I am interested in collecting information on the correlation between autogynephilia or autoandrophilia and gender identity. Anyone who is interested in contributing to this can take the survey. It is open to people of all genders, both cis and trans.
I will report the results in a few weeks.
Thing of Things 
Can we have a few more options for question 1?
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I was a little confused by the combination of questions 1 and 2. But I was happy to register myself first as “cisgender male” since in a nutshell that’s what I am, but then as not really fitting the cisgender / transgender labels since in fact I’m not sure I feel much of a “strong sense of maleness”.
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I’m fine with “assigned at birth” and even genetic questions, but nonbinary and agender people are a targeted audience if I think correctly.
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On the second question, I was uncomfortable with both “I strongly identify as male” and whatever the “I think of myself as outside the binary” option was, because I feel like I’m definitely somewhere in between those two and I’m not even sure which I’d say I lean toward. But “I moderately identify as male” doesn’t sound right either (it’s more complicated than that), and as Ozy has mentioned before it’s impossible to give every special snowflake a category for themselves and still get useable results. So I figured that since I think of myself as male and do not actively reject binary categories as applied to myself, I’m probably least misleading for the purposes of the survey if I pick the “strongly identify as male” option despite my nitpicks due to being rather cis-by-default.
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Okay well I’mma do what Protagoras did out of some effort to get the cis-by-default people in the same category, but it’s true that question 2 leaves nowhere to go, not just for the cis-by-default, but for any cis person who wouldn’t say they ‘identify strongly with [male/female]ness’. And like, I think that’s the *majority* of cis people, because it’s not just anyone who’s at all GNC but also anyone who, like most people, just doesn’t have to think about it all that much.
And yeah, I couldn’t tick the last options, because I’m *not* a neither-trans-nor-cis snowflake, I’m cis. I feel very strongly that like, the absence of trans is cis.
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Blanchardian theories do not distinguish between nonbinary and binary transgender people, making a separate “nonbinary” designation of little use for testing their hypotheses.
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and nonbinary nontransgender people don’t falsify those theories outright?
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I took the survey, as a mostly? but weakly? cis man, I feel like what the questions you asked might distort people’s experiences somewhat, in particular in most of my fantasies I picture myself as a man, but my being a man isn’t remarkable or erotic, so questions about finding sitting in a masculine way or peeing in a masculine way are sort of irrelevant, that is normal to me and not specifically erotic.
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I don’t think I understand. If those things aren’t part of what make the fantasies arousing for you, there’s an option to say that they aren’t arousing. Where does the distortion come in?
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Going to pull my examples from the female version of the quiz here, but – I feel like that kind of neutral feeling is a very different sort of “not arousing” than I feel about having my period, which is actively de-arousing for me.
Also, having female body parts isn’t arousing in itself for me, but I certainly have them in every single first-person-POV sexual fantasy I’ve ever had, since the thought of not having them is massively de-arousing! So I feel like there’s quite a bit of nuance lost if you conflate the “neutral” and “actively de-arousing” categories.
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What they said. Also, if the thought of having sex with another person is arousing, then the thought of me, as a woman, having sex with another person is arousing despite the ‘as a woman’ part having no real relevance to the arousal.
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I had a conversation where it was suggested that autogynephilia as experienced by men is different from anything women experience because of the quality of *yearning* – knowing your body isn’t that which you’re imagining and longing for it to be otherwise. This does not seem true to me – for one thing, I know men who kink on imagining themselves as female but don’t experience yearning either during fantasies or after, and for another, I’m pretty sure a significant subset of women who go to effort to femme themselves up are doing it out of yearning. As a woman, at times I’ve kinked on fantasies of having larger breasts, long hair, good makeup etc. and felt demoralised afterwards because those things aren’t true of me.
But I am interested to know if this position holds water better than it appears to. Anyone agree with it and want to explain?
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Note that when engaging with Blanchard-Bailey ideas I RP someone who believes that the two genders are “man” and “woman”, because otherwise the conversation becomes a horrible convoluted trainwreck.
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Agh, question 1 was much easier to answer than question 2! I spent quite a while pondering question 2 and I’m still not sure I answered it correctly…
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Interesting, it was the reverse for me (clearly in the last category for question 2, but spent a while pondering whether cisgender or transgender was more accurate for question 1).
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On the 1-5 scale, it’s unclear to me if 1 (“not at all arousing”) is supposed to represent “this doesn’t do anything for me” (e.g. “fantasies in which I am on a bed with an orange and green quilt”) or “this is a huge turnoff for me” (e.g. “fantasies in which my parents are watching and making disappointed faces”).
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Ooh, I was answering as if 1 was “irrelevant”. Interesting.
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Yes, this is a very important question to which I would like an answer before I fill out the survey. My initial assumption that 1 was “hard no” and 3 was “whatever”.
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yeah, i interpreted 1 as just “not arousing; doesn’t do anything for me,” with the midpoint 3 as “somewhat arousing,” but i really wish there had been a solid negative option because as a trans guy i would have answered many of the “fantasize about being a woman” questions as “hell no” if that was possible. instead those got lumped in with the things that just didn’t do anything for me, which may or may not have been the intent.
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Seconding that this is a huge issue with this quiz!
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Funny, I was just doing something similar. In my survey, I didn’t ask about both AAP and AGP, but only about women’s AGP and men’s AAP, though.
One thing I got curious about while reading the comments on my survey is whether AGP and AAP correlate. I think Blanchardianism would predict that they do, in a sense? Like, imagine that a bisexual person has an ETLI. Then this should make them both AGP and AAP, right? And this should be one of the primary ways for women to be AGP or men to be AAP. Can you share the correlation coefficient between AGP and AAP when the survey is done?
Anyway, in my survey, I included three questions that tested for magic button transness. According to the “AGP/AAP is just an expression of your gender”-hypothesis, magic button transness should correlate negatively with AGP in women and AAP in men. However, I found no correlation between magic button transness and any of my measures of AGP/AAP. They weren’t as direct as yours, though. Some correlations did appear in measure 5, 7 and 8 if I restricted who I looked at to gay and bi people.
My measures were:
1) Can feeling masculine or feminine make you aroused? Specifically, can it make you aroused in intimate situations with your partners, such as when you and your partner are alone together?
2) Or when masturbating or doing other individual sexual things?
3) How about in general, more nonsexual situations?
4) Have you ever been aroused by your own body, especially by the kinds of traits in your body that you find attractive in others?
5) Have you had sexual experiences (e.g. masturbation sessions) primarily focused on you admiring your own body?
6) Do you ever do any preparations before masturbating, in order to get yourself into an appropriate mindset? E.g. by dressing up in sexy clothes?
7) Is the way you want to look influenced by what you find sexually attractive? In particular, is your general style (clothes, hair, etc.) influenced by what you are attracted to?
8) Is your body shape goals influenced by what you are attracted to?
Other things you might be interested in: in a survey I did, AGP in cis men and AAP in cis women was strongly associated with magic button transness.
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Very interesting. I haven’t seen the survey these came from, but without going into any details I’ll just say that I would answer “yes” to many of the questions above, sometimes a vehement “yes!”. And I’m a cis (by default?) man. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this particular aspect of sexuality being so directly addressed as a Thing. I’ve always had a strange lack of curiosity towards it, rounding it off to some variant of narcissism and not really caring to analyze it.
Relatedly, I remember a question going around on Tumblr many months ago that went something like “For cis people attracted to the opposite gender: when you see someone of the opposite gender whom you find attractive, do you ever experience a desire to be them?” Which I would answer with a definite “yes”.
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I should include that question in my next gender survey.
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This is interesting but would you mind explaining some of your terminology?
What is “ETLI”? I have googled “ETLI transgender” and one of the only results was this page.
and what do you mean by “magic button transness”? I’m guessing it’s a mildly derogatory term for gender identity based transness but I could be miles out.
I would genuinely like to understand your ideas as I think you might be on to something.
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ETLI is a theory associated with Blanchardianism. Basically, the idea is that one kind of paraphilia you can have is that your erotic target location can be inverted, so your attraction targets yourself instead of others.
This is then the explanation for autogynephilia: if you combine heterosexuality with ETLI, you are attracted to the idea of yourself as the opposite sex.
It is also the explanation for body integrity identity disorder (“transabled”): if you combine an amputee fetish with ETLI, you get BIID. This theory is further strengthened by the fact that many people with BIID are also transgender.
More speculatively, it can explain other dysphoria-like phenomena. Otherkin = ETLI + bestiality (or furry fetish?). Age dysphoria = ETLI + pedophilia (Google “autopedophilia” for a study on this). Race dysphoria = ETLI + racial fetish (this probably doesn’t explain Rachel Dolezal, but in the autogynephilia general thread on /lgbt/ on 4chan, I’ve seen people talk about feeling Asian-targeted racial dysphoria).
“Magic button transness” is defined by being willing to press a magic sex-swap button. Generally, “magic button trans” people identify as their assigned sex and do not transition.
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For clarity: ETLI = “erotic target location inversion”.
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ETLE stands for ‘Erotic Target Location Error’. There is no such thing as ‘ETLI’ at least, not in Blanchard
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“One thing I got curious about while reading the comments on my survey is whether AGP and AAP correlate.”
I imagine one reason they would correlate is a general factor of ‘likelihood to rate a given thing as arousing’. Which could come from sex drive, sexual openness, or whether the person answering the questionnaire is in that sort of mood right now.
Maybe you could control for this by also listing like, some kinks and random activities to get a baseline for general horniness.
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Ouch, good point. I’ll consider adding this to my next gender survey.
(Hm, actually, I should probably make a minor gender survey to figure out how big of a problem this is…)
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I’m not sure how to answer a lot of the questions about “fantasies in which I __”. Typically in my sexual fantasies I am a woman, have a woman’s face, have breasts, etc. But like… those apply in real life, and imagining otherwise would make me dysphoric, so why would I. As far as I can tell I’m not aroused by the *idea* of any of these, and they’re not arousing in isolation. But they’re still true descriptors of my sexual fantasies. Taking the questions completely literally I’d have to mark those all as “very arousing” because I have had very arousing sexual fantasies, and in those fantasies I am a woman and have a female body. But I’m not sure this is the spirit in which the questions are intended?
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So, does autoandrophilia just cover imagining oneself as a man normally, or does it also include imagining oneself as an exceptionally manly man? Like, what if e.g. imagining myself with a penis does nothing for me because I actually have one and that’s just normal, but I like to imagine having a foot-long dong?
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Well, the modal trans-man-who-is-of-the-cluster-associated-with-autoandrophilia generally has an extremely feminine male self image (see the ‘yaoi boy’ stereotype). So ‘I have a Jonah Falcon dick in my fantasies’ is probably a different phenomenon to AAP.
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That’s weird, ’cause the way AGP is generally talked about it feels like very much the same class of thing as a cis lady getting turned on by thinking of herself as, like, a big-boobed can-walk-in-heels never-gets-a-pesky-upper-lip-hair Femmequeen. But then, I feel like it’s though to distinguish the latter from, like, ‘I want to be sexy and I have been told since birth that this is what sexy looks like’.
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For the record, I interpreted “this is not at all arousing” as “this does nothing for me”, not “this repulses me”. Things I was neutral towards got that designation. If you intended 3 to be “This doesn’t particularly arouse or repulse me”, then please make that more clear.
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yeah, I also used it that way
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Thanks for question 2. I’m AMAB; I don’t perform masculinity well, and I have some degree of dysphoria towards male features of my body; but I’m generally well-set into my life-as-a-male routine, and I feel like calling myself “trans” would cheapen the experience of real trans people.
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Sometimes I fantasize about being a cat: the chasing, the purring, the affection… it all looks so fun! But I have no interest in modifying my body or my identity to be more cat-like. Nor am I interested in the furry subculture. The only way I see myself pursuing my cat fantasies is if I’m granted magical shape-shifting powers. That’s the same way that I, as a cis-male, feel about my fantasies of being a woman.
I say this because, even if the survey detects no relationship between the *intensity* of autogynephilic/autoandrophilic fantasies and transsexuality, the fantasies could play a role. Consider the types of fantasies you wrote about recently in “Fantasies Are Okay”: A person whose *most intense* fantasies involve an immoral act might never seriously consider committing such an act. So when a fantasy crosses over to being a real ambition, there’s got to be some factor in play other than how intense that fantasy is. Maybe transsexuality is (for some) the combination of a fantasy and that mysterious factor.
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A couple of questions where it was unclear how I should answer:
-I am definitely a cis-man, but don’t strongly identify with my maleness. I felt like my gender identity was very accurately described by your old “cis by default” post back in the day: I don’t have a strong gender identity, was assigned male at birth, my intuition is that I would be just as happy as a woman, but transitioning sounds like a huge pain and I’m content as a dude too (i.e., I don’t experience gender dysphoria) so why bother? I answered “Definitely cis-male” since that’s how I identify, but I don’t really “strongly identify as male” which was the second part of that option.
-I was unclear how I should answer some of the “as a man” questions. Most of my sexual fantasies are about me, as myself, doing sexual stuff with attractive women. However, I am also aroused by fantasies of myself, as a woman, doing sexual stuff. Answering the “as a woman” questions was easy. But questions about fantasies in which I have a man’s chest…like, I have a man’s chest in most of my fantasies, because I have my own body in most of my fantasies. I find these fantasies arousing; otherwise I wouldn’t be fantasizing about them. But the fact that I have a man’s chest isn’t what’s arousing about them; it’s a consequence of the fact that I am myself in most of my fantasies. I answered most of these questions with “3” (i.e., fantasies in which I have male body parts purely as a result of having my own body are, on average, no more or less arousing than my other sexual fantasies, because in fact it covers almost all of them).
Was I maybe only supposed to answer the questions about counterfactual body parts?
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Most of this applies to me as well, in particular my confusion at how to approach the “fantasies as a man” questions: I already do have a man’s chest, legs, etc. and don’t explicitly have to fantasize about having them…
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The questions in my survey kinda disambiguate this by coming down on the side of “you have to explicitly fantasize about them”. However, I don’t know whether that is the correct thing to do. I mean, I guess you’d have to do further research on the correlates of it to figure it out.
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Question so I don’t screw up your data-when you ask if I’m turned on by fantasies such as “having sex with someone else as a man”, do you mean am I turned on by the idea of being a man, or do you mean am I turned on by fantasies that I’m a man in? I’m a cisgender male, so unsurprisingly I’m a man in my fantasies as well. Should I answer the “having sex with someone else as a man” question 5 because I’m male in fantasies where I’m banging the woman of my dreams, or 1 because in such fantasies I’m getting off to thoughts about sex with an attractive mate, rather than thinking “ooh, I get to be a man for this”?
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Yeah, this could be clearer. I only answered high marks if the thing in question is (or at least CAN BE) a salient feature of the fantasy for me. I’m a cis-ish woman who can get turned on by fantasies about being a man, but also by fantasies about being a woman (even though I already mostly am). I also have fantasies where I have sex as a man or woman and it’s not really part of what’s turning me on, just background info.
Never have I ever felt turned on by the thought of having a woman’s or a man’s legs, though, so that got a 1 (for ‘not a turn-on’, NOT ‘a strong turn-off’) from me.
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I have AAP phases but the one thing I have never desired is a man’s legs, other than in as much as girl legs sort of don’t fit. Presumably somebody is into boy legs. But no.
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Other men of ozy’s commentariat: do any of you guys sleep in jock straps? That just strikes me as really uncomfortable. Like, why.
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Was it not asking about underwear/sleepwear and jock straps was part of ‘underwear’ not ‘sleepwear’?
Tho, on the other hand, sometimes when you have big heavy boobs gentle support wear for sleeping helps, so maybe if you have an enormous heavy penis…
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Does not sound comfortable. And no, dicks don’t need support while sleeping.
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What’s the progress on this survey?
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The survey obviously should have included the user’s age, as well as when they started transition. I started my mtf transition whenever i was 19, and I’m almost positive that I actually scored more in the autoandrophilic part of the spectrum. However, I am an entertainer, and I know that AGP exists, given some of the trans women I meet in doing what I do. They’re almost always aged 25 or older, and their transitions are confined to going out as women on weekends. I would say it’s the bulk of the mtf community that falls into this category, as I’ve been TS myself for nearly 4 years and have met A LOT of other trans women. There’s a distinct difference between the entertainers or trans kids vs. the older transitioners. The only problem is that we younger transitioners (starting before age 25) have so many friends that there’s no way we’d sit around bored enough to research something as mundane as the AGP theory. I am always a glaring exception to this, though, because I’ve been recovering from surgery on my face. -_- Also, I wish the quiz results would have been disclosed.
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