[content warning: mentions of transphobic violence, slurs]
My understanding of transness bears certain similarities to those of the Blanchardians I know. I suspect that trans people fall broadly into two types, although as always sharp binaries erase the experiences of many people. However, I think that their proposed etiologies are absurdly incorrect. I believe that HSTS-subtype trans people experience gender dysphoria and are not simply transitioning as part of a rational decision, and I believe that autogenderphile-subtype trans people do not primarily transition because of a sexual fetish.
My true rejection of Blanchardian etiologies is that they don’t describe my experiences at all. Of course, I don’t expect this to convince people who aren’t me.
Regarding the HSTS subtype: I agree that it is likely that HSTS-subtype trans people are on a continuum with gender-non-conforming gay people. I too am struck by the similarity between stone butches and trans men, and by the similarity between drag queens (particularly historically) and trans women. The sharp divisions between these groups seem to me to be as much a political construct as an accurate description of empirical reality (read David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender for more). There is an incentive for both trans people and gay people to support this separation. It is far easier to advocate for trans people’s rights if transness is disconnected from icky sex stuff. And gay people (particularly gay men) have a lot to gain from distancing themselves from the victims of transmisogyny.
Of course, people currently understand themselves as either a trans woman or a gender-non-conforming gay man, either a butch lesbian or a trans man. The categories we have available influence our behavior and self-understandings, and lead to a very real difference between butch lesbians and trans men in present-day queer culture. However, this is not true historically. Either we or the people forty years ago have to be wrong, and it seems quite likely to me that the answer is “us”.
That said, it seems to me that the HSTS theory– which generally implies that transition is a rational decision made because it is easier to get through life as a passing straight trans woman than as a flamboyant gay man– neglects the reality of gender dysphoria. It’s true that it’s hard to draw a firm line where a strong desire to be gender-non-conforming transforms into gender dysphoria. And it’s true that many people, particularly historically, chose to manage their dysphoria through being a drag queen, stone butch, etc., and that whether one becomes a stone butch or a trans man probably depends in part on which one gives you the best other life outcomes. But nevertheless there are many teenagers thrown out of homes whose parents would be fine with a faggot but not a tranny. And while “no fats no fems” is a trend in gay culture, gay men are mostly not going to straight-up assault or murder you for having sex with them as a feminine gay guy, while many straight men will. Conversely, there exist feminine gay men in Iran who have not transitioned, even though it is clearly better to be a straight trans woman in Iran than a feminine gay man. It seems to me that the only way to explain this is that “desire to live as a particular gender and/or sex for its own sake” is an actual thing which puts its thumb on the scales.
Regarding the autogynephile/autoandrophile subtype: I feel like autogynephilia theories, to succeed, must sail very carefully between Scylla and Charybdis, and so far all such theories I’ve seen have wound up being devoured by the monster or drowning in the whirlpool.
Scylla: In general, people do not disrupt their entire lives out of a solely and purely sexual motivation. People who kink on rape might roleplay rape, but they don’t try to get raped themselves. People with a public-use fetish might get tied up for public use at a play party, but they don’t generally do it on a street corner. I’ve met quite a few people with an impregnation fetish, and to my knowledge they have collectively had one unplanned pregnancy, which was a result of attempting to safely indulge the impregnation fetish and screwing it up.
Of course there are exceptions: some people with a rape fetish commit rape; some people with an impregnation fetish deliberately get impregnated; some people with a bimbo fetish get boob jobs. Perhaps many people are secretly autogenderphiles, but most people don’t transition. Let’s Fermi estimate this: 0.3% of people are trans; perhaps 0.15% are autogenderphiles. I’m going to guess that maybe 1% of people are willing to do something as life-changing as transition to satisfy a fetish. (If you are objecting that this is too low, consider that– unlike, say, rape and impregnation– autogenderphilia cannot be indulged on impulse when one is sexually aroused and not thinking straight and– unlike, say, getting a boob job– it involves a major disruption to one’s personal relationships, including perhaps a divorce and parental rejection. I consider this estimate conservative.)
This estimate would imply that 15% of people have an autogenderphilia fetish, making it one of the most common fetishes among men. A study of the relative frequency of sexual fetishes suggests that this is not the case: “behavior of others”, the largest category into which autogenderphilia could conceivably be put, is less common than “body parts or features” and “objects associated with the body.” In particular, it appears that autogenderphilia is distinctly less common than foot fetishism, and far less than 15% of the population is interested in foot fetishism.
There are certain exceptions to my “people do not generally disrupt their lives out of sexual motivation.” For instance, people may cheat on their spouses, engage in 24/7 BDSM, or become polyamorous. However, these desires are generally not purely and solely sexual in motivation. A person who cheats on their spouse may find their relationship unfulfilling or be looking for a sense of validation. 24/7 subs generally find submission emotionally satisfying or have a romantic desire for a dominant/submissive relationship. Polyamorous people often value the freedom associated with being poly or not having to limit their partners’ sexual choices. While sexual motivation is no doubt one part of these decisions– a person may be more likely to become poly if they’re sexually aroused by their partner having sex with other people, or more likely to cheat if they’re turned on by the person they plan on cheating with– the emotional and interpersonal components play a more primary role.
From a gender-dysphoria perspective, transition makes sense: even if sexual arousal at the idea of being a particular gender is one aspect of why a person transitions, their gender dysphoria is still the primary motivation. From a perspective which does not accept the validity of gender dysphoria, you have to explain why this is the only sexual fetish that motivates people to this extent.
Charybdis: Researchers like Anne Lawrence argue that autogynephilia should be interpreted as a kind of romantic love which has affectional and attachment-based elements. When sexual arousal at the idea of being a woman fades, trans women may still feel an affectional bond to the reality of being women. Trans women may idealize the female body, as lovers idealize their beloved; trans women prioritize transition highly, as lovers prioritize their love; trans women may transition after some adverse life circumstance, as people use a new love affair to cope with some setback in life; people may find meaning and deep personal transformation in their gender, as they do with love.
I will set aside, for a moment, the argument that through an equal series of comparisons one could prove that the average musician experiences romantic attraction to the idea of being a rock star. (They idealize what being a musician is like, they prioritize playing music, they use music to cope with problems, they find a sense of meaning and personal transformation in music… those rock stars keep taking sexy pictures of themselves and they SAY it’s for the fans, but it’s probably a sign of their deep-seated autorockstarphilia.) A stronger question, for me, is: where are all the other people falling in love with themselves?
There exist trans women who are attracted to red-haired women, have a strong desire to be women, and have no particular interest in being redheads. By extension, there must presumably be men who are attracted to red-haired women, have no particular interest in being women, and have a strong desire to be redheads. Since red hair dye is readily available, these men would have no incentive not to admit that they are in love with themselves as redheads. Why aren’t they?
Maybe people are only capable of falling in love with themselves as a particular gender. This seems strange and arbitrary to me: our culture uses gender as the primary way of classifying people’s sexual attractions, but other cultures didn’t, and there’s no reason to assume that biology cares more about our classification system than the Romans’ active/passive system. But fine. Let’s grant that.
Where are the autoandrophiliac gay men? About 3.5% of the American population is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Assuming again that 0.15% of people are autogenderphiliac, by my reckoning there should be 15,750 lesbian, gay, or bisexual Americans who are romantically in love with themselves (7,650 people who are just lesbian or gay). Fortunately, in this age of the Internet, weird people can find each other. Any group of nearly sixteen thousand people (or about seven thousand five hundred people, if you prefer to exclude bisexuals) ought to have a thriving Internet community, with its own Fetlife groups, tiresome discourse, and extremely niche porn. This community does not appear to actually exist; at best, a small number of autoromantics appear to comment on AVEN, but not in sufficient numbers to get their own forum. (To be clear, I’m not claiming there’s no such thing as autoromanticism; human sexuality is very diverse. I am claiming that it seems extraordinarily rare, far rarer than would be required to explain this theory.)
I have occasionally heard speculation that gay male bodybuilders are autoandrophiles. It seems to me that if that were the case it would be commonly known in gay male bodybuilder communities that many gay male bodybuilders are literally in love with themselves. Again, why would they hide it? It’s not like a gatekeeper is going to take away their squat rack if they don’t.
Finally, the autogynephilia hypothesis fails to explain one of the most striking facts about type-two transgender people, their distinctive personalities. The type-two personality could be characterized as “broader autism phenotype”, “nerdy”, or “really really weird”; someone in the Slate Star Codex comments called it “Heinlein protagonists”, which is honestly my favorite characterization. (Right down to the wacky political beliefs!) When I first read about Martine Rothblatt, a highly paid trans lesbian CEO who is trying to make a robot version of her wife so that her wife can live forever, I was like “yeah, that’s the kind of shit queer trans people do”. We’re strange people.
It is very unclear to me why autogynephilia would be the Weird Person Fetish. It’s not that only super-weird people transition: like I said above, autogynephilia is not that common of a fetish. Perhaps all fetishes are more common among super-weird people? Maybe there’s some connection between fetish and personality type? It’s an answerable question in theory, but Blanchardians appear strangely averse to trying to answer it.
Thing of Things 
Blanchard identified three total types of trans people: two types of trans women and one type of trans men. Your theory seems to be that afab trans people fall into the same two categories as amab trans people. Do modern Blancharians agree on that point? Or do they count Blanchard’s original three groups or four or some other number?
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Internet Blanchardians collectively agree that Blanchard was up his own ass about paraphilias not existing in women and that autoandrophilia exists as well. This is one thing I agree with them about.
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My sense is that Internet Blanchardians seem to be more different from Blanchard himself than they acknowledge, and they should really acknowledge that to stop confusing people.(However, I am not completely certain of this, as I haven’t read that much of Blanchard’s more recent stuff.)
I am more certain that Bailey’s summary of the theory seems to be quite different from the Internet Blanchardian version, and they should be actively distancing themselves from that summary.
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@tch
I have had people tell me that I should really stop calling myself a Blanchardian because of all the ways I deviate from the theory-as-written; however, I have noted a tendency on their part to overestimate how many ways I deviate from the theory-as-written.
“You should really stop using those terms — I mean, it’s not like you literally believe trans women are only trans because they’re autogynephilic, right?”
“well”
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@Trent
Based on what I know about your opinions I certainly don’t think you should stop calling yourself Blanchardian. But also, like, it was striking how much in the ITT I or someone else would use or mention something directly taken from Blanchard (or from Bailey) and then you or others would comment that actually Blanchardians believe a much more nuanced version of that.
What’s confusing is that I’ve heard Bailey endorsed as saying the same thing as Lawrence, just less nicely, whereas it seems to me they’re really making different claims, and if I argue against Bailey’s summary I will probably be accused of strawmanning!
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@trentzandrewson
Based on what I know of your opinions I certainly don’t think you should stop calling yourself a Blanchardian! But like, it seemed to me that during the ITT I or someone would use or mention an argument basically taken from Blanchard, and the reaction in the comments would be that that’s sort of a strawman and an actual Blanchardian would have a more nuanced view.
This is even more true with Bailey – and like, I realize that Bailey just summarized/popularized the theory, but still, given that the Bailey version is sort of the strawman version, I would have expected other Blanchardians to be like “stop identifying the theory with him”.
Of course it’s terribly presumptuous of me to be telling you what you should do about your own theory! My impression could definitely be wrong. I want to share my impression anyway.
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Hannah, until 2008 there was practically no literature on non-homosexual FtM. In 1995 one paper discussed 2 possible cases but these were regarded at the time as outliers. Since 2011 we have seen a massive increase in incidence of nonhomosexual FtM and it’s safe to say that everybody in the field now recognises it. Blanchard himself is retired, but he now also does. It seems to conform to something that could be called ‘autoandrophilia’ or AAP but much more research is required. Nevertheless, a basic profile is available, although it is nothing like as nuanced or detailed as what we have for non homosexual male GD or autogynephilia.
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If you acknowledge that there are two separate types of transness who likely have a separate etiology, and you agree with Blanchardians in who to classify as each type, and you agree with many of the details of how each type functions, aren’t you already half-way Blanchardian?
It’s kinda like the difference between consequentialist libertarians and NAP libertarians. If you get down to the deep level, the founding philosophy, then they will probably strongly disagree with each other. However, in many other places, like less philosophical/foundational discussions, they will overall be very similar positions.
Try using the HSTS/AGP distinction in your everyday thoughts and discussions about transness and tell me it isn’t super addicting, and that you don’t suddenly gain a lot of sympathy for Blanchardianism.
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Do Blanchardians deny gender dysphoria?
Everything I’ve read summarizing Blanchard or Bailey seems to go to the argument that you can largely but not entirely distinguish the two groups, and some observations about the groups.
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I don’t think so. Both Trent and Sillyolme has talked about it.
However, from the Blanchardian point of view, gender dysphoria has a known cause, and it’s often more interesting to talk about the cause than the dysphoria itself.
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jossedly: no, we don’t deny gender dysphoria at all. But it’s much more nuanced than is often thought. In non-homosexuals we see it as an aetiology of transition desire, in which the mild end might be accommodated by partial or temporary cross-dressing etc, becoming stronger and more oppressive until Gender Dysphoria is identified. In this, the GD is intense and debilitating. Autogynephilia, the cause of this, is a narcissistic paraphilia.
The consensus on homnosexual transsexualism, HSTS, is that is it caused by in-utero hormone delivery anomalies — too little or too much testosterone. I call the result of this ‘Sexual Inversion’; after Ellis and Ulrichs, but some people don’t like it. Nevertheless, since it is a biological phenomenon, it exhibits variation, so again, an aetiology is formed; but unlike non-homosexual forms, this seems to crystallise out in mid-teens to early 20s, instead of becoming progressively more severe. That doesn’t mean that the homosexual form is less severe, just that it behaves in a different manner; once a individual with Sexual Inversion’s sexuality/gender is stabilised, it seems to stay that way. This is probably why transition appears to be far more successful for HSTS than for nonhomosexual transitioners.
So homosexual gender dysphoria and non-homosexual gender dysphoria, at least in males, are two completely different phenomena. They’re not similar and they should not be conflated. That leads some people who recognise Blanchard as being fundamentally correct to be somewhat circumspect with the term.
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I don’t think there’s anything contradictory in saying that Blanchard noticed real patterns and that he wedded them to a bizarre and transphobic etiology, rooted in inappropriate sexualization of trans people’s motivations, while treating them in an unnecessarily reductive way. (For instance, not all androphiles are HSTS-type, not all autogynephile-types experience autogynephilia or are queer, etc. You can see patterns on a population level but on an individual level it’s often blurrier.)
Etiology actually matters. For instance, I’m not going to recommend transition to a gender-non-conforming gay man who doesn’t want to be a woman (outside of Iran, anyway) or an autogynephiliac man who doesn’t want to be a woman. And if I meet someone who hates their genitalia but who doesn’t really fit into either type, I’m going to recommend transition. I would do the exact opposite if I thought Blanchard was right.
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I don’t think Blanchardians would give those recommendations either, though I may be mistaken.
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Do you think any of us is in a position to make useful recommendations to any other one of us about transitioning? My assumption is that every person pondering transition has a story to tell that’s particular to them, even if broad categories can be said to exist. So that they are the only ones who can make sense of what leads them to ponder transition and whether it makes sense for them to pursue it.
Etiology related to questions of identity seems to me to be so complex and multi-variabled as to be untestable.
I’m up for being persuaded otherwise, though.
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“For instance, I’m not going to recommend transition to a gender-non-conforming gay man who doesn’t want to be a woman (outside of Iran, anyway) or an autogynephiliac man who doesn’t want to be a woman.”
It seems very strange to me to suggest people transition when they don’t want to!
GNC homosexuals who don’t transition generally have strong reasons to not transition; for instance, they may have close ties to their local LGB community, think transition is the evil trans cult trying to convert LGB youth (I didn’t say they were good reasons), or be in a long-term relationship with someone who would not be attracted to them if they transitioned. Even if the most radical ‘dysphoria is a meme and transition is a choice’ interpretation of Blanchardianism was right, and I’m not sure anyone (Blanchard-Bailey-Lawrence included) thinks it is, transition would not be an adaptive choice for people with those reasons.
A*Ps who don’t transition are more complicated — the modal trans person is a lot older than people who hang around trans communities that are not Susan’s Place tend to assume, and a twenty-year-old AGP with no desire to be a woman may end up as a fifty-year-old telling her wife that she’s been hiding her true gender her whole life. (I spend a lot of time reminding gynephilic trans girls in their teens and twenties who make fun of late-transitioning ‘hons’ that it’s an accident of fate they aren’t in those shoes.) It is worth telling AGPs that their situation can and does progress over the years and that today’s mild dysphoria may be tomorrow’s ‘dying is better than living like this’. However, if someone currently does not want to transition and is confident in that statement, there’s no reason to assume ‘prophylactic transition’ will give them a better outcome.
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trentz: See, that’s a point of disagreement! I think there are a lot of people who aren’t transitioning because they think transition is an evil trans cult trying to convert LGB youth who would be way happier if they transitioned, and part of the reason I believe this is that I think “desire to live as a different sex/gender for its own sake, separate from any rational decisions” is a real thing and I can sometimes tell if people have it.
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@ozy:
Hm, in isolation, I’m not sure we actually disagree on this. I am not the ‘dysphoria is a meme and transition is a choice’-type Blanchardian*, and in the alternate universe where dirtywhiteboi67 was born thirty years later into the ‘HSTS-spectrum natal females default to being men’ timeslice she would probably be happier. I was trying to give examples of why someone on that spectrum might not transition even if one takes that specific variant of Blanchardianism as the truth.
I still fail to see how ‘transsexualism is either a neurointersex thing with the same etiology as cissexual homosexuality or an erotic target location error’ inherently leads to ‘all HSCSes and people with erotic target location errors should transition’.
*I am not sure this is possible even though I treat it as possible in discussions, because one of the fundamental HSTS traits is genital avoidance and I am not sure how that is meant to be constructed as independent of dysphoria
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Given that your type two is broader autistic phenotype, could the difference between the two types be explained simply by the fact that broader autistic phenotype people and neurotypical people are different in general (and perhaps react differently to being transgender)?
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I would say that is a different question. Why are the BAP trans people less likely to be “HSTS”? That is, where are the BAP androphilic trans women? Obviously there may be some just as Ozy says there are some autosexuals. But in broad strokes, androphilic trans women are non BAP and gynephilic trans women are BAP. Why??? Do you think BAP people are so much more likely to have a specific attraction pattern?
I don’t think it can be that simple, for one thing because in my experience both types of DFAB dysphorics are more autistic.
(Note I say both types without necessarily endorsing typology.)
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But apparently androphilic “AGP” trans women exist due to “meta-attraction”, which I don’t really understand how it differs from usual ways that women are attracted to men.
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@tch,
I am not extremely familiar with the meta attraction literature and can’t find a summary to link, so this is a rough impression here and furthermore I’m not saying I endorse this content, I’m just trying to express stuff that I’ve gathered over years of reading.
The general idea is that being a cisgender woman in a relationship with a man is a very specific experience (obviously not universal). Here is a description of these ideas where the cisgender woman is being this very diligent loyal kind wife. Whereas you could have this AGP married to a stay at home wife but escalating a CD habit by seeking relationships with men for her own pleasure. Also the impression of “wanting to be dominated” as this sort of degradation thing that’s perceived differently from cisgender men subs and cisgender female subs. As just a hobby instead of something that weighs down a cisgender woman’s lifestyle of where she goes to college and buys a house.
It’s like, a cisgender woman doesn’t value herself, she provides the value to her husband. Where the stereotypical affluent AGP is “selfish” in terms of pursuing lifestyle changes no matter what it costs the preexisting family. Anyway, these AGP folks also are in a really different position of less likely financial dependence on a man, or not facing the risks of young HSTS types looking for husbands in their early twenties.
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That seems like a really bizarre series of stereotypes of both cis and trans women, and also doesn’t address my crucial question of “is ‘meta-attraction’ to men a real category which is meaningfully different from other androphilia and in particular from androphilia as experienced by cis women”.
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(I’ve been meaning to follow up with this question on the threads started in response to my ITT entry, but haven’t gotten around to it)
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Alright, I shall put it this way, again hedging that this is a blunt stereotype. The emotion that leads a man to employ a dominatrix may be different from the emotion that would lead a man to become a househusband.
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So are you saying that “true” attraction is the latter and meta-attraction is the former?
This also doesn’t really match my understanding of how attraction typically works…
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I’m a broad autistic phenotype (diagnosed autistic) purely androphilic trans woman (sort of – I feel dirty saying it but back when I actually had a libido scent was the prevailing factor in attraction and I tended to find pre-transition trans women and post-transition trans men equally attractive cuz… you smell somewhat different when you’re on T).
I’ve met a few others. It’s just that straight trans women are less common than gay trans women I think (true of trans men too). I mean I literally haven’t met another straight trans woman in real life before (I saw two on Grindr but w/e… I felt dirty using Grindr being female anyways) despite knowing we exist and looking for them. So I don’t see it as much as “BAP trans women tend to be gynephilic” as “transwomen tend to be gynephilic and Broad Autism Phenotype doesn’t select for straightness”
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@1angelette
So what you’re saying is that “normal” attraction is more “househusband” (love?) and “meta-attraction” is more “dominatrix” (selfishness and sex?)?
I would be pretty surprised if the people who talk about meta-attraction think that normal attraction is purely loving and not at all selfish. Anyway certainly plenty of people with pretty normal attraction patterns hire dominatrixes and make sexual choices for selfish reasons.
If my understanding (to the degree that I have a understanding) is correct, I think you’re drawing a different distinction from what “meta-attraction” is meant to capture. I think “normal attraction” is supposed to be something like “visual attraction to someone’s body” and “meta-attraction” is like “attraction to the idea of someone being attracted to me”. My real objection to that is that I think a lot of cis people experience the latter sort of attraction and if there’s an actual distinction between (part of) what I experience and what trans women experience, I don’t know what it is.
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[oversharing ahead]
(I’m a bi cis woman, and my attraction patterns change a lot over time, but right now they’re actually reasonably similar to the description given of “pseudobisexual” trans women – actively visually attracted to women, somewhat attracted to the idea of interacting sexually with men but there’s less visual attraction involved. Also through most of my life, visual attraction has just not been a big part of sexual attraction for me – like, it’s mostly been the case that I have opinions that someone is attractive, but this doesn’t really make me want to have sex with them, the thing that makes me want to have sex with someone is more touch-based somehow (responsive desire mostly?). And wanting to feel desired is definitely part of my sexuality as well – in fact I think this is almost a stereotype of cis women’s sexualities?)
(I know I’m the one who introduced the notion of visual attraction here, but I just don’t understand what other thing the distinction is supposed to mean if not that)
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I keep seeing people claim they aren’t (full) Blanchardians and promptly write things I would have written half a year ago. It’s very entertaining.
The thing that popped out the most to me here is ‘A*Ps are probably innately weird, because it wouldn’t make sense for transition to select for weirdness’. Transition selecting for weirdness for both etiologies is making an increasing amount of sense to me. People talk a lot about how gynephilic trans women are a very autistic demographic, but that’s nothing compared to trans men of both etiologies — half of all trans men are Broad Autism Phenotype or higher! I’ve been in autism communities with lower rates! HSTS and AAP (maybe ‘AAP’, because tailcalled can’t seem to find many AAP trans guys, but in lack of evidence of absence there’s no better term to use) FTMs continue to look very different despite having similar weird neurotypes, particularly in that the autistic AAPs I’ve met tend to be autistic in the same really unique you-know-it-when-you-see-it resemblance-to-the-male-version-is-coincidental way that cis women are and AGP women aren’t. While you can make the prediction that 3/4 types are innately autistic for different reasons (HSTS FTM = neuromasculinization [only works if you support extreme male brain], A*P = …plasticbrains?), ‘A*Ps in particular are not super autistic as a demographic but the ones who transition definitely are’ kinda makes more sense.
(Semi-related: I have like 12 entirely separate AGP clusters and all but one of them is called ‘failed male’. 4chan was a mistake)
What’s really starting to interest me is the A*P-Judaism association — I saw it in the ‘plasticbrains’ cluster you talked about, but I just kinda assumed ‘yeah, Ashkenazim and transitioned A*Ps are both of above average intelligence, this is probably coincidental’. Then on 4chan I met an AAP who was putting some serious thought to transition who I had a really cool conversation with about The Typology, and halfway through he mentioned he wasn’t sure how to pull it off because his Hasidic family would probably disown him.
Full ‘HSTS is a decision’ of the type you see on transkids.us has never rung true to me. On the other hand, there are things on transkids.us that ring pretty true to me (“Holy shit, someone else thinks it’s really weird when people talk about ‘boymode’ and ‘girlmode’! Someone else wants to die when people ask for their pronouns because it means they aren’t passing! Someone else has no idea what ‘innate gender identity’ is supposed to mean!”) that come from that fundamental assumption, and as long as I let psychology invalidate my identity, I can recognize that if HSTS transition was a rational decision rather than an involuntary reaction I probably would have made the same one.
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“tailcalled can’t seem to find many AAP trans guys, but in lack of evidence of absence there’s no better term to use”
Well, I can find AAP “transmasculine enbies”, which is kinda like AAP trans guys.
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I think the underlying issue is that they are trying to make a moral argument disguised as an empirical one. If autogynophilia is real, and it is so important to people’s wellbeing that they choose to transition, then the utilitarian response is the same as with gender dysphoria being real, that they should transition.
Whereas the conclusion that seems to be mainly drawn is “its a sex thing, therefore icky and not a preference that should get moral value. So transitioning is bad”
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‘AGPs are equally as trans as HSTSes, deserve to transition, and should have their transitions treated as equally valid’ is a fundamental cornerstone of even the least trans-friendly Blanchardian arguments. This is hard to miss if you have ever been exposed to one.
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Reading the Sillyolme site, she shows a clear disdain for AGPs.
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Kay Brown has understandable reasons for that disdain (the posts where it shines through most tend to be the ones that talk about the reason), though it would be nice to have a significant pop-Blanchardian who didn’t have that. I’d take up the mantle, but I don’t have the executive function.
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“Sex things don’t have any positive moral value” is very different from “what opponents are calling autogynephilia is something that should get highest moral value”. Some trans advocates come off like the most terrible devil is a spouse who does not actively cheerlead every single action of the newly out trans wife, even when hundreds of thousands of dollars are getting drawn from the joint checking account. Think of it the way that “loving oneself” is getting equated with “loving another woman”. Is it reasonable to divorce one’s wife and marry a new wife? Yes. Is the way that’s done sometimes not-so-nice? Also yes.
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“I think the underlying issue is that they are trying to make a moral argument disguised as an empirical one.”
ALKAYTN, who did you mean by “they” – Blanchardians, critics or someone else?
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Even if everyone agrees that people who want to transition should transition, it also matters what’s true.
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I don’t know what this “gender” thing you keep talking about is, but I’m pretty sure biology does care about biological sex.
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Biological-sex-grounded sexual orientation is clearly an important method of classification in our culture, and really important to our identities because of that. But as you keep saying, the purpose of psychology is to invalidate people’s identities. And as a null hypothesis, noting that sexual orientation was invented in the late nineteenth century and essentially didn’t exist before then, there is no reason to think we are correct and people in the past were not. (Indeed, there’s a reason to be biased against the idea that our conceptualization is correct– we would likely think sexual orientation is important to biology whether or not it really is, because our culture thinks it’s very important.)
Of course, you can turn this back on me by saying that ETLEs are also cultural, and the importance of sexual orientation in our culture means the only ETLEs we have are gender-based. Of course, in this case you’d expect non-gender-based ETLEs in, say, feudal Japan or the Roman Empire. FWIW, HSTS-types definitely exist in the Roman Empire– Elagabalus and the priestesses of Cybele come to mind– but they are a small minority of Roman men who have sex with men.
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Wasn’t Elagabalus AGP?
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@ozy and tailcalled both:
There is probably not enough known about Elagabalus to make a call on her etiology (‘her’ for simplicity of conversation), but she appeared to be attracted to men at all times, as opposed to just while presenting as female. She married women, but marrying women when you’re a Roman emperor isn’t really a statement on your sexual orientation.
@ozy specifically:
There are without dispute people in the West who have non-gender-based ETLEs. (Of course, ETLEs cluster, and that’s how you get statistics like 50% of men with limb dysphoria also having gender dysphoria.)
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Trentz: You can see why I’m unsympathetic to “there are MULTIPLE groups we can characterize as having ETLEs in spite of their objections to the contrary.” Limb dysphoria is not exactly an unambiguous ETLE case.
Anyway, that section was about romantic love, and I’m going to guess that people with limb dysphoria also do not generally self-report being romantically in love with themselves without limbs.
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So, I don’t know very much history and could very well be wrong about this, but I thought the claim that sexual orientation was a recent invention meant that the concept of "sexual orientation" as an intrinsic attribute of a person was what was new. So we would see various forms of situational homosexual behavior (men resorting to sodomy when no women were available), but with male–female pairings are still being the default of what it means to "mate".
We know sexual orientation isn’t going to be important to biology not because we have reason to think our culture is misleading us, but because exclusive homosexuality is maladaptive. (Some have argued that the occasional gay uncle would be useful for alloparenting, but I’m given to understand that the math doesn’t check out.)
I deny this. See Lawrence’s "Clinical and Theoretical Parallels Between Desire for Limb Amputation and Gender Identity Disorder".
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@mtsw:
“Some have argued that the occasional gay uncle would be useful for alloparenting, but I’m given to understand that the math doesn’t check out.”
It’s a little complicated…
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ETLE?
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I think your dismissal of gender as a concept impoverishes your model of the world because it makes social dysphoria a lot harder to explain. For an example of how this leads to predictive inaccuracy, this leads to you being surprised that someone would transition when they’re really unlikely to pass as a cis woman. Whereas I find this completely unsurprising because it’s perfectly normal for trans women to be much happier when classified as women, which does not at all require others to see them as cis women.
Actually this clarifies something for me: if your model of dysphoria is primarily physical dysphoria, it makes way more sense to me that this could be similar to “romantic/sexual yearning for oneself as a woman”. The reason AGP seems intuitively odd to me as an explanation of dysphoria is that social dysphoria doesn’t really fit into this.
I don’t see how AGP would lead to the feeling of incorrectness and pain when one has to present the wrong way even briefly, or when one is misgendered. Like, the closest analogues I can think of are (a) it’s painful to be separated from someone you love – but like, it’s painful to be separated for a long time, most people don’t feel acute discomfort when forced to be apart for even a short time, this would explain why a person with AGP would be sad if they don’t get to present feminine ever but it doesn’t explain why they would be sad that they have to present masculine for one hour (b) it’s painful to be closeted about one’s sexual orientation – but like, part of the Blanchardian view of things is that people with AGP want their AGP to be hidden?
What is your explanation of social dysphoria? (My first hypothesis would be “desire to be perceived as a certain biological sex” – but again I think this is falsified by people who are way happier when given certain pronouns even understanding that everyone knows they’re trans, and even while talking about being trans.)
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“I think your dismissal of gender as a concept impoverishes your model of the world because it makes social dysphoria a lot harder to explain.”
I can endorse this! At least in the abstract; whether it applies to Saotome-Westlake specifically isn’t something I have spent much time thinking about.
“For an example of how this leads to predictive inaccuracy, this leads to you being surprised that someone would transition when they’re really unlikely to pass as a cis woman. Whereas I find this completely unsurprising because it’s perfectly normal for trans women to be much happier when classified as women, which does not at all require others to see them as cis women.”
…that really wasn’t where I expected that to go.
It is very important to me that others perceive me as a man. ‘Trans man’ is not the same category as ‘man’. I wish with every fucking fiber of my being that every last person in the world saw ‘trans man’ as simply a subcategory of ‘man’ on every conscious and subconscious level without any asterisks or statistically significant psychological differences, but they don’t, and it is far more likely than not that they never will, and that’s the world we live in and I’m the one who has to deal with it.
I can’t expect others to classify me as a man if I am not being seen as a cis man. I certainly can’t expect this in day-to-day life around normies, who are unlikely to even have a concept of ‘trans man’. Non-normie spaces tend to have concepts of ‘trans man’, but these are separate concepts to ‘cis man’ and will be treated accordingly — one example you see criticized in feminist communities being trans men conceptualized as ‘men-lite’. As far as I can tell it is impossible for the vast majority of people to subconsciously accept trans people as 100% equal members of the relevant gender, and this isn’t me typical-minding, because it’s utterly inscrutable to me that this is a thing other people have problems with.
Certainly there are people who experience a different morph of social dysphoria, but I am not sure ‘social dysphoria’ is a term that should be used this broadly. ‘Person who wants everyone to wear pronoun nametags so they stop misgendering her while she continues presenting in a way that makes people assume she is a cis man’ and ‘person who wants TERFs to put her in the same category as wombmoon-born wombmoons’ are very clearly experiencing different things, and calling the differences dimensional seems very insulting to the first person, who may experience very extreme distress over the fact she does not wear a pronoun nametag.
(Also, it would be remiss of me not to point out that A*Ps are in fact skewed more physically dysphoric than HSTSes on average, and so Saotome-Westlake focusing on physical dysphoria is not particularly odd)
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@Trent
Right, the main thing that keeps drawing me into this debate is that all the trans women I know would be classified as AGP (mostly against their will) and yet I keep observing social-dysphoria-driven behavior that doesn’t make sense to me under a framework that focuses on physical dysphoria.
I agree that most people’s gender classification mechanisms rely heavily on perceived physical sex, and that most socially dysphoric trans people would be happier passing than not. But also there’s a huge gap in happiness between “people are calling me the wrong pronouns” and “people are calling me the right pronouns because they realize from my presentation that I am a trans woman, or because I asked them to and they are not jerks” (which is pretty widely available in the Bay Area, though not universal).
I agree your description of your experience sounds different from what I’ve seen. I’m not sure I agree it’s totally different, though.
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FWIW, I would much rather be a nonbinary-without-asterisks than a nonbinary-with-asterisks, and having it pointed out to me that people consider me a nonbinary-with-asterisks makes me kind of want to die. (My true rejection of “woman-aligned”/”man-aligned”!) That said, my experience is definitely different from Trent’s, due to the lack of cisgender nonbinary people. But I’ve definitely spent a lot of time desperately wishing I were intersex.
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Good question! My current thoughts: when you want people to perceive and treat you in a certain way—for whatever reason—and they won’t do it, that hurts. For example, I was unhappy in school because I thought that the intellectual work I did on my own was better than my official schoolwork, and I was frustrated by the mismatch between what I should I should be doing, and what other people expected the social role of "student" to be. You certainly could reify this as "student dysphoria", a painful psychological condition deserving of respect and special treatment, but I think it’s more helpful and less victimhood-identity-politicsy to just say that I don’t like school for these-and-such reasons.
So, for late-onset gender dysphoria in males, my causal graph is a chain that looks like this: AGP fantasy → female/trans gender identity → social dysphoria. (Some fraction of males have AGP, some fraction of them develop trans identities, and some fraction of them develop social dysphoria.)
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[super belated response that I’ve had in my head for a while but just now am getting around to writing]
Thanks, some of this makes sense to me. I agree that it is generally unpleasant to be perceived wrongly.
I have a couple of follow-up thoughts to this, though.
First, I think it’s not a coincidence that most of the time when people bring up this argument – that there are other situations where one may be sad to be perceived one way and not another – the desired perception is something with inherent status benefits or substantially better treatment. In your example, if your extracurricular work was seen as more valuable, you would have been given the benefit of doing what you want to do. In another example I’ve heard – “what if I am sad when people don’t see me as attractive” – being seen as attractive carries obvious benefits (there are downsides too, but most people think the benefits are greater than the costs).
I don’t think this quite applies to gender. Or rather, some people speak as though it does, but I don’t think they’re right.
Some people think that one gender has privilege over another and that this is a good and clear reason to want to transition to the more-privileged gender. But clearly this view is pretty limited, as there are lots of trans women feminists who chose to transition despite that also being a choice to lose privilege.
Perhaps the thing one gains by being seen as the gender one wishes to be seen as is the permission to behave in accordance with one’s gender’s role. This is much more plausible, as it is usually only after one comes out as trans that one starts wearing the clothes and presentation of one’s gender – so maybe trans women want to be seen as women because then they will be allowed to wear dresses. But this doesn’t explain cases where someone first begins presenting feminine and later realizes that actually they want to be using feminine pronouns too. And in certain situations this causality is actually backwards – trans women may grudgingly wear a skirt when it’s actually inconvenient or impractical because being misgendered is worse.
So why then, in that situation, does being misgendered hurt? If it’s “because it hurts to be perceived differently than how one wishes to be perceived”, that doesn’t really say anything – why does one want to be perceived that way?
Perhaps it’s “because it’s hurtful to be perceived differently than one perceives oneself”. This is kind of plausible; I know I get withdrawn and uncomfortable when I can’t express myself openly and have to give people false impressions of myself. This is the “it’s painful to be closeted” thing. But as painful as being closeted about one’s sexual orientation is, my impression is that it’s not nearly as painful as being closeted about one’s gender, at least on a short time scale. So I think this still leaves something unexplained.
—
My other follow-up thought is: okay, it’s painful to be perceived differently to how you perceive yourself.
So, if you throw out the concept of gender, what do you think trans women want to be perceived *as*?
If we only have sex as a concept – you could say trans women want to be, and be perceived as, women-the-sex.
I think this does accurately describe the experience of a lot of trans women. But I think it’s seriously incomplete. Returning to my initial example – if this was all there was, there would indeed be no point in transitioning if one wasn’t likely to pass, and it wouldn’t make a difference whether someone called you “he” or “she” if it was obvious that even if they call you “she” they don’t think you are of female sex. And if one did transition and pass, one would then try to hide all signs of being trans and never talk about it.
But in fact we see trans women being much happier when they’re able to be out and have people call them “she” even if they don’t pass. And we see trans women openly talking about being trans and not being offended when people realize they’re trans, even though they *will* be offended if someone calls them “he” or says they’re “really a man”.
I think it makes much more sense to say we have this concept called gender, which is basically sex mapped to human cognition and simplified with prototype reasoning and complicated with layers of cultural norms, and that trans people care very much about being, and being perceived as, a member of their gender.
Being perceived as a member of the corresponding sex is *really helfpul* for being perceived as a member of their gender, because most people’s gender classifiers are heavily influenced by sex. So it could even be that a reason many trans people may want to be perceived as a member of that sex is because it is instrumentally useful for being perceived as a member of that gender. (This may be totally implausible and out of step with people’s actual experiences, I don’t know because I’m not trans.)
(Note also that “it’s painful to be perceived differently than one perceives oneself” and “it’s painful for a trans woman not to be perceived as female-sexed” aren’t really compatible as explanations of the situation, since I don’t think trans women perceive themselves as female-sexed. Again, the “gender” category reconciles these things.)
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One of your points goes approximately like this: “people can just find communities on the internet for their interests these days and these stats reflect that those communities should be larger”.
But — there are many reasons why you haven’t been able to find these communities on the internet. Some people just lurk or download media instead of participating in these communities. You might only be aware of a small slice of representation on the internet. And these groups benefit from being obscure to outside investigation if their interests are shamed.
Not to mention how many of those 15 thousand might not have regular access to private internet access, or time during the day to pursue those interests.
I’d be interested to see numbers on how large a following *any* interest has to have in order to develop a fandom and what counts as tiresome discourse. It should probably be measured not according to how many people participate, but according to the amount of time those people have to generate and share content or analysis. But either way, viewership stats from tv shows might help shed light on that.
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Maybe autorockstarphiles and autobodybuilderphiles do exist. I mean, autogynephilia theory does require that an extremely large number of trans women are inaccurately describing their feelings. So if autogynephilia is a commonly misdescribed phenomenon, other autophilia may be misdescribed as well. I mean, this is not by itself defense of autogynephilia theory as explanatory because “everyone is lying” seems pretty far fetched. I’m just saying, maybe Brendon Urie literally is in love with himself.
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I (continue to) think that if you broaden the concepts to this extent, the theory doesn’t really say anything anymore. If “auto___phile” just means “I want to be ___” then we don’t actually have a disagreement anymore.
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This is true. I would be interested on more literature about how the autophile has reduced… attraction to others? Allophilia? As my comments elsewhere on this post indicate, I’m not aware of this argument side being fleshed out much.
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Well, it smacks of Freudianism, and I haven’t read any of the actual primary sources, so what do I know, but I would say one question is whether the auto___philia is reflected in sexual fantasies.
If we learned that people playing guitars could largely be divided into two groups, one of whom had frequent sexual fantasies about themselves playing guitar, and one of whom had frequent sexual fantasies about fans having sex with them because they played guitar, and that there wasn’t much overlap, that would probably be worth a psych paper or two.
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I just noticed this:
“This estimate would imply that 15% of people have an autogenderphilia fetish, making it one of the most common fetishes among men.”
15% is the modern estimate on the prevalence of autogynephilia among cis men! This is the number that found in two studies that recruited participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk.
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With regards to:
“But nevertheless there are many teenagers thrown out of homes whose parents would be fine with a faggot but not a tranny. And while “no fats no fems” is a trend in gay culture, gay men are mostly not going to straight-up assault or murder you for having sex with them as a feminine gay guy, while many straight men will. Conversely, there exist feminine gay men in Iran who have not transitioned, even though it is clearly better to be a straight trans woman in Iran than a feminine gay man. It seems to me that the only way to explain this is that “desire to live as a particular gender and/or sex for its own sake” is an actual thing which puts its thumb on the scales.”
There may be some degree of “desire to live as a particular gender and/or sex for its own sake”, but it works very differently in HSTSs than in AGPs. The classical example of this is that HSTSs won’t transition if they can’t pass, whereas many AGPs will. However, a more illuminating example is the dilemma (for trans women) of “if you to choose between looking female to yourself and male to others; or male to both yourself and others, which would you pick?”.
From an AGP perspective, *obviously* the first one is better, since it only screws you over in one way rather than two. It’d be absolutely bizarre to pick the second one, and surely nobody would do it.
Except for HSTSs, somehow. All the HSTSs I’ve asked about it so far have picked the second option. This is bizarre, unless we model HSTS dysphoria as primarily originating from how they’re treated by others, in which case it makes perfect sense.
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This is a very late reply but I thought it was interesting to note that, at least among gay men, there are some men who could be classified as autosexual in a similar manner to women-loving trans women. They are attracted to their own masculinity and seek to sculpt their bodies in the image of their own desires (ie other masculine men).
I haven’t directly observed this same phenomenon in cisgendered women, although I have met at least one lesbian who says she habitually watches herself have sex in a mirror. She says that its not so much a desire to have sex with herself, but the image of the body being used for sex which turns her on. Which doesn’t sound entirely dissimilar to how some trans women have described their experiences to me, but a single anecdote is not data.
Still, I agree with yours and others conclusion that its unlikely that A*P trans women and trans men transition solely due to sexual motivations. I think there is a large enough body of evidence to hint at a genuine disconnect between the body’s expected and actual configuration that the comparison to phantom limb syndrome isn’t entirely inaccurate.
Of course I have to admit that I’m biased here because I am a lesbian identified female who seems to date primarily trans women (which is very uncommon in my experience) and I have extensive anecdotal experience with probably a dozen trans women during some of their most vulnerable and intimate moments.
Intuition tells me that they way they are is not just the result of some kind of inwardly focused sexual attachment, but a genuine desire to become and be seen as female. Of course, some women would tell me I’m lying to myself or I’m being manipulated, but I like to think I’m not that gullible.
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