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The elephant in the room is AGP intelligence. This is not exactly a sexual orientation, but may be somewhat related. One paper famously put the median at 122, which is actually completely believable.
Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects? I expect that there's a substantial barrier to entry for completing SRS at a university hospital (the selection criterion for that paper) and that the barriers are higher for AGPs since they don't match the stereotypical / ideologically acceptable profile. (I also suspect a similar effect causes these studies to underestimate AGP in that population. People who want a thing tend to say what gatekeepers want to hear, and those that don't... don't make it past the gatekeepers as much.)
Of course I'm also saying this as someone who suffers from AGP (though much, much less than I did in my teens / early 20s -- mental habits do make a difference) and also ticks many of the usual boxes: high intelligence, nerdy, family history both of mental illness and of joint hypermobility / connective tissue problems. So make of that what you will.
You are right. The interesting part is the difference between male-attracted vs. female-attracted TIMs. If you assume the former are about average, the AGPs would be like 1 SD above the mean, which would neatly explain their extreme overrepresentation in g-loaded activities.
Right, what I was also gesturing at above is that there is probably an additional selection effect, in the form of needing to work the system, for female attracted / AGP people, since their motivations are thought to be more "disreputable" (not sure the right word here).
However, on further reflection, 122 is an astounding mean, even for a combination of selection effects and real differences, and makes me wonder if there is something wrong here. That's a mean substantially larger than what you get pulling only from the population of 4-year college graduates. At this point I think I'll reserve any judgment about the explanation of these numbers.
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There seems to be a strong correlation with the type of mild autism that puts people in places like here or the tech sector rather than care homes and institutions. May be related to that.
I also wonder if intelligence is in some sense a prerequisite for having the introspection and general awareness to notice that society has a lot of social scripts and roles it tries to corral you into, and some of them are stupid or don't fit you well. My experience is that smart people in general are more likely to do 'weird' stuff, from polyamory to Larping to ignoring fashion to etc.
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Certainly when I look at software development discussion online, it seems to me that transwomen are overrepresented relative to their population size.
This could be explained by the idea that transwomen are just more vocal on average than the average person, but I am not sure that would explain all of the phenomenon.
If transwomen do tend to be relatively prominent in software development because of their actual skills, I suppose there are many ways to explain it. Maybe the same thing that causes men to want to be women also for some reason is responsible for high intelligence. Maybe nerdy, intelligent, tech-savvy guys are more likely to want to switch gender roles than guys who are easily successful in stereotypical male roles. There is also the common online joke argument of "both transgenderism and hyperintellectuality tend to be caused by autism" but I know almost nothing about autism so I have no way of evaluating that one.
Even more particular that software development is emulator development. I'd estimate that something like 90%+ of emulator developers are autistic trans, and almost always of the AGP variety. Off the top of my head Near/Byuu (developer of Higan/BSNES), Endrift (mGBA), and whatever the name of the guy who developed melonDS. Emulators require even more of an autistic obsession with accuracy and technical details than normal software dev.
I'm going to write something stupid and I hope no one will take it too seriously, but I cannot resist the temptation to point out certain dark irony in your comment. Taking into account that autists emulate social behavior and AGPs emulate women, it is hardly surprising that the people who are combination of both are simultaneously the masters of emulating software (hehe).
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I have heard this said before. But this raises the question of why a disorder that's often characterized as "extreme maleness" would cause a man to want to be a woman.
Autist here. The people describing autism as "extreme maleness" never seem to account for the higher clumsiness, lower social masculinity, avoidance of horseplay and contact/team sports, and other signifiers of lower masculinity. It also relies on a stereotype of men as being much less emotional and much more logical than women.
When I was trying to figure out my place in the world, I discovered an idea I've been calling Triessentialism: that the best way to categorize the world seems to be the Physical, the Logical, and the Emotional. One of the biggest components was that men tend to be physically intuitive, women tend to be emotionally intuitive, and people with autism tend to be logically intuitive. The male:female skew of autism is 4:1, which is the simplest explanation why STEM careers have been filled with men at around that ratio until recently:
I have since postulated that autism is a neurological lessening of instinct, so people with autism have to figure the world out without a set of ready-made priors which harmonize into a sense of being a whole being. Thus the high instance of AGP, thus the seemingly high intelligence of having to exercise one's logical intuition to get through daily life, thus the autist's joy in the intellectual beauty of symbolic logics, simplified sorting mechanisms, and hobbies with built-in ontologies such as trainspotting and Pokemon games.
Is your contention that STEM careers have been filled almost entirely by autists until very recently, or do you also think that “logical intuition” is similarly biased towards men vis a vis women?
Good question! I’d contend that, since non-autistic men tend to be physically intuitive (I hesitate to reference the “shape rotators” meme but it fits here), their logic is more “gear-like” and related to the STEM fields than is that of the people who are intuitive in realms of motives, relationships, desires, priorities, and other carriers of emotive meaning.
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One of my personal hypotheses is that these men are so lacking in their ability to understand women/put themselves in their place that they look at what attracts them and assume that women will want the same thing - the mirror image of a careerist woman who wonders why men are more impressed with her hips than her ability to manage a marketing team.
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AGP and actually ‘being a woman’ are radically different, it doesn’t really make sense to conflate them. AGP is often an expression of a kind of (hetero)sexual narcissism. I guess that could be a form of ‘extreme maleness’.
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I'm skeptical of the strength of the autism connection, but I don't find that in particular much of a mystery:
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Perhaps it’s a higher incidence of sexual deviance coupled with a low awareness or care that putting that deviance on display will have negative social consequences.
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Easy theory is that autism makes you largely immune to social scripts and peer pressure, and those are the only things keeping some small percent of the population trapped in their assigned gender roles.
Or, more generally: autistic people who want to be socially competent have to intentionally and intellectually examine and dissect social scripts and norms that everyone else just picks up naturally without thinking about them. Examining those things intentionally and intellectually makes it easier to notice that they're arbitrary and often dumb, and make different choices for yourself.
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