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Until I started working with geniuses, I never really understood the laments you sometimes hear that go, what a pity it is that our brightest minds have all gone off to Wall Street. I thought, that can't really be the case right? But then I joined a quant trading firm, in a sort of supporting role, and suddenly I also find myself wondering, as I interact with certain people at the office: shouldn't you be uncovering the secrets of the universe or something?
It took a while to hit me. I think I spent my first few months constantly debating people on this or that, convinced I had something to teach them, at least in my little domain. After all, it isn't always immediately apparent when someone is far more intelligent than you. But time and again I would have these epiphanies: oh, he is right, he was right two weeks ago, and I should've just listened then, as it would have saved me two weeks of trouble, and now I have to rewrite this code, and he had foreseen all this, and all this time he's been gently, politely nudging me to understand, as with a child, never brashly asserting his superiority, which must have been obvious to him. And I would feel ashamed remembering all my impassioned but mistaken arguments. After a while I picked up a sort of epistemic helplessness: even if my intuitions disagreed completely with one of these people I knew to be brilliant, I would go along with them. Eventually I would understand.
I'll call one of these brilliant and competent people Mark. I hesitate to say "genius" but I wouldn't object if you used the word. If I had to guess, I'd say he's 4 standard deviations above the mean, but really it's kind of impossible to judge people much smarter than you I think. Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore; he always worked remotely. That isn't normal at my company, but I assumed he must have negotiated an arrangement with the director. Perks of being a star. Was he on some beach? I don't know. He was still on Slack, ready to explain some point about statistics whenever I messaged him occasionally.
One day the midwits of HR took it upon themselves to organize mandatory in-person harassment training for everyone. Up till now, the annual training had been online and easy enough to click through without too much thought. But now we were forced to sit and discuss various hypothetical scenarios aloud, under the guidance of a training facilitator. In one scenario, a black employee is offended when someone describes her as "articulate". I wanted to pull my hair out, listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic. It struck me that our baroque American woke social norms perhaps do more to exclude minorities than to include them, on net. In another scenario, an intern with they/them pronouns is misgendered by those around them. Our guided discussion of this scenario was absolutely farcical. No one managed to utter two sentences about this hypothetical scenario without also accidentally using the wrong pronouns (and amusingly it was always "she", never "he", that people accidentally said), prompting stifled giggles all around. Even the training facilitator slipped up and had to conclude by mumbling something about how “intent matters”. It was as if we all knew subconsciously that individuals such as the hypothetical intern had on some level deluded themselves. Overall, I was (and am) annoyed that HR had been permitted to waste the valuable time of these smart people in this silly way, since the company had otherwise been very no-nonsense. I supposed Mark was somehow exempt from this training.
Weeks later, Mark returns to the office, ending his long absence. Only now he's a she, and goes by Mary.
And now maybe some of you are rolling your eyes at this post: you’ve been duped into reading propaganda. But no, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I’m just trying to reflect on my own perspective on trans people suddenly shifting based on this one person. It’s not that I’d never encountered trans people before, but in the past they were always of the annoying sort, the sort that you could dismiss as a self-deluded victim of a weird sort of social contagion. But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before. Somehow just witnessing one extremely competent and effective person I respect turn out to be trans made it “real” for me, especially after all the other times I deferred to her judgment.
(I recognize that not everyone worships mathematical talent like I do, and you may find my automatic deferral of judgment weird or even disqualifying of my opinion. I know there are brilliant mathematicians with stupid and wacky beliefs in other domains. I do think, though, that the intelligence of Mary and some of the other quants goes beyond the academic; trading real money tethers your beliefs to the real world. She is not some aloof ideas person. She was and is reasonable levels of well-adjusted, funny, and courteous, and unreasonable levels of good at cranking out code that makes millions of dollars. Make of this story what you will.)
Has my opinion changed on any concrete trans issue? I don’t know. If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool. I don’t know if she’d be very angry about it anyway; she’s a level-headed person. What about sex change therapy for children? Still seems bad. Maybe the main change is just that I feel like I should be less quick to judge people in general.
I wasn’t there when Mary walked into the office for the first time as a woman. I don’t think anyone made a fuss over it or anything, and now everyone respects her new name and pronouns, but it still makes me anxious just imagining what it must have been like. Surely a measure of bravery was required, probably more than I’ve ever mustered on any occasion. What compelled her to do this? On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that? I’m inclined to defer to her, whether or not I understand.
I do wish she'd go and pursue science though.
Man, there's a lot of things to touch on here! Interesting post.
First: yes, I share your concern about our economy. I look at it as a sort of "Dutch Disease," where smart people are increasingly getting pushed out of academic science (too bureaucratic and unrewarding) into finance or IT (more intellectual freedom, waaaaay more money and easier to find a permanent position). I hope the recent tech layoffs lead to some long-term restructing there, but I don't have high hopes.
In your description of this specific person, I think: "I'm shocked! Shocked!... Well not that shocked." It seems to be a common pattern among highly intelligent tech workers that they transition MtF. Eg, there's a blog I read: The Digital Antiquarian And it's jarring just how frequently the early tech pioneers later transitioned. Not a majority of them of course but like... maybe 10%? Much more likely than you'd expect from random chance.
My feeling is that when highly intelligent tech nerds like the person in your story transition, it usually ends up OK. Maybe odd, but they were odd to begin with. They've got the money for proper medical care, a community of people who can accept them, and they've probably thought it through for themselves quite thoroughly.
I'm more worred about the um... less intelligent sort of nerd/geek who transitions. Like this guy: https://default.blog/p/the-year-when-my-husband-started. Seems to be much more "fetishized," less thought out, and without a community who can empathize. That guy ended up being reported to the policy by his wife.
Then there's the ultra-aggressive athlete trans people like Bruce Jenner, and the ones who go on hormones super young. Then there's FtMs which is a whole other kettle of fish. Trans is an interesting bucket of different types, and I feel like we're just starting to get enough data to identify these subtypes.
Gender dysphoria is significantly higher among people on the autism spectrum. Tech work and engineering of all sorts are a natural fit for the computer-minded person with autism. Tech fields also tend to gather blue-tinged grey tribers.
Anecdotally, you’ll also find tons of people with autism who have species dysphoria (identifying as a nonhuman, aka furries and otherkin) or another dysphoria. A porcupine I know once told me she’s never surprised when someone in tech comes out as trans and a “furry lifestyler” (early 00’s term for species dysphoria).
I do wonder how many red tribers suffer silently from dysphorias because they don’t have culturally acceptable words for them. I’m a red-tinged grey triber due to my autism and family, and while they know I’m a furry, they’ll probably never understand about my species dysphoria or how it was cured in an instant in 2009.
Sorry if this is insensitive, but is species dysphoria a thing?
I don't doubt that furries are a thing, but I would have classified them as some kind of kink or cosplay or roleplay thing rather than genuine dysphoria.
I can totally get gender dysphoria, say someone with the Y chromosome feeling that they should really be in a lesbian relationship or being a caring mother or whatever. "I am a woman trapped in a man's body" (or vice versa) kinda makes sense to me.
Using s/gender/species/, species dysphoria would be "I am a felis silvestris trapped in the body of a homo sapiens", which seems incongruent to me. A nimble nocturnal hunter of rodents? That does not sound like a fulfillable aspiration this side of the singularity.
I think "species dysphoria" is associated with otherkin (1 2), who are separate from furries.
From your first link, the species an otherkin believes themselves to be “may range from mythical species like demons, dragons, elves and faeries to wild animals and domesticated pets.” In my experience, these are the ferals, would-be quadrupeds instead of bipedal anthropomorphs.
Usually it’s true, the furry fandom and fandoms of mythical humanoids don’t overlap much (though the Elder Scrolls fantasy RPGs have two furry species alongside green orcs, three races of elves, and four races of humans). The biggest thing they tend to have in common is a dislike of humans, disavowing their affiliation with this species in a frankly stunning display of the human capacity for outgrouping.
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I'll caveat that there's moderate overlap between furries and otherkin (or therianthropes, which was kinda a furry-specific variant of otherkin): furscience gives somewhere around 5-10%+ of furries identifying as therians or some related category, and while the higher estimates are usually coming from convention-specific surveys that have a pretty hefty selection bias, the lower ranges are not implausibly high.
But agreed that it's a different identifier, and I don't think there's any good numbers the other direction: there definitely are otherkin that aren't furries, and nobody knows what percentage of otherkin/therian/whatever they are.
That said, a significant number of therians didn't experience species dysphoria, or experience something that they don't categorize as dysphoria (eg, intentionally triggering phantom limbs for limbs they never had, but liking it), at least when I was able to follow the group in the 00s. Dunno what the internal frameworks are now; a lot of the matter has been driven off the open internet.
((There was historically more going on with the 00's-era 'lifestyler', both in philosophy and behavior, but the group that was distinguished by those differences is pretty much extinct today.))
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