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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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now that trans people are everywhere (thanks to anti-trans activists)

Surely this can't be serious? I've worked with numerous people who went down the autistic adult male to trans woman pipeline. I doubt I would have known even a single person like this thirty years ago. Are we really to believe that this was all due to anti trans activists?

I feel like Mottizens are probably more likely than most to have run into MtFs in their day-to-day life as a result of affluence, education, industries of choice etcetera. Admittedly mostly the 'Speedrunning-American' class of such.

Surely it was a man's name before that Bronte lass popularised it for her heroine!

An interesting question with all the “autistic trans programmers” where is the trans-Bill Gates in his 60’s who transitioned a decade ago when it became normalized. Last I checked Bill Gates is on Epstein Island in his old age not suddenly trans.

When I read or watch information about some of the best game programmers of the 80s I remember multiple times where the person transitionned later in life. The only one that comes to my mind spontaneously is Daniel/Danielle Bunten (creator of M.U.L.E, one of the best early Electronic Arts titles). Going by google, there's quite a few more, including some with some notable credits to their names, certainly more than you'd expect for that generation.

Seldomly on hacker news a woman is linked „look at this awesome womens youtube channel collecting miniature-clocks/explaining-soldering-electronics/extremely-male-nerd-hobby“ and it is always an old geezer who recently transitioned to a womens name.

It's kind of a meme or cliche in the gaming communities that any time someone talks about a woman speedrunner or pro e-sports player who performs at a world-class level, the odds are at least 9/10 that it's a trans male. That said, your comment reminded me of the YouTube channel Britta Food4Dogs, who, AFAICT, is just a regular old woman who seems to have genuine love for extremely nerdy JRPGs and other anime-related media, from watching some videos of her covering some very niche nerdy visual novels that I'm familiar with.

What a lovely channel!

To be honest, at this point whenever I see mention of a woman in programming (or other very nerdy things like speedrunning), I assume that it's a dude until I see evidence to the contrary. It's just by far the more likely bet, in my experience.

Bill Gates isn't rich because he was a great programmer.

I am using his name as a stand-in for great programmer then.

But he’s credited with developing MSFT originally software and had a 1590 SAT score back when that was rare and students could get into Harvard with 1300. If he’s not a stand-in for great programmer then I have no idea whose a great programmer.

He was a fine programmer, but there were many better programmers to work at Microsoft then and now. What he was, and what the autistic programmers often are not, was a brilliant businessman, and that made all the difference.

Yeah, the way the small Microsoft basically slew the juggernaut IBM's personal computer division (it took some time to bleed out, of course) and secured itself a place as one of the most powerful and important companies on the planet is the stuff of business legends.