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Originally posted by Undertoad
Shits and giggles - no, I really do look for stuff that intrigues, and I was really curious about it and mags' answer is instructional. I've been friends with several TS folks as a result of the Cellar - the TS folks have always been interested in virtual communities, for whatever reason.
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I think primarily because a lot of us have gotten to know first each other and finally ourselves by that route; we're dispersed enough into the general population that we're much less likely to meet by other means.
That said, there's still some kind of odd unifying thread running though the fields of computing and cryptology having to do with gender roles. It's not at all clear to me that Alan Turing, for example, was actually a homosexual male in the traditional sense as is commonly believed. Even his seminal (pardon the expression) paper <i>Can Machines Think?</i> which first described what later came to be known as "the Turning Test" was originally introduced in the paper as a test of gender identity rather than one of the ability to think.
And yet when Turing was <b>sentenced</b> by the UK government to contragender hormone "therapy" as a punishment for his homosexual behavior; he sank into a deep depression and apparently comitted suicide. I doubt we'll ever know his full story, but it certainly makes me wonder...I'm tantalized by the possibility that he was actually transgendered rather than classically homosexual--a distinction that few people would have been able to draw even at the time of his death.