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Comment by sverona | Hacker News Reader

Trans woman here. I agree that the neuroscience feels kind of flimsy. I would further argue that neuroscience shouldn't be used as an argument in favor of "accept trans women as being women" because, among other things, it can just as quickly be turned around by people who seek to pull the You're Not Really Trans Unless A Doctor Says So card on other trans folks.

We're women because we say we are - and that's really all there is to say about it.

We are disproportionately into things like coding because, growing up, the vast majority of us are socialized the same way as boys would be. Amazingly, it turns out that in a vacuum, the activity of programming a computer isn't actually gendered.

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"We're women because we say we are - and that's really all there is to say about it."

It doesn't make any sense for someone else to tell you who you are. How could they know? Of course, if you were autistic or schizophrenic, that would be different...

Anyway, I remember reading an evocative description by a trans man of how testosterone made him feel like a sex crazed monster. Nobody can know for sure if they have the same experience, just like we don't know if the color blue is the same for us.

But it seemed to me that implied one of two things - either he was experiencing what cis males consider normal, and it was horrifying, in which case it was evidence against him being "really" male, or else he was not experiencing what being a cis male is like, in which case it was evidence that administering male hormones may not produce the effect of natural ones.

> in which case it was evidence that administering male hormones may not produce the effect of natural ones.

The goal of trans hormone therapy is to reverse the effects of the hormones of the person's biological sex, so HRT dosage of e.g. testosterone is usually more than the average cis man would produce. It's possible that that much testosterone was too much for the person you mentioned to handle, especially for his body not being used to it, or that he just got prescribed for more than he should have taken. (He could've also gotten it from the black market, in which case it would almost definitely be an incorrect dosage.)

> Amazingly, it turns out that in a vacuum, the activity of programming a computer isn't actually gendered.

Also mirrored by the fact that other cultures do not experience this issue so acutely.

Including US culture 50 or more years ago, when most programmers were women.

I'm of the impression that this is a misconception. 50 years ago, "programmer" was a different job. Imagine if executives were just called secretaries now and that's a decent analogy for what I think happened to programmers and architects.

I'm of the impression that back in 1959 when COBOL was released, with a team of 7 designers with 3 women on it, based off the groundwork laid by Grace Hopper, that the technical skill required to be a programmer was actually much higher, and that the women involved in coding were making very technical decisions about that field.

Yeah, I'm of the impression that the intellect required to do software now is much lower - no need to understand bits and bytes or to do math, just sling a bunch of libraries together with glue code from stack over flow and voila a ML system to categorize trouble tickets. Understanding the distinction between the reals and the IEEE double floats is alas long since vanished.

Back then programming was basically applied mathematics, a field with many women. Today programming is gluing together components in order to build systems which is much more similar to engineering, a field with few women.

There are still many women among those who program mathematics (statisticians etc), just that they are usually not called programmers. Also there is much less demand for people who can program math than people who can glue together libraries and create crud apps, so even if all math programmers are included in the statistics they would get dwarfed by the app programmers.

Source of the combination mathematics and statistics being a gender balanced field, above 40% women: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...

Engineering always being male dominated, around 15% women: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...

Computer science gender balance getting lowered to engineering levels: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2017/nsf17310/digest/fod-wome...

I think the role was called "computer"?

Other cultures as in what? Far as I can tell, the best predictor of female participation in technical work is poverty. In rich countries with free women, engineering tends to sit around 90% male, and nursing tends to sit around 90% female.

The freer and richer women are, the more likely they are to be found in stereotypical fields.

A culture having "less issues with this" seems to be strongly associated with that culture having conservative views and more socioeconomic issues. I see more women programmers coming out of conservative poor Asian countries than progressive wealthy Nordic countries. I get the impression women are pushed into programming for reasons of economic stress or incentives in countries where less of a programming gender gap exists. To me if a country having less of a gender gap in programming implies either sexism or economic stress.

You can really interpret the prevalence of trans women in programming as being related to nurture or nature. The data point in a vacuum doesn't obviously point to either conclusion.

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