Nerds are described as congenital misfits, people who were all but born obsessed with Firefly and Python. As an anonymous Redditor put it, "it was simply never an option to be anything other than who we are." That doesn't stop it from being seen as a subversive gesture. Benjamin Nugent (author of American Nerd: The Story of my People) describes white nerds as rejecting the generally invisible benefits of their race: "By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white."

While it's attractive to think that you've had your identity from birth or chosen it purely for its merits, developing the right kind of aptitudes usually takes a support network of fellow nerds, whether friends or parents, and pretending it happens in a vacuum erases the work that goes into following nerdy pursuits and artificially raises the bar for "getting in." There are plenty of reasons people single out women in particular as being fakes, but one of them is the simple fact that female geeks sometimes enter their fields later, whether because they’ve been steered away from supposedly masculine pursuits or just because their interests are seen as less natural by their peers. It doesn’t hurt that social obliviousness — the third pillar of nerddom — is often far less tolerated in women.

"It was simply never an option to be anything other than who we are."

In my younger years, I could certainly claim the awkwardness and exaggerated whiteness of nerdiness. Through second grade, I attempted to address my classmates as "Miss" and "Mister," and a teacher exempted me from an explanation of plagiarism because I "sounded like an encyclopedia anyways." I once ignored a tank stopping outside my classroom window because I was concentrating on an exam. But it was never an option to shut out the world completely to focus on my interests, the way that some would-be nerd gatekeepers suggest. And though I was far from popular at my most inept, I wasn’t erasing the benefits of growing up fair-skinned in a region that still carried the vestiges of a white power movement.

Even if nerds aren’t trying for the "cultivated whiteness" described by Nugent, writing up requirements that extend beyond simple passion usually ends up limiting people, not bringing them together. If fashion can’t be nerdy, what is cosplay? If sports can’t be, what about obsessive workout tracking? In fact, when it comes to nerdiness, it’s strange to assume it should be a single culture at all. If nerdiness is indeed the combination of intelligence, obsession, and social ineptitude, why would we think such relatively common traits would coalesce into a community? And if it's a list of specific interests, why do we assert that there's a specific personality type for people who share them? As nerd extraordinaire John Scalzi thoughtfully put it, "there are as many ways to be a geek as there are people who love a thing and love sharing that thing with others."