In some people's eyes trans women are objectifying women merely by existing, and those people tend to interpret everything they do through that lens. I'm a bit surprised to see a comment like that on HN though; this particular form of transphobia is basically a radical feminist thing, and I didn't know we had any radfems.

I'm not a radical feminist in the sense of "intercourse is rape" but hmmm... I think I have body modification phobia - so that would include women getting breast implants - and also exhibitionist phobia and also pull-the-wool-over-your-eyes phobia. (Although quite frankly, I wasn't fooled for long just based on the extremely masculine technical writing. I have never read anything that a woman wrote that looks remotely like that. Sorry.)

If the article had been open about scanlime's transexuality it wouldn't have irritated me nearly as much, but my interpretation was that it was (unconsciously, perhaps) designed to validate that she really is a woman. No, you cannot actually change sex, modulo some crazy gene therapy.

I know I was kind of unfair in my original comment. I think it was really me whinging that the HN crowd wouldn't be gushing like this if they all knew that scanlime was trans, and then me also getting annoyed at my guess that scanlime was complicit in this. I feel like I need to say sorry. Sorry. But I'm about to undo my apology :/

In general, I get really annoyed by queer people making a point about their sexuality (e.g. gay men who lisp), and in my mind this article counts as such. They annoy me as much as frat boys and drunk girls in skimpy clothes and people wearing leather collars. I basically think our society is hypersexualized and that this is bad.

I don't know if trans women are objectifying women merely by existing. Most men do this, so it's highly likely. My most heinous viewpoint is that queer/fetish sexuality is likely to be some kind of psychological defense mechanism against childhood trauma, and while good and perfectly acceptable if it works and life is functional, it's important to keep the source of it in mind. Oh and finally I'm very likely not a radical feminist because I don't believe in equality between men and women but rather a kind of complementarity. (Yes, universal suffrage is good, and woman should be allowed to have jobs, etc.)

Wait, first you say you're irritated that the OP wasn't "open" about being trans (where, I assume, by "open" you mean "announce it inside the very blog post", cause it's pretty obvious from e.g. the contact page).

Then, you say you're annoyed by "queer people making a point about their sexuality". Now, the OP did not make a point about her sexuality in the blog post (1). You complained that she didn't. And then she did anyway? And that annoyed you?

Really, you can be a transphobe all you want and make an idiot of yourself that way, but this is HN, at least think about what you write.

(1) And, by the way, being trans has little to do with sexuality, but ok.

We all tend to sound like idiots when we're outside our area of competence or familiarity. Realize that the vast majority of people have no personal experience with trans etc. people, beyond what they've seen in the movies / read about.

This is not meant to excuse hatred, but there should be some tolerance for confusion due to unfamiliarity. It's simply not something that most people have spent a lot of time thinking about.

Jeri Ellsworth and Limor Fried (ladyada) write similarly to this, are both female, and tend to be awesome. And Joanna from Blue Pill. Plus a bunch of female phd students, university post docs, and industry people.

I think what you read as "masculine tech writing" is just competence. True, there are a lot of incompetent female tech people who write, but 3-7x more incompetent men who write (due to overall prevalence of men in tech).

Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. It'll be interesting to see what those women have to say.

It might be the case that this strikes me as a man's writing just because there are more men in tech, but I don't know that it's the incompetence per se. It's sentences like, "Often in this situation I’ll break out something like the Saxo board, with an FPGA and a thick USB 2.0 pipe," that I just have a very hard time imagining a woman writing. In the same way that a woman couldn't have written Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I think it's the implied, "I'm so cool because of all my techno whizbangs." But it's even in the non-tech writing: "In other words, I wanted to hack something I actually use: my vagina." is so horrid that I have to believe that even the bona fide female Xeni Jardin, lover of techno whizbangs, would have a hard time accepting it as... womanly... to talk about "using her vagina".

My girlfriend has screamed at me more than once over the futility of sharing my thoughts with "you people" who "will never understand [my] perspective", but at least a few here are kind, even if I'm not, and for that I'm grateful.

Those specific examples, and a few more in the article, did seem over the top; I assumed they were meant ironically due to the topic of sex.