According to the latest Less Wrong survey, 83.1%, or about four-fifths, of the LW population are men.
The interesting thing is that if you look at trans people the ratios are reversed. 86% of binary trans people in the LW community are trans women; that is, the gender gap between trans women and trans men is larger than the gender gap between cis men and cis women. Among nonbinary people, the gap is smaller– 67% of nonbinary people identified their sex as male. However, LWers are the sort of contrarian assholes who will put down a sex not matching their assigned sex at birth after they’ve transitioned (8.3% of trans women identified their sex as ‘female’), so it is anyone’s guess what the actual ratio is.
Nevertheless: we don’t have a gender gap. We have an assigned sex at birth gap.
I think that is significant evidence against the “misogyny” explanation. Cis women face misogyny; trans women face an intersection of transphobia and misogyny called “transmisogyny,” which usually has far graver effects. It is difficult to imagine what form of sexism would drive off cis women but attract trans women. I mean, think about the canonical examples of Sexism In Less Wrong. Are we arguing that cis women are driven off by (perceived or actual) sexist stereotypes in evolutionary psychology, but trans women aren’t driven off by those stereotypes and the implicit statement that they don’t count as women? Cis women don’t want to hang around neoreactionaries because they are monomaniacally obsessed with sluts, but trans women are totally okay with a movement that had a scandal with the charming name of “Trannygate”?
That leaves us with biology or socialization, but I would like to give some cautionary notes for both explanations.
First: trans women are not the same sex as cis men! The causes of transness are not fully understood, but they seem biological; while pre-hormones trans women’s brains are more similar to cis men’s in some ways, in other ways they are more similar to cis women’s. Once they’ve started taking hormones, their brains may change further. Sex hormones are scary powerful. Trans people on hormones have reported various psychological changes, most commonly changes to libido and emotions. Here’s a good roundup of studies about the differences in trans brains. I don’t understand what most of those studies mean, so I expect y’all to report back to me what I should believe.
Second: most trans people do not have an uncomplicated ‘male’ or ‘female’ gender socialization. After all, children assigned male and assigned female do not grow up separately: everyone learns what boys and girls are supposed to do. For myself, and many trans people I’ve talked to, social dysphoria made us internalize the socialization of our non-assigned gender– even before we came out to ourselves! Of course, this is not true of all trans people; both dysphoria and gender socialization are very personal, very individual things. And it doesn’t just matter what you internalized, it matters how people treat you, and they treat children assigned male as boys and children assigned female as girls. But it’s still enough to complicate theories based on the idea that trans women internalize childhood gender socialization in the same way cis men do.
Further, gender socialization doesn’t stop at puberty. The transition process is sometimes described as a crash course in gender socialization: a frantic cram session about how to walk, how to talk, how to dress, how to act, to get people to treat you as your identified gender (and, in many cases, to avoid the danger associated with being read as trans). And a post-transition trans woman may have years, perhaps decades, of being read as and treated as a woman. All of that has an effect.
My personal hypothesis is that it’s about interests.
In my anecdotal experience, interests seem to go by assigned sex. Trans women play video games. Trans men write fanfic. Trans women become programmers or mathematicians. Trans men get gender studies degrees. The one exception seems to be the lesbian community, which trans women who want to have sex with women have an obvious interest in; even so, many trans men stick around the lesbian community, despite missing some very basic qualifications for entrance.
And LW’s interests are very male. Computers? Male. Math? Male. Philosophy? Male. Transhumanism? Oh god so male. Thus, we get a lot of men and trans women.
One step in the right direction is HPMOR, as fanfic is very female. While 24.7% of cis men and trans women were referred by HPMOR, 32.3% of cis women and trans men were. Writing more rationalist fanfic might allow us to recruit in a very female-dominated community.
Furthermore, it seems like we ought to play up aspects of Less Wrong that overlap with female-dominated interests. The obvious one is psychology. While psychology is a core part of Less Wrong’s mission, in practice it often tends to get downplayed in favor of math and AI. Making a deliberate effort to talk more about psychology might allow us to appeal more to women.
Thing of Things 
Fascinating.
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How big is the trans/LW community?
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About a hundred people.
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One teensie-weensy bit bit of counter-anecdote. I took the SCC survey and marked myself as *also* part of LW. Here’s the thing, I don’t really hang out on their forums. Maybe I’ll start now. Maybe not. On the other hand, I’ve read most of the sequences — maybe all. I’ve been reading them for years, from long before I figured out the trans stuff and started my tittie skittles. To my view, the sequences are amazing — well, some of them; parts I diverge from. But seriously, the stuff on semantic and epistemology are pretty much my religion (with an appropriately metaphorical understanding of religion).
So yeah, the sequences — but the forums! Hmmmm, not so sure I belong. I kinda like SCC cuz Scott is pretty righteous and I like YOU (Ozy) quite a lot. So your forums are pretty great even if some of the people who post there and here are awful. But LW always seemed a pretty off-putting community.
I dunno. Maybe I’m the only one who feels this way.
(This is not meant as a true-and-objective evaluation. This is a how-I-feel evaluation.)
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FWIW, I feel exactly the opposite way. In my experience, the LW community is one of the more welcoming ones I’ve encountered. By “welcoming” I do not mean something like, “unconditionally accepting and comforting”, but rather, “full of people who will take me seriously regardless of how controversial my opinions may be” (and will then proceed to argue with me, but that’s part of taking someone seriously).
But perhaps I only think this way because I’m a heterocispatriarch ? It is entirely possible…
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What you say about HPMOR is interesting! I am primarily a fandom person, and not really an LW reader though I’m interested in this blog and SSC and a few other LW-adjacent things, and I learned about HPMOR long before I learned about LW.
(I also correctly identified HPMOR as very much not the sort of fanfic I was interested in. Which correlates, I suspect, to my coolness toward LW in general.)
I don’t want to say anything like ‘rationalism is coded male,’ but I am (cis woman) moderately interested in math and computers and much less interested in LW — I suspect there might be something male-coded in argument styles or writing styles. Or it’s just me.
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LW is weird; I think most CS/mathy people wouldn’t be super into LW if they knew about it, regardless of sex out gender. It’s a pretty niche cluster of personality types and interests.
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To what extent do you think this also applies to the tech/software industry? (I haven’t been able to find good statistics but at least my anecdotal impression is that trans women are somewhat overrepresented amongst software engineers and that software has more of an assigned-sex-at-birth gap than a gender gap.)
Also why would interests be associated with assigned-at-birth sex? The usual explanation is socialization but you’ve already raised significant arguments against that.
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There’s some indication that there are biological factors that influence interest. Noticeably, testosterone is linked to preference for masculine toys (and its absence to feminine toys) in very young children (and monkeys). I suspect this relates to preference for math, via spatial reasoning in particular; masculine child toys tend to be more mechanically interesting, like cars which can be pushed down halls and rolled down inclines. Children who have preferences for those toys develop better mathematical intuition, which after a couple decades of iteration (skill at math -> enjoyment of more mechanically complex toys -> higher skill at math -> etc…) results in a fairly large difference in preference and capability.
It’d be interesting to see if this hypothesis (which I’m calling the K’Nex theory of child development, because nostalgia) has any merit. I don’t know how to test it, because I’m not sure how to persuade girls to enjoy playing with mechanically interesting and challenging toys.
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I saw as study once (no link) that tested spacial skills on women and men. However, they tested them twice: once before the group took an organic chemistry class and once again after. Before the class the male students outperformed the female students, which is the common result. However, after the class the gap had narrowed significantly. To me this seems a big deal. It shows the gap, which is important, is at least to some degree *social*. Women are not destined by weak-brain to lag forever behind men, at least not to the large degree commonly assumed.
This was one semester, versus years and years.
On the interest thing, yep, interests are real. However, they have found that *environment* affects interest a lot, and that when interviewed women feel pushed away from STEM. Similarly, women *in STEM* often have shorter careers than men. When they are surveyed, it turns out sexism is the chief complaint. Just how you *decorate an office* can be off-putting to women.
(Personally it annoys the crap out of me that the swag my team provides seldom fits me or looks good on me. It’s all dudely all the way. This is a small thing, but it reminds me I do not quite belong.)
This is all to say, this is perhaps not *all* environment, but a lot of it is.
And who controls the current environment? For whose comfort is it arranged? Who picks the swag?
Okay, so I know how the conversation usually goes at this point, and let me tell you what I think happens:
Men are used to 100% control and power in these spaces, which is not to say these particular men have 100% power everywhere. They’re nerds and all that implies. (Insert long conversation about how nerd social power works.) But *in these spaces* they are used to being dominant.
In my experience, when men lose even a slight amount of power, if they lose anything at all, THEY FUCKING FREAK OUT ABOUT IT!
Not just nerds. Dudes in general.
(#notallmen conversation goes here.)
Thus any power at all, among women, to control the space, the discourse, the comfort levels, is met with overreaction, resentment, and (among nerds) temper tantrums.
(#gamergate conversation goes here.)
So we get, “Waaaaa! OMG! Sensitivity training!”
In actual fact, I’m not totally happy about how things have played out. I have noticed that *I*, as a trans women, can get away with saying just about any risqué thing without cost, whereas men cannot. This is kinda unfair. I like a bit of playful banter. I love to flirt. I think a better compromise can be reached compared to what we currently have.
But then, what we currently have is the result of real abuses.
REAL FUCKING SERIOUS ABUSES OMG!
So we struggle through in good faith and I try to signal to the men I work with that I’m “cool like that” so they can make a joke now and again. And if they go too far then we can work shit out.
Cuz we know each other and I’m not some random stranger. And I adore my coworkers. THEY ROCK!
But from men I want acknowledgment that sexism is real is harassment is real and abuse is real and sure it can happen to men but it happens to women A LOT and this comes at a great social cost and it is worth some imperfect rules to try to balance shit out and stop being a jackass you sexist trolls!
*cough*
Anyway, I have zero respect for the crowd that says, “No sexism everything fine whaaaa sensitivity training!”
They’re just wrong.
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In addition to swag, what are some specific things that you would like men to lose ?
In terms of sensitivity training, I acknowledge that there may be a way to accomplish it effectively. However, all of the corporately-mandated seminars I’ve ever attended were, shall we say, less than effective. The only useful message I could ever take from them was, “If you are a man, do not ever hit on any female coworker in any way, and don’t ever comment on her appearance”. This is fine as far as messaging goes, but most companies already make dating coworkers a termination-worthy offence (at least, they used to, maybe they don’t anymore), so even that is kind of redundant.
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I don’t want men to lose anything, *per se*. The fact that you invariable see my getting cool swag as men losing cool swag is — well — dude, seriously!
Why don’t we both get swag we want? And yes, there are cost-tradeoffs anytime you have more options, but like you’ve never experience a working compromise?
That *you personally* don’t get much out of diversity training perhaps says much about you and less about diversity training. Which is not to say it is uniformly good, but one’s attitude tells a lot. The diversity training provided by my current employer has been excellent. On the whole it seems to work.
At my company we are allowed to date coworkers. We are not allowed to date up or down the chain of command, nor are we allowed to date folks on the same team. But outside of those limits things are pretty open. Which seems about right for a company our size.
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I would be ok with you getting your preferred swag, but it sounded like you wanted get rid of swag altogether, so I just went with it. Personally I don’t care about swag one way or another, I have more T-shirts than I know what to do with already.
But still, I am going to push you on this point:
> In my experience, when men lose even a slight amount of power, if they lose anything at all, THEY FUCKING FREAK OUT ABOUT IT!
I understand that “acknowledgment that sexism is real” is a good thing, and yes, obviously it’s real. But what powers, specifically, would you like men to lose ? You say that men tend to “freak out” when you mention the specifics, but I promise to keep my violent temper under control.
In terms of diversity training, can you offer some specific points that I should’ve gotten out of it, but didn’t ? I am pretty sure I have guessed who your current employers are, but I have never attended one of their diversity seminars, so it’s possible our experiences are different.
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So I work for a large tech company. They are west coast based, but I work in an east coast office. There are maybe 800 engineers working here. About 100 of those are women. Among those, seven our trans women (six are “out”, one is mid-transition, but folks are figuring her out). There are a couple AMAB gender queer people who are kinda close-to-trans-women in their approach.
This is about 1% of the AMAB engineers, which is double the (guess) of 0.5% in the general pop. There are no trans women among the non-engineering staff. (that I know of, although there is this one woman that I kinda suspect maybe, but a very weak maybe. I’d put it at 10% odds.) I know of no trans men here, but perhaps I’m missing something obvious. That said, many of the women do present on the masculine side of things. But they’re hyper-smart nerd girls. This is not unexpected.
Anyway, trans women software engineers are definitely a *thing*.
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Note, I believe that most of us began our engineering careers while presenting male. This is not evidence against sexism. Not even close.
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Anecdote time, actual woman I met the other day at a bar:
Me: So what do you do?
Her: Oh, uh, boring stuff. I write software.
Me: *big grin* Oh, yeah, I work for {blah} on {blah}. It’s this ginormous thing in Common Lisp. So, tell me what you do.
Her: Well, I do {medical imaging thing}. I take the data from the scans and figure out its 3d structure.
Me: Oh, so you invert big matrices.
Her: Well, actually we do non-linear inversions.
At this point I turn completely stupid as waves of love crash over me. She probably said other stuff, but seriously!
I NEED TO BE KISSING HER!
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I actually would have expected higher than that; anecdotally something like a third of the women software engineers I know are trans (10ish out of 30ish). Most of them transitioned around college, so it does seem to me like (limited and anecdotal) evidence against workplace sexism (suggesting that sexism in schools etc may be more significant). It would be nice to have actual statistics.
I don’t think I understand the point of your story.
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There are many trans women in tech, but nowhere near a third, thus your sample is wildly skewed. It probably indicates your age and social space. My sample is among 800 total engineers with 100 women. But my employer is *singular*. They’re Silicon Valley bigtech, one of *those companies*. The last place I worked, which was more middle-of-the-road, had one trans women (me!) among maybe 50-100 women engineers, alongside 900 men. (Numbers from memory. Old-employer does not publish diversity stats. New-employer does.)
Trans women are definitely overrepresented, by not *wildly* overrepresented.
But consider this: men in tech often perceive trans women in tech *differently* from how they perceive cis women in tech — for an example see THIS CONVERSATION we’re having right now — thus conclusions we reach regarding sexism-in-general should not use trans women as a definitive data point. Perhaps cis women get it worse.
Actually, I think they get it worse in some ways and better in others, which is what you would expect. Life is complicated. Cissexism is real.
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> But consider this: men in tech often perceive trans women in tech *differently* from how they perceive cis women in tech…
We do ? How so ? I personally have never met any trans woman in tech — though obviously it’s possible that I did and I just never noticed…
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Huh. In pretty much every other thread, I’m always one of the ones representing non-default cis male gender essentialism, but psychology definitely ranks a bit above math in my hierarchy of interests.
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It occurs to me, I also missed the other obvious data point here: Scott is a psychiatrist who admits to being less than completely enthusiastic about math.
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Is your argument that women and men are equally likely to be interested in psychology and in math (which seems to be not true, c.f. college majors) or that an interest in psychology and not math doesn’t drive cis men away from LW?
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I wasn’t surprised to learn that women liked fiction more then men. But I was surprised that men had little interest in psychology. After I thought about it for a minute and realized the connection is actually very obvious.
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Ozy didn’t say women like fiction better than men. They said they like *fan*fiction more than men. I doubt there’s any evidence at all for the former, whereas the latter is extremely obvious if you’ve ever looked at fanfiction sites.
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Are you implying that psychologists are nothing more than novelists with delusions of empiricism?[/smacktalk]
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No just saying that good fiction utilizes a lot of psychology. Even probably fanfic.
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I am appalled at the prospect that interests are apparently determined by assigned sex.
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Are willing to elaborate on why?
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I can stop being male, but I can’t stop being amab. I consider interests to be an aspect of personality. I am distressed by the idea of birth assignment determining personality. It feels like saying there’s a meaningful-on-the-level-of-who-I-am category that includes me and cis men but not cis women.
I am aware that Ozy is not transphobic. This data seems to be saying that reality is siding with an anti-trans viewpoint, which is worse.
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I’m betting that your preferences have not changed as a result of learning a statistical generalization about a group to which you belong. Your preferences are meaningful on the level of who you are; who you share them with is not.
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I am, perhaps not appalled, but at least mildly disgusted by the suggestion that any large number of people’s preferences are inauthentic. That kind of thinking can take you down some very ugly roads.
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What do you mean by “inauthentic”, and how does it follow from biological influences on personal preference?
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If anything, the idea of inauthenticity is invoked more often by the nurturists, e.g. “Women only want X because society tells them they should.” Such arguments are not only condescending and irrational (since the speaker usually is a member of the same society as the accused), they can be used to justify ignoring other people’s values. And that just never ends well.
Ironically, I find nurturists typically have too much respect for biology, in that they seem to regard it as the “real” self beneath the social veneer; thus they are overly hostile to behavioral genetics findings that seem to contradict their politics. IMO, this is much like a manufacturer of silverware being upset at the claim that we ate with our hands in the ancestral environment.
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To be honest I find the assumption that systematic sexism doesn’t effect gender differences to be both appalling and disgusting. At the least it’s an excuse to just ignore gender inequality by appealing to the fallacy that something is “good” merely because it’s “natural”. Although their are people who abuse the “nurture” argument to shame individual behavior. To say that gender differences are caused by cultural does not necessarily imply that literally every woman who has gender stereotypical preferences does so because of social pressure. It just means that on a population level gender differences are social rather than biological. Whether an individual woman’s preferences are a byproduct of culture or biology is another thing entirely ( and in my opinion an irrelevancy because innate does not necessarily mean good/authentic nor learned necessarily mean bad/inauthentic).
It’s also important to point out that the nature v.s nurture debate is also fallacious. A trait can be both biological and environmental at the same time. In fact many genetic traits only express themselves within specific contexts. The famous example of this is grasshoppers and locusts. In some species of grasshopper every grasshopper can become a locust and every locust can become a grasshopper. The only difference is the way the environment effects an individual animals gene expression.
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@MegaEmolga
The issue is that often systematic sexism is assumed from the existence of gender differences, which is circular reasoning. Claiming that gender differences in the population at large are generally social, and not biological, requires a stronger empirical basis than I have seen presented (as does the converse, though I’ve seen slightly more evidence to support it). And I don’t see an intrinsic moral problem with there being gender gaps in areas, because I believe people should have the freedom to do what they want, even if that results in gender-skewed demographics. The issue is people being forced away from the things they enjoy by sexism, which is bad when it causes skewed demographics and bad when it causes balanced demographics (because bias making people unhappy is bad, full stop).
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@MegaEmolga — If there is no test to determine whether an individual woman’s preferences are the result of social pressure (or if the question has no meaning, as your second para seems to imply), then why are you prepared to believe a social-pressure hypothesis about entire populations of women? It seems to me that pragmatic agnosticism about nature/nurture — a position I share, by the way — strongly implies a live-and-let-live policy, and a presumptive grant of definitiveness to other people’s expressed desires. IOW, if there are fewer DFAB people entering math/science degree programs or joining LW, and they tell us it’s because they’re not interested, we should simply take them at their word.
If we want to pursue the question out of academic interest, we do so with full awareness of the naturalistic fallacy.
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I agree that people should be free to make the choices want. The problem is that not everyone is always free to make the choices they want. If men are rewarded for certain choices and women are punished for the same choices there’s going to be gender gap. You can say that’s not going on but that ignores huge parts of history and social science research.
During the 1800’s most teachers were male but now the reverse is true. Was there some massive change in women’s genes? No. The U.S government created public schools but they didn’t want to pay the new teachers as much money. So the government encouraged women to get jobs in teaching because they could pay women less. You can argue that’s changed now but research today doesn’t support that. Applications with women’s names are way less likely to get acceptance than those with male names despite equal qualifications. Which is not consistent with women having equal opportunitys with men.
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Discrimination exists and is not OK by any means, but that isn’t what we’re discussing. We’re discussing the authenticity of preference, a very different question.
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@MegaEmolga
I find it highly odd that you feel a massive demographic skew in favor of women is evidence of bias against women. Furthermore, I am unsurprised that male teachers have an easier time getting hired; given the importance of male role models (which has research supporting it), and the lack of male teachers, supply and demand predicts it. It is also my understanding that male teachers face more hostile work environments, since they receive a disproportionate number of accusations of improper conduct with students.
There are certainly cases of sexism in the western world, but I’m not convinced that this is one of them.
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“I find it highly odd that you feel a massive demographic skew in favor of women is evidence of bias against women.”
You ignored the part where I said that they hired more women because they could pay women less.
“Furthermore, I am unsurprised that male teachers have an easier time getting hired; given the importance of male role models (which has research supporting it), and the lack of male teachers, supply and demand predicts it.”
I was talking about the 1800’s. During that time period 90% of teachers were male. Now that has reversed with 75% of teachers being female. But that change didn’t happen because women spontaneously decided teaching was their preferred job. The U.S government was creating new public schools and actively encourage women to become teachers. But that inclusively was double edged, they hired more women because they could pay women less
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So how is the fact that people did a sexist thing a hundred years ago relevant to anything that is being discussed in this thread?
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I’m going to plug my pet hypothesis about trans women here again. I think they share a lot of interests and personality traits with gender-conforming cis men because of selection effects.
To be “out” to yourself and alive as a trans woman when society hates you and is passively mindfucking and gaslighting you, it probably helps to be privately disagreeable, contrarian and have an independent source of validation, i.e. not unlike the gender-conforming male tech geek stereotype.
Trans men face comparatively less oppositional sexism, and so they are probably a lot more like butch lesbians than trans women are like “camp” cis gay men.
Modus tollens anecdote: I’m quite unlike the LW stereotype (can’t even code!), I clashed a good deal with the LW culture, I was on LW for like three years, and only after leaving have I acknowledged to myself that I am not cis.
Obviously none of this rules out the male socialization hypothesis, but I think that this effect might be at least similar in size.
Ozy, what do you think?
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It seems worth noting that the statistics available on wikipedia suggest there are about three times as many trans women as trans men, so you shouldn’t necessarily expect an even ratio. (Prevalence estimates vary widely but the ratio of trans women to trans men seems more consistent between different estimates.)
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Looking into that source a little more: “people seeking SRS” is not the same thing as “all trans people”. SRS for trans women gets pretty close to the functionality and appearance of a natal vagina. SRS for trans men is rather more complicated and risky, and spontaneous erections aren’t a thing we can do yet.
As such, I think it’s possible/likely that there’s basically equal numbers of trans women and trans men, but that trans women seek bottom surgery at much higher rates. This is borne out by my anecdotal experience.
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Not all of those numbers are based on seeking SRS; studies based on gender dysphoria or hormone therapy find similar ratios.
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“Trans men face comparatively less oppositional sexism” are you sure? I could also believe that male privilege makes it easier for trans women to be taken seriously when seeking initial diagnosis, that they’re more likely to have the resources required to transition, etc. This seems like it might explain some of the imbalance between reported numbers of trans women and trans men.
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They are more likely to have the resources? *Yes*, that’s male privilege. Being taken more seriously when seeking the initial diagnosis? No, transmisogyny hits us very hard there, precisely because it is considered criminal and transgressive for us to “betray” our ascribed identity.
Just consider, who’s likely to take more shit just going about their business; a female-looking person in a suit and a tie, or a male-looking person in a dress?
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Yeah, I can see how that would be an issue. What is your explanation for the larger number of (diagnosed / receiving hormones) trans women than trans men, then?
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Okay, so I spend a lot of time trawling the tranny bars and drag clubs, and I meet a lot of people. Likewise, I meet them at conferences, at fetish events, on the subway. I meet a lot of sex workers. I talk to them. I meet lonely old women who work in sales, who cannot transition. I know a professional chef who is a former boxer and who *did* transition. I know women who “always knew” and women who took decades to figure shit out.
Okay, so look, the majority of trans women are *not* nerds. They don’t care about anime. They have not heard of furries. They think “gender queer” is a weird idea. They have old flip phones and have only vague ideas of what “software” is. (When they want to hook up they ask for my phone number and not my Twitter handle.) They dimly recall doing math in school. Honestly, I’m just as weird to them as I am to anybody. In some ways I’m *more* weird to them than I might be to many of you, since many of you know what it is like to be a bookish nerd.
On the other hand, they know I’m a woman; that is never questioned. They know what dysphoria is like. That is a deeply shared thing, something we *do not need* to talk about cuz one word or gesture tells all. We are connected. With them I am “one of the girls.”
Which is fucking amazing and something I can never quite share with cis women.
The point is, the trans women you meet on forums such as this are atypical among trans women. That should not be forgotten.
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I agree completely, but I never said that most trans women are *likely* to be geeks; I meant to convey that the survivors of the selection effect are probably more likely to share certain qualities with male geeks than the average cis woman, and that’s why among *women in geeky spaces*, trans women might be represented *disproportionately* to cis women.
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@multiheaded — Yeah, that sounds right.
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If this was true, wouldn’t you expect those who transition young to be more like LW, because they would have had to buck society even more? Yet younger transitioners tend to have dispositions less like LW than later transitioners.
I’m not sure if it makes sense that trans womanhood selects for geek male stereotype. There is a strength that develops with transition, but that is really separate from disposition/interests/being contrarian. I know trans women that are very agreeable, would hate forums like this, but are none the less extremely strong emotionally.
I mean I think it must be just the outcome of the shitty situation trans women find ourselves in. Like when puberty hits you have a shit storm of testosterone running through you, while also discovering (or already knowing) you have a female gender. There’s a lot of isolation that goes into that. In fact, if there’s one theme to trans women’s existence it’s isolation. Isolation and the internet are a match made in heaven.
Trans womanhood has only really been figured out in the past 10 years or so. Before it was, well this an option for you if you’re really feminine. Which is why you see really feminine or outwardly feminine trans women transitioning earlier, it’s been the acceptable trans narrative for a while now.
But really trans womanhood is largely separate from feminine stereotypes. It’s more just like a gender orientation. In the same way you are attracted to certain genders, you are a certain gender(s). It doesn’t mean you’re super feminine or anything. That wasn’t understood until very recently. Without that understanding, most trans women thought of themselves as fetishists (because until recently thinking of yourself as a woman during sex if you’re AMAB was considered a paraphilia), or not trans enough.
So because of all these factors, until recently, trans women would isolate themselves and especially isolate themselves from other women. You don’t think of yourself as being accepted by women if you’re outwardly male, considered to have a paraphilia, have deep issues around womanhood because of repressed transness, and you’re not especially feminine. That creates a lot of socializing with men online, and leads trans women to develop interests in stuff that skews male.
I think if you intervened in trans women’s lives at puberty and gave them a pathway to transition, you wouldn’t see trans women hanging out as much in places that skew male.
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Anecdotally I think this happens in STEM more generally. I know certain professional organisations had more women join by transition in a year than by new recruits
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I think Vitali’s typology sums this up pretty well: http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
I bet most (all?) of the trans gals on LW will fall under her “Group Three.” A good place to start is to ask stuff like this:
1. When did you figure out you were trans?
(Probably after puberty.)
2. When did you transition?
(Probably adulthood; transitioning as a teen is hard.)
3. What were you like as a kid?
(Bookish, a loner, off in her own world, not fitting in.)
4. Your sexuality?
(Either solidly lesbian or “confused” but leaning lesbian. Kinsey 4+.)
(#4 will have a weaker correlation than the others, contra Blanchard’s garbage, but there will be a correlation.)
Add to this some correlations with neuro-atypicality, which is seldom talked about but very real, and you’ll get that occasional smart-nerd type who turns into a MEGA-UBER-SMART nerd.
Take this girl and show her a computer. Watch what happens.
Take this girl and introduce her to a teacher — but remember they see a lonely, bookish “boy”. Her inner weirdness and indescribable confusions are not plain to see.
Cuz she’s girl and she has no idea. Just, everything in her life seems somehow wrong and the things she’s expected to do and to be DO NOT QUITE FIT. She has no idea why.
“Why doesn’t anybody like me!?!?!?”
She cries a lot.
But what will the teacher think? For me, they put me in the hall away from the other kids and had me do math for hours and hours and hours and hours. So that is what I did.
(Autism was not on the radar back then. I did get my dyslexia diagnosis and my ADHD diagnosis — they called it “hyperactivity.” They missed my face blindness.)
(Face blindness FUCKING SUCKS.)
Show her role playing games and video games, wherein she can be a girl. Get her online, where no one knows she’s not a dog. Show her Anime, where cool young girls are the action heroes. How does she respond to this material?
We are definitely a “type.” We are hyper-intelligent girls who were raised as boys.
But we are a subtype of a subtype of a subtype, often crushingly alone. Be nice to us.
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(One thing I hope to communicate here is this: the trans women on LW are likely to be such an odd group that they should provide little evidence either way regarding sexism.)
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Interesting article. The proposed etiology seems to exclude Scott’s idea of “cis by default”, though — it predicts actively feminine, actively masculine, and conflicted (pardon the term) individuals, and you could probably make a case for agender or genderqueer people as a resolution of the G3 conflict, but it doesn’t seem to have room for people without a strong, active gender identity.
Of course, it’s possible that Scott’s wrong and that self-perceived lack of strong gender identity is what you get when you’re masculine or feminine enough that you don’t feel the need to justify it to yourself. But that doesn’t tally especially well with what I’ve seen.
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I think it would be a mistake to see that paper as a grand theory of gender. It tells us little about cis people, nor is it meant to. It says very little about gender queer or other non-binary people. Quite frankly, its coverage of trans masculine issues seems perfunctory and shallow. That said, I think it is very insightful regarding transsexual women, and in particular her “Group Three” (which, by the way, is a category that clearly includes the author of that paper).
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One might expect by symmetry a “group 4” of assigned-female-at-birth people who outwardly exemplify feminine gender roles but have strong internal male identity and gender dysphoria. Do such people exist in comparable numbers to the other categories? If not, why not?
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In her later writing she lumps them in with “Group Three”, but to me that feels like an afterthought rather than something central to her model. As I said to Norganest, the typology is not exhaustive or even particularly good in the general case, and certainly not for AFAB people. However, she really has a handle on a certain subset of trans women.
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It’s interesting that you find that interests correlate better with assigned sex at birth than gender identity. I’m trans (FtM), and although I do like fanfiction my interests are otherwise very male: math, computers, AI, physics, etc. I do also like softer sciences such as linguistics and neuroscience, but I don’t see a very large gender gap in those fields. Then again, my physical dysphoria is on the mild side and my most important reason for transitioning was social dysphoria, so that probably puts me in a different category from most trans guys.
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Someone has to put this hypothesis out there: maybe transmisogyny is harder to avoid and hence trans people are more willing to tolerate it in a community, whereas cis misogyny is easier to avoid and thus its presence on a community is more of a deal breaker? That is, LW is above brave on cis misogyny but average on transmisogyny? There are probably a lot of controversial assumptions baked in there, but it’s the best alternative to this post’s interpretation that I can come up with, and as rationalists we’re compelled to argue as much as possible before any self-congratulation.
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I cannot find a list of the core interests of Less Wrong, other than it is about rationality. If there is a desire to include more women within that remit, wouldn’t it make sense to put more focus on many fields that require rationality but have more women in them – not just Psychology but various social, environmental and life sciences?
If you intend to recruit from fan fiction, that is mostly people assigned female, but is a sub group of those people. In the frequently debated question of why people read and write fan fiction, one issue is that the treatment of same sex relationships and a particular type of exploration of gender in fan fiction may be uncomfortable for heterosexual cis males to read, or at least not of emotional and sexual interest to them. Fan fiction is then likely to attract people who feel able to participate in an online community which has low numbers of heterosexual cis males. In a very loose sense, fan fiction communities are a kind of women’s informal separatist space that includes trans men, non binary people and some gay men. Wouldn’t such people potentially be those among cis women and other gender groups who feel least capable of contributing to a male dominated community like Less Wrong?
As for the misogyny elements, if a cis woman wants to experience less misogyny than on Less Wrong, there are other places she can go online. Trans misogyny is harder to escape, so maybe trans women will endure it on Less Wrong due to a lack of online alternatives?
From an individual perspective, Less Wrong says it requires a high standard of posting. I’d go on there if it had a learners’ pool which accepted lower posting standards. It may be that an unintended consequence of the high posting standard is that your blog and Scott’s get contributions from the less confident posters.
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A lot of rationalist community discussion nowadays happens on social media– Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. The barrier to entry is much lower. The different social media platforms have communities with different norms and such; I personally like Rationalist Tumblr the best, but it’s up to you.
I suggested rationalist fanfic because it’s a thing that’s already happening, inspired by HPMOR, and so it’s easy to encourage people to keep doing the thing they’re doing. I’m not sure if it’s the optimal choice in all of lady-recruitment-space. 😛
I think emphasizing various social, environmental, and life sciences would be awesome.
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I’m digging up a post from three years ago just to say that I don’t get the same numbers, meaning this whole post is bunk. I get ~90% for the cis gender gap and ~80% for the binary trans gender gap.
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