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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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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).

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.

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.

a disorder that's often characterized as "extreme maleness"

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:

The share of women and underrepresented minorities in the STEM workforce increased between 2011 and 2021. Compared with women, men make up the greater share of the STEM workforce. In 2021, about two-thirds (65%) of those employed in STEM occupations were men and about one-third (35%) were women.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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’.

I'm skeptical of the strength of the autism connection, but I don't find that in particular much of a mystery:

  • Autism (also let's be real, we're talking about what used to be called Asperger's here, not all autism) is only "extreme maleness" along one dimension: a focus on systems/things rather than people. I've never heard of autistic people being more athletic, more competitive, etc. than typical men (though disabuse me if I'm wrong!).
  • One typical characteristic of being male is finding feminine characteristics attractive and valuable. It's not too far a jump -- for a certain kind of mind -- to feel that those things would be valuable in oneself.

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.

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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