By “people”, I just mean my friends and a bunch of other jailbreakers on YouTube, but whatever. I have a few friends. One is a trans girl, which I mention because apparently it’s common for trans women to love tech, and the other two are genderfluid AFAB. Well, anyway, I prefer new electronics that you can do a lot more stuff with and I don’t understand the hype on using and blogging on a 10 to 18-year-old electronic device?
Depending on the age of the hardware it is likely to have more resources for documentation, be easier to physically modify, and often more examples of other people messing with it to use for inspiration. Then there is the affordability factor, where a lot of older tech can be found cheap or very free.
For example, old alarm clocks are easily opened with a screwdriver, simple enough to repair or modify, and there are often scanned user and tech manuals online. Plus they are common to find really cheap as people replace them with more modern disposable ones.
PCs are similar, I had fun monkeying around with an old 486 when I was gaming on a more modern AMD build because running Linux on something that couldn’t handle modern windows was fun! Plus it was easier to know what was what and not worrying about breaking my primary rig meant tinkering and trying things out wasn’t a worry.
Gender identity doesn’t really play into it.
I feel like the gender identity aspect of it is probably, at least correlated with the fact that many people in society are still uncomfortable with non-binary people.
If you face even the tiniest little drop of aversion when you go out in public on a regular basis, it’s going to decrease the amount of time you go out in public, and therefore you’re going to look for more things that you can do in the privacy of your own home.
That correlates probably also causes a relatively high percentage of non-binary people to get involved with technology.