LGBT issues
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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual and genderqueer people in geek communities face a range of issues which sometimes overlap with those experienced by women.
For example:
- Invisibility -- anything that assumes a heterosexual male audience assumes the absence of all women (because they are not male) as well as all gay and queer men (because they are not heterosexual).
- Sexualized environments may be uncomfortable to people who do not conform to the majority sexual identity
- Online harrassment in the form of "faggot" and "dyke" jokes
- Male Gaze, for example being defined as ugly by heterosexual men and heterocentric culture generally. This is especially relevant to butch women.
- Fetishization of lesbians: like wider society, some male geeks will fetishize lesbian sexuality depicted in pornography while treating as disgusting other lesbian or gay relationships or sexuality.
Gender and sexuality in databases
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A lot of software makes presumptions that users are cisgender or that they have cissexual bodies: social software often doesn't handle trans individuals' genders. Sometimes they cannot handle LGBT identities.
Links
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- Thread about a transsexual woman in the open source community (Trigger warning: transphobic, misogynistic, and biologically essentialist comments.)
- Being Gay: Google+’s Missing Feature
- Stuff Geeks Love: Homophobia
- When the Gay Outweighs the Geek – An Unexpected Encounter with Homophobia
- A Brief Exploration of Misogyny and Homophobia in Geekdom
- Homophobia at BlizzCon: Is Gamer Culture Anti-Gay?
See also: Intersectionality