Re: Does being queer and/or TGD contraindicate STEM?

[gemini://republic.circumlunar.space/users/flexibeast/gemlog/2020-10-03.gmi](Response to thread that started here.)

CW r___ and r___ culture.

I love y'all AMAB ladies & enbies but I see strictly fewer, numerically, AFAB women on Gemini and Fedi and IRC. Non-zero, but fewer. Given the proportion of the population, that's saying a lot.

In most contexts the T population is among the most oppressed and it has become more so, the past few years, not less, as hating on TGD has become the new wedge issue that conservatives use to scaremonger against to get votes for their rich-get-richer politics, now that gay is finally legal.

I'm not trying to deny the horrors of daily life, how scary just going shopping or whatever can be for some of you peeps. Keep on keeping on, my darlings!

When it comes to nerdy stuff specifically (games, programming, Unix stuff), including the hobbyist part of STEM which is where I hang around (defined as neither academia nor workplace), however, that's like the last place I think this is a problem compared to AFAB women.

Men, yes, whether they are AMAB or AFAB guys, have it way easier in there than women (talking about all women). Mom taught me and my sister programming when we were young and it's still rough to be in these male-dominated spaces. Guys, I love you, but, sometimes it's not fun to be the only woman in a roomful of men.

Like, in Magic: the Gathering, an enby won a MQ/PT before a woman did!

As you yourself point out:

> Research has shown that women and girls have to navigate a social

> tension between being interested in STEM (Science, Technology,

> Engineering and Mathematics) and being 'feminine', because STEM

> fields are coded 'masculine'.

It seems to me that many (but not all!) AMAB women a have to a greater degree overcome this tension than (in general population much more numerous) AFAB women have. That's not to make light of any one individual's struggle with their gender identity or expression, with their role in society, with neurodiversity, or the interplay of any of the three.

Do NOT take this as me being aligned with the TERF or GC assholes, I'm not saying "go away". I'm saying please stay, please stay! But also bring in even more women, of all kinds of stripes, including AFAB, because it's rough to be AFAB in the world of nerdy things.

Feeling safe in hacker spaces, workshops, online communities while being ground down by patriarchy daily. I recognize TGD women and enbies as allies, not rivals, in this struggle, but it seems to me that your journeys are sometimes different (with the caveat that every individual is different). Going from having a nerdy identity/coding to adding a feminine identity, vs having a feminine identity/coding and adding a nerdy identity is different.

The friction is to a large degree from interfacing with men — for every 19 super nice guys there is this one guy who does rape jokes or defends rapists — and secondarily from other women, or maybe from losing connection to them. Going down into the dungeon of nerdery is… Not a self-evident step to take. ("Whaddayamean you don't want to be Instagram anymore? Aren't we friends?")

TL;DR:

Compared to men, you are right, I agree, this must change and I'm glad it's changing to the extent it is.

Compared to non-TGD women, I don't think you're right. I just don't.

Again, I realize that this struggle is an area where ALL women & enbies can ally up rather than fight each other, don't get me wrong.

Later

Continuing the ongoing discussion from:

Re: Does being queer and/or TGD contraindicate STEM?

So it's about fictional portrayals. You are correct that I misunderstood that, and thank you for letting me address that now.

I get that being influenced by culture when forming your identity is inevitable but it's a scalar question, not a boolean one. It's not really something I want to encourage. You only have to be yourself.♥

To the extent that we want to, or are even able to, prescribe what fiction should do (beyond what ink flows from your OWN pen), I would want to see portrayals of women and femininity in STEM over specifically the subset of women that is TGD.

We're both talking about our subjective reads on the sitch rather than any kind of NPoV survey or study, and my subjective read is... even when talking about portrayals, which I weren't originally, I still land with the same two statements as quoted.

Occasionally it has flashed through my head that being into nerdy stuff is just a guy thing, that it's not for me, that I should sober up, uninstall GCC, sell my DMG, and become a nurse or something.

Those thoughts, how ever wrong-headed, fleeting, and rightly dismissed as they are, are prompted by a subculture coded more as a masculine thing than as a cis thing. So strongly masculinely coded is it that it's even been easier for queer women to gain a foothold than for cis women, especially proportionally. Easier, not easy. I recognize that it's a fight daily and I thank you for helping to blaze a trail for all women, TGD and cis alike.

Please don't take that as me saying that queer women "are men". The queer community is varied and sprawling and involves a variety of experiences. Some of those experiences -- not universal to every individual, but represented in the group as a whole -- involve having had access to traditionally male-coded areas, workshops, and communities. ← yes, I see that my extemporaneous writing on the subject keeps veering from portrayals and into reality, and therefore is only tangentially relevant to the original essay.

Aside:

This is also why blorb, why all the RPG analysis. We started out trying to learn on our own, me and my sister and a handful of our neighbors. We weren't part of any larger "nerd community". (Not that every nerd is.) And it took me so many years until the pebble dropped that now I think I have a keen eye on what went wrong, how to address it. I think some women get this strive to teach and to document because it's what we wish we had. It's not as accessible by "osmosis", by hands on "apprenticeship", to some of us.

Aside over.

The point is that coding of an area isn't always a shadow cast by portrayals. It's a larger issue.

Now to the other topic.

STEM vs Art.

When I first heard the word "STEM" I felt as if this big drab wall had suddenly been erected between me and my pretty little integer sequences. I love art and I am glad to see the worlds of STEM and art colliding and the border between those two worlds being erased.

Finally, I don't want my capsule to become dominated by multiple posts in this thread. I'm at sandra.snan@idiomdrottning.org iff there are any followup questions and requests for clarification, and then I'll update this post, or, down the line, make a new one.