Where did all the weird nerd women go?

Alexej von Jawlensky

My latest is up at Genspect, an interview with Nicole Rainey* about her experiences and insights into why so many of her fellow weird nerd women fell in thrall to trans. Excerpt below:

Eliza: What made you decide to dig deeper into the issue of gender?

Nicole: The short answer is: I wanted to understand why women like me–weirdo nerds with Autism diagnoses who love to write and draw–were so likely to decide we weren’t women.

The long answer is: the toll of being asked to accept so many remarkable things added up over time. I had questions that weren’t getting answered. I read every pro-trans article anyone linked on social media hoping that this would be the article that finally made sense, only to be disappointed. For a long time, I thought I was the problem, because when I first encountered the trans stuff, I was coming to terms with the fact that some of my other beliefs about how the world worked weren’t true, so I figured, well, this doesn’t make sense, but just because I don’t understand something doesn’t make it not true. I don’t always understand things when I first encounter them, especially when those things involve other people’s experiences. I was keenly aware that my inability to understand other people’s point of view was lacking, and that was something I was actively trying to work on at the time. So I said OK, fine, I don’t get it, but that’s me. I’ll keep trying to understand.

But, as time went on, it became harder and harder to believe. It was upsetting to realize that I’d spent years arguing that women could be weird nerds… only for all the other weird nerd women to say “Oh, no, we’re not women, actually.” It was easier to go with it when it was just the occasional slash-obsessed person coming out as trans and wanting to look like a J-rocker. But it came to the point where, whenever I joined a new fandom discord or a discussion forum or something, I’d know that everyone would be female and that none of them would put she/her in the pronoun field.

Actually, at one point I caved. I joined a discussion group and I felt so awkward being the only person to use she/her that I put he/him. I justified this to myself by thinking, but we all know that everyone in this fandom is a woman, so it doesn’t matter. Anyway, it turns out we do not all know, which I found out when someone asked for advice and I gave it and everyone said, “Wow, how could you be so insensitive, you can do that because you’re a man, but we’re AFAB [assigned female at birth], so we can’t.” These trans-identified women then took it upon themselves to spend the next several months educating me about the female experience. (And I never told them the truth, because I’m an asshole and wanted to see if they would ever catch on. They didn’t).

When I decided to dig deeper, I didn’t trust anyone invested in gender to give me accurate facts because my experience with both liberal social justice culture and the conservative culture I grew up in was that facts are less important than demonstrating group loyalty. Most of the weird liberal nerds I know would be greatly offended if I said this to their faces because they believe that rejecting their parents’ value system demonstrates that they’re independent thinkers who aren’t swayed by group loyalty or peer pressure. But they are. They simply chose to cast their allegiance with a different group. They enforce this new group’s norms very stringently, in fact. There are all sorts of fun little hashtag events for creators on social media, and so many of them have rules that say things like, “If you’re transphobic you can’t participate.” “If you don’t believe in self-diagnosis you can’t participate.” “If you don’t have all the exact correct opinions you can’t participate.”

I want to say that I don’t think this underlying impulse is inherently negative. Having a group is a necessity for our survival. But this kind of blind loyalty can have negative consequences, depending on the group norms. And it’s vexing when you want to have a conversation about a topic that has become a “Group Loyalty Test.” Because you can’t. It’s the worst.