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In my limited experience their personalities seem to not just be male, but hyper male. Like take for instance the prevalence of trannies in the speedrunning community, it is hard to think of a more hypermasculine activity than speedrunning. I don't mean masculine in some spiritual sense of idealized masculinity (masculinity of war, hunting, bravery, leadership etc) but in the empirical sense of percentage of partakers in the activity. The motte is similarly hypermasculine, so it doesn't surprise me we have a few AGP types such as yourself around here. But why do you think this is? Are you generally hypermasculine in your other interests and thought patterns?
I have always suspected that I am in the "at-risk for AGP" demographic, even though I've never felt it myself. I imagine that some AI classifier, upon taking stock of my job, my hobbies and even my writing style would probably say that I am male with the an unimaginably high degree of certainty. Job in software (probably 90% male), enjoys Paradox games (probably 99% male), main hobby is a collecting hobby (probably 90% male), participates on The Motte (probably 99% male)...I imagine these things are even more heavily male coded than things that stereotypically come to mind like UFC, hunting, Joe Rogan etc.
I have an acquaintance who came out as a trans woman a few years ago, and the irony of her situation has not escaped my attention. She claims to be a woman trapped in an "assigned male at birth" body, and yet the number of cis women I know personally who
are zero, zero, zero and zero, respectively. Likewise the recent micro-scene of bedroom black metal solo projects whose members identify as trans women (most famously Liturgy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_(band)], but it seems every other band on this label meets that description exactly): does anything scream "socially awkward man with some autistic traits" more than starting a bedroom black metal solo project?
What you're describing is autistic traits, and many feminists have argued that autism is "extreme masculinity" (men tend to be high-systematising, and autistic men are almost totally systematising). I'm sure you're already aware that the correlation between autism and gender dysphoria is extremely strong and seems to becoming stronger with every year.
I'm a man who several people have independently suggested might be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, high-systematising, bookish, socially awkward, didn't fit in at school (as a result of which I retreated into social media and anonymous online chatrooms), love video games enough to have done a master's in game design, listened to black metal obsessively as a teenager, passively interested in anime and manga as a teenager. If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now. (At least then my enormous ass would have been more of an asset in my dating life.) By the same token, had my aforementioned acquaintance been born five or ten years earlier, I think the chances of them coming out as trans at the age they did would have been somewhere around nil. Anyone who thinks social contagion plays no role in this phenomenon must be blind.
I think you're right that the zeitgeist has a lot to do with it. I remember at the nadir of my dating life (before Obergefell) looking in the mirror and asking why I couldn't find an awesome woman. And at least very briefly thinking that I'd be a good one myself (fit, tall, all those cool male-coded interests: what's not to like?). But it wasn't a popular idea to consider at the time, so it got shoved aside never to return and things got better for me within a few weeks. I'm occasionally thankful it didn't get further consideration at the time.
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I know this feeling too. At the end of high school, around 2008 I had a friend confide in me his feelings of gender dysphoria (although he didn't word it that way, being before the whole transgender trend) thinking I shared them. Of course I didn't, but he must have taken my autistic personality traits to signal it. I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
And this is specifically autistic, though. Your plumber dissatisfied with his love life hits the strip club instead.
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It's a real "there but for the grace of God" situation, isn't it. It's funny when you see street clashes between Proud Boys and Antifa, and for all the talk of this being a clash between a racist organisation and an antiracist organisation, both groups look about as racially diverse as rural Sweden, or in some cases the Proud Boys are more diverse than the Antifa guys.
I read somewhere (possibly in a review of The True Believer) that the number of literal Nazis (as in, members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s) who were previously communists is off the charts. I also read somewhere that in the UK in the 1980s, both far-right skinheads and antifa recruited from the same pool of talent: football hooligans, young frustrated men spoiling for a fight, who could easily be radicalised into one extremist ideology or the other (or even both in succession) if there was the possibility of getting to bust some heads with impunity in it. See also my post about how being generally dissatisfied with your life is a far better predictor for endorsing an extreme ideology than anything else.
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Right. But shouldn't we take special note of this distinction? When you look at this personality type that's "at risk" for AGP - nerds, aspies, autists, whatever you want to call it - isn't there something about it that's "in between" masculine and feminine? (Appropriate, given the topic at hand). In one sense you are correct that it's "hyper male" just in terms of sheer statistics. But at the same time, these men tend to display traits that are decidedly unmasculine - higher in neuroticism, more emotional in general, higher verbal ability, less physically aggressive, often averse to traditionally masculine interests like (physical) sports, etc.
My understanding of aspies is basically that they have to learn to be social explicitly, they have to kind of learn that something is a joke and that you laugh after a joke, etc. it’s completely external like a skill. And I think that since our vision of our identity or identities is seen through the other, the aspies have a bit less self-awareness of their identities than a normie might. You don’t just naturally act like your gender as most people do by picking up on cues, you learn to act your gender the way I might learn French — you make an explicit decision to study the subject, and then to use it. Of course it’s never going to feel quite natural in the same way my French isn’t going to feel natural— it’s something I’m translating in my head from my natural language to French and it’s not the same as English which I just naturally speak without having to think about it.
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You're correct that aspies, nerds or whatever tend to display more feminine traits. In terms of their interests, I would argue they're "hypermale" not just in terms of statistics but also in terms of their character. Men tend to be high-systematisers and interested in abstract systems, while women are more interested in interpersonal relationships. "Intensely interested in abstract systems but utterly lacking in social skills" is about as pithy a definition of "nerd" as you can get, whereas more typically "bro" males tend to be jacks-of-all-trades: they'll have a passing interest in abstract systems (e.g. have memorised Nomar Garciappara's on-base percentage or the acceleration on a '67 Ford Mustang), but without sacrificing the ability to "read the room" and charm people. Most of the stereotypically nerdy interests (systems-heavy video games; hard sci-fi; fantasy universes with elaborate magic systems, conlangs and extensive worldbuilding; electrical engineering; tabletop gaming; computer programming; progressive/technical death metal; IDM; math rock) are about complex abstract systems first and human beings/interpersonal relationships a distant second, if at all. Even saying "nerds like video games" doesn't really sell the distinction I'm getting at: plenty of ordinary dudes will play a little Call of Duty to unwind in the evening, but it takes a certain kind of nerd to log thousands of hours in high-level grand strategy games from Paradox Interactive or learn the entire metagame for Starcraft II. The reason nerds don't have much of an interest in team sports isn't because they're more interested in traditionally feminine interests, but the same reason they don't like playing Call of Duty: they find these activities mechanically shallow and uninteresting from a systems perspective, and are usually not shy about expressing their contempt for the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who do derive enjoyment from these activities (the latter clause is "in character" and not what I personally believe, in case it wasn't obvious). Show me a nerdy dude or trans woman who's into knitting, astrology and murder podcasts, and then we can talk about how feminine their interests are.
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