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  • So, yeah.

  • My name's Bryan Hughes, find me online in all the places.

  • This is a talk I have been thinking about for a long time.

  • Actually, first came up with like the original kernel of an idea for this talk at this very

  • conference two years ago.

  • So, I think it's fitting that I'm able to actually give it here at JSConf EU.

  • Because this is a really special conference.

  • I think we've all felt that.

  • You know, it's great technical content, of course.

  • Some of the leading technical content.

  • But really, we're a community, more than that.

  • And so, like, as you can probably guess, especially if you have read my Twitter bio, I'm bisexual,

  • polyamorous, and you can read it there.

  • Some things that aren't in my bio.

  • I was born in Texas in the United States which is one of the most conservative parts of the

  • country.

  • I grew up there in the '80s and '90s.

  • A little older than I look.

  • Things were a little bit different back then.

  • I'm going to talk about queerness and tech and how these things intersect in all kinds

  • of different ways.

  • The truth is it's complicated.

  • There's no binary tech is good, tech is bad or any of that.

  • It's just all over the map.

  • I really want to dig into what these things are, really.

  • How tech helps, how tech hurts and how tech can be better.

  • I'm just one person.

  • We talk about the queer community a lot.

  • But it's not just one community.

  • Not just one type of person in it.

  • The queer community is a federation, really.

  • There are lots and lots of different communities with a lot of different people and a lot of

  • different experiences.

  • Of course, disclaimer, I speak for myself.

  • I did reach out to a number of queer folks that I know, friends of friends, things like

  • that, to try to get a lot of different perspectives.

  • You'll see quotes from other folks.

  • Hopefully not just speaking for myself.

  • Before we get into it, this talk comes with content warnings as I'm sure you can imagine.

  • So, if any of these parts of the talk are difficult or uncomfortable, take care of yourself.

  • Feel free to step outside, anything like that.

  • I want to start by setting the stage a little bit.

  • Go back in time a little bit.

  • Talk about one of the fathers of computer science, Alan Turing.

  • Made contributions to computer science as well as art official intelligence.

  • The renaissance in tech, artificial intelligence, the big new thing.

  • Alan Turing was talking about it in the first part of the 20th century.

  • And Alan Turing was also gay.

  • And he was persecuted for it.

  • It.

  • I think in a way it's fitting that we start by talking about tech and queer employees

  • given in the way that Alan Turing was the first queer tech employee.

  • At least that we know of.

  • When we talk about being a queer employee, tech is very complicated, you know?

  • I'm queer and I'm a tech employee.

  • I think a lot of folks in this audience here are.

  • And so, it's really complicated.

  • Like the first thing I want to talk about one of the best things is that tech offers

  • us stable employment.

  • And as queer folks, this is really important because a lot of queer folks are just not

  • financially stable.

  • Regardless of the family we come from, so many were, you know, kicked out of their homes

  • when they were young.

  • So, even if there was wealth in the family, that often didn't translate to the queer kids

  • themselves.

  • Having financial stability is important.

  • And in tech, compared to other professions that pay about the same and offer the stability,

  • tech tends to be one of the most accepting.

  • At least in that strata of professions.

  • As a queer tech worker, I have a job that is intellectually challenging and offers economic

  • stability.

  • I do my best to pay it forward and pass that money along to people who need it.

  • One of the first issues that we tend to run into, and this is kind of a meta one, is corporate

  • pride is rainbow capitalism.

  • All right.

  • Throughout I think about three different definitions to use to break this down a little bit.

  • First, the concept of pride in the queer community.

  • That's really, really important to us.

  • Because for centuries and millennia, we were told that who we are is something to be ashamed

  • of.

  • It's not.

  • And it's taken a lot of work for us to become proud of who we are.

  • And so, pride is very, very important us to.

  • And we're starting to see a lot of companies expressing queer pride in various different

  • ways.

  • So, this corporate pride is kind of it's a new thing, of course.

  • But we really look at it, though, it's what we call rainbow capitalism.

  • And so, rainbow capitalism is whenever companies, institutions, whoever, engages with the queer

  • community.

  • Not to help the queer community.

  • But in order to further their own interests.

  • Usually to sell more products, make more money.

  • And what we end up seeing is that corporate pride end up just being another reflection

  • and lens of rainbow capitalism.

  • The tech industry is engaging in a queer specific version of diversity theater by sponsoring

  • events like the pride parade.

  • They market to sell more products, and most are not doing anything to make the life better

  • for queer people.

  • Queer ERGs, employee resource groups, should be run by queer employees.

  • However, it's also important that you value the work people are putting into this.

  • I was the head of the queer employee resource group for a while.

  • And that work was seen as completely extracurricular and I missed out on a promotion as a result.

  • See, companies want to take the work they do in order to further their own interests

  • and they don't actually give back.

  • They don't support us in that.

  • They only take it from us.

  • And our other intersections are compounded.

  • You know, we talk about social justice.

  • We talk a lot about intersectionality.

  • And that absolutely applies to queerness as well.

  • And one of the things that I think is important to note about this is, you know, we tend to

  • think about diversity, inclusivity as like different axes.

  • This is not necessarily wrong, but they are not independent.

  • And this is something we have to remember.

  • When people have more than one marginalization they're dealing, this is not an additive,

  • it's a multiplicative one.

  • They inform each other and makes things more complicated.

  • When my disability became ongoing, it was hard to tell if I was put on small projects

  • because of my disability, gender, or actual job performance.

  • I'm definitely more marginalized for my Judaism and ADHD, but that's only because I have been

  • working in queer friendly cities.

  • I'm marginalized for both my queerness and my race.

  • Queer rights isn't an equal playing field.

  • Race always had something to do with it.

  • Our pain is ignored and dismissed.

  • Just after the Pulse nightclub shootings, I mentioned to a co worker that I was going

  • hold a moment of silence at an upcoming all hands.

  • My co worker said, I don't think tech companies should take a stance on that kind of thing.

  • I like the idea of being neutral.

  • What the fuck?

  • I didn't say anything because I didn't feel safe to speak up to this person that thinks

  • companies shouldn't condemn gun violence against queer people of color.

  • Tech is never neutral.

  • And the only way you can think that tech is neutral is if you love in a place of extreme

  • privilege.

  • Tech is a part of this world.

  • It always has been.

  • [ Applause ] And it shape this is world in a way that no

  • industry does in this day and age.

  • And, you know, actually, I should say something else on this.

  • I actually have my own story with Pulse as well.

  • I had been working at Microsoft for three, four months.

  • I was working on a product team before I got into my current role now.

  • And Pulse nightclub shooting happened on a weekend.

  • And I think every queer person remembers that weekend pretty clearly.

  • At least if you were connected to the queer community at that time.

  • I was working on a remote team, something I was grateful for in retrospect.

  • And we had a stand up Monday morning.

  • I'm devastated.

  • Every queer person I know and talked to was a complete and utter wreck.

  • I hop on the call, a virtual call, thankfully no video.

  • I'm barely able to speak, and all the people on the team, all cis straight men, they were

  • asking about weekends, laughing and joking as if nothing had happened.

  • And like I'm struggling so much already.

  • And that made me feel so much more alone in that moment.

  • Because it was a reminder that, you know, most people aren't queer.

  • Most people don't have to deal with that.

  • And most people don't care.

  • So, what can tech employers do?

  • First, let's talk about hiring.

  • And this is just a few things.

  • Like we could spend an entire talk on this alone.

  • I'll just give you a couple of things.

  • First of all is ignore social media.

  • Like, if you're higher, just don't even look at a person's social media account.

  • Because the truth is, if we're going to talk about our daily lives, that means talking

  • about some things that people find controversial.

  • If we're not going to talk about our daily lives like privileged, straight, cis white

  • folks do, we get punished in ways they don't or we have to hide it, which is effectively

  • going back in the closet.

  • If we talk about other marginalizations on top of it, it's even worse.

  • On my bio on Twitter, I mention that I'm bi and poly.

  • I try to be out about that.

  • But you know what with?

  • If a bi queer woman, especially of color said the same thing, that would probably disqualify

  • them from being hired, but not me.

  • The other thing is to understand variances in employment history.

  • This is especially true for trans folks.

  • Because the truth of the matter is queer folks in general have a tougher time finding employment.

  • There are more issues we have to deal with.

  • And the more marginalized intersections it is, the more difficult.

  • People are in bad situations at work and are discriminated and have to leave.

  • Especially the more marginalized followings tend to hop jobs.

  • It's not the fault of the queer folks, but it's the companies.

  • And in hiring, the queer person is punished all the time.

  • We need to stop looking at that.

  • And talk about HR once in the company.

  • Implicit bias training.

  • This is kind of an obvious one.

  • And there are a lot of problems with current implicit bias trainings.

  • But this is still important.

  • We all have biases.

  • This is the nature of the human condition.

  • Every single person has some biases.

  • We can't understand everyone's viewpoint in the world.

  • We didn't simultaneously grow up in every single country to simultaneously being born

  • to dozens of different types of parents.

  • We cannot understand everyone's position innately.

  • We don't have the experiences.

  • And the best way to get through that is through education.

  • And also, we need to improve implicit bias training.

  • And also, we need to take sexual harassment claims seriously.

  • This is especially true for clear women.

  • Because this is an issue in the industry for all women.

  • But again, intersectionality.

  • This comes into play.

  • Queer women face even more issues.

  • There was I remember a study came out a while ago that showed bi women actually face more

  • discrimination than lesbian or straight women as it turns out.

  • There's a whole complicated host of reasons for that.

  • But it's true.

  • And so, taking these claims seriously benefits queer people especially.

  • And people of color and other intersections as well.

  • Inclusion.

  • You know, gender neutral language and bedrooms.

  • We have gender neutral bedrooms here at the conference.

  • It's actually part of the venue.

  • They didn't do that last minute switch that a lot of conferences did.

  • You can do it at a concert venue, you can do it at work.

  • And the same thing with language.

  • Don't use he, him in documentation language.

  • Depending on the language, this is a little bit different.

  • Some languages it's easier to do gender neutral pronouns than others.

  • Regardless, think about what they're talking about in the language and the culture and

  • figure out how to support them with language.

  • Preferred names and pronouns.

  • This is important in companies and comes up in a lot of places we don't think about.

  • For legal reasons, most companies need your legal name.

  • A trans person, their legal name is often not their real name.

  • We need to understand that and propagate that through a system.

  • If you have HR systems to log in, show their preferred name there, not the legal name.

  • In their email, corporate email account, show your preferred name and not your legal name

  • and so on and so forth.

  • Create queer only spaces.

  • I bet a lot of us use Slack at work.

  • Make sure in the Slacks there's a queer only space.

  • Same for other marginalizations.

  • We need a space to talk about ourselves where we're not constantly having to do one on one

  • education.

  • And let queer people speak and listen.

  • Stop speaking and listen.

  • Stop thinking you know what's best for queer people at your company.

  • Let's back out and talk about tech in the broader queer community.

  • This is one of the biggest benefits of tech and the most transformation I have seen.

  • Tech lets us escape our isolation.

  • This is a big difference, when I was kid to when I was in college.

  • When I was a kid, there was no Internet.

  • Even when I was in high school, it wasn't really there.

  • But now we can actually find community online.

  • And this is deeply powerful.

  • Tech makes it easier to find and meet community.

  • Grinder, et cetera, make finding like minded people or people with the same sexuality is

  • a lot easier than flagging my friend Dorothy.

  • There's a reason, read up on it.

  • Tech makes it easier to find porn which helps with sexuality discovery.

  • This is important.

  • A lot of people don't think about it.

  • But when we grow up in a society when we are supposed to have a certain orientation, certain

  • sexual desires.

  • We have to dispel with that.

  • We have to figure something else.

  • And interestingly enough, porn is a really good way to do that.

  • And porn is tied into tech.

  • So, we need to this is so useful in so many ways.

  • Queer folks spend most of our lives in some form of social isolation due to the hostility

  • and violation of the cis hetero normative society we are forced to live in.

  • Having tech for a space to be ourselves and meet people like us matters.

  • Tech has a lot of isolated people, allowing them to find thousands or millions of others

  • just like themselves.

  • Queer folks of all types have found a large, receptive community to help them feel normalized

  • and legitimate.

  • The trans rights movements has advanced due to the isolated people finding a multitude

  • of peers going through the same process.

  • But tech asserts its biases on the world.

  • I think the biggest harm is training AI systems that incorporate existing bias and then treating

  • those systems as Oracles and always correct.

  • Also, unlike with human interactions where you can negotiate, if a tech solution isn't

  • coded to do something, there's no way to do it.

  • If you're a queer, non binary or trans person signing up for a service and they have only

  • a male/female check button, you can't talk to the website and have that button appear.

  • It's not there.

  • You don't do it.

  • It's driven by powerful cis men, and the tech is baked with the world they create.

  • And put out into the world via the Internet.

  • It's a small portion of the straight world who is setting that culture.

  • Tech is also explicit in gentrification.

  • Now, gentrification is a complicated topic and there's not just one single cause.

  • But tech absolutely does play a role in it.

  • Societally some of the safest spaces for queer communities are in big cities like New York

  • and San Francisco and, yes, here in Berlin.

  • However, tech is hyper gentrifying those areas, making it impossible for queer folks to live.

  • When queer folks can't live in places that are safe for them, they have to live in places

  • that are not safe for them.

  • I live in San Francisco.

  • My local community pretty much got destroyed by gentrification, along with everything else

  • that's good and beautiful.

  • I live in San Francisco.

  • And I have to agree.

  • Social media tech refuses to fix hate and bullying.

  • Online spaces have been increasingly hostile towards marginalized groups speaking up about

  • their expressions, and that's fucking shitty.

  • I have seen friends and friends of friends stand up against white supremacists, tech

  • doesn't ban the Nazis, they ban the queer people standing up for themselves.

  • I've seen this many times.

  • The tech industry is profiting from social media platforms that enable harassment of

  • queer and trans people as well as spreading fascist ideologies.

  • The tech industry has the power and resources to quarantine harassment and hate speech.

  • We do it with Spam in email.

  • It's just harassment and hate speech don't affect the white men in charge of the industry.

  • And the harm of viralness is intersectional.

  • I think we've all heard various stories in the media about someone does something, says

  • something, whatever.

  • It goes viral.

  • And then their lives are ruined.

  • This is compounded by intersectionality.

  • There's a lot of stories I could tell.

  • There's actually a very specific story I want to tell, though.

  • About two months ago a trans black woman in Dallas, my hometown.

  • I grew up in Dallas.

  • Her name was Malaysia Booker, assaulted in a parking lot and someone recorded it and

  • it went viral.

  • After the attack, she had this to say.

  • This time I can stand before you when I was attacked.

  • Whereas in other scenarios, we are at a memorial.

  • So, what can tech companies do?

  • The first is safety.

  • And start by banning the Nazis.

  • Get rid of real name policies.

  • Like Facebook still has a real name policy.

  • And I use Facebook, these are not people's real names, they're legal names.

  • And I've seen this abused in many ways.

  • Trans people are banned from Twitter because they dare to use their real name.

  • And speak out against anti queer legislation.

  • We're seeing more and more anti queer legislation in the United States, here in Europe and around

  • the world.

  • And there is precedence for this, by the way.

  • A year or two ago in the United States when some of the really bad anti immigration policy

  • was first being force the through, Microsoft released statements condemning that.

  • We should do that with anti queer legislation too.

  • And, again, ban the fucking Nazis.

  • It's 2019.

  • Why are we having this conversation again?

  • And respect.

  • Stop using us as props to promote yourselves.

  • We are not things in your game.

  • And put your money where your mouth is.

  • Companies will spend tens of thousands of dollars on one float in one pride parade.

  • Yes, they actually cost that much.

  • But you know what?

  • They don't give a single dollar to any nonprofit that actually helps queer people.

  • They only want to look good.

  • They don't give a shit about us.

  • So, like, where will the future take us?

  • And, you know, this is something I'm torn on myself.

  • I don't know where we're going to end up in all of this.

  • Some days I'm pessimistic.

  • Some days I'm hopeful.

  • And today I'm going choose to be hopeful, though.

  • I want to read you some excerpts from a speech from some time ago by Harvey Milk who was

  • a famous queer activist.

  • And I think he had a lot of really good things to say.

  • Like every other group, we must be judged by our leaders and by those who are themselves

  • gay.

  • Those who are visible.

  • For invisible, we remain in limbo.

  • A myth.

  • A person with no parents, no brothers, no sisters.

  • No friends who are straight.

  • No important positions in employment.

  • The anger and the frustrations that some of us feel is because we are misunderstood.

  • And friends can't feel the anger and frustration.

  • They can sense it in us.

  • But they can't feel it.

  • Because a friend has never gone through what is known as coming out.

  • I will never forget what it was like coming out and having nobody to look up toward.

  • I remember the lack of hope.

  • Our friends can't fulfill it.

  • I can't forget the looks on faces of people who've lost hope.

  • Be they gay, be they seniors.

  • Be they black folks looking for an almost impossible job.

  • Be they Latinos trying to explain their problems and aspirations in tongue that's foreign to

  • them.

  • I use the word "I" because I'm proud.

  • I stand here tonight in front of my gay sisters, brothers and friends because I'm proud of

  • you.

  • In San Francisco, three days before gay pride day, a person was killed just because he was

  • gay.

  • And that night I walked among the sad and the frustrated at city hall in San Francisco.

  • And later that night as they lit candles on Castro Street and stood in silence.

  • Reaching out for some symbolic thing to give them hope.

  • These were strong people.

  • These faces I knew from the shop, the streets, meetings.

  • And people who I never saw before, but I knew.

  • They were strong.

  • But even they needed hope.

  • And the young gay people in the Altoona, Pennsylvanias, and the Richmond, Minnesotas, who are coming

  • out and hearing the story on television, the only thing they have to look forward to is

  • hope.

  • And you have to give them hope.

  • Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow.

  • Hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great.

  • Hope that all will be all right.

  • So, without hope, not only gays, but blacks, Asians, seniors, the handicapped, the uses.

  • The uses will give up.

  • If there's a message I have to give, is that I found one overriding thing about my personal

  • election, if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light.

  • And you and you and you you have to give 'em hope.

  • Thank you.

  • [ Applause ]

So, yeah.

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LGBTQ+社區與技術之間的爭議關係,由Bryan Hughes主持|JSConf EU 2019。 (The Contentious Relationship Between the LGBTQ+ community and Tech by Bryan Hughes | JSConf EU 2019)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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