[nomansland]

This article illustrates how trans men are such an interesting problem for feminist institutions. Either you go along with the current trans party line, which is men are men, trans or cis, and they have no place at a women's institution/space. fin. This is an interesting expression of some really rigid thinking about binary gender. Or you take the "women and trans" position and place yourself as an institution for people of oppressed genders. You include anyone in the category of not cis men. You cease to specifically celebrate femininity at that point. You also start defining yourself in terms of cis men, which can be... problematic.

I'm concerned with how this spills out in the tech industry and our current focus on gender. All of the gender equity campaigns at the moment are inclusive of women, the more liberal include trans women, but none of them appear to have any explicit inclusion of trans men or non binary gender people. Which I find curious since trans masculine people often share the same structural issues with cis women being: lack of access to STEM pre-education in gradeschool/highschool, reproductive realities which are disruptive to a tech career, lack of socialization as boys/access to old boys' network. Trans people, including trans masculine people, do not occur in large enough numbers to have multiple tech industry gender advocacy groups and the best they can do is hope that "women's" groups eventually advocate for them.

I know of zero trans men in leadership positions in tech (eg, visible senior/staff engineers at the large companies, or actual management (PM doesn't count)), but I do know of quite a few trans women in these sorts of positions and even more cis women. Of course, the trans men in leadership could all be stealth, as I am (but I'm just a cog in the machine). I've worked in tech long enough, and have heard the stories of cis men when they think they are talking to another cis man, to know that the people tech are still deeply transphobic and we have such a long way to go.