The main reasons I’ve heard thrown around for this are: 1) Autism-spectrum traits correlate to being trans (why? nobody knows) and also correlate to high technical ability, 2) tech is generally fairly accepting of alternative lifestyles and identities, 3) if you were brought up as a boy you probably had more access to computers and were encouraged to go into that field, 4) if you were brought up as a boy but were actually trans, you probably preferred nerdy stuff to sports and computers were a good distraction from hating your body, 5) tech jobs have good healthcare.
There's also the need to be part of a community online, a community which is not physically accessible in most places, so the level of social media engagement is higher, and maybe that leads to tech and tech-adjacent work.
It’s a neat thing about nerdland.
(Starbucks has famously good trans healthcare.)
One of my friends legit quit her well paying tech job to work for Starbucks for like a year and a half because it saved her money
Here are some reasons:
- Autists tend to be uncoordinated which makes them feel uncomfortable in their own bodies, which is a feeling used to diagnose transgenderism.
- Autists are often outcasts, which can make men feel less masculine, which they may accidentally equate to being more feminine.
- It’s accepted in the literature that autists tend to be naive as they can’t read social cues properly. Compared to their more socially sensitive neurotypical peers, they are more likely to trust that others will genuinely perceive them as the opposite gender based on cues from social media alone.
- Autists tend to over-rationalize which can lead to thought spirals that cause them to convince themselves of something that a neurotypical person would think is unrealistic.
- Autists tend to lack social sensitivity which includes the absence of the ability to sense the subtle discomfort that people feel in their presence.
This is why trans women who are lesbians are extremely over represented compared to cis women.
Possibly, or also possibly likely that people are more likely to come out when they feel less constrained to societal expectations (i.e there may be more LGBTQIA+ who are closeted outside of tech because of nonconformity-related fears). Whether it's one or the other (or both), these populations have always gravitated towards tech because tech was always the outcast thing to do.
2. Autistic spectrum is over-represented in tech.
3. There are many more man in tech.
4. There are many more trans-woman than trans-man.
Multiply all these together and you get the phenomenon you observed.
[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/transgender-and-gender-d...
HOWEVER, you can easily tell trans folks on github because their avatar will be an anime picrew.