this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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I have not seen a single piece of reliable evidence to show that this is true. There may be a louder minority in that specific area, but so far nothing indicates it is an actual overrepresentation.
Minority, yes, but not louder if you want to see loud trans women they're there on Instagram with the rest of all the oversensitive-vulnerable narcissist personality types (subclinical but quite annoying indeed).
As I see it trans folks gravitate towards general nerddom precisely because it doesn't have to do anything with sex or gender, is a refuge for people who don't really feel like they fit in with the majority. Not to dismiss the existence of sexist etc. asshats calling themselves nerds, by and large noone bats an eye if you'r AMAB but play a flirty female elf rogue in AD&D. And as far as contributing to an open source project is concerned you could be a literal cat and people would barely notice.
If it was a literal cat contributing to FOSS I'd like to cuddle it and buy it old Thinkpads
Yea, n I unintentionally fked it up here too for one such person. So I was discussing solutions for a problem that I had encountered with my project on Matrix. I didn't know it then, but I was talking to a trans woman then. Now, I had a habit of "yessirrr"-ing when I was excited. So I found the solution, and in my excited state, I said "yessirrr" somewhere. She immediately corrected me by saying that it was "yes ma'am". I apologized and explained the situation. I then looked at her bio, and it had the flag and all that. She unfortunately ghosted me after that incident :(.
So yeah... I've tried to have inclusive language n whatnot after that. Cuz uk... U never realise how heteronormative our language is and how not inclusive it is for many many people.
Happens to the best of us. But you improved because of that so there's a silver lining.
An overreaction to a honest 'mistake' wow.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the main dev of Elementary OS is trans. And I think one of the devs behind Asahi Linux.
There is a slight association. Not a bad thing, there are probably more examples too. But those are the ones that immediately came to mind.
I am aware. But that makes 2 out of how many?
Look, i'm not trying to attack a group here. I'm just having the habit of calling out bullshit when i see it. That there is a larger proportion of trans people in FOSS is a myth. It's based on memes that have gotten out of control.
In FOSS specifically, the opposite has been true for a long time and there has been a severe lack of diversity. That has thankfully improved a lot and the environment has now become much more colorful and has adapted to the reality of the general population. But that's all there is to it. There is no significant overrepresentation, at least I haven't found anything that would prove that.
I've observed this over representation in graphics programming and games development as well. Now that I type it out, I wonder if it's perhaps less over representation and more, just, seeing those people, now.
[email protected]
have you been to an open source convention?
Yes, multiple. I'm also in multiple FOSS user and developer groups.
But there is no need to believe me. You can ask Github. https://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/
The proportion of the general population is 0.5 to 0.7%. So yes, it is very slightly higher, but not in the way that all the memes have been trying to portray it lately.
I would say programmer circles tend to be progressive as well, so some over-representation makes sense. I mean, where do we expect trans women to want to work?
It's probably more of where one can be expected to be open about not being 'normative'
It seems to have become fashionable to over-hype it among younger more casual Linux users. Hence things like "Linux/Unix socks".
It's quite heavily pushed in Discord servers where you'll be asked to choose whether you're a "catboy" or "femboy".
It's quite irritating. Some of those 'femboys' can be quite homophobic funnily enough which is infuriating.
9% of women in open source is a massive over representaion
While I doubt there are like scientific papers on it or anything, the reverse correlation seems to be pretty strong. I know a lot of trans women who work in tech (IT support, programming, electronics, etc). There are also plenty of memes in trans communities about how we all work in tech, especially programming. If you search for “programming socks” or “Unix socks” you’ll get stripped thigh highs for instance.
Now whether trans people are more likely to work in tech, or if people in tech jobs are more accepting of trans people or something else, it certainly seems like trans people have a slight affinity for tech jobs.
Overrepresention means it's in relation to something else. Compared to the rest of the internet there is for sure more trans folk in FOSS.
Why do you compare it to the rest of the internet and not to the rest of the tech sector or more specifically closed source development?
following your logic i could just pick a random group of people and say e.g. "look, there are more trans people in FOSS than in Deep-sea fishing crews". Makes no sense. You have to compare it to something that is actually comparable.