Last updated September 18, 2017 at 6:35 pm

The Future of Australia’s Transgendered Youth

It’s not easy to be transgendered. Statistics reflecting the experience of young trans people in Australia have just been released, and they are sobering.

Almost 50% of young trans Australians have attempted suicide – compared to about 2.5% of young people in the general population. 80 % have self-harmed, compared to just over 8%. And about 75% have been diagnosed with depression, compared to about 7.5%.

This is a wakeup call that we can’t ignore – particularly because this is entirely preventable. Mental health issues are not a foregone conclusion for trans men and women. Today, they suffer bullying, discrimination, and a lack of social support, and these are the kind of experiences that trigger mental illness.

This study could be a turning point: we’re looking at a future where these numbers remain stagnant, where they get worse, or where they get better. It’s up to all of us to support transgendered people, otherwise known as people, to fix this.

Quick Draw is Google’s Artificial Intelligence Side Project

Under the guise of a game, Quick Draw is actually a machine learning project. You draw, and a neural network tries to guess what you’re drawing. The more you play with it aka the more information you give it, the more it will learn to recognise drawings.

On Twitter, Kyle McDonald (@kcimc) revealed some of the patterns he and a friend had discovered from the publicly available data. They found that certain countries and regions of the world draw objects different. He showed examples including everything from houses to fish, to bread to underwear to ice cream. It’s fascinating insight into culture, language, history and colonisation from simple drawings for AI.