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« I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans »

From a purely statistical POV, this is absurdly bizarre.



I think there's a few factors going into making this more likely (though still unlikely on the whole)

Much of the difficulty of being trans is social, which makes it more likely for people to come out / actively transition in environments with less social consequences. Programming, as an activity which can be anonymous and online fits that bill simply because there's less socializing at all.

And speaking of social difficulties, most people don't want to be social trailblazers. They don't want to be the first trans person in a group and deal with the potential existing prejudices, or more likely ignorance. So if you see a group that already contains trans people, you're probably seeing a group you can slide into without much difficulty.


It's not a random pick from the population, or the 95% male ratio in engineering would also be somewhat weird.

They have a small team: https://asahilinux.org/about/

People like to team up with others like them, so the fact that they're more likely to collaborate with other trans people is not weird at all.


I suspect it was actually a reference to https://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/.

> X.Org Foundation's (or X.Org for short) purpose is to research, develop, support, organize, administrate, standardize, promote, and defend a free and open accelerated graphics stack and the developers and users thereof. This stack includes, but is not limited to, the following projects: DRM, Mesa, Wayland and the X Window System.

Pretty neatly describes "I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics.".


This seems more likely than the Asahi Linux team, actually.


I don't think she was referring to Asahi there.


https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/maintainers.h...

The only graphical subystem she is on the list for is the Panfrost driver. I don't think that counts as "on the board overseeing Linux graphics", not at all. This is one GPU driver. She is on the board overseeing the general graphics for Linux for the Asahi project, so I think that's what she was referring to.


Yeah. Trans men and cis women are like unicorns.

There are more cis women (>50% of the U.S. population) than cis men. Trans women are still like ~1% of the population, and that's being generous.

And there are more trans women than cis women in these spaces.

I don't know what it says (feminism failed? pre-transition heteronormative programming?? bIoLoGy???), but bizarre's the right word. (The smartest programmers I know are trans women too, fwiw.)


Not really.

Statistically there will be weird coincidences completely naturally. It's also quite arbitrary which we see as meaningful. If say, Linux networking has unusually many people called "John" that probably will be unnoticed because nobody pays that much attention to common, unremarkable names. If they all randomly turn out to have green eyes, then that's more visible. It's completely subjective which of those is more remarkable.

There are also likely social effects -- people stick together, and some side interests align with some fields. Eg, I think it's reasonable to guess there's going to be more furries than average in VR development. Part because VR allow you to look like whatever you want a lot of the time, part because people will invite their friends in.


It is not just a random coincidence. It's a phenomenon more broadly across programming, especially very low-level/hardware stuff.


There does seem to be a correlation between autism spectrum and gender confusion, with the former often present in individuals who are into highly technical pursuits.

The logic seems to be not conforming to masculine stereotypes ==> must be a woman.


It's not "gender confusion". They know very well who they are. You are confused about the topic.




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