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The significant intersection between programmers (and particularly the functional programming side, e.g. Haskell/OCaml/Rust) and trans people (and furries, don't forget the furries) has been noted numerous times. Examples: 1, 2/3, 4, 5/6/7
I personally have, several times, had the experience of "I start learning some math-heavy programming tool, I go through the tutorials but get stuck on a new or undocumented use case, I discover that the place to go to talk to people who know things is the discord server for the project, and I find a significant fraction (think "half") of the helpful and active people in the project are (vocally) trans." I've also observed the same thing in IRL meetups for those kinds of topics.
So yeah, pretty sure you're observing a real phenomenon. I, too, would love to know what's going on here. I've seen the explanation of "autism" floated, but if that were the case I'd expect there to be strong trans representation among railfans (people who really really like trains), and as far as I know that is not the case? I do suspect "a surprising fraction of network engineers are furries" is the same sort of phenomenon.
Alternative hypothesis: if Internet-borne social contagion plays a significant role in trans identification, then autistic males who are also terminally online are disproportionately likely to identify as trans women. Autistic men who aren't terminally online are far less likely to identify as trans women.
People who are into computer programming are bound to spend a lot of time on the Internet, and are hence likely to spend a lot of time on social media, where they stumble across the idea of being transgender. There isn't as strong a link between "spending a lot of time on the internet" and other hobbies traditionally enjoyed by people on the spectrum (e.g. trainspotting).
This strikes me as plausible -- I've run across and talked with groups of railfans IRL on three occasions, and on all three occasions the group seemed to be almost entirely composed of older men (I'd say median age of like 70).
One other factor that might favor trans identification online: "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog". Throw an anime girl pfp and she/her on your profile and start responding in a feminine way, and you just pass automatically. So on the internet it's a lot easier to establish that "having a feminine identity" is in fact something that brings you joy.
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Found this after a cursory Google: https://old.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/tt9vbx/happy_tdov_to_all_of_our_fellow_transgender/
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