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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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it's trivially true that social contagion plays an astounding part, as well as fetishism and abuse, and autism

I don't have any hard numbers to give you here, but one of the strongest pieces of evidence for me personally about transness mot being an inherent part of who you are is the autism->hyper-sexualized autogynephilia pipeline. Specifically a certain field of technology that I have closely followed for about 30 years is the biggest source of evidence for this: video game emulator development. Emulator developers aren't inherently always destined to be trannies, but the more talented they are the more likely they are to be a tranny (and/or a furry and/or all sorts of paraphilias generally).

Name the lead devs of a successful emulator (i.e. high accuracy and/or amazing performance) and in 80% of cases I can find lurid details of their weird fetishes for you. Off the top of my head Byuu/Near (SNES amongst others), Endrift (GBA amongst others), and the guy who made MelonDS (can't be bothered to look him up) are all trannies. Basically everyone on the Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii emulator) team are notorious sexual deviants. One of the only devs of a successful emulator I can't find anything about is SourMesen (dev of Mesen, a great NES emulator). He seems smart enough to not get involved in personal drama on the internet at least.

And this goes beyond just emulation, the sortsof people who get hyper into low level coding/hardware/hacking stuff tend to be deviants too, emulator devs just seem to be one of the most purely distilled examples of this tendency.

My experience with these sorts of people has probably been the strongest blocker for me accepting the trans lobby's claims regarding the nature of transness, potentially even a stronger blocker than my religious beliefs. Their claims just don't match with a much more obvious connection to me: turbo-autism leading to sexual devisncy including AGP.

As a funny add-on: a photo of core Rust (programming language) contributors celebrating the 10th anniversary of the language launch: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/05/15/Rust-1.87.0/

I have observed the same thing and I also think that the trans phenomenon is clearly one of social contagion, but I think your particular argument is very weak, practically self-defeating. Autism is generally understood to be an in-born condition of biological/genetic origin, and transgender activists would typically argue that they're the same way. A correlation between these conditions is exactly the kind of thing they'd predict.

It's much clearer to observe the spread of trans stuff through a community, how insular and tight-knit communities wind up disproportionately transgender through cultish dynamics and the memetic equivalent of the founder effect.

The problem is they are doing one of the single most strongly male-coded things in existence, up there with working on boilers etc. That the best people in a field that is essentially 100% male (I've literally never heard of any female emulator devs despite following the scene for decades) would claim they're actually female in their brains is the strongest evidence against it being real that I can imagine.

Edit: When I tried to search Google for female emulator developers the only relevant result I got was for a tranny working on Dolphin that committed suicide. I'd be surprised if the female:male ratio that have even written a simple CHIP-8 emulator, let alone something more complicated and technical, is more than 1:100000

I mean ‘taking agency to reinvent yourself rather than going along with societal expectations’ is also very male coded.