Trans Deaths, White Privilege

At first I thought, "there is no way all of these happened in the same year." Then I clicked through a few links to check the date, and a few more. o_O

As a transman, I have experienced discrimination (a) as a woman (before I transitioned), (b) as a known transgender individual, and (c) as a man [1]. So I have a lot of empathy for women, both cisgender and transgender, within the tech world. That said, whenever I see photos of American tech company employees, I can't help but notice the complete or near-complete lack of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Latino Americans [2].

While the lack of certain ethnicities in the tech world does not compare to the deaths of Papi Edwards, Lamia Beard, Ty Underwood, Yazmin Vash Payne, Taja Gabrielle DeJesus, Penny Proud, Kristina Gomez Reinwald, Londyn Chanel, Mercedes Williamson, India Clarke, K. C. Haggard, Amber Monroe, Shade Schuler, Kandis Capri, Ashton O’Hara, Elisha Walker, and Tamara Dominguez, there is a common theme of not even being aware of, or acknowledging that there is, a problem.

For most of us, including myself, the lack of awareness or acknowledgement is because we are fairly isolated [3]. So one of the big steps is just increasing awareness. Of course, acknowledging there is a problem is also important. Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that people of color, transgender people, and transgender people of color are genuinely human and worthy of respect as fellow humans [4].

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[1] Most recently, I was denied a job, despite being eminently more qualified on every advertised measure than the woman who got the position. When I respectfully confronted a key individual in the company, my suspicion was directly confirmed by that individual (i.e. "No, you were never seriously considered because you're a guy, but HR said we had to interview men so it didn't look like discrimination"). It was blatant enough that this person was willing to testify to it in court if I wanted to pursue legal action, and actually encouraged me to do so. The one upshot of this incident was the willingness of someone in authority to confirm the discrimination. In my decades living as a woman, the preponderance of evidence made it clear that I was being discriminated because of gender, but the handful of times I confronted someone in authority it was denied or danced around.

[2] For example, take a look at employee pictures from these randomly selected, well known within this community, tech startups: https://github.com/about/ , https://slack-files.com/files-pub/T024BE7LD-F03LQMUD8-0a2227... (pink section), https://squareup.com/careers , https://grandst.com/team , and https://www.uber.com/jobs . The most diverse I found, in the few minutes I was searching, was https://www.hipmunk.com/about , out of 35 employees shown there's still only one of clear African descent, but there are several people who could be of Hispanic or Latino descent.

[3] I'm at a small start-up, and we're all Caucasians.

[4] I recently had an extremely awkward conversation with someone in the tech community about transgender individuals. This individual certainly does not know I'm transgender. The hatred and degrading language this person used proved to me that they do not see transgender individuals as beings worthy of basic human rights or respect. While the opinions of someone like that cannot be changed in a single conversation, I hope my comments start to humanize transgender people for this particular individual.