Ask HN: Silicon Valley and being transgender
My name's Jessica, I'm transgender, and I'm seriously wanting to move to Silicon Valley. So I figured I would post here as a lot of people on this site hail from that area and have quite a bit of business acumen from what I've seen. I'm currently the CTO and lead software engineer at a small development agency in Australia, and my reason for wanting to move is to be somewhere I don't know anybody so I can be myself. With that, I have two questions:
1) Environment: I know San Francisco and Silicon Valley are generally regarded as some of the nicer and friendlier places towards the LGBT+ community, but with the rise of the alt-right and transgender being a hot button issue in America right now, how friendly and conflict-free towards people like me is it really nowadays? The Python community recently changed from "master" / "slave" terminology and the Linux kernel has adopted a code of conduct, and these have brought up some unaccepting characters in the community (particularly on reddit) some of which I imagine work in the area.
2) Risk: I have yet to undergo various surgeries that I need, which can put me out of action for weeks or months and overseas. Would companies, particularly startups or smaller ones want to hire me? If not, would anyone really want to hire me? I've worked at startups for most of my time since graduating university and love the close-knit and tight atmosphere, not to mention having to keep up to date, know and learn a _lot_ about different technologies and bizdev which I hear you miss out on in larger companies. An extension to this question: if my projects are sound, would VCs want to back a person like me if a) I have yet to undergo some medical procedures, and b) I am a public face of the company? I'm an entrepreneur and ideas girl at heart and would like to develop an idea or two in my spare time which I hope to grow and become successful.
Thank you all so much and I hope you all have a lovely day! Jess