Leap: An Online Community for Women
I expect this to be a controversial comment. I might just be overreacting.<p><pre><code>  If you identify as a woman and are interested in joining Leap, 
  please sign up for our beta here.
</code></pre>
I&#x27;m a trans woman who works in tech. I think it&#x27;s dangerous to open a
community for women to people who &quot;identify as women&quot;. For one thing, there
are plenty of women who do not &quot;identify as women&quot;. For instance, older women
may not really know what &quot;identifying&quot; is all about and just think &quot;well, I&#x27;m
a woman, what&#x27;s to identify with?&quot;. There are also younger women who reject
the idea that gender is an identity that you can choose at will.<p>Obviously the invitation is meant to show that trans women are welcome.
That&#x27;s... moving, but I think it will only cause trouble. First you create a
place especially for women, which is needed because like the announcement
says, many women don&#x27;t feel welcome, comfortable or even safe in online
discussions that tend to escalate to shouting matches, typically among men
(since it&#x27;s the women leaving). Then you invite in to the community people who
have been socialised as men, have grown up as men, have spent most of their
professional lives as men and who have often contributed to exactly the kind
of working environment that makes womens&#x27; lives difficult as tech workers.
That&#x27;s defeating the whole point of a &quot;community where the core culture [will
be] set by women&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m not trying to say that trans women are not women (I mean, duh; I&#x27;m one. Of
both). But it should be kept in mind that most of us carry a great deal of
baggage from the time we lived as men. Baggage that&#x27;s very hard to get rid of
and that many of us are not even aware of. In light of this, I think this
big-hearted invitation to everyone who identifies as a woman, should be
revised to something more cautious. I&#x27;d think, if someone &quot;identifies as a
woman&quot; and works in technology, they&#x27;d respond to an invitation to just
&quot;women&quot; anyway.<p>To be perfectly clear, I&#x27;m totally not joining and I invite any other trans
women who read this to think very carefully before doing so. Just think of all
the times you had a civilised and polite debate with other trans women about
trans stuff, or about anything.