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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe transgender hackers are specifically discriminated against or disadvantaged in the startup community? Do you think that a startup incubator built around the all the participants being transgendered and drawing attention to their gender identity will help address this?

Or is the idea just to give something back, in general? It's not clear what your purpose is, or why you decided to go about it without any resources.

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I'm looking at the data. 1 in 500 people are trans. 0 in 10000 venture funded startup founders are trans. Why is there such a disparity between their proportion of the population, and their representation in the startup world? I am not going to speculate as to why that is, I am just going to hack it. I don't intend for all incubated startup to have all transgender founders. My only condition is that they have at least one. It might seem like I am doing this with no resources, but my gut tells me that I am building wealth by doing it this way, that the story it creates will catalyze events that make those resources available. All I need to do is get picked up by YC.

While I admire your intentions, I think you should first look at the actual number of transgender people starting companies before drawing a conclusion that they "don't get funded". For all I know (and I don't know the numbers, I'm speculating here) we could use the same argument about Latinos and African Americans (jeez, do I hate those stupid terms).

It'd be interesting if you could backup your intentions with some numbers. I think you'll find the startup community, specially in San Francisco and the Bay Area, is specially open to all cultures and sexual orientations.

In any case, the best of lucks! :)

Just because you could make the same argument for any group, does not invalidate the argument. It speaks to it's universality. If getting them funding were the problem, it would call for a different fix. The problem is getting them to apply, to make them aware the option even exists, and to get them to think like entrepreneurs to prepare them for the rest of a YC like process. We just come in earlier in the life cycle and are using a succesful business practice as a tool for social good. We got 5 new incubees over night, so they do exist, and we are rolling.

Lots of things in the tech field are very straight male centric. From brogrammers to the lack of women.

After all, if we have problems getting cis women to stay in technology, how do you think trans women will feel?

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