I was an apologist for Proton during the whole Andy Yen commentary mess, but this is a really sus choice for Proton to be making.

All that matters under capitalism is growth. I wonder if the thinking here is that Proton has already captured all the geek/privacy enthusiast crowd that it’s going to, and Andy Yen’s social fuck-up basically killed any future expansion in that space, so this is part of a pivot to new markets and abandonment of areas they know they aren’t going to win back.

If so, I’d expect to see Proton making expanded ad buys targeting preppers, libertarians, sov-cit types and other “I’m being watched!!” kooks.

I appreciate the sentiment. Thank you. We need all the support we can get.

I also want to take advantage of this post to share a bit about what’s going through my mind right now, being a trans person in tech who has been out of work for a long time.

When large companies hide all of their diversity, equity and inclusion advocacy, this is sending a message to their employees. I don’t have the privilege of passing for cis. When I interview with a hiring manager the fact that I’m trans is as visible as the nose on my face. And when it comes to making a hiring decision, that manager is forced to account for my trans-ness in their decision-making.

Hiring a transgender person can be perceived as stepping into a minefield of new problems that this manager may have never dealt with before. What if they slip-up and misgender me? Will I cry, or freak out, or rat them out to HR or the media? What if fellow teammates or coworkers aren’t socially accepting? Or a customer? How will these problems that I face reflect on them as a manager? Business leaders at the highest levels have made a point to memory-hole their LGBTQ+ advocacy, so not only is my presence on their team no longer a boon to my manager for embodying diversity values, they can almost certainly no longer count on any air support from leadership if I were to run into any interpersonal problems. That manager would be on their own.

That’s a lot. Then consider that all of that risk and uncertainty could be avoided if the manager just picked somebody else to hire.

That’s the world I’ve been living in, and it’s only gotten worse.

This problem isn’t unique to folks like me, either. Swap out “trans” for any of the other marginalized groups that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives sough to protect: disabled people, English-second-language speakers, black and brown folks, single parents. This is going to be a reality for all of them, too.

So thank you for your support, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to put these feelings into words that can live outside my brain for a change. They tend to echo with every “we’ve selected another candidate” email I get.