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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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I'm convinced the reason trans people occupy such a large space in the cultural imagination relative to the size of their demographic (and are able to get their demands met so easily) is simply because a disproportionately large number of coders in Silicon Valley are trans women.

That could explain other things too, like why the furry community has a significant number of people and why furries have so much disposable income. I've seen many jokes about how if there was a plane full of furries, and it crashed, killing everyone on board, the tech infrastructure in America would crumble soon afterward.

If it's the plane out of a gathering, I found the way I want to go out.

Or it’s simply because of toxoplasmosis of rage. Liberals pushing for polyamory doesn’t get the same reaction, so there’s less attention drawn to it, so less resources go into promoting it. Trans, well, just took $26 billion off the market cap for the largest beer company in the country(world?).

Yeah, it's hard to see "it's the beer for bigamists" generating anywhere near the hatred, at the present time anyway.

Coders are low status, so that's not it.

It's probably the same phenomenon that leads to, for instance, white people who run universities declaring that they live on stolen land. I guarantee you that this has nothing to do with a disproportionately large number of Native Americans being at the university.

They may be low-status in society at large, and yet still wield power and influence within tech companies.

Imagine a social media company drawing up their policy on hate speech, and they get pressured into making transphobia (however defined) a bannable offense - because a number of their senior coders/software architects/designers/whatever are trans, and threaten to resign in protest if they don't implement this policy. The social media company may do this not out of a sincere belief that transphobia is wrong but just for fear of losing key talent - but the end users of the social media platform will likely interpret it to mean "this social media platform thinks that transphobia is a sin on a par with racism" and update their beliefs accordingly. If something like this happens independently in enough tech companies, you end up with widespread institutional opposition to transphobia even if most people in the society don't agree with said opposition.

As to the object-level question of whether trans people are overrepresented in tech, the closest I could find to hard numbers was this https://abcnews.go.com/Business/transgender-tech-visibility-obstacles-remain/story?id=76374628

So? I'm sorry, sure, elites and politicians do a have disproportionate cultural impact. But I would expect the people who build all of the technology that runs your life and live next to the people who make your movies and work for the billionaires paying into your charities to also have some effect. Regardless of what effect society thinks they should have. Coders are low status yes. Because status doesn't effect how good the code you write is (well it does but mostly your status among other coders. Where the trans people who make it to silicon valley tend to be relatively high status.)

This is why trans people become coders. Because it's a form of power that tends to focus less on existing status structures and builds new ones instead.

Lots of the people pushing that one are actually 1/32 Cherokee and trying to use it to their advantage, though.

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