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Proportionally, do Trans women have greater visibility in the Open Source ecosystem as compared to Cis Women?
This is anecdotal, but I've often noticed that, I read a technical blog post by someone, end up following them, find that they are women (pronouns/name) and later find that they are trans.
At this point almost all women whose technical blogs I follow are Trans. So, this makes me wonder, are Cis women Software Engineers just not interested in Open Source or writing blogs? If there is some sort of discrimination involved then it should also effect Trans women since they are just another username on the screen, just like everyone else. In fact they may even face more discrimination than Cis women.
This very much looks like something progressives should be up in the arms about since Identarian politics and equality of outcome is very much their thing. But you only have strategic silence.
I think this is potentially evidence against the blank slatism that says systemic discrimination is the only possible reason for the lack of female representation in certain occupations. One issue you could poke in this argument is that Trans women were socialized as male, but I think all the young boys who are being socialized as girls today will soon prove them wrong.
I don't think my CS domain interests are too niche. They mostly lean towards Systems, Security, Programming languages (Go, Rust, C++, ...). I source technical content on these topics from HN, lobste.rs and some subreddits which themselves are not overly niche platforms in the Software industry. So I think there is something to think about here.
OR I am just falling prey to some sort of Sampling bias and the argument above is garbage.
Having said all this, I actually think a 50/50 gender distribution typically helps in creating a healthier work atmosphere, mitigating the worst excesses of either gender. Male dominated work environments can run you ragged and be outright abusive when under a lot of competition.
<rant>But, I do not see any way to achieve this due to the asymmetry in the distribution of interest. When taken to its logical conclusion, average expendable (male) Software Engineers like me will be left hanging out to dry unlike average or below average women. And it galls me when my concerns get gaslighted as incompetent men who cannot handle the competition.
</rant>Epistemic status: rampant speculation
To an extent, transgenderism is attention-seeking behaviour. Or at least... validation-seeking behaviour. The insistence that others recognise them as the opposite sex and use their pronouns points to a people whose self-image relies on the affirmation of others. Indeed, it occurs to me that the frequent insistence in trans discourse (which I reject, but it nevertheless points towards their motivations) that "sex and gender are different, gender is a social role" bears me out on this - trans people want the social role of the other sex, to which the attitudes of others are not merely important, but definitional.
Anyway, this overriding concern for the affirmation of others, I imagine, overlaps somewhat with the urge to blog. Here one intentionally opens themselves up to outside scrutiny, curating a window into your field that other people can peer through and read your hot takes.
So it's not that cissies(?) are discriminated against in the blogosphere; it's that the cluster of personality traits associated with trans is somewhat overlapping with the cluster of personality traits that would make someone want to blog.
In conclusion: if anything could possibly be attributed to a selection effect, then it's a selection effect.
It's not just an urge to blog. It's the urge to create incredibly complicated novel software:
"Perl 6 specification is so huge no one could implement it, I'll write the interpreter in motherfucking Haskell!" - transwoman
"Linux and Windows use completely different object file formats, calling conventions and system calls, I'll write a compiler that generates a single binary that runs on both!" - transwoman
"Apple M1 GPU is completely undocumented, I'll reverse engineer it and write a Linux GPU driver" - two transwomen
"existing SNES emulators support 80% of the games, and the rest require game-specific hacks, I'll write an emulator that works exactly like a real SNES, so that it will run all games by definition" - a whole can of worms, let's go with non-binary
Justine Tunney is an absolute unit of a developer and I'd call her by whatever damned pronouns she pleases. She's also based and redpilled.
ah fuck, I think I just found my soulmate.
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Okay, these are actually hilarious.
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Dayum!! I recognize all of these people except the first one.
Their passing away triggered a hell lot of drama, if I remember correctly.
It's still not a given that they did die, and pretty much all the evidence I've seen points to no while all the news articles take it as a given.
But yes, hell of a lot of drama is a good way to put it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
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I think there is something to discuss regarding affirmation-seeking behaviour among trans women. I haven't seen as many suggestive selfies on the social media of cis women Software Engineers as I tend to do for trans women.
Though, I would oppose the use of "attention-seeking" since many of the blogs I am referring to are very much the opposite of low-effort and portray work that requires some serious technical chops and a high level of verbal skill to explain to a layman.
Another poster here attributed this to MtF transgenderism and interest in Computer Science being correlated with Autism spectrum disorders, which sounds convincing, though I haven't read into this much.EDIT: @faul_sname, pointed out that if "autism" is the reason for the overrepresentation (by proportion) of trans folks among CS open source communities, then you would observe the same in other "autism" dominated hobbies like train lovers, which we don't.
I think you're greatly overthinking this. If you assume females don't care about computer science, then logically all CS blogs are written by males, and the only CS blogs written by “women” are trans. This is exactly what happens in practice.
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Oh, that's a really good point. I still think there's something to the way autistic people interact online that means once "trans" started being a thing some tech autists focused on, it became much more likely that "trans" is a thing that tech autists latched onto, but it sure is piling a bunch of epicycles on to the model.
This letter from a frustrated mom seems to describe that "latching onto trans" effect: You're Not Trans. You're Just Weird.
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