If you identify as a woman and are interested in joining Leap,
please sign up for our beta here.
Obviously the invitation is meant to show that trans women are welcome. That's... moving, but I think it will only cause trouble. First you create a place especially for women, which is needed because like the announcement says, many women don't feel welcome, comfortable or even safe in online discussions that tend to escalate to shouting matches, typically among men (since it's the women leaving). Then you invite in to the community people who have been socialised as men, have grown up as men, have spent most of their professional lives as men and who have often contributed to exactly the kind of working environment that makes womens' lives difficult as tech workers. That's defeating the whole point of a "community where the core culture [will be] set by women".
I'm not trying to say that trans women are not women (I mean, duh; I'm one. Of both). But it should be kept in mind that most of us carry a great deal of baggage from the time we lived as men. Baggage that's very hard to get rid of and that many of us are not even aware of. In light of this, I think this big-hearted invitation to everyone who identifies as a woman, should be revised to something more cautious. I'd think, if someone "identifies as a woman" and works in technology, they'd respond to an invitation to just "women" anyway.
To be perfectly clear, I'm totally not joining and I invite any other trans women who read this to think very carefully before doing so. Just think of all the times you had a civilised and polite debate with other trans women about trans stuff, or about anything.
Societally, we have recently gotten to the point of being able to talk about the importance of having spaces where historically marginalized groups can forge a shared sense of belonging and build up the social support structures that historically less marginalized groups have long enjoyed, but I don't believe we've gotten to the point of being able to have a reasoned debate about edge cases where different groups overlap in some ways, yet diverge in others, along axes some might find incompatible.
I also don't necessarily think that this is for the group leader to solve: this is a process that will take years of successes and blunders, and cause everyone involved to tackle an additional layer of delicate subjects that they may not be ready for. It appears that the group leader has laid out their vision, so for now, the points you raise will likely be addressed in a distributed fashion, in the minds of every member or prospective member, as time goes on.
It took me a long time to start thinking of the effect of my being trans on others around me. For example, when I get hired in a job, is the fact that I'm perceived as a woman giving me a tiny advantage? Is the interviewer thinking it's cool to have a female SE on the team? And does that mean I'm taking some other woman's place? Or is the fact that I'm trans (which is never discussed in interviews) a convenient compromise between a development team that's 100% men and actually going out and hiring more women?
In trans circles, it was my experience that such questions were brushed aside and never given any consideration. Of course I'm a woman, of course I deserve everything a woman deserves and as a woman I'm subject to discrimination in tech anyway (maybe all the companies that didn't even reply to my applications didn't think it's "cool to have a female SE on the team"). That was the general reaction. Or I was just overthinking things (but I do that for a living).
Currently the only people who even broach the subject of how trans womens' rights could affect cis womens' rights are extremely unpleasant transphobic trolls and that's very unfortunate. We've left the conversation about what claiming our rights does to othes entirely up to the very people who want to take our rights away from us. My comment here is in the context of a half-hearted attempt on my part to reclaim this conversation.