Steve Sailer writes: I have a vague hunch that the growth of the transgender movement is somehow related to the Nerd Liberation movement, which was the most unexpected successful identity movement of my lifetime. It’s not clear if autism, Asperger’s, and/or nerdism is becoming more common, but it’s definitely more of an identity than it once was.
There has been a little research into this subject, breaking trans people up into three main categories:
– Effeminate early transitioning male to female trans individuals (ladyboys) are of course not very nerdy at all. They tend to be people persons (e.g., prostitutes) and not big on logic.
– Female to male trans are very nerdy.
– Late transitioning masculine male to female trans people (the Wachowskis, the baseball stats person, my MBA school teammate, the economist, etc.) tend to be at least as nerdy as the average man and much more nerdy than the average woman.
COMMENTS:
* That dovetails completely with the news friends dropped on me last October when I visited Spain: that my ex-brother-in-law (brother of my ex-wife, that is) had changed his name from Marc (or Marco, as they’d always known him) to “Mar,” and was now living in Madrid and getting hormone treatments etc. in order to “become a woman.”
A nerdier guy is hard to imagine, and he’s in his forties and a big sci-fi fan, with a longstanding slew of emotional and personality disorders.
Fortunately or unfortunately for him, he’s rich, so he can totally live the dream. On the other hand he’s also traditionally really hairy, which must complicate matters.
* The slightly less fringy version of that seems to be the techies’ quest for immortality, which was touched on by Franzen in his last novel.
* There might be a better word someone has come up with, but I’m increasingly using the term “biophobia” to describe resistance or aversion to the idea that biology and biological factors influence, constrain, or affect the human condition. You see it many places relevant to this blog: aversion to HBD, transgenderism, blank-slatism, nurture over nature, etc., and also in other areas I expect are of relevance to many readers of this blog (the analysis of sexual attraction that comes with Heartiste-style game/PUA examinations, for example).
It’s all the more interesting because in other areas, the idea that the natural world has imposed limits or constraints on human progress has become uncontroversial. Environmentalism is the best example. In thinking about human ability and the human form itself, though, the conventional wisdom seems firmly stuck somewhere around the mid-20th century.
* Trans women are overrepresented in my circle of (young, nerdy, autistic) people, so much that we discuss this all the time. There could definitely be multiple types/clades. If late-transitioning people used to be characteristic of the autistic clade, it could be the “nerd liberation” thing, and this type is transitioning much earlier now. Definitely not limited to manly men, as lots of them are quite feminine in appearance.
* A father of a transgender Assberger mentioned to me there had been a study. Something like 8% of Assbergers are somewhat transgender.
* There seems to be a behavioral cluster that involves comic books, sci-fi and Social Justice. My two most Social Justicey friends – one meal and one female – are not super nerdy, but they’re both heavily into sci-fi. They dress up like the characters and have big collections of toys and stuff.
* Science fiction writers seemed to have picked up on the fact that male sexual rejects tend to read their stuff. Many of their stories set in “the future” give the impression that sexual experience doesn’t exist as a current reality for the reader, but it might become possible some day, say, somewhere in the vicinity of the time it becomes possible to travel to Mars.
* The going theory of “trans”, among scientists who are brave enough to say it, is Blanchard’s typology: some younger homosexual transsexuals, and many, usually older, heterosexual autogynephile crossdressers. All of whom are now subsumed under “transgender”, because the crossdressing fetishist majority found it convenient to use the plight of the transsexual minority to gain political support.
So for the majority of male “transgenders”, it’s a sex fetish, heterosexuality taken to such an extreme they want to become the objects of their own lust. The common factor in nerdiness and autogynephile transgenderism is hypermasculinity.
In other World War T news: Google today inadvertently perpetrated Transphobic Crimethink by having a doodle to honor Nettie Stevens, the woman scientist who discovered sex chromosomes make you a man or a woman way back in 1905.
Fortunately, we’ve moved past all that essentialist nonsense in 2016, as a woman is anyone who says she is a woman, and you’d better agree if you know what’s good for you. Wikipedia’s small army of transgendered editors will surely be along any moment to put the offending page down the memory hole.
* With the late transitioners, might not money have something to do with it? I’ve often thought that after some people have a certain level of money they go loopy. All their basic needs are well met and then their minds wander, and where the mind wanders they actually have the money to entertain their thoughts.
* They may be both related to the over-surplus of males today. I’ve written about how it seems that female power grows when they are more males, and vice versa, due to the laws of supply and demand: the more the surplus of one sex, the more that sex caters to the whims of the minority sex due to mating needs.
So men at the bottom of the sexual marketplace “transition to female,” and thus :(1) avoid being the bottom of the male social order; (2) get to be “special” and noticeable; and (3) become part of the sex in more demand, immediately becoming more powerful. And there are so many “hungry” men that they might take a chance on a tranny in a moment of weakness (of course most tranny men just want lesbians, but that’s another topic, although probably related).
This is also why “gay men” become more prominent when societies are in soft times: soft times=fewer men dying in wars/hardships=surplus of men. Men who are naturally more submissive/don’t want to fight go gay to avoid dying over female mates.
* There’s a slightly alarming tendency among what Vox Day calls “Omega males” to desire castration in order to be set free from their unfulfilled desires…
