Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance.

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.

Based on...what, exactly?

Female only is not transphobic and is not excluding transwomen.

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.

You are creating a drama where there is none. People identify as male or female, and that might be different to how they were born.

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.

Generally sex is what you were born as, you were born as either male or female.

Gender is what you identify as, you either identify as man or woman.

Now it is clear that PG and company aren't transphobic, but by giving in to the first demand for more representation of "minorities" (as if asians, immigrants and indians weren't minorities and weren't already statistically over representated) they have given the SJW a finger and when you give the devil a finger...

Personally I am going to get some popcorn and watch this drama unfold.

This distinction between sex and gender is a common use of those two terms (at least in particular contexts) but the idea that "man" and "woman" identify genders and "male" and "female" identify sexes is much less common. More commonly, "male" and "female" are adjectives pertaining either to sex or gender and "man" and "woman" are mind referring to adults who are, respectively, male and female, again, either by sex or gender.

That's just a question of words and their definitions.

Personally, I use both woman and female completely the same, and sometimes it means women and trans-women (e.g. when I see someone who looks typically female), but mostly it means born women only (e.g. when I say I'm attracted to women).

But of course, not everyone uses the same words with the same meaning. There's no need to assume bad faith.

Words and their definitions are pretty much what society is built on and it's useful to have words mean different things since it is what allows us to express so many different ideas -1984 famously destroyed the vocabulary of society expressly so that only the correct ideas could be considered.

Without a difference in meaning, why have different words? It seems preposterous to extend the English language just to play scrabble.

Right, but the original meaning of "woman" is "a female human", whereas "female" is an adjective or a noun for one of the biological sexes (the one that produces ova in sexual reproduction). Including trans-women in the definition of "woman" is a modernistic redefinition of the word, so people are totally justified if they use the word with its original meaning. Maybe we should make up a new word for the new meaning?

That might have been a sensible choice about twenty years ago. As it is the other usage seems to have been established too much now. This isn't anything new, words change meaning and tone all the time.

I think that only 10% of English speakers think trans-Women are actually women. However that 10% are disproportionately powerful, so they are able to control how the word is used in the media, in the workplace, and in educational institutions. If they stopped doing this, usage would revert to its original pretty much instantaneously.

When you are with your doctor there is a distinction between the two, but in general vernacular "female" is simply an adjective for "woman." They both mean the same thing, they just two different word types.

For example, in this case "Female Founders Conference" is the exact equivalence of "Founders Conference of people who are women."

And was possibly chosen in part because Female and Founders both start with F. That sort of thing is really not at all uncommon. People often consider how things flow when choosing a name.