Where did All the Weird Nerd Women Go?

I had a long conversation with Nicole Rainey about her experiences in online fandom, what she witnessed as gender overtook these communities, and what she’s learned there. In some ways, her story is a story of viral evolution in a susceptible environment—gender before it spilled out of niche online communities into the ‘real world.’ But there’s a lot more here to explore.

Eliza: We started talking because you shared some interesting insights with me about the entanglement of fandoms and transgender identities, and—the more we talked—the more I realized that what you had to say would be interesting to a lot of people, not just me. Our conversation began with you mentioning just how soaked in gender online fandom and hobby spaces have become. What does that look like?

Nicole: Every hobby I have is saturated by gender identity and this started way back in the early 2000s. So the subject has been unavoidable for me. I read a lot from the trans side in the early 2000s and—while I did have some questions—I also assumed I’d understand it… eventually. That’s not really what ended up happening. But we’ll come back to that.

The spaces where I’ve spent a lot of time online tend to be female-dominated spaces dedicated to shared interests like writing, drawing, theater, and fandom. Let’s start by establishing a kind of baseline for what these communities are like. Most people probably understand that the women drawn to these types of activities are often obsessive neurotics. That can make these spaces difficult to navigate socially —which is zero fun when you’re Autistic, by the way—because people tend to be sensitive and terrified of confrontation unless there’s safety in numbers. We’ll get to that. At their worst, these spaces bring together a bunch of people who are terrified of rejection, brooding about whatever offense someone has committed but not doing anything to work it out. Not everybody is like this, but it can feel like that sometimes.

Unfortunately, the culture of these online spaces can reinforce these tendencies. When someone tries to communicate directly about a problem, people often respond as though they’re being rejected—or attacked. Because problems can’t be dealt with openly, there have always been satellite websites where people can anonymously air passive-aggressive complaints. These complaints don’t name names, but the people involved often recognize themselves. That means that reassurances like “most people don’t think about you, they’re not judging you as harshly as you judge yourself” don’t provide much comfort because there’s evidence that a lot of people are judging and holding grudges.

These spaces can also be highly sexualized, and the TIFs [trans-identified females] I know are hypersexual. Some are too afraid to have sex with real people, but others have multiple sexual partners and bring sex into all kinds of conversations. If you prefer non-sexual content, even asking where you can find that kind of content will result in you being shouted down by hypersexual women for judging them for liking sex. But it isn’t just that they like sex. It’s that there’s no sense of boundaries and the mere suggestion that some boundaries should exist is considered prudish and conservative. Frankly, this is true of offline nerd spaces too. I live in a large metropolitan area with a thriving nerd scene, and the nerd spaces and the kinkster and poly spaces are the same people. Everyone knows that after-hours at conventions, everyone is hooking up. I wouldn’t say people tried to pressure me into participating, exactly, but the fact I’m monogamous and vanilla invited a lot of commentary.

On the other side, there’s a vocal contingent of “anti’s” who complain about how porn-saturated these spaces can be. But they don’t go about this in a productive way either, telling people to kill themselves for such crimes as “thinking a fictional villain is interesting” or “writing stories that involve anything remotely unsavory because writing about a topic is the same thing as condoning it”.

The majority of the people I’ve met through these spaces grew up in fairly religious, conservative households, and felt restricted by the expectations their family and religion placed on them. In fact, many of these people were incapable of meeting the expectations their families had—often because of mental illness, something they didn’t realize until later in life. So they often spent their childhoods being told their inability to meet expectations was a character flaw. Then, when they grew up, many went low or no contact with their families, and adopted left-wing and atheist identities. But they all kept their fear of being “Inherently Bad People” and hung onto the black-and-white thinking they learned from their parents.

And that brings us back to the topic of conflict and safety in numbers. It was always acceptable to have a conflict with another person if you could get a group of people to support you (also known as… cyberbullying). In most cases, cyberbullying happened out of public view or unfolded in ways that were more subtle. This kind of bullying happens more openly now if the victim can be painted as “Morally Bad” in some way. In most cases, the accusations are untrue, and at the basis is some fact that has been distorted beyond recognition. As an example, you could be accused of being a pedophile if you once said something like “I thought Buffy and Angel were a cute couple in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. Anyone who dislikes you is now free to attack you openly and to call for other people to attack you. People who are in the same circles but don’t really know you will join in. Honestly, for some people, bullying is their real hobby, rather than whatever hobby the space is ostensibly for. Some people believe any and all accusations. Others don’t care if the accusations are true or not. They’re so insecure about being morally impure that they’ll join in every crusade because it reassures them that they’re a “Good Person.”

This type of culture feeds insecurity and anxiety about goodness or purity. 

Most of the people I’ve known in these spaces are bright and creative, always producing idea after idea, but following through on ideas is harder. They may be fantastic illustrators, costume designers, or prop-makers, but they actually finish a project only once in a blue moon. And they hate themselves for it and they hate their creative work, because no matter how impressive it is to anyone else, it never lives up to their own expectations. Many of them try to freelance, but in most cases—even when they’re truly excellent craftswomen— there just aren’t enough people willing to pay enough for them to break even on material costs, let alone earn anything.

Others are less skilled because they can’t prioritize a skill to learn. They want to be good at so many things that they end up not being good at anything. So these people also hate themselves and compare themselves unfavorably to the people who were able to claw their way towards competence at something.

I get the sense that these spaces are full of people who live unfulfilling lives. Working in food service or retail is not fulfilling. Some of them do have partners—generally their partners are also mentally ill—and/or children, but that isn’t enough. They don’t feel like they’re succeeding at anything. And even those who are very talented wind up unfulfilled creatively and dependent on receiving a steady stream of positive feedback, which is unrealistic to expect when there is so much creative content out there.

I know I’m making it sound like these spaces are completely awful all the time, but they’re not! There’s a lot of camaraderie and fun. My fellow mentally disordered disaster women can be brilliantly entertaining, creative and interesting. And it’s possible to somewhat insulate yourself from the more dramatic and toxic elements. But you can’t understand why gender took hold in these spaces unless you understand the drama and toxicity.

Back in the early 2000s, the more mainstream nerdy writing and illustrating spaces were very homophobic. There was a lot of antagonism between the mainstream nerd spaces and the more niche ‘slash’ fans who wrote fan fiction depicting gay relationships. Even the slash fandom could be blatantly homophobic. It wasn’t uncommon for women to write disclaimers about how homosexuality was a sin before sharing art or fiction about gay relationships.

There was also a lot of misogyny, even in female-only spaces. Like, very hostile to female characters existing at all. Women would wish violence upon female characters for having the audacity to star in their favorite TV series or pair off with their favorite male character. So if you dared to write about female characters, you could expect your work to be torn apart.

As society as a whole became more accepting of gays and lesbians, so too did these online spaces, which helped move slash into the mainstream in nerd-creator spaces. At the same time, a new culture around social justice was also taking hold. There was a lot of interest in examining media from a social-justice lens. In some ways, this just shifted problems that already existed onto a new terrain. Female characters were still more harshly criticized than male characters, but now these criticisms were framed as “Oh, the woman writing this female character is a bad person who has internalized misogyny.” Meanwhile, slash fans got accused of “appropriating” gay male culture. Sometimes, these criticisms came from gay men, who pointed out the ways that gay characters written by female authors didn’t line up with their experiences. But most of the time, the criticism came from women attacking women they didn’t like. Over time, this culture of criticism pushed more women into writing male characters because they were less likely to be attacked. Even if you wrote a boring male character, your fellow female creators would shower you with love and praise. If you wrote slash, you might be criticized for fetishizing gay men. But it turned out there was a way around that.

The first handful of women I knew who transitioned were all hardcore slash fans, who underwent medical transition and claimed to be gay men. These women became some of the most vocal critics of other slash writers because now they were authentic and nobody else was. More and more people began to claim not to be women: they came out as nonbinary or demiboys or something. Even if they don’t go all the way, these identities still provide shelter from criticism for writing gay male characters. And identifying as trans means they can say, “Oh, that’s why I never write female characters, because I’m not a woman and it’s triggering.”

I also witnessed infighting about what did and didn’t count as transphobic. I noticed that the concept of “transphobia” caught on much faster than misogyny and homophobia had—because it was harder to respond to. Trans also provided an opportunity to prove what a good, progressive, open-minded person you were. Meanwhile, trans members of these communities made catastrophizing, hysterical posts about how anyone who wasn’t publicly catastrophizing right along with them was a horrible person who wanted all minorities to be murdered. Because so many other people in the community were also prone to catastrophizing—and terrified of being singled out for holding the “wrong” views—this fed on itself.

These spaces were early adopters of new rituals like pronoun-sharing. It shouldn’t surprise anybody that in a space where everyone is into creating new characters and worlds or doing theatrical productions, the idea of playing with different self-presentations is very appealing. Trans was just another way of creating and playing a character for a lot of people. (Because nerd spaces were early adopters of pronouns, many of these spaces have also now dropped asking pronouns because it triggers people who aren’t ready to come out yet and is therefore transphobic, which shows how this trend may die out in the wider culture, too). 

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.

I read scientific statements about gender hoping to find compelling evidence, only to read about freaking lizards and fish—as if that’s relevant to mammals at all! I would read articles about sex differences in humans that would include caveats about not having studied non-binary and trans people.

The people I knew who medically transitioned already had the worst mental health of my peer group. Unfortunately, many of their mental health problems are such that modern medicine would not be much help, even if we restructured all of society to be more accommodating, and therapy and psychiatric medications more accessible. A lot of these people were already medicated to manage their mental illnesses but that didn’t mean they were anywhere near healthy or stable. Medical transition seemed to make their problems worse rather than better. They ruminated more and more over how they were perceived, became more and more self-conscious, and more prone to catastrophizing. Several of them ended up with eating disorders they didn’t have before they started transitioning. These are the kinds of things that made me question what I was being told about gender.

Then, a fandom Tumblr account I followed turned into a TERF blog and answered every question I had ever had. Their explanations aligned with my observations. Not only that, but they discussed a lot of issues that I had never encountered before. As I did more research on my own, I concluded that these arguments made a lot more sense than anything I’d been given by the trans-positive side.

But I wanted to make sure I was getting accurate information. So to double-check that the TERFs were correct, I tried to think of information that might be relevant without being directly on the subject of gender. This included a lot of neurodiversity-related research, not only because of the association between Autism and ADHD and trans identity but also because I had suspicions that a lot of online neurodiversity activism was driven by a similar impulse to the trans trend: a quest for a solution to real problems, combined with a belief that labels should be maximally inclusive because denying someone the right to use a label is mean.

Autism’s rise as an online identity, rather than just a diagnosis, began increasing in the spaces I was in a few years after trans identity did. And not long after that, ADHD as an identity increased even more dramatically. I don’t doubt that some of the women who now identify as Autistic or ADHD do, in fact, have Autism or ADHD (especially ADHD). It’s the overall trend I question. One of the reasons I question this is that, based on my early experiences in online fandoms, other fandom women made it clear that I was weird even among the fandom nerds, and there was a prevailing attitude that they didn’t trust anyone who disclosed an Autism diagnosis because they thought we used our diagnoses to be intentionally socially obtuse. Sometimes, claiming an Autistic identity seems like an obsession with being part of a group, with being liked. That doesn’t quite ring true to me. I don’t worry about other people liking me. I worry about weirdos holding grudges whipping up cyberbully mobs, but I don’t think, “Man, I can’t text Lydia, what if she secretly hates me”? 

I have a lot to say about how the neurodiversity movement prioritizes self- and late-diagnosed people and how self- and late-diagnosed people are often less tolerant of those of us with childhood diagnoses. Online neurodiversity spaces—which influence nerd spaces—have a lot of unspoken rules that get people with childhood diagnoses in trouble when we don’t pick up the cues. Then we get accused of mixing things up on purpose. But if you have any qualms about self-diagnosing, then you must hate poor people (even though poverty is correlated with receiving a childhood ADHD diagnosis) and black people and women. Besides, reading social-media posts and taking online quizzes qualifies you to diagnose yourself and who are you to deny someone’s identity? People know themselves better than anyone else does. I don’t think it’s right to demand people show me proof of their diagnosis, either. But the idea that anyone can claim anything about themselves and the act of claiming it makes it true….? That’s disturbing.

Similar to trans, having a developmental disability means you’re more special, more interesting, more creative, more intelligent, more honest, and more moral. But there’s a big difference between how people conceptualize gender vs. neurodiversity. Basically, gender is a spectrum. Mental disorders, on the other hand, are a binary. You either have a mental disorder or you don’t. Subclinicality doesn’t exist in this world. The boundaries of (self-)diagnosis must keep expanding to be inclusive of ever more people with subclinical traits.

This results in the suppression of the voices of people with more severe disabilities. People who were diagnosed with Autism in childhood are considered privileged–even if they were in special ed and require a caregiver. Acknowledging there’s a difference between me and someone who requires a caregiver in adulthood is considered “ableist” and I find that offensive—not to me, but to the people who need caregivers.

The expansion of these neurodiversity categories doesn’t help the most severely disabled. It just lets people with less severe disabilities claim authority, and demand attention and accommodation. The more the boundaries expand, the less patience there is for the realities of these disorders.

There are some small, private groups on Discord and Reddit for people with childhood diagnoses and these communities are filled with people who got pushed out of more mainstream spaces because they couldn’t read subtext or took someone else’s sarcasm literally and then were accused of launching a personal attack. If a space claims to be by and for people with Autism and then punishes people for being Autistic, that’s a problem.

Eliza: We’ve talked a lot about the negatives. What makes these spaces positive or desirable places to spend time?

Nicole: Okay, I really focused a lot on the negative in my description of how gender ideology took hold, so this is a fair question.

First of all, I learned more about collaboration and compromise and considering other people’s perspectives from these spaces than anywhere else. I also learned a lot about socializing by writing and then listening to other fandom nerds discuss my writing and what they got out of it. Early on, I would experiment with character behaviors and see how other people reacted and that helped me gauge how different things came across, like, oh, people read this behavior as aggressive. I didn’t intend for this character to be aggressive. I do this behavior. Maybe I should consider this in the future.

All of my friends come from those spaces. All of them. Literally all of them. I would have zero friends if I wasn’t in these spaces. I’m a catastrophizing neurotic, too, and it’s nice to talk to other people who understand neurotic life. I’m more emotionally avoidant than emotionally needy, but that isn’t necessarily healthier. We’re all a little bit of a disaster.

And—despite my complaints—everyone in these spaces is capable of self-reflection and critical thinking. They can be brilliant and insightful. It’s just that there are some topics where emotional biases and team loyalty hijack that ability. That’s a human thing, and I’m not immune.

There’s so much passion and intensity in fandom. People want to share their knowledge, their creations, and their analysis—and I love this! I love learning more about other people’s stories, characters, and ideas; what research rabbit holes they went down, and what their thought processes were behind different decisions. I want to hear it all. This is almost as much fun as research and graphs.

Then there’s the creative collaboration! This is my favorite form of socializing. This can come in the form of fandom-specific activities, like getting together with other fans and fleshing out the content in books that are mentioned only in passing in the Harry Potter series. Or you can create a shared universe and everyone writes different short stories or makes art or composes music as long as they adhere to the world’s parameters. And all this creative effort is for the joy of doing it. This is something I have missed since scaling back, but my kids also love to create, illustrate, and world-build so we work on family projects together.

And—even though there are a few people whose number-one hobby is causing drama—most of the people involved want to be supportive of each other’s efforts.

In other words, the great parts are amazing and incredible. Seriously, I wouldn’t have participated in these spaces my entire adult life if I didn’t find value in them.

Eliza: What would these spaces look like if they were healthier? Or, maybe my question is: in what direction do you hope these spaces develop?

Nicole: I’m afraid to write out my hopes for how things will change because I used to wish my fellow nerd women wouldn’t write weirdly violent fantasies about how much they hated my favorite female characters, that gay and lesbian characters would become more welcome outside of their small fandom niches, and that the slash fans wouldn’t write disclaimers at the beginning of their works explaining that homosexuality is a sin but this is fiction and they got off to it, so it’s fine.

These changes happened. But they happened because all the nerd women decided they were, in fact, gay men themselves.

I mentioned I find it believable that people with ADHD are overrepresented in fandom, and one of the reasons why is because of how ADHD impacts emotional maturity. (If you want to learn more, you can watch Dr. Barkley discuss his research on this here). Emotional immaturity is the root of many problems with fandoms. We cluster together in our emotionally immature groups, because outside of fandom, in the real world, we’re often held to expectations that are based on assumptions about how mature we should be—not what we’re actually capable of. It’s hard to be measured against a standard that’s set too high for where you’re actually at, because then nobody notices when you improve, because your improvements still don’t meet expectations. As a result, people may give up and think they’re incapable of improving. 

But we’re not. We can improve. We just need a road map: small, manageable steps that push us a little beyond our comfort zone—but not so far outside our comfort zone that we’re destined to fail.

That brings me to my greatest hope for nerd and fandom spaces: more awareness about emotional maturity and people finding ways to take into account emotional maturity without denying personal responsibility. It would help not only to make the spaces themselves less drama-prone, but it would alleviate at least some of the self-hatred so many women in fandom feel. Because at their best, the creative collaboration and passion in these spaces is incredible. Other fandom women are incredible, and it hurts me that fandom so often amplifies their (and my) pre-existing problems, of which gender ideology is only a symptom and not the root cause. And I hope that readers outside of fandom spaces are able to understand a little better what’s going on in them that allowed gender ideology to take hold so strongly.