I'm a trans woman. Every time I go through the scanners at TSA they flag something in my crotch area as an unidentified foreign object. I'm asked if I'd prefer to be pat down by a man or a woman, who then must resolve the anomaly by running the backs of their hands across the front of my hip atop my genitals and up the inside of the leg until they "encounter resistance."1
As we develop AI systems capable of collating data on a previously unimaginable scale to identify anomaly, the problem isn't detection, isn't achieving a vision of being able to incorporate daily scanning into modern life in the pursuit of early identification of not only markers for currently intractable diseases like cancer but also the minutiae currently unconsidered by our current imaging and processing technologies that will give way to a new era of understanding ourselves.
The problem is understanding individuality. When a scanner encounters my trans body, will it decide that my atrophied testicles after 6.5 years of HRT are an anomaly? Against what measure? We can talk as much as we like about rigorous population sampling, etc. but collapsing the problem to a problem with upstream data is to erase the individual.1
In the last two weeks Claude Fable 5 was pulled through what is now being chalked up to a government takedown in response for Anthropic's refusal to cooperate with the national security apparatus, and Midjourney announced their entry into medical with the promise of a full-body ultrasound scanner that could bring daily full-body, radiation free, MRI quality scanning to every human on earth.
I have hundreds and hundreds of claude sessions. Hundreds and hundreds in ChatGPT before that. Many are obviously work, development session on aswritten.ai, strategy and product work, CFP and application development, etc. Others are personal: bread baking recipe dissections as I bake my way through Stanley Ginsberg's The Rye Baker, travel recommendations, briefing about political events and research into my obscure side projects ranging from modeling the neurodynamics of the cochlea and hearing to a system to place subtitles next to the speaker's mouth using a word placement system designed for speed reading. Many, many more are about health. As a trans woman with long COVID related chronic lung problems, a wildly changing relationship to my body, fitness, and health as I now learn to balance pacing, energy management, and too much time spent on computers and phones talking to AI (even if much is spent dictating while out on walks in the Wissahickon), a source of truth is nebulous at best. Doctors contradict each other, and each must be placed into a careful context that understands the limited scope of their expertise and actual exposure to my case (15 minutes, a hurried exam).
AI offers to be a new kind of relationship that reflects our individuality across domains. In those conversations, there is much of the truth of who I am. More importantly, there is the interconnected and interstitial layers so easily missed in the limited clinical encounters. Last week I was seen in the ER with a suspected kidney stone. They did not ask for a full list of my medications. Neither did the urologist at follow up. A camera inserted into my urethra was offered instead, with a hopefully well guided assurance that "if he was a betting man," the blood was just a stone and as long as the pain resolves in a few weeks, we could skip the invasive test.
What is invasive in the world of AI? What is necessary, both for our own health, freedom, and happiness as well as that of our communities and society at large? The back of the hand touching my genitals through my pants at the airport? The mining of my conversations with AI to reveal who I am for the next conversation? For the next interrogation? For the next medical scan? A daily scan that promises to allow an unprecedented degree of health optimization?
Easy answers there are not. But what I do see is a fundamental split in where the ownership of my digital individuality will lie. As I approach the scanner, does the data that presents who I am, my health history, my interests, my personality, my activities, my relationships, my desires and hopes and dreams - is my identity, in short, mediated by a system external to myself? Is the agent asked to press button that compresses gender into male/female? I do not expect the future of AI driven health analytics to be so binary, but to think that the corporate owned profile does not perform the same kind of collapse of nuance is to miss the lessons of history. Must I bring my list of medications with me for the rest of time?
The moral of Anthropic's recent Fable (I will not beg apology) looks to me less like a cautionary tale of regulatory misuse, although it certainly is that, but rather of a clear demonstration of who is left holding the bag when the power granted by these centralized powers is pulled - the user. If I am to leave anthropic for another provider (please god not to the morally bankrupt OpenAI and their ever touting AI for all) or perhaps to a self-hosted open weight model, is the individuality that I have shared in those conversations something I can bring with me? After my 50th midjourney scan, do the results translate beyond their system?
Exportable data is not the same as ownership. The right to be forgotten is not the same thing as freedom.4
Individuality in the age of AI is not about the profile, it is about the data that encompasses my history, my preferences, and my perspectives and the surface area with which I allow it to fill the contexts of the multitudes of agents that are quickly being adapted to every task.2 The future is not one of a single model to rule them all, it is one of millions of interactions, each one running like a program on model hardware, each one running with a goal, an organizational context, and a representation of the actors in the system - a digital representation of me - a synthetic identity that acts on my behalf.3
Either my synthetic identity will be owned by me, and I will carry it with my physical and digital self as I encounter systems, or it will be another patchwork across fragmented corporate networks, forever asking me to prove access, to link accounts together, and to consent, always to consent to things I will have little choice over.4
In her June 24, 2026 essay work on reclaiming AGI, Scarlet Dame grounded the abstract threat of centralized AI models in the physical reality of the trans body navigating airport security:
"a system built on a centralized norm flags the body that diverges from it — the same shape recurs in every AI encounter: corporate profile, or yours to carry?"
This narrative serves as the political spine of the synthetic-identity thesis, illustrating how collapsing individuality into upstream data erases the person. It extends the political argument of the Fable takedown, where government pressure on centralized labs proved that users are left holding the bag when centralized power is withdrawn.
Reframing the relationship between LLMs and human individuality, Scarlet Dame established a core architectural principle during the June 24, 2026 session:
"Model as operating system, not model as application — the program (perspective) is what matters, not the hardware (model)"
This principle asserts that identity resides in the program (the perspective) rather than the underlying model hardware. It aligns with adjacent naming constraints from March 2026, which demand that the installable unit capture a whole way of thinking rather than a flat, centralized data package.
During the March 19, 2026 MVP redefinition session, Scarlet Dame connected the product's packaging to the deeper concept of a synthetic identity:
"This individuality or identity of a whole, multifaceted person and their perspective."
This notion of a synthetic identity acting on behalf of an individual directly challenges the monoculture of a single general model. It is extended by the June 2026 architectural reframe where AGI is rejected as a misnomer, arguing instead that the future belongs to millions of individual programs running on commodity model hardware.
In her June 24, 2026 essay draft, Scarlet Dame drew a sharp line between regulatory compliance and true digital sovereignty:
"Exportable data is not the same as ownership. The right to be forgotten is not the same thing as freedom. Ownership means carrying the synthetic identity with your physical and digital self as you encounter systems."
This claim defines the political stakes of the essay, contrasting true ownership with the patchwork corporate networks that currently mediate identity. It sits alongside the adjacent essay spine, which frames this ownership fork as the defining choice for individuals interacting with future AI systems.
Bonus: the deli story
In 2024, after a first call with the founder of a digital-identity company, I took a walk and wrote him this email. It rebranded the company and got me hired. It is this essay, two years earlier.
You got me thinking about the language around trust and authentication. I think about product and branding primarily through narrative and metaphor, so I hope you'll bear with me while I tell you a story.
There's a sandwich shop in Red Hook, Court St Grocers Hero Shop, where I go maybe three times a week. For the longest time the same guy would answer the phone and we had a cadence worked out where I'd order the same way every time - Vegetalian Combo for pickup for Scarlet. He'd tell me it'll be 10 minutes, and then I'd show up and he'd recognize me without a word and pass me my sandwich without me having to do anything other than pay and smile. It felt natural, easy, like I was a part of the place.
A few months ago someone new started. Perfectly nice lady, but every time I'd call ready to give my order she'd ask me to please hold! It felt like hitting a brick wall. I'm Scarlet! I order all the time! I have a slick ordering system! This could be so easy for everyone! Eventually I'd order and then I'd show up and walk to the counter and she'd look at me expectantly. Suddenly it was my job to tell her who I was to get my sandwich. Not only did I have to verify my identity to get my sandwich, I didn't get treated like a regular because she didn't recognize me.
I don't want to prove my credentials, I just want to be recognized and treated as the regular I am.
Fast forward a few months to a day last week. I call and I said no more than two words and immediately she said "oh hey Scarlet! What can I get you?" And when I walked in, she passed me my sandwich without a word. I felt like me again. I felt seen. I felt recognized.
Every time I log into my email and it asks me for my password, it's like someone new was hired at the deli. If I lose my keys and have to call a locksmith, it's like my home and even my life doesn't recognize me anymore. Every time I walk up to my motorcycle, like she doesn't know that my heart is already fluttering until I fumble to fish the key out of my pocket and coax her back to life.
I don't want to prove my credentials to be myself. Whether it's with a password, a key, a phone, or with biometrics. I want to be recognized for who I am and welcomed joyfully into the spaces and communities where I find and make a home for myself.
Can we move away from metaphors of power, control, and security towards respect, comfort, and invitation? Can we move away from models of penetration and access into inclusion and reception? Away from proof of trust towards recognition and belief in who we are and what we need?
The technology is a means to an end. Towards the kind of silent, a priori recognition that happens the moment I walk through the door of the deli.
Vouch - be recognized
In retrospect it was a bit crazy. Highly opinionated. I rebranded the company in a closing line after talking to someone for an hour. It was entirely individual. An essential reflection of my personal perspective.