Female Founders Conference today at 1pm PT

Op is downvoted not because they have correctly identified transphobia and HN is full of bigots (although it is) but because OP has leapt to an unsupported assumption. There is nothing transphobic about the submitted link.

Edit: also, as far as I can tell op only got one or two downvotes, and so if they are being heavily downvoted they're also being up voted too.

Ask a trans-person if they identify as male or female and they will usually tell you what they identify as now.

They choice of "female" is possibly for the aliteration with "founder". There's nothing strange about that word choice.

I know it bothers minorities -- and I understand why, since I am a "minority" on HN (woman, nearly 50yo, writer with only minor coding skills, etc) -- but most people who aren't part of that particular minority say "exclusionary" things mostly out of ignorance, not as some kind of dog-whistle fuck-you policy to specifically keep X people out.

One of the biggest issues women face is that most men will not talk to them unless they are hoping to bed them. Men sometimes do this out of the best of intentions -- not wanting a woman to think he is hitting on her or not wanting anyone to think there is an affair because he is "friendly" with her -- but it is a very serious obstacle to women being able to network and actually have meaty discussions of business. It's also generally helpful for minorities to see examples of someone "like them" in some important way who has done the thing they inspire to. One of the benefits of that is to see an example of what works, even if you don't know the right questions to ask about "what do I need to do differently to be successful at this, in spite of the fact that people like me are so seldom successful at this?" It can be helpful to see those examples even in cases where you do not think too deeply about what they are doing differently from others "like them." It can just give you a glimpse of a pattern you haven't seen before that you can emulate without fully analyzing.

I do what I can to make it possible for women to participate more equally on HN. I am sort of appalled that Jessica Livingston, the sole female among the YC founders and a presenter at this conference, does not see fit to participate more in discussion here. I think her absence on the forum is one of the reasons it is such a boyzone. But I am glad to see YC doing something to try to support women founders, even though I tend to be much more interested in finding a means to be inclusive of women in the "boys club" rather than in trying to segregate them. Nonetheless, segregation for women to help them get started seems to have a track record of success. From what I gather, women-only colleges have a decent track record of producing female leadership and female coding groups appear to also help women break in. So unless I can offer something definitively more effective and also ideologically more palatable, I see no reason to tear it down with criticism.