Trans folks may in general possess qualities that make them better hackers, but they certainly aren't the only ones, so I wouldn't call hacker culture inherently trans.
That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person's identity.
> Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian, therefore queer and leftist. If you have a problem with queer leftists in your hacker community, you are the problem and need to leave.
> Leadership in the hacker community doesn't look like RMS or ESR anymore. The culture is queer, trans, furry, neurodiverse.
> Hacker culture is queer, furry, neurodiverse. Deal with it.
> Hacker culture is queer now, and queer, kinky (but SSC) sex is an integral part of that.
> Hacker culture is trans/furry/otaku/plural/neuroqueer. Get used to it.
> The tech sector and hacker culture are increasingly queered.
> Times have changed. Social justice is now a core part of hacker ideals.
I don't recognize these claims either. The hackers I know are much more diverse in identity and belief than the narrow subculture described above.
Hacker culture has changed in the past ten years or so. The lodestar is no longer ESR's Jargon File, nor the GNU Manifesto, nor Steven Levy's Hackers. They're just ideals of what we think hacker culture should be, but that's not how hacker culture is actually practiced (if it ever was).
As more and more queer and trans people have gotten involved with hacker culture, they've brought queer and trans political and philosophical thinking with them and with it, a new orientation. They're sort of terraforming the hacker space to make it more comfortable and welcoming to people like them. I mean Mara Bos, a leading developer in the Rust ecosystem, states that her goal is to "make the Rust standard library more gay". Cishets are still welcome, of course, inasmuch as they give due respect to queer and other marginalized people in the community and do not express regressive opinions about the same.
The Q in LGBTQ can stand for Queer, or it can stand for Questioning; and maybe that's the basic mindset of queer theory that's applicable here: to question everything, especially your assumptions, and examine critically the social constructs that are intrinsic to the environment in which you live and work. Especially give thought to who is centered and who is marginalized by your efforts.
Allison Parrish does a great job of explaining this attitude in her talk "Programming is Forgetting: Towards a New Hacker Ethic":
She and Parrish are probably the most prominent exponents of what constitute the new norms of hacker culture. Oh, and uh, both are trans women.
That's the thing: Hacker culture never was as inclusive as people claimed it was. It was still oriented around the cishet white male nerd; inasmuch as others outside that template were allowed to participate, it was made more difficult for them because of the cishet-white-male-nerd-oriented assumptions and norms that were intrinsic to the community (as Parrish elucidates with her example about Margaret Hamilton being unable to assemble her programs on the surreptitiously modified PDP-1). That's what's changing.
Remember, traditional hacker culture could never exist without vast sums of DARPA money to supply funding for the equipment, resources, payroll, etc. It only came about because the military-industrial complex wanted the missile to know where it is as it hurtled through the sky on its way to blow up thousands or millions of Others. It is inadequate as a general framework that allows for talented people regardless of background to make a contribution. The queer hackers are attempting to modernize this framework to better meet the goal of welcoming valuable contributions regardless of the contributor's identity, using their experience as outcasts among outcasts.
We could argue about the history of hacker culture and its inclusivity, but it would most likely be just a series of proofless claims from both sides. I personally have never seen or heard of a person rejected from any hacker clique because of their sexual orientation. I've heard of a few having their contributions refused for trying to push political agenda [0], but then again it wasn't their identity that was refused, only the contributions related to advertising that identity.
I don't feel like the neo-queer-hacker culture you're discribing is particularly welcome to anyone who disagrees with them. I've heard of multiple instances of people calling for bans of people who said something they disagree with [2]. That is completely opposite of "inclusive". Inclusivity only matters when it includes people you disagree with.
> Coraline Ada Ehmke slew the meritocracy buddha in 2018
It doesn't surprise me that a person who hasn't shown much skill or merit is arguing against meritocracy. It is in her own interest to do so.
That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person's identity.