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gwern comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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After I posted my comment, I realized that 3 vs 16 might just reflect the overall gender ratio of LW: if there's no connection between that stuff and finding LW interesting (a claim which may or may not be surprising depending on your background theories and beliefs), then 3 vs 16 might be a smaller version of the larger gender sample of 120 vs 1057. The respective decimals are 0.1875 and 0.1135, which is not dramatic-looking. The statistics for whether membership differs between the two pairs:
(So it's not even close to the usual significance level. As intuitively makes sense: remove or add one person in the right category, and the ratio changes a fair bit.)
Under this theory, it seems (with low statistical confidence of course) that LW-interest is perhaps correlated with biological sex rather than gender identity, or perhaps with assigned-gender-during-childhood. Which is kind of interesting.
Does anybody know if this holds for other other preferences that tend to vary heavily by gender? Are MtoF transsexuals heavily into say programming, or science fiction? (I know of several transsexual game developers/designers, all MtoF).
I don't know of any such data. I'd imagine that there's less of a psychological barrier to engaging in traditionally "gendered" interests for most transgendered people (that is, if you think a lot about gender being a social construct, you're probably going to care less about a cultural distinction between "tv shows for boys" and "tv shows for girls"). Beyond that I can't really speculate.
Edit: here's me continuing to speculate anyway. A transgendered person is more likely than a cisgendered person to have significant periods of their life in which they are perceived as having different genders, and therefore is likely to be more fully exposed to cultural expectations for each.
FWIW, I have the opposite intuition. Transgendered people (practically by definition) care about gender a lot, so presumably would care more about those cultural distinctions.
Contrast the gender skeptic: "What do you mean, you were assigned male but are really female? There's no 'really' about it - gender is just a social construct, so do whatever you want."
It's more complicated than that. Gender nonconformity in childhood is frequently punished, so a great many trans people have some very powerful incentives to suppress or constrain our interests early in life, or restrict our participation in activities for which an expressed interest earns censure or worse.
Pragmatically, gender is also performed, and there are a lot of subtle little things about it that cisgender people don't necessarily have innately either, but which are learned and transmitted culturally, many of which are the practical aspects of larger stuff (putting on makeup and making it look good is a skill, and it consists of lots of tiny subskills). Due to the aforementioned process, trans people very frequently don't get a chance to acquire those skills during the phase when their cis counterparts are learning them, or face more risks for doing so.
Finally, at least in the West: Trans medical and social access were originally predicated on jumping through an awful lot of very heteronormative hoops, and that framework still heavily influences many trans communities, particularly for older folks. This aspect is changing much faster thanks to the internet, but you still only need to go to the right forum or support group to see this dynamic in action. There's a lot of gender policing, and some subsets of the community who basically insist on an extreme version of this framing as a prerequisite for "authentic" trans identity.
So...when a trans person transitions, very often they are coping with some or all of this, often for the first time, simultaneously, and within a short time frame. We're also under a great deal of pressure about all of it.
Relevant: http://xkcd.com/592/
Yeah, no idea how good my intuitions are here. I don't have much experience with the subject, and frankly have a little difficulty vividly imagining what it's like to have strong feelings about one's own gender. So let's go read Jandila's comments instead of this one.
It's a common inside joke amongst SF-loving, programmer trans women that there are a lot of SF-loving, programmer trans women, or that trans women are especially and unusually common in those fields. But they usually don't socialize with large swathes of other trans women who come unsorted by any other criterion save "trans and women"; I think this is an availability bias coupled with a bit of "I've found my tribe!" thinking.
Yep, I'd guess that matters a great deal. (IIRC certain radical feminists dislike male-to-female transsexuals for that reason.)
That's the explanation I'd lean towards myself.
As for the radical-feminists-versus-transsexuals thing - there seems to be a fair amount of tension between the gender/sexuality theories of different parts of the queer and feminist movements, which are generally glossed over in favor of cooperation due to common goals. Which, actually, is somewhat heartening.
Now I feel dumb for not even noticing that. "In a group where most people were born males, why is it the case that most trans people were born males?" doesn't even seem like a question.
That sounds like hindsight bias. If there were 16 trans men and 3 trans women, you'd be saying ‘"In a group where most people currently identify as men, why is it the case that most trans people currently identify as men?" doesn't even seem like a question.’
I can attest that this reasoning occurred to me knowing only that there were 1.3% trans women; my prediction was 'based on my experience with trans people, this probably reflects upbringing-assigned gender, so I expect to see fewer trans men'.
Haha, that's a great way to look at it. Had skipped over this myself too!
Now it makes me wonder which would be more significant between this and the apparent prominence of M->F over F->M that I just read some stats about (if the stats are true/reliable, 0.7 conf there).
link?
Oh, heh, sorry.
I mentioned them in a different subthread around here. The linked PDF has a few fun numbers, but didn't notice any obvious dates or timelines. The main website hosting it has a bit more data and references from what little I looked into.