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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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A couple unorganized thoughts:

  1. Of the people I've worked closely with in my software engineering career, the women are smarter and more competent than the men, by a significant margin. This is entirely driven by most of the women I've worked with being trans women.

  2. There is absolutely a very significant correlation between all of mathematical capabilities, having at least mild autistic tendencies, and identifying as trans. My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).

  3. I don't think trans people are the primary drivers of corporate woke struggle sessions. I've heard from two that they actually dislike them. Constantly having people tiptoe around them and someone making a performative point to always ask for pronouns in front of them is, if anything, triggering and othering. Instead, it's mostly white HR women who are pushing it: it establishes a social hierarchy with arbitrary rules that they can assert themselves as enforcers into.

  4. Trans people on Twitter are not at all representative of typical trans people, who are much more normal than you'd think if social media was your primary exposure to them.

It seems like people in the field are more likely to be a bit all over the place. There are more people doing things far out of the mainstream in every direction.

As for the trans thing I find it perplexing as the typical developer especially in the nerdier fields is far from being feminine. Even the ones who are trans aren't very feminine. Stick a transgender haskell developer in with at a Taylor Swift concert and he will really stand out. Much of the femininity is missing from them. They aren't talking with their friends for four hours about nothing, they don't really love kids, they don't really have feminine habits. Developers tend to speak in bullet points rather than the free flowing emotional output that women speak in.

Mathematics/CS is hyper masculine. It is purely logical, incredibly concise, black and white and doesn't care about your feelings. It is for somewhat unempathic types who answer the question "do you like my shirt" honestly. They aren't very girly. I find the autist to trans pipeline to be truly perplexing as autism is linked to high prenatal testosterone and is in many ways a hyper masculinized brain.

My guess is that they don't fit in with the bros and are desperately searching for an identity while needing attention.

I imagine some of it is also that stereotypical masculinity is not the self-image of many nerds.

Is it though, nerds throughout history are nearly all men. Pretty much all major scientific discoveries were made by men. Technology has been dominated by men. Nerdy occupations have some of the highest over-representations of men.

It is a different male archetype than the chad but it is hardly one that isn't male.

My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).

I wonder about this myself. I know a transman who is likely autistic, and from what I have gathered talking with him, it really seems like part of the motivation for transitioning was his difficulty fitting into the female social role as an autistic person. He was raised a conservative Christian, went to a Baptist college, and was married to an emotionally abusive man for 10 years, so I wonder if he didn't experience the female role as rather more restrictive than most women experience it?

I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day. I could easily imagine a pipeline that looks something like: born autistic in a community with strong gender norms > doesn't fit in to natal sex role due to autism > labels that difficulty "gender dysphoria" and questions if they might be the opposite sex > transitions and enough people give them a bit more leeway for them to learn the rules of their new sex role > they're much happier in their new role as a result.

That's possible, but then one would like mainstream society to be sending a message like: it's perfectly alright to be a nerdy masculine woman or an effeminate man!!! You definitely do not need to go on hormones and cut off your breasts or other parts to deal with this! Go find yourself a supportive community in a big city, they totally exist!

Mainstream society should definitely not be sending a message that medical procedures and messing with puberty are a good way to deal with the situation, or at least not until they've tried other things like finding a supportive subculture, finding their own preferred aesthetic, etc.

one would like mainstream society to be sending a message like: it's perfectly alright to be a nerdy masculine woman or an effeminate man

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so. Obviously there's no blinded experiment or anything and lots of different overlapping trends, but it seems pretty clear to me that downplaying gender roles led to an increase in people desiring to transition rather than forestalling transitions.

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so.

It used to be. Then a certain kind of angry, selfish person started problematizing masculinity and proclaimed that "nerdy/masculine woman" (masculinity as action) and "effeminate man" (masculinity as identity) were all bad.

That started around 2010 or so and has done nothing but get worse. It seems that the trans stuff is just responding to that worldview.

That's the tack that society has been taking since at least the 80s or so. Obviously there's no blinded experiment or anything and lots of different overlapping trends, but it seems pretty clear to me that downplaying gender roles led to an increase in people desiring to transition rather than forestalling transitions.

Hypothesis: Downplaying the traditional norms effectively removed the training wheels from the kids who would have really needed them. It may be difficult to adapt to unsaid social norms if the well-meaning adults are too drunk on their utopian koolaid and insist there being no norms. If a task is difficult, some people do not succeed.

If you complain, the well-meaning adults may say that you've got it all wrong, it is how it is meant to be: the kids (later grown-ups) who take non-standard paths have been liberated from oppressive structures and are finally able to find/express their non-standard identity.

I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day.

There isn't any other kind.

I feel like that's a bit presumptuous though, unless you mean it in some trivial sense like, "All communities emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex), therefore all trans people come from such communities."

I would tend to think that so-called "autogynephillic transexuality" would be a kind of transness that only requires that men and women wear different kinds of clothes and look physically different, which isn't a "hard-to-navigate social rule" in my book. Heck, even so-called "homosexual transsexuals" don't require the existence of hard-to-navigate social role for either sex, just for a "gay" person to realize on some level that they'll have more of the sexual options they prefer if they transition.

I'm inclined to give my hypothesis a label more like "pseudo-dysphoric autistic transsexuality", and would tend to consider it distinct from either of Blanchard's two categories (though I'm sure there's comorbidities.) I actually wonder if most transmen in the modern rise of transness don't belong to this category. Though I could also see an argument for something like "pseudo-dysphoric cluster B transsexuality" or a more general supercategory of "pseudo-dysphoric 'weird outcast' transsexuality" (which I suspect would often line up with neurodivergence of some kind, though it might never be diagnosed.)