AlterConf Atlanta 2015 - Fake Geek Girl: Trans Microaggressions in Tech  by Bree Stanwyck
Channel: Confreaks
Date: 2015-06-19

Fake Geek Girl: Trans Microaggressions in Tech  by Bree Stanwyck

A daily necessity of being openly trans in the tech industry is navigating microaggressions—the barely-visible, often unintentional slights that highlight trans people's position as separate from our cis colleagues'. These are even more frustrating in feminist spaces that pay lip service to trans issues but whose members fail to confront their own privileges. I'd like to tell you about my own experience transitioning, and the way it changed my treatment by friends and peers in the tech community. It's easy for us to think of marginalization as something that a nebulous "other people" do. But microaggressions show us that it is something we all participate in, often without meaning to. The aim of this talk is to showcase some common microaggressions faced by trans folks in tech, and examine their root causes, to open up discussion on how we can build a community that is safer for people of all gender identities.