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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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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

"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

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.

Okay, these are actually hilarious.

Dayum!! I recognize all of these people except the first one.

"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

Their passing away triggered a hell lot of drama, if I remember correctly.

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.

the first one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

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.

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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