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I mean, the rationalist community, or the programming community, or similar, have a ton more trans women than trans men, and a ton more men than women. How does one square this with the claim that trans women have the biological / psychological inclinations that women do?
I don't think socialization makes sense here. Because the differences are starker than other things that are more obviously socialized, like 'actually having a career in tech'. A randomly chosen rationalist is a lot more likely to be a trans woman than a random person employed as a programmer. A lot more employees of a FAANG are (biologically) female than 'authors of popular open source projects' are (biologically) female This is what you'd expect if socialization was pushing women to do things like 'code' more than they naturally* would, while smart weird men tend to transition and be into rationalism and coding more than usual.
* "Human nature" is socially contingent. Also, it's imo good to force women to code and do stem stuff a lot more than they would 'naturally'.
Well, that one is because al three are highly correlated with mild autism.
(if anyone is unsure: this is not a joke, this is my actual answer, I'm a bit paranoid about being misconstrued)
Beyond that: I don't make the claim, and I don't think that most progressives would try to defend the claim, that the population average and variance for trans women is exactly the same as the population average and variance for cis women on every possible psychological and sociological axis. T
This isn't prohibitive; obviously, most individual members of most groups will not personally be at the precise population average for most traits. And there are lots of subgroups you could make, like 'women who play sports' or 'asian women in the US' or 'women who write fanfic' or etc. that will have slightly different population averages for all kinds of things, but still be women.
Basically, no one ever said trans women aren't weird women, just that they are women. (that statement being a normative prescriptive statement arguing in favor of certain semantic and cultural lines, rather than an empirical claim, since empirical observations can't on their own make a semantic definition 'correct').
But also, note that trans people don't just get socialization as boys or as girls or as men or as women; they also get socialization as trans people. As a political football in a high-contact era of political sportsmanship, they're naturally pushed towards having to be a lot more involved in the culture wars and political rhetoric just to defend their own interests and stay on top of what is about to happen to them next. I think this makes them more common than would otherwise be the case in all types of highly-online politically-themed communities, rationalists being one of those.
Mildly autistic bio women don't seem to have the same attraction to e.g. rust that trans women do, once you account for the percent of the population they are. I think this is reasonable evidence against trans women having the same psychological inclinations as bio women,.
Another thing to think about, along the original line: Biological women have a strong innate desire to be around and care for children, one you can both see in choice of occupation and just casual observation, and I don't see that at all in trans women.
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Scott warrants that it's due to a strong correlation between autism and transgenderism, likely due to them attributing their discomfort from bodily signals everyone else accepts as a sign of them being assigned the wrong sex.
And autism is rampant in the programming community, and LW/other rat-adjacent fora too, so it's no surprise to find trans people there. Especially since the latter are unusually accepting and open to experience, so they get plenty of the early adopters.
Scott's claim, I think, brushes against a lot of the right ideas while also being mostly wrong, imo. Like, why would the discomfort be so narrowly focused on gender? I think that smart and self-driven people are naturally more vulnerable to - or more active explorers of - whatever tendencies the material and social circumstances create in humans. And I'm not really sure what to think of 'autism' in very smart people, is it really the same thing as autism in normal-iq people?
I mostly agree with Scott myself. Being a Furry, transgenderism, programming, they're all strongly correlated with autism. It might not be "misinterpreted bodily signals" necessarily, but programming is still a field where it's acceptable to be eccentric as long as you're competent in a way that's not acceptable, in say, investment banking. Similarly, LW folk and the rat community are incredibly open to experience, so I wager that and the autism covers it. Same deal as for taking psychedelics really.
If you want to consider changes in material circumstances, I would also posit that modern technology heavily rewards prowess in shape-rotating that high functioning autists often excel at, to my chagrin as someone who's a 99.999th percentile wordcel and maybe 75th percentile in the former. Hence more tolerance and less pressure to conform, since they're getting wealthy enough to indulge in their individualist tendencies.
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