post on HN even though I don't hide my real name or identity. Knowing me on HN is not the same thing as knowing me in real life; if I'm allowed to do that, why can't he?

So he extends that to his face. Maybe he(she) is a woman but hasn't chosen to let people know yet. Maybe he's genderfluid in different places. Or maybe he just wants to have a woman avatar on social accounts for whatever reason. None of that is a problem.

This is fine even though he seems to identify as a man outside of the Internet; he doesn't have to identify as a woman to do this. Unless he's running around doing something genuinely harmful or trying to troll women, then let him choose how he presents himself online regardless of whether or not it matches his normal day-to-day gender identity.

"Getting more clicks on Instagram" isn't a horrible crime or deception that we should be concerned about.

Agreed. And honestly as a trans woman I hate seeing this kind of thing. The only reason people are paying attention to this is that society has turned the idea of men (ie assigned male at birth) identifying or representing themselves as women into a joke. The amount of random strangers who laugh at me on a daily basis is absolutely disheartening, it's really an awful thing to have to deal with (same with being threatened, assaulted, denied service which I have no legal protection against, not being able to use public restrooms)...

If you're interested Netflix has a wonderful documentary called Disclosure [0] about the media's portrayal of trans people, women in particular. I highly recommend!

0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8637504/

Wouldn't stuff like this make it less likely for people to be shocked by gender nonconforming folks?

I don't really buy that these stories help. The article plays this off as a surprising, weird event that people should be surprised by.

And while I'm assuming the person in question identifies as a man based on what he says, he(she) might not, and might just be in the closet saying the right things because he knows the environment he lives in. If that's the case, the article might even be harmful since it reinforces that this is a persona and never even touches on the idea that it might be a representation of his(her) actual gender identity.

But in either case, the big thing to me is that the article is harmful because it makes it everyone else's business. It creates this world where people are expected to validate that avatars online match physical bodies. Another way of looking at the question of whether or not this person is in the closet is that none of us know this person in real life, and it's kind of messed up that we're jumping behind the veil he put up so that we can validate whether or not he's transgender or nonbinary or what.

He doesn't owe us any of that. He doesn't owe us coming out of the closet, or staying in the closet, or explaining whether or not there is a closet, or justifying what he's doing. Even in the real world when we see nonbinary people, we're not owed some kind of explanation of their entire world; not unless that's something they want to share. So the article turns something that should be a personal decision into a curiosity that needs to be explained, to the point where the media actually tracked this person down for comment rather than just leaving him alone.

An article that talked to someone like this and (consensually) explored his motivations on his terms might be normalizing, but to me this comes off as the opposite -- it comes off as reinforcing that people should be shocked by gender fluidity.

There's nothing in this article that talks about gender non conforming people an the issues that affect us.. unless I'm missing something. People who aren't already educated are just going to have a laugh and leave with the same preconceived notions that they came in with. This person is being portrayed as someone who is misrepresenting themselves, not someone who identifies as female, and in fact that's what he says he's doing.

There are some face-adjusting filters that make people "prettier" on both instagram and snapchat that immediately make them look like recognizable-looking aliens to me, but they're common enough that I could see people missing that it's actually a more extreme change in this case.

Everyone big on instagram is fake. But people assume it's large asymmetric women faking, not men.

Nobody cares about the fact pictures are fake. 90% of instagram pictures are fake.

The only problem is he/she is not "real" woman. This person is clearly presenting themselves under different gender, and here is large number of people harassing them/her/him.

This goes to show how dangerous deep fakes can be when people are willing to believe. Several people had called him out already, and they had provided evidence, but thousands of people still believed he was a young woman.

It's only "dangerous" if being a young woman is somehow an intrinsically important transactional part of following the account -- if the followers feel like they're being defrauded or something.

But honestly, the people who have that association or who view following an account as some kind of relationship should be taking a look inward about why the physical characteristics of a biker are so important to them in the first place. I don't feel a huge need to make it easier for people to do something that I feel like they shouldn't be doing in the first place.

Down that road lies the segment of the Internet that gets mad when they find out a woman streamer is married because "she should have been upfront about it." And I just don't want to touch that part of the Internet with a 10 foot pole. I'm not worried about their ability to form unhealthy, one-sided relationships with people they've never met.

So? That's the point. He is what he represents himself to be. Not what we want him to be.

> The man reportedly said that nobody wants to see an "uncle", and so, he turned himself into a "beautiful woman" so that his photos would be popular.

He self identifies as a 50 year old man. He admits that he just did it for attention near the end of the article.

So? He wanted to make a point, or he wanted attention, what did anyone lose by him pretending to be a young woman and get attention?

Instagram biker chicks might be annoyed because he's a competitor, but anyone else?

I assume all the instagram biker chicks are no turning off their filters and removing makeup, right?

I'm not going to assume anything about this person's gender, but I think it's worth mentioning that the Japanese government uses violence to erase transgender existence [1], so it may not be a safe place to be non-cisgender.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/9ef16f52e9b94b9a838b17a63c6c1e8d

Unfortunately, there are quite a few things Japan has tried to erase through history, with varying degrees of success. "Silence" is a pretty good novel that touches on one of those things (beware of descriptions of torture / extreme violence).

He self identifies as a 50 year old man who identifies as a young beautiful woman, not just as a 50 year old man.

Why does anyone care