Hey! I’m a trans FOSS enthusiast studying computer science and I hope to be a FOSS dev sometime in the future.
I stay inside pretty much all day. In terms of hanging out irl, the closest I do is vc lol. It actually would be nice to hang out with someone irl though.
Ironically many are enlisted in the military so they can use the subsidized health care and mental health support that's provided free for being a veteran.
Thank the fucking lord I don’t live in such a dystopian country (although our Conservative Party wants to drag us down to that level and are projected to win the next elections…)
I don’t think voluntarily joining an org that makes you need mental assistance and mental health support is a great plan. Plus there’s the whole “contributing to the crimes of American foreign policy” thing. idk couldn’t be me
Depends on the culture of the space. For cis white males, no problem. Anyone outside that description, though, you might have to hunt to find one that’s welcoming.
The makerspace I helped get off the ground is far from perfect, but we try. It was started in the first place because the existing makerspace in town was very much not welcoming to people outside of cis white males. Around 25% of our membership identifies as not male (which is really high for a makerspace, but we can do better). A super majority of the current board is also non-male identifying.
I’ve tried a few times in the past to get into it but I just get overwhelmed. I’m frankly amazed by and so thankful for all the programmers who contribute to all of the great libre software I use. I am stuck at the level of knowing more about computers than essentially everyone I know or encounter, while simultaneously being a complete and utter noob to anyone who actually understands computing. I just know how to use search engines and follow instructions written by people smarter than me.
Everyone is overwhelmed when learning to program or even learning a new framework. This is normal. We just do our best to ignore that feeling and keep going. You will often fail and sometimes spend hours wondering why something doesn’t work. But eventually it will become easier and you will be able to make cool things. Python and JavaScript are good languages for beginners (but choose one).
If you would like to contribute to Libre Software, there are other ways you can do it too. You can join some chat rooms for a specific project and help people when they have issues. You can help to document things or help translate stuff.
Learn with the help of LMMs (AI chatbots), it’s awesome, just let it generate some code, read it, understand it, and try make the code better, more beautiful and/or more efficient. Add some feature you miss in the code, don’t hesitate to ask your LMMs follow up question, it won’t laugh at stupid questions, it is just great.
However, do keep in mind that LLMs regularly pull language an library features out of their asses that have no direct correspondent in practice. I'd use the LLMs to generate small snippets of code, giving them a small and restricted set of requirements to minimize hallucinations.
Yea, encountered that as well (depending on LLM model). Mostly, it is enough to just feed the exception output back into the LLM thread and it will Fix it’s bugs, or at least can tell you why this exception normally occurs.
Don’t discount yourself. I’m dumb as shit. There’s a lot of dumb programmers. We just know a handful of things and kept beating our heads at it until suddenly, it works.
Keep picking up things every year and after a few years, suddenly you know more than others and they keep promoting you.
There’s a perceived correlation between trans women and development roles (especially Linux development and rust devs for some reason). This is also the basis for the programming socks meme
Funny! Majority of the women in my eng program are straight, I am also not strictly one way or the other. Something something greedy Bis. Edit actually Pan, not Bi.
I hope you don’t take it the wrong way, but I never had the opportunity to ask. What’s the difference? Attraction to non-binary in addition to male and female?
I have not seen a single piece of reliable evidence to show that this is true. There may be a louder minority in that specific area, but so far nothing indicates it is an actual overrepresentation.
Why do you compare it to the rest of the internet and not to the rest of the tech sector or more specifically closed source development?
following your logic i could just pick a random group of people and say e.g. “look, there are more trans people in FOSS than in Deep-sea fishing crews”. Makes no sense. You have to compare it to something that is actually comparable.
I’ve observed this over representation in graphics programming and games development as well. Now that I type it out, I wonder if it’s perhaps less over representation and more, just, seeing those people, now.
Along other dimensions, representation is stronger: 1% of respondents identify as transgender (including 9% of women in open source), and 7% identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, or another minority sexual orientation.
The proportion of the general population is 0.5 to 0.7%. So yes, it is very slightly higher, but not in the way that all the memes have been trying to portray it lately.
I would say programmer circles tend to be progressive as well, so some over-representation makes sense. I mean, where do we expect trans women to want to work?
Look, i’m not trying to attack a group here. I’m just having the habit of calling out bullshit when i see it. That there is a larger proportion of trans people in FOSS is a myth. It’s based on memes that have gotten out of control.
In FOSS specifically, the opposite has been true for a long time and there has been a severe lack of diversity. That has thankfully improved a lot and the environment has now become much more colorful and has adapted to the reality of the general population. But that’s all there is to it. There is no significant overrepresentation, at least I haven’t found anything that would prove that.
Minority, yes, but not louder if you want to see loud trans women they’re there on Instagram with the rest of all the oversensitive-vulnerable narcissist personality types (subclinical but quite annoying indeed).
As I see it trans folks gravitate towards general nerddom precisely because it doesn’t have to do anything with sex or gender, is a refuge for people who don’t really feel like they fit in with the majority. Not to dismiss the existence of sexist etc. asshats calling themselves nerds, by and large noone bats an eye if you’r AMAB but play a flirty female elf rogue in AD&D. And as far as contributing to an open source project is concerned you could be a literal cat and people would barely notice.
Yea, n I unintentionally fked it up here too for one such person. So I was discussing solutions for a problem that I had encountered with my project on Matrix. I didn’t know it then, but I was talking to a trans woman then. Now, I had a habit of “yessirrr”-ing when I was excited. So I found the solution, and in my excited state, I said “yessirrr” somewhere. She immediately corrected me by saying that it was “yes ma’am”. I apologized and explained the situation. I then looked at her bio, and it had the flag and all that. She unfortunately ghosted me after that incident :(.
So yeah… I’ve tried to have inclusive language n whatnot after that. Cuz uk… U never realise how heteronormative our language is and how not inclusive it is for many many people.
While I doubt there are like scientific papers on it or anything, the reverse correlation seems to be pretty strong. I know a lot of trans women who work in tech (IT support, programming, electronics, etc). There are also plenty of memes in trans communities about how we all work in tech, especially programming. If you search for “programming socks” or “Unix socks” you’ll get stripped thigh highs for instance.
Now whether trans people are more likely to work in tech, or if people in tech jobs are more accepting of trans people or something else, it certainly seems like trans people have a slight affinity for tech jobs.
There seems to be an oddly large overlap (tbh I’m not sure if just in memes or in real life) between linux users (particularly arch and nixos), foss devs, and lgbt+ people (also rust, nim, and go devs lol).
The various “neurodiverse” communities seem to be meshing together more and more. A good chunk of them are autistic, or ADHD dominated interest groups, like FOSS, or various hobbies. It also includes the LGBT+ crowd.
This mixing allows for a lot of cross pollination of ideas. The trans community hears a lot more about FOSS etc than “normals” and so are more likely to get involved. Conversely, the techies have more exposure to alternative lifestyles. Some, who would traditionally do all they could to fit in, now are willing to show off/become who they really are.
The community meshing also helps by its supportive nature. Most NDs have experienced being the outsider to society. The nature of the cause is often very different, but the effects are similar. This makes the community particularly accepting of differences, as well as people experimenting with change.
Basically, all the weirdos got together and realised “Apes together, Strong!”. We are now running with it more and more.
A good chunk of them are autistic, or ADHD dominated interest groups, like FOSS, or various hobbies. It also includes the LGBT+ crowd.
I call bullshit on that. There may be a slightly more than average representation (maybe not even that) but i have not seen even a single robust proof that indicates it is a “good chunk”.
This whole FOSS and LGBT+ or autistic or whatever is a meme, nothing more.
This whole FOSS and LGBT+ or autistic or whatever is a meme, nothing more.
it’s a control campaign, they really want to establish the thought in everybody. neurodivergent will mean you either are trans either should be trans, because “most of them are”. that’s the singular idea behind the push with these memes, literally.
about a constant push to make it seem like linux users and programmers are (or secretly want to be) trans. this is a bunch of bullshit and it’s misrepresenting reality for weird reasons.
Age shaming me or? Am I not allowed to have opinions from the go or how does this work? What exactly are you implying here? What does the age of my account have to do with anything? How do you think the age of my account is an argument against of what I said? And really, did you have to go there to make ANY argument?
One of my research interests has been a group in antiquity with similar attitudes about the mind body divide, including talking about gender with things like “when you make the male and female into a single one so the male isn’t male and the female isn’t female.”
One of my favorite lines about the body is:
If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.
How and why is this so relatable? Literally since I started on lemmy there have been a bunch of FOSS projects lead or solely developed by trans coders ( pun semi intended).
More recently one of the lemmy apps I started on was as well and it looks pretty decently written. Hope they’re doing well wherever they are now.
I don’t plan on actually doing this, but would this be appropriate to send to a trans coworker who I work with, but don’t actually have a relationship with outside of work? We don’t have any history of sharing memes or anything.
For context, she’s one of the senior devops engineers at my company
I’d say no. This is a bit of a risque type of humour. There’s so much here that could be misunderstood, and it requires some context which they might not know or appreciate.
I think generally memes about marginalised groups should be avoided entirely in work environments unless said groups are extremely normalised.
Personally I feel like if you have to ask, I’d lean towards caution and not sending it. I mean, best case she gets a chuckle out of it, worse case it kinda creeps her out.
If you’re unambiguously an ally and she has seen proof of/knows this, most trans people I know would be fine with it. I’m not sure the risk/reward is worth it though (and tbh I’d say the same for sending memes to any coworkers one’s not on more familiar terms with)
Personally I feel like if you have to ask, I’d lean towards caution and not sending it.
That’s exactly why I don’t plan to =].
most trans people I know would be fine with it
I should have been more explicit with my question, as that’s kind of what I was getting at. If most trans people are comfortable being identified as trans even if it’s in a neutral/positive context
Posted a response to another person, but I think it’s identifying her as trans that’s my biggest hesitation; I almost guarantee she would appreciate the meme. I probably should have been more explicit in my question, but I don’t how personal it is for people to be identified as trans even in a neutral/positive context.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to receive a meme that assumes some level of familiarity with me from a co-worker if we never had that relationship before.
I think it’s identifying the person as trans that’s the issue. That’s my biggest hesitation; I almost guarantee she would appreciate the meme. But if I were to actually transition (egg_irl) I don’t think I would want people who I wasn’t very familiar with identifying me as trans even if it was obvious. I just wanted to hear some people’s thoughts here
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