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The Bud Light debacle made it into the watercooler talk at my work, which is rare but not unheard of for culture war items. The general consensus seemed to be: it’s not just that he’s a man trying to be a woman, it’s that he’s trying to be an “adolescent girl”.
Oddly enough, I had the opposite reaction as you. If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention? His is perhaps the most sincere desire to “be a woman” as I’ve ever seen. Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?
Seriously. My top 3-5 lady programmers were all AMAB. Patriarchy?
I'd guess there's a bunch of reasons other than just plain old coincidence. One is that there just aren't that many female programmers, so there's a relatively higher proportion of MTF women in the industry. Also the well known male/female difference in interest-in-things versus interest-in-people could be resistant to whatever the cause of an MTF transwoman to be a transwoman rather than a cis man, and also resistant (perhaps not fully immune, but resistant nonetheless) to whatever treatment they might undergo as part of the transition. And there's also some (weak) indication that autism is correlated with transness. The latter 2 don't automatically translate to someone being better at programming, but it's not hard to see why someone who's further on the autism spectrum and with a greater interest in things could develop programming skills further than otherwise.
The 1st 2 could be attributed to patriarchy under standard modern feminist ideology. Not having roughly same amount of female programmers in the industry as male ones is, tautologically, an indication that society hasn't been engineered in such a way as to equalize the proportion of the sexes within this industry, and this is attributable to patriarchy no matter what the mechanism. If society has largely provided women the freedom to pursue whatever careers they want and they're just choosing not to pursue programming - which is likely the case in most western societies - that means that society has sent girls some sort of messaging that has discouraged them away from pursuing programming, which is a form of patriarchy. For the 2nd, the same reasoning applies, just to the interest-in-things/interest-in-people difference. The fact that there's some measurable difference between the sexes in this dichotomy means that there must be some sort of messaging, possibly starting even from the womb, that girls receive that pushes them towards greater interest in people rather than things. The messaging can take forms that are literally invisible and undetectable, but it must be there, and it must be an indication of patriarchy, as long as the results are the kind of imbalance we're talking about.
For the 3rd one, I'm not sure what feminist ideology has to say about the apparent correlation between autism and transness - it might not exist in any case, since I don't think this has been studied much. But there's got to be a way to attribute it to patriarchy somehow if it turns out to be the case; it's just that both autism and transness are considered to be "innate" or "born with it," and I'm not creative enough to come up with a way by which patriarchy can be attributed to a correlation between the 2, but that doesn't mean nobody is that creative.
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You could equally ask "why wouldn't someone who's already a woman not want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos?" Because that's behavior which depends on having a lack of adult responsibilities and on excessive self-centeredness.
To the extent that "wants to be a woman" is acceptable at all, it can at most mean "wants to be a woman in a situation similar to the one he's in now, except with the effects of gender changed". "Wants to be a woman + X" is no good if wanting X is already bad independent of gender.
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Even if that were true, not sure why it would be more sympathetic.
Basically you're saying that everyone is being asked to indulge someone trying to secede from being an adult (a right they don't have)
Strip the trans element out of it and it would still be received badly. All the more for how much the desire has been indulged.
Well unfortunately many of the younger generation are succeeding in exercising that right. It's a sad world we live in.
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