The thing is, I care about tech. And not about the NBA. Since I work in tech and am not even clear on the rules of basketball beyond that it’s usually two points when you throw the ball into the hoop unless it was a really cool shot and then it’s three.
If you are expecting everyone who cares about a certain kind of disparity to care exactly as much and have exactly as much to say about all other kinds of disparities then I think you might want to reexamine your expectations.
Even if your complaint is on a societal level, there are like thousands of times more people in tech than in the NBA and the respective concern about racial disparities seems reasonable.
I have a lot of concerns about the way ‘diversity in tech’ conversations happen. I think they’re often essentializing and simplistic and ignore or misrepresent data and create perverse incentives. I think the extent to which the difference is a legitimate preferences difference sometimes gets downplayed by people with ideological commitments to not saying ‘sometimes there are differences in how commonly boys like something and how commonly girls like something even when we raise them in a very egalitarian environment’. But the problem there is irresponsible and misleading coverage, it’s not that the topic gets discussed at all.
I presume that the argument you’re trying to gesture at here is not ‘disparities in the NBA matter as much, and therefore should be discussed as much, as disparities in tech’ but ‘just like disparities in the NBA are probably explained by there being more tall black men, disparities in tech are probably explained by there being more programmer-y white men’. But ‘programmer-y’ is affected by more things than ‘tall’. (In particular, countries vary wildly in their tech gender ratios; if other countries also had basketball teams and there different skillsets dominated, that’d sure look like reason to wonder what is going on with our talent pipeline.) Consider me less than convinced that people who can’t take seriously articles about what goes into ‘programmer-y’ have it all figured out.
Another reason why caring about diversity in tech is more important than caring about diversity in NBA even if the disparity could be explained with biological factors is that tech giants have the power to shape the world in the way that NBA decidedly doesn’t. Facebook, Twitter, and Google combined hold more soft power than some governments, as entire revolutions and election campaigns have been sparked by and coordinated with posts on social media – and the outcome is determined by whether algorithms decide to show this information to many people, or bury it at the bottom of the feed, or ban entirely.
Have too few white guys in the NBA, and the world works jut fine, but have too few transgender people in Facebook management, and deadnaming becomes the official policy of a website with a billion users.
It’s not really a problem when one small pizza shop refuses to cater to a gay wedding, but when Amazon (unintentionally! They were just maximizing profit!) doesn’t offer Prime in poor (and largely non-white) areas, being as big of a retailer as they are, they’re directly contributing to inequality by making poor people spend even more time and money on shopping, and to segregation by making richer people less likely to move into the areas without services they like.
Generally, the more power to unilaterally shape the world you have, the more responsibility you have to try to make it a better place rather than to maximize profit. Much like when a Roomba is trying to minimize dust without any regard to anything else, it mostly works fine, and at worst knocks over your lamp, but when a superintelligence does so, it clears the galaxy of elements heavier than helium.
to be honest this feels more like a reason to break up Google and Facebook than to worry overmuch about their board representation.
Highly Detailed Laser Cut Wood Sculptures With Ornate Patterns and Motifs
Oakland-based artist Gabriel Schama produces highly detailed laser-cut wood sculptures made of mahogany plywood. The complex relief sculptures are composed of several layers of wood that forms a cohesive portrait of patterns. The shapes commonly resemble mandalas, and the labyrinth of patterns form the silhouettes of people’s faces, motifs, and blocks inspired by geometric, floral and Persian inspired designs.
i now have an incredible mental image of like a white leather gender binary with gold tooling, sitting in an antique store somewhere.
WHOA I just learned something wild. I started googling around, because my impression is that the gender binary has had a lot of roots in Western imperialism but I don’t actually have a lot of details on that before, say, Columbus. And look at Wikipedia:
The term gender role was first coined by John Money in 1955, during the course of his study of intersex individuals, to describe the manners in which these individuals expressed their status as a male or female in a situation where no clear biological assignment existed.
I was just thinking about him the other day! Because I returned a book to my old college library that I’ve had for about ten years, and it reminded me that I accidentally-on-purpose stole an old copy of John Money’s “Sex Errors Of the Body” from there. Like, I checked it out, around when I was learning about intersex stuff for the first time, and then was like, “okay, I can never give this book back, it is too heinous.”
(Also holy shit? I thought, from the looks of it and what I knew at the time, that the book must be really old, from like the 50s when he was first creating intersex genital mutilation as a thing. But it’s from 1994. That is some nonsense right there.)
AAAAAAAA I clicked through to the article on John Money to see exactly how terrible he was (and what the book I stole was called) aaaaand it’s actually so bad that I’m going to reblog this to add it, so that I can put it behind a cut. Like, wow. Wow. Jesus fucking christ. wow
(less egregious but still gross: he apparently also wrote a book called “Gay, Straight, and In-Between,” like… no.)
ummm anyway so
I actually don’t know if there are any good sources on this stuff, because part of the problem of binarism in colonialism and post-colonialism has been that it colors the way people have studied the past.
So for example, it’s hard to pick an aspect of the gender binary and look at when it started, because people have tried so hard to project our gender binary onto whatever writings and artifacts they’ve found.
Looking specifically at the roots of the patriarchy will probably be a good starting place, both because people have done a lot of work in that area… although it’s going to include a lot of cissexism, I can tell you that right now, and quite probably a bunch of TERFs…. and also because the difference between the gender binary, and just having gender roles, imo, is the power structure, where one way of expressing gender is considered good, and all other variations and genders are seen as less-than and gross.
But maybe someone else will have some good suggestions!
ok so, let’s talk about how John Money is one of the worst human beings to ever exist! On the plus side: the following story is a great example of how intersex people are an oppressed class, and how the roots of intersex oppression is rooted in the same policing of gender and sexuality that “homophobia and transphobia” are.
(i put that in quotes because I am deeply tired of seeing people say that biphobia is just homophobia against bi people. also because the “phobia” thing is an ableist construction, but that’s another post.)
Don’t forget to include the “i” in your acronym, especially during Pride!
And this story is also maybe the best possible example of why I try so hard to be an ally to the intersex community.
And why it’s infuriating to me when people who are not intersex either ignore intersex people and intersex issues, or try to focus on “but I heard on Tumblr that intersex people didn’t want to be LGBT” instead of being like, “our issues are interconnected, so we fight for you and welcome you.”
Like, if people do want to “play oppression olympics,” and argue that you’re not REALLY LGBT or REALLY OPPRESSED if you don’t get killed for what you are: people actively try to keep intersex people from ever being born. And as a group, they’re subjected to really awful abuse as soon as people do realize an intersex person has been born.
On the minus side: this story is just a series of really horrible things about child abuse, so. There’s that.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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