Comment by larodi
1 year ago
Only thing I fail to understand is why a hacker needs to know where to buy estrogen… I can more easily take the idea of hacker knowing how to cook Molotov cocktails.
1 year ago
Only thing I fail to understand is why a hacker needs to know where to buy estrogen… I can more easily take the idea of hacker knowing how to cook Molotov cocktails.
This is only an example of the type of thing a hacker would do- a hacker is willing to solve problems on their own on their own even if it requires methods that are illegal, dangerous, or complex.
A lot of people throw their hands up and give up when they need an expensive medication they can't get prescribed but in general you can often buy them overseas, grey market, make them yourself, etc.
Replying to awooooo who was flagged dead:
> They want it, but it's not a necessity.
What a person "needs" is complex and individual. Unless you are their doctor or are paying for it, your opinion of what medications a person needs is irrelevant- it is absolutely none of your business.
This nit-picking is in no way central to my point as it was a general statement about hacker culture ethos not any particular person or medication, so why did you post it? With only two comments so far - It appears you joined HN just to share anti-trans bigotry? That isn't okay. This is not a "hate forum" - accepting people that are different is a fundamental aspect of hacker and HN culture.
@awooooo - nonsense, you have people minding their own business and being themselves, and you don't approve so you are insulting them, and trying to say they need to hide who they are or be different. That is just plain old bigotry. Being trans doesn't hurt of affect other women in any way.
I'm willing to bet you are different in some way that isn't acceptable to others, so you feel the need to hide it out of fear, or hoping for acceptance. It's true of most people, and the fact that people need to hide themselves is awful.. and what you are contributing to here.
I'm not trans but I am neurodivergent in a way that I can't hide, and was bullied and attacked for being different a lot of my life. Bigots that only know of one way people can be different would call me "queer" when they cornered me in the school hallway in groups to try to hurt me. Luckily for me, I'm a strong guy, and even being in groups they usually had a worse time of it than I did. I understand what that is like, and don't wish it on anyone. I want a world where people can mind their own business as themselves without hiding and without awful people trying to shame or attack them.
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Estradiol valerate (which is what the article actually names) seems to be used for a wide variety of female reproductive health issues, especially when (as the article suggests) it's compounded with other drugs. It's also used by transgender people as a hormone therapy. A hacker might live in a place where gender-affirming healthcare is illegal or unavailable, or where female reproductive healthcare in general is difficult or expensive to obtain.
Reproductive healthcare is much more broadly useful than Molotov cocktails.
It's hard to say what the motivation for the estrogen is but it's a case study in pharma-bro-ing type hobbies which is fine. Life extension nootropics and such. It could be a menopausal woman juicing up. It could also be a biological male who identifies as a female, which was big tech's engineering solution as far as how to get more women in tech (turns out, innovative solution, it's easier to retrofit male programmers as females than it is to convince your average woman to sit alone in a cubicle all day fighting against a pedantic and buggy compudah) - don't announce that at google, however, or you'll be punted out next day and end up needing to settle it for a few million.
The article didn’t articulate why or how these were used and you somehow turned it into a big tech transgender conspiracy.
Get some help before it’s too late, cooker.
There have been hypotheses that a significant number of trans women (i.e. biological men who identify as women) are actually on the autism spectrum. Considering natural tendency of autistic people to prefer isolated activities and puzzles, there may be a correlation between hackers and trans women.
> There have been hypotheses
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27872002/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26753812/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38803560/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38831234/
As with any novel phenomena, especially in sociology, it is very hard to provide tangible evidence for anything. If you demand nobody speaks of anything of sort without hard evidence, rarely anything would ever be said.
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it is very hard not to observe said tendency, though really I was hoping that it was just that programmers always been rich enough to undergo transition. is this still true, though, perhaps now you can be jobless and still somehow apply for transition? depending on GPS coordinates, of course, but possible here and there.
this mentioning of potential trans-paraphernalia in an article calling to all hackers is a little misleading (imho), biased perhaps, or even influential. it is a statement i guess.
back in our teen hacker days we heard stories of ppl building molotovs, credit card scammers, eavesdropping equipment, lock-pick etc. but biohacking and female hormonal medicine in particular has definitely not been on the list (that much) if memory serves right... and my bet is that Phrack back-archive can confirm it.
perhaps it is a logical to see a change in popular understanding what hackers can find, or do, or are defined by. curiosity and daring courage to intrude is one thing, we can all agree.
perhaps also we may agree that hacking one's body is still hacking, as social engineering IS considered hacking.
Might also depend on how you define "hacker". Most people don't know the true meaning of the word, and should be using "cracker" instead.
Even if this is true, it need not be either-or. Saying that they are 'actually' autistic seems to imply that you do not believe that they are 'actually' trans.
It doesn’t seem that way with a charitable reading.
For what it's worth, I didn't mean "actually" in an either-or sense, but more in an unexpected-correlation sense. I tend to avoid ontological discussions on this topic.
English is not my native language, I sometimes miss the subtleties.
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What’s with this ‘biological men’ stuff? How would you define that and what about chromosomal abnormalities like XXY or XYY people? If I have Jacob’s syndrome and a penis am I biologically male or something else entirely? Explain.
If you just want to have silly ideas about trans people, that’s fine because I’m done arguing with people over that. It’s a huge waste of time to get that interested in another person’s genitals but you do you. However if you’re going to use something as silly as ‘biological male’ you have to support that.
> If I have Jacob’s syndrome and a penis am I biologically male
Yes, of course. It's a condition that only affects males.
A few years ago I freaked out the Reddit moderators on a sub called /r/bodymods , which was, ostensibly, about modifying your body, when I asked about the feasibility of doing ones own liposuction.
I'm not saying that's a good or bad idea from a medical perspective, but I certainly was off-put by their hypocrisy at shutting me down and their myopic definition of "body mods" which apparently to them was just poking holes in their face.
Unless you think/say/repeat the same things as everyone else on a subreddit you get downvoted and shadowbanned. It has the most aggressive and militant groupthink culture I've seen anywhere, which makes it pretty useless for trying to learn new things or share new ideas.
If you have any type of niche hobby for example, and someone finds a new and better way of doing something, they will pretty much universally be attacked and censored.
And somehow, it’s still less toxic than stackoverflow.
That part is definitely not aimed at every reader, but it is appropriately used to highlight how some might circumvent the lengthy legal processes involved in getting estrogen. Moreover, it points to the possible need for them to compound it themselves which in turn makes them a hacker.
They may be hacking their own body to a binary that's different from their source code
I see you have only met a narrow subset of hackers.
why not both?
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Well, the author can. You know this stuff actually works, right? It's not pie in the sky thinking.
Only in that it can cause a relatively unusual male body type to materialize.
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Trans folks may in general possess qualities that make them better hackers, but they certainly aren't the only ones, so I wouldn't call hacker culture inherently trans.
That would imply that non-trans people are somehow outsiders, which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill, regardless of the person's identity.
Looking at this user's comment history, they've been beating this drum for a while: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> Hacker culture is inherently antiauthoritarian, therefore queer and leftist. If you have a problem with queer leftists in your hacker community, you are the problem and need to leave.
> Leadership in the hacker community doesn't look like RMS or ESR anymore. The culture is queer, trans, furry, neurodiverse.
> Hacker culture is queer, furry, neurodiverse. Deal with it.
> Hacker culture is queer now, and queer, kinky (but SSC) sex is an integral part of that.
> Hacker culture is trans/furry/otaku/plural/neuroqueer. Get used to it.
> The tech sector and hacker culture are increasingly queered.
> Times have changed. Social justice is now a core part of hacker ideals.
I don't recognize these claims either. The hackers I know are much more diverse in identity and belief than the narrow subculture described above.
Hacker culture has changed in the past ten years or so. The lodestar is no longer ESR's Jargon File, nor the GNU Manifesto, nor Steven Levy's Hackers. They're just ideals of what we think hacker culture should be, but that's not how hacker culture is actually practiced (if it ever was).
As more and more queer and trans people have gotten involved with hacker culture, they've brought queer and trans political and philosophical thinking with them and with it, a new orientation. They're sort of terraforming the hacker space to make it more comfortable and welcoming to people like them. I mean Mara Bos, a leading developer in the Rust ecosystem, states that her goal is to "make the Rust standard library more gay". Cishets are still welcome, of course, inasmuch as they give due respect to queer and other marginalized people in the community and do not express regressive opinions about the same.
The Q in LGBTQ can stand for Queer, or it can stand for Questioning; and maybe that's the basic mindset of queer theory that's applicable here: to question everything, especially your assumptions, and examine critically the social constructs that are intrinsic to the environment in which you live and work. Especially give thought to who is centered and who is marginalized by your efforts.
Allison Parrish does a great job of explaining this attitude in her talk "Programming is Forgetting: Towards a New Hacker Ethic":
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting...
> which is contrary to the hacker philosophy, which respects merit and skill
Coraline Ada Ehmke slew the meritocracy buddha in 2018: https://where.coraline.codes/writing/meritocracy/
She and Parrish are probably the most prominent exponents of what constitute the new norms of hacker culture. Oh, and uh, both are trans women.
That's the thing: Hacker culture never was as inclusive as people claimed it was. It was still oriented around the cishet white male nerd; inasmuch as others outside that template were allowed to participate, it was made more difficult for them because of the cishet-white-male-nerd-oriented assumptions and norms that were intrinsic to the community (as Parrish elucidates with her example about Margaret Hamilton being unable to assemble her programs on the surreptitiously modified PDP-1). That's what's changing.
Remember, traditional hacker culture could never exist without vast sums of DARPA money to supply funding for the equipment, resources, payroll, etc. It only came about because the military-industrial complex wanted the missile to know where it is as it hurtled through the sky on its way to blow up thousands or millions of Others. It is inadequate as a general framework that allows for talented people regardless of background to make a contribution. The queer hackers are attempting to modernize this framework to better meet the goal of welcoming valuable contributions regardless of the contributor's identity, using their experience as outcasts among outcasts.
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I'd say queer/trans subcultures are hacker/DIY friendly, but not necessarily the other way around.
I'd say hacker culture tends to be accepting of individualism and diversity, but the vast majority of people in hacker culture have no affiliation with, or knowledge of queer/trans subcultures.
> Hacker culture is inherently queer/trans
Would like to see that explored more. I think I get where you're going, but which statement is more true: "hacker culture is inherently queer" or "hacker culture is inherently anti-authoritarian"?
Because I'm thinking it's maybe more like "Both queer culture and hacker culture are inherently anti-authoritarian, so they have many points of concordance".
But then I start thinking around the problem, and I think about the amount of privilege inherent in that white-boy-from-the-suburbs 80s/90s hacker thing ("fifty thou a year'll buy a lot of beer") and I start to wonder if the gulf is maybe a bit deeper than it first appears.
Where does the cyberpunk/libertarian stuff fit in with queer culture, which IME is a lot more communal?
I don't know. I think it's a really interesting line of inquiry.
(Edit: you've been flagged. What the actual fuck?)
Ironically, as a homosexual female, I consider modern queer culture authoritarian as hell. It's really big on there being one way to interpret the world, one way to build/structure your identity, one set of 'correct' opinions, trying to convince you to cut off people who aren't in the Good People Club(TM), etc. This is just enforced via panopticon/mob surveillance rather than a centralized authority.
If anything, I'd consider modern (post-Obergefell) queer culture to be pretty hostile to hacker culture since hackerdom is partially about understanding systems and working them to whatever purposes you decide, whereas modern queer culture seems to be about finding a system that works for you and pledging allegiance to it.
A lot of my distaste/lack of fitting with queer culture right now stems from the conflicts between the values instilled in me as the child of hackers and the values of queer environments.
They were flagged because the comment was deliberately inflammatory and lacked any nuance - there is no way to spring-board from that comment into any kind of continued discussion. It was a comment that was only meant to virtue signal/push an agenda, not to promote discussion. HN tends to frown on that outside of specific aspects of techno-politics.
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> so many transfems
Sounds interesting. How many? What proportion against the general population? Do you know?