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This post is a person– who may believe either a gender identity or a Blanchard-Bailey theory of transness– doing their best to write what a Blanchardian believes. Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is or what “gender identity” and “Blanchard-Bailey” mean? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post.
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1. How I Define Men And Women
Let’s start off by conceding a completely irrelevant point: intersex people exist. I mean, yeah, they do exist and deciding whether an intersex person is male or female is complicated and there’s nothing wrong with letting them pick whichever they want so they can put “Mr.” or “Ms.” on forms instead of explaining their complicated medical situation to everyone they meet. There’s no god to tell them what they really are. It’s sort of the parable of bleggs and rubes. When you have a purple cuboid thing with rounded corners that’s furred on one face and smooth on the rest, you admit that you have to make a judgment call. You know what you don’t do? You don’t decide that you’ll never be able to tell whether a blue furred egg is a blegg because of the existence of edge cases… unless you’re politically motivated, that is.
I have to start with this long, irrelevant digression because otherwise the entire transgender community will remind me that intersex people exist—not that they actually care about intersex people who were sterilized against their will and without medical need, intersex people who are taught to be ashamed of their bodies, intersex people who exist in real life in contexts besides transgender arguments—and pretend that’s a knock-down argument that we can’t define men and women at all.
Men are men. They have XY chromosomes, broader shoulders than hips, beards, flat chests, testes, penises, more testosterone and less estrogen. Women are women. They have XX chromosomes, broader hips than shoulders, no beards, breasts, ovaries, vaginas, more estrogen and less testosterone. What about people with XX and SRY translocation? Judgment call. I say they’re men. Better question: does anyone identify as a trans woman due to getting a karyotype and finding out that they have this condition? If not, then why bring it up? It’s irrelevant and it’s a distraction. I’ve never heard anyone say “I am really a woman because I have gynecomastia” or “I am really a woman because I’m shorter than the average height for a man of my race” so it seems to me like this is all irrelevant. Everyone knows a man with SRY translocation is actually a man. No one is actually confused about this.
I’m not going to come up with one single thing that all men have and no women do, but I don’t need to. We all know what makes someone male or female. I’d like the transgender community to stop pretending to be confused now.
2. The Cotton Ceiling
People who want to be seen as women more than anything else, enough to rearrange their entire lives to achieve it, who especially want to be seen as women in a sexual way, feel bad when people just won’t see them that way. They want to be attractive women whom people attracted to women want to have sex with. Not being able to get what you want is disappointing. It’s even more painful when you can’t be what you want to be than when you just can’t have what you want to have. Admitting the problem is inherent in you is extremely disheartening because it means giving up hope. This is why some transgender people look for a way to blame their rejection on other people. It’s true that transgender people are at very high risk for assault; transgender people take this as evidence that they’re an oppressed minority. Once they already believe in “transphobia” as a social ill like racism, they can attribute all sorts of things to it.
Of course trans women are at a massive disadvantage trying to look like attractive women. They’ve had all of adolescence to grow into adult men. Some can still manage to look feminine enough to attract partners who are attracted to women, depending on which aspects of womanhood they’re attracted to and that’s lucky for them.
There’s a reason the cotton ceiling is mostly about lesbians and that’s because it’s later-transitioning, more masculine autogynephiles who want to be seen as women and desired as women and want female partners. Earlier-transitioning, more feminine homosexual transsexuals are able to pass better and don’t have this concern to the same degree, which is why there aren’t similar complaints about straight men. Further, more feminine homosexual trans women are more feminine (and tautologies are tautological) and more accommodating. Autogynephiles, who are very masculine, are more willing to demand that other people make them happy.
It’s not PC to say it that way. It’s not even nice. I do agree, in general, with the idea of talking to the person in front of you rather than a statistically average member of the same group as the person in front of you, but when you’re actually asking about the reason for general trends in group behavior, then you’re just going to have to talk about statistical tendencies and not that one autogynephile you know who’s a total teddy bear and would never hurt a fly.
3. Trans Women Programmers
Most trans women are actually more masculine than the average man. That is, autogynephiles are. Even a normal male sex drive isn’t intense enough to make someone risk losing friends and family and undergo painful and risky surgery just to live out a sexual fantasy; autogynephiles are more sexual than the average man, probably because they have even more testosterone. They’re even more inclined toward traditionally male pursuits like sports and programming than the average man is.
Besides, programmers are pretty autistic and interested in what you do, not who you are. I bet it’s a welcoming field for anyone who can do it.
The statistics are different for homosexual trans women, but they’re a minority of trans women.
4. AFAB Trans People
There’s nothing hard to explain about this. Paraphilias are less common in females than in males, which explains why trans men are more rare, but just because they’re less common doesn’t mean they never happen at all. There are also homosexual trans men who are attracted to women and generally more masculine than women. There are probably about as many of these as there are homosexual trans women who are attracted to men. What’s so inexplicable about that?
5. Transgender People Being Wrong About Their Own Experiences
The questions didn’t include this, but I thought I should mention it. One of the things that really seems like it bothers the transgender community is being told that they’re wrong about their own experiences. A lot of autogynephiles say that their experience isn’t autogynephilia at all. Some of my “side” (I’d really like to think we’re all on the same side, though: Team Help People Live Comfortable Lives) thinks they’re lying but I don’t think so and I think it’s horrible that that’s anyone’s first idea.
Everyone here reads Thing of Things, right? So we all remember Ozy’s post about feeling shame instead of sadness for losing time to depression. I love that post and it helped me a lot. I’m the exact opposite of Ozy! I used to feel guilty for everything. I thought I had a scrupulosity problem because I would feel so guilty all the time. Except, the weird thing is, it didn’t help to realize that I wasn’t doing anything that went against my values! I figured out eventually that I wasn’t guilty. I was scared everyone in the world would hate me! I don’t think I’m bad at introspection and I don’t think Ozy’s bad at introspection, so I don’t think it says anything mean about transgender people to say that they can’t always figure out their own motives. People can’t always figure out their own motives. Ozy thought they were ashamed of their depression. I thought I felt guilty whenever I did something that anyone in the world didn’t approve of. Most transgender people think they’re experiencing “gender dysphoria” when they want to transition.
“Gender dysphoria” isn’t a worthless model for homosexual transsexuals, either. That works with the analogy, too! Some people do have scrupulosity problems. Some people do feel ashamed of their mental illnesses.
Transgender people tell the truth about their beliefs about their experiences and their mistakes aren’t stupid or obvious. It took a lot of research the state of available evidence to a point where I feel comfortable saying that most transgender people are actually experiencing a sexual fetish. If you don’t have multiple studies behind you, it’s probably a bad idea to say you know someone’s experiences better than they do. I agree with that. People know their own experiences better than they know other people’s. I could be more cynical and say people are even more wrong about other people’s experiences than their own. It should take a lot of evidence to decide someone is wrong about their own feelings, but sometimes you have that much evidence. Check out Kay Brown’s blog, sillyolme.wordpress.com, because she understands the science and explains it better than I do. She has some great posts laying out the evidence. People usually can’t do better than just believing other people about their own feelings, but usually isn’t always.
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The first item on the poll refers to what side you think the author of this post really believes, while the second item refers to what side you believe. When taking the poll, if you can POSSIBLY round yourself off to Blanchard-Bailey or gender identity, please do so. Please do this even if you have major disagreements with the side you are leaning towards. Only use “neither” if you really really really cannot in good conscience round yourself to either.
Thing of Things 
I’m voting GI for this one, actually. Mostly because I found it so violently repellent, in a way that feels very out of place among the other entries. It’s like… Some of this seems like the sort of thing that would be passed around SJ communities as cherry – picked proof that your ideological enemies are scum.
And, like, BB/AGP isn’t actually inherently awful or repellent. And I would not expect something like this to be sincerely submitted by the sort of person who hangs around Ozy’s blog. Something like “actually, trans women are not only not women, but they’re actually more masculine than cis men” just doesn’t seem like something you’d address to this audience unless you were actively trying to be edgy.
And I think it’s more likely that would come from someone creating an umcharitable version of sn ideological enemy, than that someone would be that edgy in trying to represent the view they actually agree with, or that someone who hangs out here would add that line in without considering that it sounds super dickish.
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On the other hand, I don’t see any *obvious* mistakes, other than them being really mean about it. There certainly are Blanchardians who are very angry about it (sometimes understandably so), whereas I’d expect people who do an honest attempt at an ITT to try to present a nicer opinion (though I don’t have much experience with ITTs).
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Yeah. I mean, if I were to encounter this in pretty much any other context besides being 1) an ITT entry which was 2) on Ozy’s blog, I would absolutely believe it was sincere. If it *is* secretly a GI entry, it gets top marks for effort.
Because of that context, I’m tentatively voting GI, but that’s really just a hunch based off of what might very well just be my smoking too many meta-levels. I would not bet money on it.
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I never really figured out whether “AGPs are more masculine than average cis men” is actually a common part of Blanchardianism, or just a meme.
I’m leaning BB on this one, but not very confident.
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Well, it’s certainly believed strongly by one (1) person, but taking her as an authority on How AGP Works is maybe a bad idea.
That said, the largest cluster of AGP women (in my observations, which are skewed by the fact I’m going to hang out with weird nerds more than I’m going to hang out with anyone else) are what gets ironically called the ‘failed male’ cluster, which has a lot of overlap with ‘plasticbrains’ but is not synonymous, and I’ve concluded there are a lot of hypermasculinized thought processes (and demasculinized ones) in this cluster the same way autism is a lot of hypermasculinization combined with a substantial minority of demasculinization. This is also the cluster of a lot of the trans women who become successful in technical fields, and fortunately for me the psychological profile of this cluster’s most high-achieving women was outlined in the comments of a Slate Star Codex links dump back in November:
“I’ve been vaguely following the subject of late transition transgender individuals since being assigned one of Morris’s books in a history class in college in the late 1970s. I read Morris’s memoir “Conundrum” in the mid-1990s.
There’s a very distinct flavor to this second type that doesn’t fit into usual categories so it’s hard to describe. It’s a fuzzy set with common membership qualities of:
– High IQ, especially in logic
– Science fiction orientation
– Future orientation (Morris an outlier here)
– Masculine interests and tastes (e.g., the military and sci-fi)
– Not people persons
– Not conventionally liberal/progressive/leftist
– Libertarian / Randian
– Not at all feminine or effeminate
– Competitive
The whole package reminds me of sci-fi novelist Robert Heinlein, who indeed wrote a couple of transgender stories.”
I think the difference between the Rothblatt-Wachowski-Conway cluster and the kind of person who hangs out on /tttt/ is dimensional, not taxonomic. I think that when — fuck, is this that Steve Sailer?! oh well, Blanchardianism and HBD are already overlapping ideologies — discusses later his view that this cluster is more masculine than the average man, he’s biased by the fact he observes the successful ones, and also that he appears to not be able to distinguish this from the very distinct Beck-Jenner-Kroc ‘masc repression’ cluster (he lists Jenner as an example of this cluster). I encounter a lot of members of this cluster who are not CEOs or Hollywood directors, and while there’s the hypermasculinized ‘high PIQ, future orientation, tool-oriented, politically bizarre’ traits there’s also a decent amount of demasculinization going on — hence ‘failed male’ (= couldn’t succeed in super-high-achieving male society) and the fact this is also the cluster of AGP early transitioners (e.g. Eli Erlick).
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This is the first one I’m really too uncertain to vote on.
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I voted GI. I was pretty convinced for most of it, but the idea that trans women have more testosterone than cis men is so blatantly not-plausible as an explanation for their behavior (given that getting rid of excess testosterone is a standard component of transition) that it broke my SoD.
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I haven’t read enough to give my own opinion on the veracity of the theory, but this does seem to be an existing theory from the blogger that was linked by the essayist.
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Brown’s critique of Vitale’s ‘testosterone toxicity’ model doesn’t require the presumption that AGP women have high T by male standards before starting HRT, just that having male-standard T levels in the first place intensified their AGP.
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This reminds me of a Blanchardian who I expected would participate in this ITT and I was looking out for a response from him. On the other hand, I agree that this is so hilariously anticharitable it probably wasn’t written in good faith.
Identity, low confidence.
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Interesting: every comment so far seems be to leaning towards calling this one gender identity, yet the poll results are /strongly/ in favour of BB, enough so that the “BB and I lean towards BB” category beat out “GI and I lean towards GI” for second place. Wonder why that is.
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I never even considered voting anything other than BB. What I’m interested by is all the comments (three?) mentioning basically how “mean” this entry is. Can anyone who thinks that say more about it? Like, someone said this entry might be intended to show what ideological scum the BB side is; someone else said it was mean; someone else said it was maximally uncharitable.
While I was reading it I was thinking that it was not as… I don’t know, carefully touchy-feely? … as a lot of the entries. Maybe it’s just that I’m an INTJ and this reads to me as something written by someone else who might be an INTx, but I can’t pick out much of anything in it that I would actually describe as unkind. Blunt, maybe. But if this is what some people truly think of as mean, I wonder what those people would think about things that were actually intended to be hurtful or insulting.
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Same, actually. “Anticharitable”, “violently repellent”… I wonder if that’s just because the posters have ideologized their answers to the factual issues, so that someone who disagrees about the nature of transsexuality is automatically Bad.
I could have written this and meant it as a genuine explanation with no inflammatory intent (presuming that I had agreed with the facts, that is). I’m surprised to hear that any significant proportion of people identify it as offensive.
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Several of the people offput by this post are Blanchardians.
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Yeah I noticed that, which just made the “this is mean” reading that much more confusing to me. (Now the ITT#7 entry, THAT I see as mean, no problem. But this one, not as much…) I’m serious, I would love an explanation – and I guess this is a pretty selfish request for other people to help me in my ongoing quest to avoid accidentally saying things that are perceived as mean when I don’t intend them that way, so it’s not like anyone is obligated to participate. But if anyone can point out specifically what it is that makes this one ugly, I would super appreciate it. NB, I am not the author.
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Sorry, that was unclear of me. I didn’t mean the factual issues involved in Blanchardian typology vs. Gender identity, I meant the factual issues of “are transsexuality and transition treatments as understood by transpersons themselves at all legitimate?”, “is sex a spectrum” and similar things. The only way I can understand this post as anticharitable or repellent (and perhaps that’s a failure of imagination on my part) is if I assume it to be morally unacceptable to think e.g. that men are men and there’s really very little unclarity on this point, or that meaningfully changing your sex is ipso facto impossible.
Personally, it seems to me to be clear that on the strength of presently available facts a person who does think that transition is possible should still be capable of very clearly understanding why someone would disagree with that on a purely intellectual basis, instead of assuming bigotry and getting offended. For instance.
(For the record, I am also not the author.)
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@Beef
Here’s what I see as mean-spirited:
1) The post begins with a digression whose main purpose seems not to be an explanation of why the author thinks edge cases aren’t relevant, but to accuse transgender activists of acting in bad faith when they point out the existence of edge cases.
-“unless you’re politically motivated, that is”
-“I have to start with this long, irrelevant digression because otherwise the entire transgender community will remind me that intersex people exist—not that they actually care about intersex people”
-“I’d like the transgender community to stop pretending to be confused now.”
This is an uncharitable reading of why people bring up certain types of edge cases. It should be pretty easy to think of a charitable reason trans people would bring this up. It’s the difference between “I don’t think this is relevant, here’s why” and “I don’t think this is relevant, you’re obviously trying to distract the issue.”
2) The post accuses trans people of blame-shifting when they want women to be attracted to them, and of being entitled because they’re men.
-“This is why some transgender people look for a way to blame their rejection on other people.”
-“Once they already believe in ‘transphobia’ as a social ill like racism, they can attribute all sorts of things to it.”
-“Autogynephiles, who are very masculine, are more willing to demand that other people make them happy.”
Again, uncharitable attributions of other people’s motivations. The author even says that this is not a nice way to frame things, then tries to excuse it because statistics are mean–and is needlessly mean in that excuse.
-“It’s not PC to say it that way. It’s not even nice… when you’re actually asking about the reason for general trends in group behavior, then you’re just going to have to talk about statistical tendencies and not that one autogynephile you know who’s a total teddy bear and would never hurt a fly.”
What’s the bit about “that one autogynephile” got to do with anything unless the author is trying to imply that the average AGP is dangerous? It would fit with the accusation that they’re hyper-masculine and entitled, if the author also had negative opinions about men. But I see no stats that AGPs are likely to be rapists or abusive, etc., so it’s an out-of-nowhere derogatory implication.
Many of the other Blanchardian posts don’t seem so combative–I don’t see disagreement on this as inherently rude. Most of the other parts of this entry do seem like sincere factual disagreement rather than meanness. But I hope that explains where some of us are coming from.
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“I hope that explains where some of us are coming from.”
It does, in fact! I’ll be honest here and admit that #1 is a pure failure of imagination on my part: it genuinely has never occurred to me even for a moment that anyone would mention intersex people in this context in good faith, so the thing struck me as unremarkable. Intersexuality is, from my POV, so obviously and wholly irrelevant to the issue at hand that I thought it could only possibly be rhetorical sleight-of-hand – similar to how in Sexing the Body, to take an adjacent example, Fausto-Sterling artificially inflates the numbers of intersex people by counting everyone with any kind of dinsorder involving chromosome pair 23, e.g. people with Klinefelter’s, who outnumber clinical intersexuals by at least one order of magnitude IIRC.
Now, to me this is something that everyone does approximately all the time in arguing, so I didn’t see it as uncharitable, either as a a description of the transgender community or (one meta-level up) of the Blanchardian community for the writer to take the time to explicitly dismiss it. After all, we’re all human, right? Casting aside each other’s bad-faith arguments is just a rote operation which virtually always needs doing before you cna get down to brass tacks.
Nevertheless, yes, now that you mention this explicitly I can certainly see why it seems uncharitable.
As for #2, well, cisgender people blame others for their rejection all the time when they can, every large social ill like transphobia, racism, misogyny, misandry etc. seems to have the trait of becoming almost immediately overused as an explanation, and men do as a group more willingly demand that others (particularly women) work to satisfy them. Maybe these aren’t exactly maximally charitable statements, but they’re statements that one needs to be able to make. In fact, I’m prepared to say that “attributing an act or idea to an agent’s transphobia” is far more uncharitable than any of these. So here I must to some extent stick to my guns. I don’t think these are unreasonable.
Nevertheless, thank you for your thoughtful reply! You did change the way I looked at #1 significantly. I hope I haven’t offended in replying in turn.
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