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This Reddit thread that I saw linked over on rDrama made me wonder if any studies have ever been done about the relative intelligence of straight people and gay people.
Just like there is reason to believe that some ethnic groups are more intelligent than others on average, is it possible that some sexual orientations are more intelligent than others on average? I have not tried to crunch the numbers, but it seems to me that gay people are overrepresented compared to their population size among the ranks of prominent intellectuals and artists. Not just recently, but also hundreds of years ago. Them living in high cost of living areas would add evidence to this theory.
Of course there are many possible other explanations, and the thread mentions some of them: gays have more money because they usually have no kids, gays in poor areas stay closeted out of fear of persecution and are drawn to liberal and usually also expensive cities, gays move in to poor areas and make them fashionable and then those areas become rich. Etc.
One other possible explanation that comes to my mind that I did not see in the thread is that maybe because it is easier for gay men to get laid than straight men on average, they don't have to devote as much of their minds as straights to getting laid and are thus free to focus on other things. I'm not sure about that theory, though - after all, just because getting laid is easy for you does not necessarily mean that you will spend less of your mental energy thinking about getting laid. And being a sexual minority could tend to add some level of stress that partly counterbalances the benefits of being able to easily get laid, especially in the olden days.
I suppose it is also possible that intelligent, creative gays are more likely to come out than intellectually mediocre gays, but I have no idea if there is any truth to that.
I do wonder, though, if maybe part of the reason for gay affluence and prominence is an actual intelligence difference of some sort.
The elephant in the room is AGP intelligence. This is not exactly a sexual orientation, but may be somewhat related. One paper famously put the median at 122, which is actually completely believable.
Certainly when I look at software development discussion online, it seems to me that transwomen are overrepresented relative to their population size.
This could be explained by the idea that transwomen are just more vocal on average than the average person, but I am not sure that would explain all of the phenomenon.
If transwomen do tend to be relatively prominent in software development because of their actual skills, I suppose there are many ways to explain it. Maybe the same thing that causes men to want to be women also for some reason is responsible for high intelligence. Maybe nerdy, intelligent, tech-savvy guys are more likely to want to switch gender roles than guys who are easily successful in stereotypical male roles. There is also the common online joke argument of "both transgenderism and hyperintellectuality tend to be caused by autism" but I know almost nothing about autism so I have no way of evaluating that one.
I have heard this said before. But this raises the question of why a disorder that's often characterized as "extreme maleness" would cause a man to want to be a woman.
I'm skeptical of the strength of the autism connection, but I don't find that in particular much of a mystery:
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