We’re talking about the same event, aren’t we?

Big university in Germany that’s well-known for their computer science department. Started in 2008 and took way longer than planned. As stated in my other comment, being openly trans was rare when I started but had become more common by the time I got my degree, especially among new students who took the chance to make new friends who never knew their pre-outing personas.

So they see you as a human. Not a gay human.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog

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.

As we said back in university: “If we have too few women in our field, we will make our own.”

My old manager sent out invitations to the bride‘s family before telling me I was the groom.

(he publicly announced the new product‘s price and release date before telling the dev team that there will be a new product)

Lately? Firefox…