I can't tell whether Ashleigh had transitioned before starting the job and wanted to tell colleagues her trans status but was afraid, or hadn't transitioned and didn't feel able to do so while in that job? And what any of this has to do with feminists, when tech is a pretty hostile place for anyone but dudebros, and the article says the company was 80% male?
Maybe it makes more sense to a "US domestic audience", though.
The “feminist” they quote in the article just wrote a book advocating for paid surrogacy on a global level, so yeah, I wasn't expecting a radical or Marxist feminist here but, um ... Sophie's scholarship operates in the spheres of trans feminist cultural criticism and queer social reproduction theory, notably around utopian critiques of the family, Marxism, and Black and abolitionist feminisms. Her research currently focuses on the etiologies of eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminisms, including narratives of so-called white slavery past and present, femonationalism, and trans-exclusionary femocratism.
Here's the book blurb:
"Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family”. The surrogacy industry is estimated to be worth over $1 billion a year, and many of its surrogates around the world work in terrible conditions—deception, wage-stealing and money skimming are rife; adequate medical care is horrifyingly absent; and informed consent is depressingly rare. In Full Surrogacy Now, Sophie Lewis brings a fresh and unique perspective to the topic. Often, we think of surrogacy as the problem, but, Full Surrogacy Now argues, we need more surrogacy, not less!"
"Rather than looking at surrogacy through a legal lens, Lewis argues that the needs and protection of surrogates should be put front and center. Their relationship to the babies they gestate must be rethought, as part of a move to recognize that reproduction is productive work. Only then can we begin to break down our assumptions that children “belong” to those whose genetics they share."
Ta, Sophie, but I'll pass. The issue is not that there are hordes of aspiring birthing bodies around the world just looking for better working conditions so they can flourish in their nice middle-class surrogacy careers, but that women are forced into these positions - often by abusive husbands or fathers - out of poverty and lack of agency. This "feminism" looks pretty colonialist and imperialist to me.