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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.
'Genius autistic MtF transitions' appears to be an exclusive phenomenon observed among residents of the digital landscape (Esports players, Programmers, Wikipedia editors).
My pet theory is that autistic geniuses blitz down to the bottom of rabbit holes faster than anyone else, and digital rabbit holes always end in Paraphilias. Furries, Wiafus and Trans MtFs are the exact same thing. It could have been something innocuous like trains, tanks or bonsai tree cutting. But on the internet, it always ends up being 'chicks with dicks'.
I'm a degenerate internet dweller, and I have navigated deep into some pretty glarly rabbit holes. Thankfully, my curiosities have been limited to geo-politics & cars. But even there, I've had to develop a strong filter to scroll-past futas, impossibly proportioned waifus, 500 year old loli vampires and furries. They are everywhere ! I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was into a hobby that WAS tangentially to any of those topics.
Now even 'normal' people have a fondness for paraphillias. S&M, Voyeurism, exhibitionism, (name you favorite porn category) are all paraphillias too. If the appeal of sexual-deviation has something to do with the taboo-ness of it, then a no-social-filter having autistic person is more likely to end up 'an expert' by getting to the bottom of it. A trans person might be into niche-and-odd sexual fetishes for the same reason that they install arch-linux and build compilers. Next, austic people are often obsessive (trans OCD seems to be pretty big area of discussion by itself), and you can see how they'd start obsessing over trans / furry / futa-dom.
To me, the final piece is community. Autistic people struggle to fit in or find their own. They find their people deep in sewers of the internet, and some of them are feeling pretty Trans. Now you have a group of people, who think like you do, feel like you do, and can explain the obsessive source of their condition in the exact words that make sense of tanother autstic person. That is a recipe for indoctrination. Now, I don't believe this is malicious or intentional. But, I do believe this phenomenon is an emergent property of 'internet sewers'.
I believe that some base population is trans.
I belive that autistic men are most pre-disposed to gender dysphoria.
I also believe that the social patterns of internet sewers lead to dysphoria, mlp-fandom & furries as a social phenomenon.
These people are the sole reason for the survival of the internet or the tech industry. I wish them a happy life. I hope they continue contributing 100x every FANG engineer.
But, I don't think we should normalize their condition among 'normies'. These people are kinda different, doing their different thing. I don't judge, but it is fine to keep it out of mainstream media.
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