Considering way less than 50% of developers are nonbinary/transgender, don't you get the impression that they're then trying to fill quotas rather than picking the best speakers? Not saying they weren't the best, just that either rust is a very unique community or something is "up" with the selection.

Just to clarify, I'm asking with good intent.

There's a selection effect: people like me experience so much ambient hostility in society that we gravitate towards communities that welcome us and that already have people like us in leadership positions. So the correct metric is not % of all developers as a whole but just the ones involved in the Rust community.

The Rust community has many nonbinary and transgender people in it, and speakers are selected from the community. The selection process for RustConf is blind so the talks were picked for their merit: it just so happened that half of the speakers weren't cis.

> rust is a very unique community

Yes, this is true in my experience.

I've been thinking about a good answer, but these days it's a fine line to talk about these things. I'm happy the rust community is so open while being widely successful. Might shine some light into the rest of the world. I'm from Sweden,where this kind of hostility probably exists, but I never see it (gay people are very well accepted, trans I'm not as certain, only have a pool of 1 friend so not enough data).

I'm not Swedish so I don't know much about what it's like to be a Swedish trans person.

One thing I will say is that my general impression from afar is that Europeans are generally a lot more tolerant of the state interfering in personal identity issues than the liberal parts of the US. Iceland used to have a fixed list of approved baby names for example, something unimaginable in the US.

The situation was made better in 2019: https://www.icelandreview.com/news/icelandic-names-will-no-l...

I think the discussion gets a bit blurred around what acceptance means.

It varies from acceptance of an adult just being trans, of trans babies, of schools preaching medical transition without parent approval, and of issue of bathroom usage and sex-segregated prisons.

Regardless of the political questions presumably Swedes are fairly liberal about someone's personal choices.

It might be that people from disadvantaged communities _need_ to have more talent & insight to become experts than people like me (straight, white, male, speaks English, went to college, ...) and (I assume) you. And even more so to become _recognized_ experts. Also, they might feel more of a need to demonstrate that they should be allowed in the "club".

Put another way and exaggerated wildly for hopeful clarity, if person A became an expert despite being shoved away, and person B was wooed into the group, had tutors, friends,... I'd be more interested in A's talk than B's.

Good insight, it seems like the reply below said the talks were submitted blindly though, so that's even better. They're just accepted and doing really well!

Somehow, queer people are subconsciously attracted to each other (not necessarily in a romantic or sexual way). While 50% non-cis is surprising, when we are represented we tend to be overrepresented.