From personal experience, I would say it’s a phenomenon of the last… maybe 10 years, at least in Germany. When a friend of mine started university in about 2010, I think she was the only openly trans person out of 300 first semester computer science students. These days, when you go to a Chaos Computer Club event, it’s full of pride flags and queer people dressed in skirts, striped programmer socks and cat ear headbands. In the opposite direction, free tampons for trans-masc people in the men’s bathrooms are just… normal.
For a while this caused a bit of friction, not because people were outright anti-queer or anti-trans but because they felt it had gotten so extreme that their queer-welcoming computer nerd event had turned into a pride event which just happened to include a few people with laptops. Now everyone seems to get along though.
That being said, there have always been gender-nonconforming people in IT and gaming. As an arbitrary example, Rebecca Heineman is a trans-woman who taught herself how to pirate and reverse-engineer Atari 2600 games in the 1970s, became the first (US) national video gaming champion in 1980, worked at a gaming magazine, co-founded Interplay Productions, worked on many well-known games. It’s just that being trans wasn’t as accepted back then so a lot of them chose not to out themselves, which honestly can’t be good for one’s mental health.
Somewhat ironically, it was about 10 years ago that I had to quit, and that was because of my mental health.
In my case, I’m a vanilla cis-het male, but if you go out along that other axis, the one that’s neurodivergence, well, that’s where years of trying to get by in a world heavily geared to neurotypicals finally took its toll and my brain just couldn’t take it any more.
From personal experience, I would say it’s a phenomenon of the last… maybe 10 years, at least in Germany. When a friend of mine started university in about 2010, I think she was the only openly trans person out of 300 first semester computer science students. These days, when you go to a Chaos Computer Club event, it’s full of pride flags and queer people dressed in skirts, striped programmer socks and cat ear headbands. In the opposite direction, free tampons for trans-masc people in the men’s bathrooms are just… normal.
For a while this caused a bit of friction, not because people were outright anti-queer or anti-trans but because they felt it had gotten so extreme that their queer-welcoming computer nerd event had turned into a pride event which just happened to include a few people with laptops. Now everyone seems to get along though.
That being said, there have always been gender-nonconforming people in IT and gaming. As an arbitrary example, Rebecca Heineman is a trans-woman who taught herself how to pirate and reverse-engineer Atari 2600 games in the 1970s, became the first (US) national video gaming champion in 1980, worked at a gaming magazine, co-founded Interplay Productions, worked on many well-known games. It’s just that being trans wasn’t as accepted back then so a lot of them chose not to out themselves, which honestly can’t be good for one’s mental health.
Somewhat ironically, it was about 10 years ago that I had to quit, and that was because of my mental health.
In my case, I’m a vanilla cis-het male, but if you go out along that other axis, the one that’s neurodivergence, well, that’s where years of trying to get by in a world heavily geared to neurotypicals finally took its toll and my brain just couldn’t take it any more.