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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I think Rust, Go, and hardware engineering tends to be more trans than the general programming world, less because these are niche and more because they're just under certain selection pressures. Go in particular has a lot of reasons (the build system alone wtf) to only make sense for people who are really deep into Google world (and if actually working for Google, largely on the coasts, progressive, young, and able to put a ton of hours into their job), but as someone that admires Rust and a lot of the deep systems world things, they take a pretty severe level of dedication to understanding what's actually happening, and a lot of time to put into them.

People vs things preferences in part of that, but there's also the bit where -- even as recently as five years ago -- it wasn't uncommon for trans people to basically disappear from the meatspace social world for months on end during parts of their transition, except where necessary, because it was pretty rough not doing so. Not everyone shoved into a dorm room-sized space for half a year will develop an obsessive interest in opcodes, any more than making a cis person go into a monastery would, but it was a pretty strong external pressure.

I do know some cis women in the Minecraft open source sphere, and a number of cis women programmers in meatspace (generally not high-profile, but I'm not very high-profile either so I wouldn't). It's still more trans (or trans-adjacent, like nonbinaries or not-sure-if-trans-or-what a la Vazkii) than the general population, and a lot of the cis people tend to not be fans of meatspace meetups, but it's not as heavily trans as Rust or (eg) radio engineering. But these spheres are ... well, they're not friendly to having a real life, because an Oracle database admin dealing with a massive migration basically gets to say goodbye to their friends for a few months. But it's not as much about drinking straight from the firehose as hazing a rite of passage.

((And, to state the obvious: for cis women who want to have kids, it's hard to do that and a job and contribute to open source, and falling out of practice for three or five years absolutely does make it harder to get back on the bike.))