Why are the leet coders trans?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H.L. Mencken
Mencken is usually right but there’s often an answer that—once you are aware of an underlying cause—gets you 80% of the way there.
A couple weeks ago in response to the US Intelligence community purging trans employees, Noah Smith observed a substantial portion of cracked super-coders are trans and actually this should be accepted because they’re that fucking good and it’s NBD. This is obviously true. Always has been.
Sarah Haider pointed out this applies to all strongly STEM-adjacent people and Kathrine Dee made the connection to autism.
And yes, the thing that combines all these and is most of the answer is indeed autism.1 Autists have very systemic and literal ways of thinking. They take ideas seriously, really believing in what they believe, and taking things to their logical conclusions. It makes many of them exceptionally well suited for STEM work and draws them into coding, rationalism, tech, etc. It also gives them a distinct disadvantage in many social realms. Perhaps the biggest disadvantage is that they tend to believe that people really believe what they say they believe. In short, they trust the words that come out of people’s mouths. A lot.
Autists are frequently confused by social niceties and will say embarrassing true things without guile, especially early in life. Most of us figure out that we’re supposed to lie a lot eventually, and we do better in life as we age up and incorporate this. But our favorite fictional characters continue to be people like Data or Anya or Castiel. Because they remind us of how we used to be, and reassure us that we’re not alone. Importantly, we also see these characters often confused or hurt by taking other people at their word. We recognize the pain of realizing what we thought was honest communication is some bizarre other thing that somehow everyone else can see through but we can’t.
This is why autists are so susceptible to pervasive society-wide lies2. If everyone proclaims a certain thing to be true, and no one is around to let us in on the secret, we can very easily come to think it is fact. And since we actually take ideas seriously, we will naturally take them to their logical conclusions. When I was growing up this was the idea that men and women are basically identical. It wasn’t until I was in my late thirties that I discovered that the women’s World Cup champions don’t play against the men’s World Cup champions because that would be cruel (see link). Up until that day I had truly believed it would be a fair match. Because everyone I trusted had told me my whole life that there are basically no sex differences.
I feel lucky I didn’t grow up in the last ten years. The lie then was “You can totally be a girl. Super easy. Yes, you, the guy reading this right now. Everyone can. Anyone can.” I would have jumped on this immediately. There is nothing I would have loved more. Every dream finally true.
As we all know now, that’s not remotely true. Most of us cannot pass. Everyone can see we’re male, but they’re being polite, because what does it hurt? It’s not like they are gonna sleep with us, so as long as that doesn’t come up it doesn’t matter to them. It’s easier to play along than to hurt our feelings.
(Does it actually hurt anything to live a lie, thinking everyone sees you as a woman, when in fact they know you’re not but are being nice? I think that varies from person to person. It certainly would be an awful fate for me. I don’t know how many nonpassing folks would be OK with the charade, but it’s gotta be non-zero.)
So why are the best coders so often trans? Because they’re all autists. Autists believe people that tell them they can totally be women. Since they take ideas seriously and act on their beliefs, the autists then transition, and not just the small percentage that can pull it off. It’s not a social contagion insomuch as it is a false map of reality that was given them by a society of callous cowards.
Autism as per the popular understanding, I’m obvs not talking about institutional cases here.
Or at least, pervasive to the social milieu they are in.
I think a significant piece on a very similar vein is autists both believing and taking their hard-line, black-and-white thinking style to generalisations and stereotypes. “Boys like sports and cars while girls are caring”; well I don’t like sports and cars, therefore…
While I like your explanation I think it's also that many people who do high level engineering work feel like they don't live up to the standards of masculinity, or rather don't want to compete by those standards. If you sit at a computer all day you're going to end up a scrawny dude who doesn't have much social ability. Guys in those positions tend to be marginalized implicitly. They see that women with those qualities are treated much better (as long as they're pretty), and they're used to more fluid identity overall due to their interactions being primarily online. So it seems logical that they'd rather be judged by woman's or trans people's standards than straight guy's, which they feel they don't align with anyway. And given that there's a significant group of people (leftists) who will support and commend you for doing this, all the ingredients are there to make this a seemingly workable proposition.