if you're trapped in a gender not your own you can find space for a self, mutability, community. as you come out, new interfaces, operating systems.

is it any wonder that trans are represented well among software, firmware hackers ? no.

the other thing is that until recently and maybe still academia and other disciplines were not as welcoming.

Basically, my stereotype of trans women is "incredibly cracked coders who like sharks from Ikea"

@Noahpinion Yes. Trans-identification appeals to smart, lonely, odd balls as a way to escape (the feelings associated with) low social status in one's sex class. Transgenderism has run through the smart, lonely odd ball population like wildfire.

@Noahpinion Aren't both sort of co-associated with high functioning autism?

@DanielleFong Including hardware engineering?

@Noahpinion This is news to me. is this like an actually measured thing?

@Noahpinion Autism causes men to be good at software via obsessive personality, sociability problems leads to non normative methods for acceptance etc. Why it causes men to go trans is left as an exercise to the reader…

@Noahpinion It’s the same reason so many trans women are drawn to video games.

We are locked out from social lives with the girls, and we can’t really function with the boys. What are we supposed to do in our childhood?

Computers are a refuge. A mathematical system we can understand.

@Noahpinion Software engineers love having a pseudonym. They like hanging out on social networks where almost nobody uses their real name.

People fearing oppression—transgender people, Russian people, etc—gravitate to the same social networks.

@Noahpinion it def shows up in other technical fields

@Noahpinion Probably autism. Men who do not identify with their biological sex are several times more likely to be autistic than men who so identify. And autists tend to be good at coding.

@Noahpinion Advanced porn. It's actually a very easy answer. If you polled based on internet fetishes rather than "gender identity" you'd find more than you want to find.

As someone deeply involved in the most technical end of software for many decades, I suspect it doesn't really show up in software engineering either. The trans people are just very good at being loud, making it appear that there are "so many" of them, when in fact they are not a bigger percentage than elsewhere.

@Noahpinion Don't know if they're on average better but they've been way overrepresented forever

@Noahpinion Probably b/c software has fewer barriers to entry, much harder for a Trans woman to succeed in law, finance, consulting and business. But if you can code, who cares what you look like.

@esrtweet @Noahpinion

@DanielleFong @Noahpinion Weird how these people trapped in The wrong Gender are at the top of a profession that is dominated by people of the gender that they are supposedly trapped in

@esrtweet @Noahpinion i can’t point to data, and i had never thought about this, but, yes, in my experience it does show up, and not out of a signal to noise issue. the talented trans sw engineers i’ve known were *not* loud about it.

@esrtweet @Noahpinion You're wrong on this one. It's the autism (and autistic-leaning). Something about being a hard systematiser tends to produce weird sex freaks in a much higher percentage than the general population. With public opinion no longer supressing them as much it shows up very noisily

IQ a full stdev above mean and a strong correlation with autism, so strong predisposition to technical work.

became socially accepted in an era when there was enormous wage premium to working in software and particular acceptance in bay area culture (libertarianism + wokism + transhumanism), plus it's a profession that much more readily permits solitude and remote work.

i've also heard stories that a lot of trans people got into hacking to circumvent access controls that conservative parents tried to put on them, but this might be a bit just-so. regardless, do not fuck with the catgirls. you will get your shit rocked.