Hermeneutical Injustice, Not Gaslighting

Tags

abuse tw, language, neurodivergence, not feminism go away, speshul snowflake trans

I have regularly complained about misuse of the term “gaslighting.” Gaslighting is a form of abuse in which a person you trust manipulates you into distrusting your own perceptions, memories, and judgments.

Unfortunately, the Internet has decided that instead “gaslighting” should be used as a synonym for concepts like “lying” or, in particularly irritating cases, “disagreeing with me.” As someone who was abused by gaslighting, I find this incredibly upsetting.

It is not gaslighting when someone contradicts you, or intentionally causes you to doubt your beliefs, or leaves you uncertain of what you believe, or even makes you think that they think you are crazy. Gaslighting is about someone lying to you in a way that causes you to lose trust in your own capabilities as a rational person: your ability to reason, your competence to figure out the truth, your capacity to remember things in a broadly accurate fashion even if you are sometimes fuzzy on details, your knowledge of your own feelings and thoughts and desires. And if your mind is unreliable… well, you’ll have to rely on someone else.

Gaslighting is already confusing and difficult to identify by its very nature, even when people haven’t decided to make the only word we have to refer to this very important concept mean “lying, but like I’m really upset about it.” If “gaslighting” refers to “lying,” it is difficult for people to name their abuse and recognize that what is happening to them is wrong.

(Honestly, using “gaslighting” to refer to someone disagreeing with you is itself kind of gaslight-y. Might want to check that out.)

Many people who want to misuse the term “gaslighting” should just suck it up and use a phrase like “blatantly lying” instead. However, I think sometimes people are gesturing for a concept that really isn’t covered by words like ‘lying.’ They’re gesturing for something structural, a harm done by society rather than by an individual; they’re gesturing for something oppressive, a dynamic related to their presence in a marginalized group; they’re gesturing for something that causes harm to your ability to reason and come to conclusions and trust your own self-knowledge, similarly to how gaslighting does, even if less severe and not perpetuated by a person.

In the name of not striking terms from others’ vocabulary without suitable replacement, I would like to suggest an alternative: hermeneutical injustice.

Hermeneutical injustice is a term invented by philosopher Miranda Fricker in her book Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is the harm caused to a person when they have an experience, but do not have the concepts or frameworks they need to make sense of what their experience is. For example, a man who falls in love with a man, in a society where homosexuality is conceived of as a disgusting perversion with no true affection or love in it, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A woman whose boss keeps plausibly-deniably touching her breasts and telling her that she has a great ass, before the invention of the concept of sexual harassment, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A man forced into sex who has no concept that men can be raped experiences a hermeneutical injustice.

(Of course, not all cases of hermeneutical injustice are related to a social justice topic: trypophobes of the world suffered a minor hermeneutical injustice before we had a cultural understanding that, for some people, that particular pattern of holes is just horrible.)

The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice is, of course, that you can’t express your feelings or experiences. If you don’t have the concept of “transness” or “sexual harassment” or “misophonia,” you are going to sound like an idiot when you try to explain why something hurts you.

You: “That sound is just BAD, okay. It makes me want to KILL SOMEONE. I want to STAB OUT MY EARDRUMS.”
Them: “This is a kind of unreasonable reaction to forks scraping against a plate. Why do you feel that way?”
You: “I don’t KNOW it just SUCKS.”
Them: “Well, are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?”
You: “AARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.”

Hermeneutical injustice also makes it harder to understand your own experiences. If you don’t have the concept of gender dysphoria, it’s hard to put together your body image issues, your depersonalization, your deep-seated jealousy of women, your desire to wear skirts, and the fact that you never play a male RPG character. Those will all seem like discrete unrelated facts that don’t point to anything.

But the harms of hermeneutical injustice go deeper. There are harms to the individual as a knower: you feel stupid or crazy because you can’t articulate your experiences, and that makes you feel stupid and crazy in general; it is hard to cultivate certain epistemic virtues if you can’t understand yourself and your own mind. And quite often– especially in more serious cases of hermeneutical injustice– there is a harm to your identity. The harm of growing up conceptualizing yourself as a sodomite rather than a gay person; the harm of thinking of yourself as a person who freaks out about normal flirtation instead of a victim of sexual harassment; the harm of having your very sense of self shaped by narratives and concepts that were developed by people who don’t understand people like you at all.

And if you’re harmed by hermeneutical injustice– if the concepts and narratives available don’t describe your experiences, and this makes you feel stupid and crazy and hysterical, and you internalize as descriptions of yourself statements that aren’t true because you don’t have a way of saying the things that are true— well, you might reach for the word “gaslighting” to describe the way it makes you feel. As a way of expressing that this is a very serious harm, that it’s driving you crazy, that your problem is not just lying or disagreement but something more fundamental.

And if you’re in that situation, I hope this essay resolved that piece of hermeneutical injustice, and therefore you can stop perpetuating hermeneutical injustice against me.

Strawmanny Questions About Genital Preference, Part One

Tags

speshul snowflake trans

I recently stumbled across this set of questions for trans people about sexual orientation and genital preferences. Since there is nothing I enjoy more than answering strawmanny questions, I decided to help.

1) if sexual orientation is an inborn trait, what is it based on? Innate sexual orientation can’t be based on a social construct — gender is a social construct — and can only be based on physical, material traits. This excludes genitalia, secondary sex characteristics, body hair distribution, scent, voice, etc, so what determines our attraction to others in terms of their gender? What element of any given gender is attractive to hetero- and homosexual people?

First of all, I think “innate” is a confusing word when talking about any aspect of human psychology, and prefer not to use it. All complex human traits– from language use to altruism, from art to work, from love to childrearing– are a product of a complex combination of genetics, non-genetic biological influences (such as prenatal factors or childhood nutrition), interactions with other people, the broader culture, and that thorny and mysterious thing we call ‘free choice.’ Sexuality is no different.

“Innate” is a confusing word, because it bundles together a bunch of different concepts. For example, if a thing is innate, there are connotations that it is more real or legitimate than things that are not innate: your genes are what you’re “really like,” and all that society stuff is just brainwashing covering over your genuine preferences that would exist in a cultural vacuum. But this is not how humans work. If we are innately anything, we are innately a cultural species. A child raised without cultural influences does not have the true, free, authentic preferences that humans have untouched by society; they are a feral child.

Similarly, there are connotations that if a thing is innate then it is unchangeable, and if it is not innate then it is changeable. Imagine that we knew for certain that one person’s depression was exclusively and 100% caused by a certain gene and another’s by her experience of childhood abuse: is the former cursed to depression forever, no matter which medications she tries or how much therapy she goes to or how well she takes care of herself? Are you surprised if the latter winds up dealing with the aftereffects of abuse for the rest of her life?

For this reason, I feel it is necessary to define “innate” with some less connotationally-laden term. I am going to here treat “innate” as meaning “caused by genetics or non-genetic biological influences early in life”; if I am misrepresenting the author’s point of view then I hope they go to the comments to correct me, and I shall rewrite. 

“Social construct” is also kind of a confusing word. I am not really sure what it means. So I am going to replace it with “thing that only exists because we all agree on it,” which again I think reflects the intended meaning of the author. If we chose not to have “do you have a penis or a vagina?” as a major organizing factor in our society, which decides everything from what color we decorate the nursery to how much you’re paid, then gender would not exist.

There are lots of things that only exist because we all agree on them. For example, language exists because we agree on it: we have all agreed that this one set of mouth sounds means “dog” and this other set of mouth sounds means “pickle” and this third set of mouth sounds doesn’t mean anything at all; if we all woke up one day and decided that no mouth sounds meant anything, they wouldn’t. But while the science of language acquisition is tremendously complex, we can all agree there is some genetic influence on humans’ ability to acquire language: that’s why humans can learn language and lemurs can’t.

Similarly, money only exists because we agree on it: dollars have value because we all agree that they have value; if we decided that dollars were worthless, cash would primarily have value as a form of toilet paper. Some people desire money greatly, while others don’t care about it at all. It seems likely that this is to some degree genetic, like every other personality trait. If you have two extremely greedy parents from lines of extremely greedy people, their child is likelier than average to be very greedy. But money is a social construct! So a genetic trait can cause someone to want something that is a social construct.

Therefore, the entire premise of this question is fallacious. 

2a) if they are not inborn traits, what are the bases of hetero- and homosexuality? are they learned behaviours, conscious or subconscious decisions, or something else?

Sexual orientation has a genetic component but is actually not particularly genetic. Among men, genetics explains about a third to two-fifths of variance in sexual orientation, while among women genetics explains about a fifth of variance. Sexual orientation may be related to prenatal environment. Sexual orientation has never been firmly linked to any postnatal childhood experience (although people are more likely to identify as LGBQ in an environment where this is socially acceptable). Certainly, the scientific consensus points to sexual orientation not being a choice.

However, historically, many societies have had much higher rates of homosexual behavior than our current society. Societies such as classical Greece, Rome, and the Islamic Golden Age all had extraordinarily high rates of bisexual behavior among men, to the extent that the average man behaved bisexually. It is difficult to explain this in any way other than culture. People in societies where being interested in both men and women is no more marked than being interested in both tea and coffee are far far more likely to have sex with both men and women. Since that’s not true in our society, you’d hardly expect it to show up in our studies of the variance in sexual orientation. So I do believe that there is a cultural component. Certainly, there are some people who are exclusively interested in men in any possible culture, and others who are exclusively interested in women. But the balance of the evidence, in my opinion, suggests that there is some cultural component for many people. 

2b) is the exclusive attraction to one gender bigoted in the case of gay men being unattracted to straight women, whom they oppress on the axis of gender? if so, why? if not, why not?

I don’t actually think it’s bigoted to not be attracted to people, even across an axis of oppression.

Certainly, one could be not attracted to someone in a bigoted fashion. To use an extreme example, if I am not attracted to a Jewish person because I believe that I must preserve the purity of the white race by not having sex with those of lesser races, obviously my lack of attraction is rooted in bigotry. For a less extreme example, if I am not attracted to a fat person because I believe that all fat people are lazy and gluttonous and that lazy and gluttonous people are unattractive, then that is rooted in bigotry. For an even less extreme example, our society typically does not depict wheelchair users as sexual beings: if I have never been attracted to a person in a wheelchair, is this because I have never been exposed to narratives in which a wheelchair user is an object of sexual desire? It is difficult to know without exposing me to those narratives. 

But in any of those cases, the problem is not the lack of attraction itself. A Neo-Nazi who is attracted to Jews is hardly a more ethical person than a Neo-Nazi who isn’t. The lack of attraction is a symptom of an underlying prejudice (or in the case of the wheelchair user, an oversight) that should be addressed.

But imagine a person who is not attracted to fat people because, for whatever reason, they happen to not find fat rolls particularly attractive, the same way that a person might not be attracted to thin people because for whatever reason they don’t find muscles or slender waists particularly attractive. I do not think this is bigoted. It is part of the beautiful diversity of human sexuality. 

I am assuming here for the sake of argument that the person knows why they’re attracted to a particular trait. Many people don’t: if you’re not attracted to fat people, it can be hard to know if that’s because you happen to dislike a particular physical trait or because you associate fat with laziness. Fortunately, this is totally irrelevant to what you should do. If you are prejudiced, you should try to become less prejudiced; if that changes your attraction patterns, then cool. If it doesn’t, well, who cares. 

If a man happened to be exclusively attracted to men because he thought women are silly and frivolous, and in the absence of this belief he would be attracted to both men and women, then he is a misogynist. If he is exclusively attracted to men because he prefers flat chests and penises and beards, then he is not. 

2c) if sexual orientation is immutable despite not being inborn or innate, at what point is it formed, and based on what? at which point is it immutable? at which age?
2d) if sexual orientation is not immutable, how can it be changed? under which circumstances? by which processes?

We don’t understand the origins of sexual orientation very well, so I don’t know at what point it is formed. However, given the general lack of success of conversion therapy, one could argue that sexual orientation is probably fixed by the time one goes through puberty. 

Alternately, of course, people who grow up in repressive religious environments who can be anything other than gay already are. That is why conversion therapy is so stunningly unsuccessful and doesn’t have its success rates inflated by the existence of bisexuals who could maintain a happy straight relationship all along. The bisexuals don’t go to conversion therapy in the first place. The existence of situational sexual behavior suggests that this is true for some people; however, anecdotally, people’s deliberate efforts to make themselves bisexual do not work as well as one would hope. 

So my guess is that it is fixed around puberty for many people and is more but not infinitely flexible for other people. And trying to become attracted to people doesn’t work at all. If you’re going to become gay in prison, your dick will handle it for you, willing yourself into wanting your bunkmate is not going to work. 

That said, placing yourself in an environment without people of the gender you are typically sexually attracted to sometimes seems to work. Many people are more likely to be bisexual in an open accepting environment which encourages low-stakes experimentation with people of the same gender, although many people won’t be. Hormone replacement therapy is also sometimes known to change sexual orientation, but obviously this approach is not helpful for cisgender people.

3a) if sexual orientation is not an inborn trait, why are approximately 5-10% of people of either sex repulsed by the opposite genitalia without necessarily having experienced trauma? what determines this? is “penis repulsion” (or “vulva repulsion”, i suppose) an inborn trait?

I am really skeptical of this statistic! Only about 1.7% of the U. S. population is lesbian or gay, and only one percent of people are asexual. Even if you assume that all asexuals and all gay people are repulsed by the opposite genitalia– which is very far from true– that suggests that between 1% and 6% of straight people are repulsed by the opposite sex’s genitalia. Since no source is given, and that seems pretty implausible, I think this statistic was made up.

Many people find genitals in general to be kind of squicky, especially outside of a sexual context. But I think that being repulsed by particular genitalia is pretty easy to get over, if there’s some reason to. Consider other forms of sexualized disgust. Homophobes are often genuinely disgusted by (male) homosexuality; I have read homophobic writers mention something as bland as the fact that gay men are sometimes penetrated, and then immediately apologize for the horrifying mental images this brings up. A completely non-homophobic person (who is not repulsed by sex in general) is not particularly horrified by reading the sentence “gay men are sometimes penetrated,” nor do they experience disgust when watching two men kiss or hold hands. (To be clear, if you are homophobic in this fashion, I don’t think you need to beat yourself up about it, as long as you don’t let queer people know that we disgust you.)

Presumably this is not because homophobes were born with a natural disgust for gay sex, while non-homophobes were born without this repulsion. Instead, non-homophobes have interacted with gay people, seen gay people kiss and hold hands, and normalized homosexuality. It is an ordinary part of life for them. Similarly, I expect that if you are repulsed by certain genitalia, and then you interact with them as part of a normal course of life– perhaps because you are a medical professional or you participate in certain clothing-optional events or you are heterosexual– they will become less disgusting. Instead, they will be an ordinary body part, perhaps an unappealing body part, but no more remarkable than an elbow. 

I don’t expect that becoming less disgusted by particular genitalia will make you want to have sex with people with those genitals. Lack of disgust is not enthusiasm; it is indifference. Even if you are chill about penises in general, it is perfectly reasonable to not want one coming anywhere near your bits. Fortunately, there is no law that requires that people have sex with everyone they are not disgusted by, or non-homophobic straight people would be in real trouble.  

Of course, a major difference between genital repulsion and being repulsed by gay people is that, unless you are heterosexual or a medical professional, you can live a perfectly long and happy life never interacting with genitals you think are gross. You should avoid expressing this opinion in public, as it may make people feel bad about their bodies, but I think there is no particular obligation to become undisgusted by genitalia unless you want to.

3b) if “genital preferences” are not inborn, how are they formed, and based on what? at which point are they immutable?

If the study of sexual orientation is in its infancy, the study of how sexual orientation interacts with transness is a fetus. I don’t think anyone knows the answer to this question.

3c) if genital preferences are not immutable, how can they be changed? what process should someone go through if they are seeking to overcome their genital preference? what resources are available?

I feel like I need to emphasize that I do not actually think any person needs to be attracted to people with penises. There are more than enough straight and bi men, bi women, and lesbians who are attracted to trans women to keep every trans woman sexually satisfied for the rest of her life. (And the converse for trans men, of course.) I think a better approach is to destigmatize attraction to trans people, so that people who are attracted to trans people are not so full of self-hatred and disgust about it, so they can date trans people. 

But if for some reason you feel a deep desire to be attracted to both women with penises and women with vaginas… well, I’d suggest “conceptualize women with penises as women” but honestly a lot of guys who are into trans women don’t seem to do that? “She-male” is its own porn category. It’s worth a shot, though. I am not sure how to convince your brain to reclassify trans women as women; it seems like a thing that naturally happens in trans-positive social groups. At a guess, I’d suggest that hanging around with trans people helps. 

I’d also suggest looking at porn with trans girls in it. Maybe trans girls with cis girls at first, so the dick is no different than the dick in het porn you watch, just attached to a woman with a pair of nice breasts. Once you associate trans women with hot sex things happening, maybe you’ll be more cool with dick. 

There’s also just random chance. A lot of people I know were not particularly interested in trans women… until they met the one trans girl who happened to turn them on. I don’t believe in forcing people to be attracted to people they’re not attracted to. I encourage people to be open-minded about unexpected attractions, so that they don’t wind up dismissing something really good because it doesn’t fit your preconception of what you like. For a lot of people, dick in general is meh but their girlfriend‘s dick is hot. 

4a) sex-based attraction is considered to be problematic because we can’t always know someone’s sex just by looking at them. isn’t it also true that we can’t know someone’s gender just by looking at them?

Yep! This is why, in my experience, the most common form of attraction is based on secondary sexual characteristics: both the obvious ones like breasts and beards and the more subtle aspects of fat distribution and muscle size that make a person recognizable as male or female. Trans people who have been on hormones for a while usually have the secondary sexual characteristics associated with their identified gender, so many people are attracted to trans people.

Of course, the diversity of human sexuality is infinite. Some people are attracted to other people based on their stated gender identity; others, based on their presentation as feminine or masculine; still others, based on genitalia; and of course many people are attracted to a combination of these things.

4b) if a hypothetical gay man experiences attraction to a woman-identified person, does he lose attraction to her upon learning of her gender identity, or is he in fact bisexual?

Some people do lose attraction to people upon learning that they identify as women. Some people don’t. Being attracted to the occasional person of the other gender doesn’t make you straight, any more than a straight girl with a girl crush on Christina Hemsworth is bisexual, or a straight man who’s attracted to a very convincing crossdresser is homosexual. Trans people are confusing for sexual orientation, and it makes sense to identify as ‘gay’ if in general you are not attracted to women. 

4c) if he loses the attraction, why does the same principle not apply to sex-based attraction?

Well, sure, you can become unattracted to someone upon learning that they have a penis, just like you can become unattracted to them upon learning that their favorite movie is Thor: The Dark World or that they are cruel to puppies or any other trait you can’t learn from looking at them. You can also become unattracted to someone upon learning that they’re infertile, although the rarity of this complaint among infertility bloggers makes me suspect it is a less common preference than blog commenters on posts about dating trans women would lead one to believe.

You can also become unattracted to someone upon learning that they almost certainly have XY chromosomes. However, this is a very strange preference. Normally, people do not have sexual preferences about the inside of other people’s bodies: no one goes “it is SO sexy that you have two kidneys” or “I am only attracted to people with arachnoid cysts.” Therefore, one might suspect that this is related to the gendered meaning we assign XY chromosomes: that is, that people with XY chromosomes are men, and you are not attracted to men.

In fact, not being attracted to someone because they have XY chromosomes is very similar to not being attracted to someone because they identify as a man. In both cases, you have learned a fact you cannot observe that causes you to reinterpret their bodies as someone who is not a target of your sexual attraction, because they are not the gender of person that you are attracted to.

To be honest, I am curious about how this is supposed to work with the genetic nature of sexual orientation which cannot be influenced by social constructs or other such things we expect genes not to know about. How do your genes know what a chromosome is? Did you evolve very very quickly after the invention of karyotyping?

4d) if he is in fact bisexual, are we not all bisexual? how can we claim to be only attracted to women or men if we don’t know the gender identity of everyone we’ve been attracted to?

How can you claim to be only attracted to women or men if you don’t know the sex of everyone you’re attracted to? It seems to me that the “I am only attracted to people with XX chromosomes, therefore I’m straight” argument fails equally: you can never know for certain that you haven’t been attracted to a trans woman (or, for that matter, a convincing crossdresser). 

Like, seriously, are you going to tell me that if you’re a straight woman or a gay man and you walked down the street and looked at this guy:

and went “Nice!”, actually you’re bi? And how convinced are you that this has never happened?

Let us please use words in a way that vaguely corresponds to reality. 

5) if sexual orientation is based on gender, what is the definition of ‘gender’?

Gender is a word that means several different things, including:

• The system of roles and expectations that derive from our sexed bodies;
• The way that people classify individuals in relation to this system (as “men” or “women”);
• Your inner psychological relationship to that system;
• The specific aspect of your inner psychological relationship to that system that relates to your preferences about your sexed body and how you’re classified. 

The second one is thorny and people often misunderstand it as saying that it is masculinity or femininity. Laith Ashley up there probably has XX chromosomes. Lea DeLaria also has XX chromosomes:

They are both masculine people. They are both people with XX chromosomes. Gender is the thing where you can tell that Laith Ashley is a man and Lea DeLaria is a woman, and that she does not magically become a man due to her choice of haircut. 

I would honestly expect that sexual orientation is most often based on gender in that sense, because of the simple fact that most gay men and straight women are going to go “nice!” about Mr. Ashley and are going to go “not my type, because I’m not attracted to women” about Ms. DeLaria. If we have to reduce sexual orientation down to one single trait– instead of accepting that people’s sexualities differ and that “gay,” “straight,” “bisexual,” and “asexual” are abstractions over a more complex reality– this one would be the one. 

Rapid Onset Gender Denial

Tags

neurodivergence, not feminism go away, speshul snowflake trans

Recently, some transgender adolescents and young adults have begun reporting a disturbing new trend.

In recent years, a number of transgender adolescents have been reporting in online discussion groups that their parents suddenly have begun misgendering their children, disrespecting their children’s self-identified gender, and espousing anti-trans beliefs. We believe this may reflect a new clinical condition: rapid onset gender denial (ROGD).

Adolescents have described clusters of these beliefs occurring in pre-existing friend groups, such as the popular parenting website Mumsnet. Adolescents typically notice a process of immersion in social media immediately preceding their parent’s lack of acceptance: “binge-watching” trans-exclusionary feminist YouTube channels, excessive use of websites such as FourthWaveNow and TransgenderTrend, and accounts on self-identified “gender critical” subreddits. These descriptions raise the question of whether social influences may be contributing to or even driving this lack of acceptance in some populations of parents.

The adolescents and young adults that report this disturbing behavior are not in any way bigoted against anti-trans people. The vast majority of adolescents and young adults whose parents have ROGD support the right of radical feminists to found organizations that reflect their beliefs and believe that anti-trans individuals deserve the same rights and protections as other individuals in their country.

In proposing the existence of rapid onset gender denial, we by no means intend to disrespect people with real, valid anti-trans beliefs. We recognize that a small minority of people struggle with a crippling inability to accept trans people for religious or political reasons, and we support tolerance and accommodation of these uncommon beliefs. But this minority have had anti-trans beliefs for their entire lives. Parents with rapid onset gender denial are no hairy-legged bra-burning radical feminists or church-going anti-gay Christians. Even parent-affirming clinicians agree that most ROGD parents favor gay marriage— hardly what you would expect from someone genuinely anti-LGBT! On online fora, parents regularly discuss their “peak trans” moment: the moment when they “realized” that they were anti-trans. Most of these “peak trans” moments are inspired by stories spread by other ROGD parents– proof positive that it is a social contagion.

We recognize that parents with ROGD face real problems. Their children report that parents with ROGD are sensitive, intelligent people who often struggle with anxiety and depression. ROGD is a way of expressing very real distress. Many parents with ROGD are trying to cope with the stress of their child individuating, a difficult time for any parent. It may be particularly difficult for parents who put psychological weight on their children growing up to be a particular kind of person or who invest much of their self-worth in their child agreeing with them. Many other parents may simply be seeking attention: after all, their children are developing lives separate from them, which can be a difficult adjustment, and it’s perfectly normal for parents to be attention-seeking in this developmental stage. Still others may be using ROGD as a coping mechanism for other stresses in their life, such as depression or divorce. After all, it can be easier to blame these stressors on a child’s transition than to accept the harsh reality. Many ROGD parents engage in magical thinking: if their child simply detransitions, then all of the depression and anxiety the parents experience will go away.

Several children have noticed that their parents with ROGD have autism or “autistic traits.” Could ROGD be caused by autism? The rigid, black-and-white thinking associated with autism may lead parents to struggle with the idea of gender fluidity or the concept that someone they previously thought of as a girl might in fact be a boy. And people with autism often struggle with finding friends: the social acceptance they find in ROGD communities may have been the first social acceptance they’ve found in their entire lives.

Supporters of parents with ROGD say that recognizing that transness “isn’t real” improves parents’ lives. But the evidence from their children says otherwise. Many parents with ROGD appear angry, sullen, and withdrawn: they yell at their children, dish out unreasonable punishments, and petulantly refuse to call their children by the correct name and pronouns. It can be impossible for adolescents to have a civil, open conversation with their parents without their parents indignantly spewing insults or accusing them of making up their gender. Many others are depressed. Not only do ROGD parents openly admit their despair about their children’s transition, they have the distorted thoughts characteristic of a struggle with depression: for example, many grieve the “mutilation” and “death” of their children, who are in fact still alive and trying to talk to them. Worst of all, ROGD typically ruins parent-child relationships, with many parents alienating their children so much that a normal-parent child relationship is impossible and the child must go low- or no-contact to preserve their sanity. To any parent, their children are one of the most important things in their lives; this pernicious ideology destroys the precious parent-child relationship, one of the foundations of society and a bond any parent cherishes.

It makes sense that ROGD would cause such difficulty in parent-child relationships, because of the nature of the ideology itself. Parents with ROGD are known for their irrational and science-denying beliefs, such as that a twenty-two-year-old is a child if the parent identifies them as such. Unfortunately, you can’t identify out of biological reality. These beliefs will likely lead them to great distress if they don’t learn to accept and work with the reality that, whatever their friends say, some things– such as the fact that their adult children are fully competent to make their own medical decisions without parental input– won’t change.

Fortunately, treatment is available for ROGD. Several therapists have begun to specialize in the treatment of parents with ROGD. Unlike ROGD parents, we believe in scientific and biological reality, which is why our therapists practice CBT and other evidence-based therapies instead of Jungian psychoanalysis. It is a nonjudgmental course of therapy intended to explore the reasons that parents have ROGD. If, after a long course of therapy, it turns out that the parent genuinely has anti-trans beliefs, of course we will accept this. But it’s simply irresponsible to think that these parents might genuinely be anti-trans– making possibly irreversible decisions such as destroying their relationship with their children– unless we have explored all the other options.

Autogynephilia Survey

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

Methods

I have 784 respondents; twenty respondents were deleted for skipping an excessive number of questions, leaving me with 764 respondents. The respondents were mostly taken from my blog, Thing of Things; therefore, they may not be representative of the general population.

To assess autogynephilia, I used a 22-item scale which is commonly used in the literature on autogynephilia. Unlike in previous studies, I did not alter the language for cisgender respondents. To assess autoandrophilia, I genderswapped the items on the scale. Certain items were easily genderswapped: for example, “fantasies in which I have a vagina/vulva” became “fantasies in which I have a penis”. Others required more of a judgment call, as when I decided that erections and ejaculation are physical male functions analogous to pregnancy. As my autoandrophilia scale has never been validated, the results are unreliable and should be considered preliminary. Further, this scale would not capture any ways that autoandrophilia manifests differently than autogynephilia. (For example, one might expect autogynephiles to be more interested in wearing women’s clothing, as there is more sexy clothing which is only for women than sexy clothing which is only for men.)

To assess gender, I presented two questions. The first asked people to identify as cisgender or transgender. The second asked people to identify as transgender, definitely cisgender, or uncertain whether the terms “cisgender” or “transgender” best describes them.

To assess sexual orientation, I asked whether a person was attracted to both men and women, men but not women, women but not men, exclusively nonbinary people, or no one at all.

Demographics

A gender and sexuality breakdown follows. Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.

53% cisgender men
19% cisgender women
10% transgender people assigned female at birth
18% transgender people assigned male at birth

24% definitely cisgender men
9% definitely cisgender women
8% AFAB transgender
16% AMAB transgender
14% neither cisgender nor transgender AFAB
30% neither cisgender nor transgender AMAB

18% bisexual cisgender men
32% heterosexual cisgender men
2% homosexual cisgender men
1% asexual cisgender women
12% bisexual cisgender women
4% heterosexual cisgender women
1% homosexual cisgender women
2% asexual AFAB trans people
6% bisexual AFAB trans people
2% homosexual AFAB trans people
2% asexual AMAB trans people
8% bisexual AMAB trans people
1% heterosexual AMAB trans people
6% homosexual AMAB trans people
1% miscellaneous

Autogynephilia and Autoandrophilia Scores

(For these numbers, a score of zero indicates that none of the fantasies are arousing, while a score of 88 indicates that all of the fantasies are very arousing. Please behold the quarter-assed bar charts.)

Autogynephilia

Cisgender man: 44
Cisgender woman: 22
AFAB trans: 13
AMAB trans: 35

 

Definitely cisgender man: 36
Definitely cisgender woman: 25
AFAB trans: 11
AMAB trans: 40
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AFAB: 22
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AMAB: 48

Asexual cisgender man: 41
Bisexual cisgender man: 52
Straight cisgender man: 40
Gay cisgender man: 40

Asexual cisgender woman: 6
Bisexual cisgender woman: 36
Straight cisgender woman: 17
Gay cisgender woman: 21

Asexual AFAB trans: 2
Bisexual AFAB trans: 17
Straight AFAB trans: 15
Gay AFAB trans: 7

Asexual AMAB trans: 31
Bisexual AMAB trans: 39
Straight AMAB trans: 17
Gay AMAB trans: 36

[Note that sample sizes for asexual cisgender men and heterosexual AFAB trans people are particularly small.]

Autoandrophilia

Cisgender man: 20
Cisgender woman: 25
AFAB trans: 30
AMAB trans: 6

Definitely cisgender man: 23
Definitely cisgender woman: 18
AFAB trans: 30
AMAB trans: 7
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AFAB: 29
Neither cisgender nor transgender, AMAB: 17

Asexual cisgender man: 18
Bisexual cisgender man: 23
Straight cisgender man: 18
Gay cisgender man: 26

Asexual cisgender woman: 8
Bisexual cisgender woman: 28
Straight cisgender woman: 23
Gay cisgender woman: 24

Asexual AFAB trans: 19
Bisexual AFAB trans: 33
Straight AFAB trans: 19
Gay AFAB trans: 34

Asexual AMAB trans: 7
Bisexual AMAB trans: 8
Straight AMAB trans: 3
Gay AMAB trans: 2

[Note that sample sizes for asexual cisgender men and heterosexual AFAB trans people are particularly small.]

Discussion

Confusingly, cis men are the group most likely to experience autogynephilia, and cis women are also more likely than average to experience autoandrophilia. However, when broken out into more specific categories, we discover that this is mostly driven by people who identify as neither cisgender nor transgender– that is, the potentially gender dysphoric.

People are much less likely to experience autoandrophilia than autogynephilia. It is unclear why this might be. It is possible that my measure failed to capture autoandrophiliac sexuality; I suggest performing qualitative research on transgender men to construct an appropriate measure. It is also possible that autoandrophilia is legitimately less common than autogynephilia for some reason: for example, perhaps because female bodies are hypersexualized in the media while male bodies are not, or because people with testosterone-dominant systems have kinkier sexual fantasies.

It has been occasionally claimed that women do not experience autogynephilia. My study suggests that this is false. While cisgender women do not experience autogynephiliac fantasies as commonly as AMAB transgender people do, they do seem to sometimes experience autogynephilia. However, it is also occasionally claimed that autogynephilia is ordinary female sexuality. It does not appear that my survey supports this hypothesis; cis women are far less likely than trans women to be autogynephiles. Autogynephilia seems more characteristic of definitely cis male sexuality than definitely cis female.

Some trans advocates argue that trans women overreport autogynephilia, because if one has a penis it is marked and unusual to have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina, while if one has a vagina it is not at all marked or unusual to have sexual fantasies in which you have a vagina. It is unclear how this hypothesis can be tested; as such, my survey does not provide evidence for or against it.

It has been occasionally claimed that trans men do not experience autoandrophilia. My survey suggests that this is false; trans men have a notably higher rate of autoandrophilia than other groups. The alternate construct of “autohomoeroticism” is not supported: autoandrophilia is detected in a survey which does not ask about any specifically homosexual male behaviors, but merely about sexual arousal when imagining having a physically male body and adopting a male social role.

Autogynephiliac fantasies tend to be about having a woman’s body, wearing women’s clothing, or being admired or having sex while a woman. Very few people were interested in more outré forms of sexuality, such as menstruation, urinating while sitting down, sitting in a feminine way, or being seen as a woman by strangers. Trans women are more likely than cis women to be aroused by these unusual fantasies: cis women’s average is typically between 0 and 0.5 on a scale where 0 means not at all arousing, and trans women’s is typically around 1. However, most trans women have no interest in these fantasies; attempts to depict them as typical of trans female sexuality are inaccurate. 

Similarly, autoandrophiliac fantasies tend to be about having a man’s body (particularly a penis) or being admired or having sex while a man, and not about adopting a male-typical social role outside of a sexual context. 

Bisexual cis women experience a rate of autogynephilia comparable to transgender women’s. I believe this is problematic for claims that no real woman would experience autogynephilia; it implies that either bisexual cis women are not real women or that they are lying about their sexual fantasies in a far less socially desirable direction. It is possible that something unusual about bisexual cis women causes them to fetishize womanhood. It is also possible that autogynephilia is associated with same-gender attraction; certainly, it seems like being attracted to breasts might cause you to be attracted to your own breasts. However, if that is the case, it is unclear why lesbians show such low rates of autogynephilia. My sample size of lesbians was quite small and it is possible this is just noise. I suggest interested people study autogynephilia specifically in a queer cisgender female population.

Gay and bisexual men show elevated rates of autoandrophilia compared to heterosexual men. However, their rates are not comparable to trans men’s. It is possible that while autogynephilia similar to trans women’s is typical of (bisexual) female sexuality, autoandrophilia similar to trans men’s is not typical of any sort of male sexuality. It may also reflect the inadequacy of my measure of autoandrophilia.

Definitely cisgender men are both more autogynephiliac and more autoandrophiliac than definitely cisgender women. This may be due to social desirability bias, poor awareness of one’s sexual fantasies, lower sex drives due to estrogen-dominant hormone systems, or a legitimate difference in sexual interests between definitely cisgender men and definitely cisgender women.

Why More Transgender People?

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[This post was prompted by Andree. To prompt a post, back me on Patreon.]

In the past ten or fifteen years, there has been a massive increase in the number of transgender people. A 1997 estimate– from the clinic that treated over 95% of transgender people in the Netherlands– suggested 1 in 10,000 people assigned male at birth and 1 in 30,000 people assigned female at birth are transgender. Today, the best surveys suggest that 0.6% of people in the United States identify as transgender. How did this increase happen?

If you read LGBT history, it is striking how many people are what we would presently call transgender. Classic lesbian novels such as the Well of Loneliness depict recognizably transgender experiences. Stone butch women wore masculine clothing, behaved in a masculine fashion towards their partners, and did not allow their partners to touch their genitals; some people who had a stone butch identity, such as Leslie Feinberg, eventually identified as transgender. In the gay male community, we see “drag queens” who lived as women, used female pronouns, and desired bottom surgery (for an introduction, I can’t recommend highly enough the documentary Paris is Burning and David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender). There were many heterosexual men who crossdressed regularly, and even special cruises and conferences which catered to them; again, many of these men took hormones or even sought surgery (Amy Bloom’s Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses is unsympathetic and rather transmisogynistic, but an interesting resource).

What did these people have in common? If they bought hormones, they did so on the grey market; if they got surgery (and most either couldn’t afford it or had spouses who objected), they flew to Thailand. Most did not biomedically transition. They also did not legally transition, and often did not socially transition: crossdressers were male at work and around their family; many drag queens and butches lived as their assigned gender during the work week. Their experiences are recognizably transgender experiences, but they are invisible to gender clinics, survey-takers, and much of the cisgender population.

Today, we have better access to transition treatment: while there is still gatekeeping, it is rare in the Anglosphere to be denied hormones because you’re gay, because you use your genitals during sex, because you’re a trans woman who wears pants, or similar. That leads more people to transition and more people to transition through a gender clinic instead of on the grey market.

Being transgender is also more socially acceptable in many ways. It is a double-edged sword; if people are more aware of transgender people, it is also harder to go stealth. But trans people tend to experience less housing discrimination, job discrimination, and familial rejection than they used to.

Trans people respond to incentives. It’s not true that gender dysphoria automatically leads to transition. Some gender dysphoric people have a choice between transition or suicide (although to be fair even in this case we would expect some of that population to show up in the suicide statistics instead). But if the cost of transition is high enough, many gender dysphoric people dissociate and depersonalize and are depressed, many gender dysphoric people live for the weekends or trips into the big city where they can be themselves, and many gender dysphoric people will have secret fantasies that they never tell anyone about. As transition becomes more accessible and socially acceptable, people are less likely to use non-transition coping mechanisms for gender dysphoria.

Equally important, I think, are the narratives which are available to frame our experiences. One of the reasons people identify as transmasculine instead of stone butch, or transfeminine instead of drag queens, is that these are the narratives we have to put our experiences into. The lines between gender-non-conforming people and transgender people are not as sharp as we’d like to believe or as would be politically convenient. We gender-non-conforming and gender dysphoric people are, often, an inchoate mass of feelings and desires and incoherent yearnings; it is often hard to know what we want as opposed to what we don’t want. We reach out to our communities for labels and identities and ontologies, and those labels and identities and ontologies wind up shaping what we desire. Of course they do. That’s how people work.

The same person, with the same desires, may identify as a butch lesbian, a radical feminist, a nonbinary person, or a queer trans man, depending on what segment and era of the LGBT+ community they are part of– and they might be equally happy and comfortable in each identity, if it is socially legible to their community. I think it’s a mistake to say that that person “is really” nonbinary, or “is really” butch, or “is really” a radical feminist. They have certain wants, certain needs, and certain ways of articulating those wants and needs are socially legible to their communities. (I wrote a similar process here, with regards to gray asexuality.)

As trans-related identities, labels, and ontologies displace their predecessors, and people are more likely to understand themselves from a trans-related framework, more people are likely to identify as trans and to transition (at least socially). To some extent, the incentives and labels explanations feed into each other: as more people come to understand themselves as trans, the conditions for trans people improve; as the conditions for trans people improve, more people come to understand themselves as trans. But I believe they are distinguishable and both play a role.

Further Objections To Three Sentences In An Interview With Ray Blanchard (They’re A Really Bad Three Sentences)

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On Monday, I wrote a post about my most important objection to this answer of Ray Blanchard’s in an interview from 2013:

[Interviewer:] Do you think autoandrophilia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphilia?

[Blanchard:] No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists.

I wanted to stick to the most important issue in the first post. However, I could not in good conscience refrain from objecting to everything else objectionable about those three sentences.

First: autoandrophilia obviously exists. Autoandrophilia obviously existed in 2013. Archive of Our Own had existed for four years at the time. AO3 hosts an enormous quantity of porn written by women about men having sex with each other; many (although of course not all) of the readers insert themselves as one of the characters in the pairing. The phenomenon of women imagining themselves as men in slash fanfiction dates back to 1966, when the TV show Star Trek began and women began shipping Kirk/Spock. There is honestly no excuse for a person who considers himself a world expert in sexuality related to gender deviance to be unaware that autoandrophiles exist.

As I said in the previous post, Blanchard has recently admitted to the existence of autohomoeroticism, a sexual fetish in which people assigned female at birth are sexually attracted to the idea of being a gay man. He considers this to be extraordinarily rare. (Out of curiosity, I did a small survey on a fandom Discord I frequent and found that 60% of the respondents assigned female at birth were autoandrophiles, although I suppose it is possible that every autohomoerotic person in the world frequents this particular Discord.) It is unclear to me how the hell autohomoeroticism is supposed to be different from autoandrophilia, except that it would be embarrassing to Blanchard to admit he’s wrong because of something as minor as “the facts.”

Second: Blanchard implicitly equates pedophiles, rapists, and exhibitionists with autoandrophiles. Pedophiles and rapists either perform nonconsensual sex acts or are tempted to do so; while people who have sex in front of consenting people are also considered exhibitionists, presumably Blanchard is referring to people who want to show their genitals to or have sex in front of nonconsenting people. Cisgender autoandrophiles might strap on a dildo and get a blowjob from another consenting adult, but they don’t do anything nonconsensual nor are they tempted to do so.

I am glossing over the complicated issue of transgender autoandrophiles, in part due to the disagreement about whether they exist. I have met the occasional self-identified non-dysphoric autoandrophile who has transitioned. In general, they have tried to be indistinguishable from dysphoric trans people and to pass as their preferred gender. This is very unlike rape, pedophilia, or nonconsensual exhibitionism, where the victims know they’re involved in a sex act. It seems rather more like a person getting off on the reactions they get when they wear sexy clothes, or on secretly wearing sexy underwear, or on receiving a hair massage, or whatever: perfectly fine as long as it is not obvious to other people what they’re doing. Whatever you may think of the wisdom of their transitions, it does not seem to be a nonconsensual sex act. Blanchard’s inability to distinguish between consensual and nonconsensual sex acts is appalling.

Third: Blanchard has an openly contemptuous attitude towards the idea that women commit sexual violence. However, women uncontroversially commit sexual violence. In a study conducted in 2010, it was found that 4.8% of men had been, over the course of their lives, forced to penetrate someone through violence, threat of violence, or use of drugs/alcohol, and 6% were coerced into sex. 79.2% of male forced-to-penetrate victims had only female perpetrators, while 83.6% of male sexual coercion victims had only female perpetrators. By comparison, 98.1% of female rape victims had only male perpetrators, and 92.5% of female sexual coercion victims had only male perpetrators, and women are more likely to experience both rape and sexual coercion than men are.

Female child molesters are understudied. However, victimization surveys suggest that somewhere between 14% and 26% of children molested are molested by a woman. Official crime statistics suggest that as few as 1% of children molested are molested by a woman; it is probable that female child molesters are undercounted.

It’s true that men are more likely than women to commit sexual violence. However, a significant minority of victims of sexual violence have female perpetrators. The idea that pointing this out is laughable is rape apologism and morally wrong.

Fourth: Blanchard appears to believe the only reason one would write paragraphs like the above is some sort of bizarre “women can do anything men can do” ethos. It does not seem to occur to him that people would care about supporting the victims of female rapists. I have drafted several sentences in response to this and had an extraordinary difficulty ending them with anything other than “fuck off.”

People– men, women, and nonbinary– are sometimes raped by women. I’ve gotten anguished emails from victims of rape by women thanking me because I am the only blogger they’ve found who will even say they exist. I’ve listened to people– blog readers and friends– talk about bracing themselves when they say the gender of their rapist, because people will laugh at them, or tell them they wanted it, or question them to see if there was some sort of horrible misunderstanding, or immediately derail the conversation to talk about how Men Commit Most Rapes Though, or assume they’re anti-feminist men’s rights activists and call them misogynists, or ask intrusive details about how it could happen mechanically, or assume that they’re the perpetrator and their rapist was the victim. Our society is awful to rape victims of all stripes, but there are unique ways in which it is awful to victims of female perpetrators, and it needs to stop. Pointing out that female rapists and child molesters exist is the first step.

Ray Blanchard Lied To Try To Get A Condition Included In The DSM Out Of Political Correctness

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ozy blog post, ray blanchard callout post, speshul snowflake trans

[content note: rape apologism]

In 2013, Ray Blanchard– head of the paraphilia working group for the DSM-5 and originator of the controversial ‘two-type’ theory of transness— gave an interview about his work as part of the paraphilia working group, which included the following passage:

[Interviewer:] Do you think autoandrophilia, where a woman is aroused by the thought of herself as a man, is a real paraphilia?

[Blanchard:] No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say, “women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too.” It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists.

Quite frankly, I am flabbergasted.

Ray Blanchard openly admitted, in a publicly available interview, to attempting to include a condition that he does not think exists in the DSM. Why? Because feminists might get angry at him if he didn’t.

In the published version of the DSM-5, Transvestic Disorder does not include a “with autoandrophilia” specification; it existed only in the draft version. One hopes that someone read this interview, talked to Blanchard, and explained to him that the DSM should include conditions that exist and should not include conditions that don’t exist. One would hope that that was a fact a psychologist would be aware of once he has his PhD, or gets tenure, or is involved in writing the DSM, or is literally the head of a DSM-related working group. But I suppose we all miss minor details now and again.

Perhaps there should be some sort of training or orientation for people joining a DSM working group. I imagine, ten years from now:

“It is important,” the trainer might say, “that the DSM reflect reality as best it can. Psychologists and psychiatrists will use it to guide their treatment; insurance companies will allow or deny coverage based on it; drug companies will develop medications for the diagnoses we create; journalists and self-help writers will take inclusion in the DSM as a sign that a disorder wasn’t made up by crackpots. Human psychology is messy and it’s hard to create categories that aren’t at least a little bit arbitrary; we’re not expecting perfection, just do your best. A good-faith effort is fine.”

A member of the sleep disorders working group raises her hand. “So, if we’re just supposed to make a good-faith effort, what does this actually rule out?”

“Well, for example,” the trainer says, “if you would describe a phenomenon with the words ‘I don’t think it even exists,’ you should not put it in the DSM.”

“Who would do that?” the head of the depression working group says. “This is absurd. This is worse than the ‘instead of being a Nazi, consider not being a Nazi’ trainings we have to do every time we do research.”

“Yes, well,” the trainer says, “you’d think, but unfortunately Ray Blanchard fucked it all up for everyone. Please turn to page twenty of your booklets for the quiz entitled ‘In What Circumstances Is It Okay To Put A Disorder In The DSM Even Though You Don’t Think It Accurately Describes Reality At All’.”

The room is silent except for the scribbling of pens. A hand is raised.

The trainer sights. “Yes, Ray?”

“I’m stuck on number 12, ‘is it okay to put a disorder in the DSM, even though you don’t think it exists, if a feminist might get mad at you and write a mean article saying you’re wrong?'”

“That’s a no, Ray,” the trainer says.

“But what if it’s a really, really mean article? Like what if they call me a transphobe or something? Surely it’s okay if they might call me a transphobe.”

“We’ll cover that in Unit Four,” the trainer says, “where you learn about the exciting career opportunities available in pitching articles to Quillette.”

Sadly, this vision of the future would not come to be.

In fact, other than having “with autoandrophilia” removed as a specification, Ray Blanchard has faced zero negative consequences for his behavior whatsoever. There was no investigation; he was not censured; he was not removed as the head of the paraphilia working group; his previous research was not reviewed to see whether he has at other times engaged in academic dishonesty in the name of political correctness. This interview appears to have been entirely forgotten.

Indeed, Ray Blanchard has somehow gotten a reputation as a defender of science against political correctness. Presumably this is because his beliefs about transgender people are extraordinarily unpopular among trans advocates and he has faced various negative consequences, such as harsh criticism and Twitter suspension. It is easy to assume that a person facing a lot of criticism for their beliefs is a disinterested scientist following the data where it goes without regard for politics. As a recent example, Helen Joyce, an editor at the Economist, objected to Blanchard’s recent Twitter suspension by calling him “a world expert in the field… setting out his findings from a lifetime of research” and highlighting his work as head of the paraphilia working group.

Certainly, feminists and trans advocates have sometimes made arguments that contradict the best scientific evidence; certainly, it is important to pursue truth even when it goes against what you find politically palatable. But to the best of my knowledge no trans advocate or feminist has ever put a diagnosis into the DSM-5, which they sincerely believed did not exist, for the sake of political gain. Certainly, none of them have done so not because they think it would help people– which would be understandable, although morally wrong and academically dishonest– but because experiencing criticism from feminists is scary and they don’t want to.

That is literally all Ray Blanchard.

Have you considered that if you don’t like being criticized maybe you should be involved in writing the DSM?

Late in the interview, Blanchard says:

But I don’t think we should promulgate untruths for the sake of political agendas, even if they are worthwhile political agendas.

I believe this is excellent advice. Ray Blanchard should consider following it.

—

Two final notes:

In the interests of being more intellectually honest than Blanchard, I’d like to highlight that Blanchard appears to have changed his mind to some degree about autoandrophilia. He has recently argued that “autohomoeroticism”– a paraphilia in which female people are aroused by the concept of being gay men– may exist, although rarely. However, it is unclear to me whether Blanchard sincerely believes in autohomoeroticism, or merely has figured out that lying in order to keep feminists from yelling at you works better if you don’t openly admit to lying. It seems wise to me to view all his research with distrust.

Second, I have avoided discussing anything other than the object-level issue in this post. Although I am a trans advocate, I hope people of all political persuasions may find Blanchard’s behavior here objectionable; certainly, people who are against trans advocacy have made it very clear that they consider science to be more important than political correctness. I don’t want the conversation to be derailed by other, more controversial topics. Therefore, I have written my other thoughts in a separate post, which will be up on Wednesday.

Some Representation Is Better Than None

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans, writing

There’s a bit of a perverse-incentives problem in writing about marginalized groups.

If you write a marginalized character, people are going to criticize you for writing it offensively. This is true whether or not the way you wrote the character is actually offensive, because there is at least one person who thinks any possible depiction of a marginalized character is offensive. You write a nonbinary trans character, someone is going to write a passionate Tumblr post about how you’re catering to the genderspecials. You write the most transmedicalist-approved depressed and dysphoric trans character you can imagine, someone is going to complain about how you’re depicting transness as endless misery. You write a trans character who’s happy and okay with their body, and someone will complain that the character isn’t really even trans if they aren’t dysphoric. If you’re popular enough, it’s going to happen.

What’s worse, some of those criticisms will be right! It is difficult to accurately depict the way dysphoria affects trans people without showing our lives as unremitting sadness and self-hatred, and many writers will err too far on one end or another. Even the most well-meaning person can reproduce transphobic tropes, and even if you get a trans person to be a sensitivity reader sometimes they won’t catch it.

On the other hand, if you don’t write a marginalized character, no one is going to complain. There should be more trans characters in general, but (except in certain unusual circumstances, such as a book that takes place at Stonewall) there’s no reason to believe any specific book should have a trans character. No one is going to write “actually, the Dresden Files should totally have had a trans character in it,” and they’re definitely not going to repeat this for every single book series that happens to not have a trans character in it.

So I see a lot of young writers who are concerned about giving offense just not writing marginalized characters at all. And that’s really bad, because most of the time, an imperfectly written marginalized character is much better than no marginalized character at all.

I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to write a marginalized character that is worse than no marginalized character at all. For example, you could write Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. (Transmisogyny at the link, and in the rest of this paragraph.) The world would be a better place if the authors of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had not written a story with a transgender character in it. If you are writing a comedy in which one of the punchlines is a trans woman being sexually assaulted until the protagonist reveals that she has a penis, at which point there is an extended vomiting sequence because of how disgusting it is to have kissed a trans woman, and this is all played for laughs at the trans woman’s expense, I ask you on behalf of trans people everywhere not to write any more trans characters.

If, however, you would not do any of that, because that’s horrible, then you should write trans characters. Even though you’re going to mess up!

By contrast, consider Wanda from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Wanda is, in some ways, a problematically written character. About half her characteristics boil down to “Wanda is trans and faces transphobia.” Her birth surname is literally Mann. She cannot participate in a moon ritual because the universe itself limits certain rituals to people who menstruate. She dies tragically.

But would it be better if she didn’t exist?

Wanda is, after all, a sympathetically written character. She gets to call out the forces of magic itself for not thinking she’s a woman, and the narrative is pretty much on her side. Misgendering trans people is unambiguously depicted as wrong, and the fact that the wrong name is on her tombstone is shown to be a tragedy. She has interests and traits unrelated to being trans. Her body is not shown to be repulsive.

And… as far as I’m aware, Wanda was the first trans female character in a comic published by DC or Marvel. If Neil Gaiman had been like “hm, I guess I don’t know how to write trans people, I should make Wanda cis,” it would not have summoned an unproblematically written character out of the ether. Trans people would continue to not exist in mainstream comics, and once they did exist, they might be written by one of those people who thinks vomiting after you touch a trans person is the height of humor.

I am confident that Wanda made some cis people empathize with trans people who would never have empathized with them otherwise. And I’m sure I’m not the only trans person for whom Sandman was one of the first places we learned trans people even existed.

Of course, you should always try to improve your writing, and working on not perpetuating oppressive ideas is part of that. But the hurdle to clear before writing a marginalized character is better than not writing one is very low. You have to avoid making any particularly glaring factual inaccuracies. You have to not do the vomit thing. Most of all, you have to depict the character as a person, with thoughts and feelings and dreams and fears, someone whom the audience can empathize with (even if they’re a villain). If you do that, it’s okay to screw up on something more complicated. You’re still making life better for marginalized people.

Man Should Allocate Some More Categories

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

My friend M. Taylor Saotame-Westlake wrote a blog post during my parental leave from this blog, in which he disagrees with Scott Alexander’s The Categories Were Made For Man Not Man For The Categories and in true dialectical fashion I am disagreeing with both of them.

No one wants to read two long blog posts about the epistemology of transness before they can read my blog post, so let’s sum up the argument so far. Scott argues that categorizations don’t come from the Big Dictionary Up In The Sky: they’re justified based on usefulness. For example, a whale is not a fish to a biologist, because whales are more closely related to other mammals like humans. But a whale is totally a fish to King Solomon, because King Solomon mostly cares about whether a whale is in the ocean or on land. Neither definition is strictly speaking “wrong”: it just depends on whether you’re talking about evolution or planning a hunting trip.

Scott then extends this argument to apply to trans people. Trans men may not be male in a certain biological sense, because they don’t produce small gametes and usually produce large gametes. However, it makes trans men happy to be called men, so we might as well classify them as men.

Taylor points out that there are totally shenanigans going on here. There are two different senses of the word “useful.” Calling a whale a fish is useful in the sense that it captures a group of creatures that share certain traits in common, such as swimming and typically having an aquatic habitat and being the sort of thing you would use a boat to hunt. Calling a trans man a man is useful in the sense that it makes him happy.

You can perfectly well agree that definitions aren’t objectively true and we should use the one that is most useful in the first sense, without agreeing that we should use the one that is most useful in the second sense. For example, if there exists a person who has read entirely too much Strunk and White and insists that “flammable” should mean “not capable of being lit on fire,” they may feel very strongly about this, but I am going to ignore their opinion and instead use it to mean “capable of being lit on fire.” I do not want to hold my language use hostage to every pedant with an opinion.

Now, there are several perfectly good definitions of the word “man” which Taylor and I agree on. First, there is the biological definition, a human who produces small gametes. (Since humans are not yet a sequentially hermaphroditic species, we also use “man” to refer to people who produced small gametes in the past or are going to produce small gametes in the future.) This definition is useful for writing scientific papers and speculating about evolutionary history.

Second, “man” can refer to a particular cluster: people who have XY chromosomes, penises, the ability to grow a beard, testosterone-dominant hormone systems, no breasts, no ability to get pregnant, the capacity to impregnate others, etc. This is a cluster: for example, some (cisgender, non-intersex) men have breasts, can’t grow beards, are infertile, or lost their penises during World War I. This definition is useful for a variety of reasons, ranging from predicting who needs prenatal care to deciding who is likely to empathize with the horrors of the female reproductive system.

By this definition, while some trans people are clearly in one cluster or another, any trans person who has biomedically transitioned is in between. For example, a trans man who has biomedically transitioned can’t get prostate cancer, but is as likely as a cisgender man to go bald.

Saotome-Westlake argues for the existence of a third definition, based on psychology. He argues that (some) trans people are psychologically different from cisgender members of their identified genders: if you graph, say, how likely cisgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, and how likely transgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, these charts will not look very much like each other at all. Therefore, it makes sense to consider trans people to be members of their assigned gender at birth for some purposes.

I’m not going to argue with the claim that trans people are unusual psychologically; it would be silly to do so. However, I note that transgender people are also not particularly similar to their assigned genders at birth. To pick an easily observable example, trans men are vastly overrepresented in gender studies departments, slash fiction writing communities, and lesbian events, while trans women are vastly overrepresented in esports, computer science, and lesbian events. Conversely, as far as I can tell, there has yet to be a single transgender NFL football player, while statistically there ought to be five currently playing.

So by Saotome-Westlake’s argument, any group of women whose interests and personality traits, on average, observably differ from that of women as a whole ought to be classified as not actually women at all.

By extension, lesbians are not women.

Source. Sorry, lesbians, you really should have thought of this before you decided to be so obsessed with the L Word.

Autistic women also are on thin ice.

Source.

And what about horny women? Sex drive is one of the best-attested differences between men and women. Of course, we wouldn’t want to mis-classify anyone, so let’s make the rules as strict as possible: if you’re a woman and you jerk off to visual porn, enjoy casual sex, have had sex with a stranger, and want sex five to six times a week, you will have to go by “he” pronouns from now on. You may pick up your testosterone shot by the door.

Of course, “is this person from a group the distribution of whose personality traits is identical to that of women as a whole?” is not actually the criterion anybody actually uses to classify whether someone is male or female. That is why there is a general consensus that lesbians, autistic women, and horny women are in fact women.

Nor are the problems that Saotame-Westlake identifies best solved through creating this category. In fact, both are solved by allocating new categories:

He quotes a female member of a rationalist community:

There have been “all women” things, like clothing swaps or groups, that then pre-transitioned trans women show up to. And it’s hard, because it’s weird and uncomfortable once three or four participants of twelve are trans women. I think the reality that’s happening is women are having those spaces less—instead doing private things “for friends,” with specific invite lists that are implicitly understood not to include men or trans women. This sucks because then we can’t include women who aren’t already in our social circle, and we all know it but no one wants to say it.

I observe that I have never been invited to any all-female rationalist events.

This is a good thing! On pretty much every conceivable axis, I would be a terrible person to invite to your all-female event. I am attracted to women, so there wouldn’t be the comfort of knowing no one here is sexually attracted to anyone else. I don’t know anything about fashion or makeup. I find many female social bonding rituals somewhere between offensive and incomprehensible. I would be very irritated at being invited.

“That’s not fair, Ozy,” you might say, “you’re transgender, they wouldn’t invite you!”

So consider my friend theunitofcaring, who has graciously agreed to be a cis female example of a person you should not invite to your female-only event.

Once again, she is attracted to women. She does not care about most stereotypically female interests. She finds many social bonding rituals somewhere between offensive and incomprehensible. She has a personality that is different from the stereotypical woman on many axes, and for this reason finds women-only spaces unwelcoming and unpleasant. And, yes, she would be very irritated at being invited.

She has also never received an invite to any of these events!

So far, the organizers are 2/2 in terms of never inviting people they shouldn’t invite. This is a pretty good track record and they should be proud of it. However, if they replaced it with a cis-woman-only system, or a people-who-produce-large-gametes-only system, or whatever, they would invite me or theunitofcaring. The best-case scenario is that we would be irritated and not go. The worst case scenario is that we would be confused what sort of event you were running, show up with the intent to swap clothes, and ruin your event.

The actual category they should be using is not “cis women.” The actual category they should be using is “people who would be contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for.”

You might argue that there are not that many cisgender female outliers. Well, let’s assume for the sake of argument that all psychological differences between men and women are correlated into a general factor of Psychological Femaleness. If the Cohen’s d effect size is 1 (commonly glossed as “large”), a full 24% of women will have less psychological femaleness than the average man, which means that 98.67% of your problem is a cisgender female problem.

Or you might argue that that’s all very well if your community is 0.3% trans women, but if ten percent of the people in your community are transgender then that’s a different story. Of course, if your community is full of trans women, it is probably attractive to unusual women in general, and you should expect lots of cisgender outliers as well.

[NOTE: Upon request, the second quote has been removed. If you are interested in reading what I am replying to, please go here and control-F “another (cis) female friend of the blog.” I have also been informed that the person who provided this quote does not identify as a cis woman.]

I do not understand the relationship between this and psychological gender differences. It seems quite obvious that the relevant category here is “people who look like the vast majority of street harassers” versus “people who do not look like the vast majority of street harassers.” The former group uncontroversially includes some trans women (closeted trans women) and some trans men (Buck Angel) and has nothing to do with psychology anyway. No matter how female-typical a trans man’s psychology is, if he has muscles like Chris Hemsworth and a beard like a lumberjack, he belongs in the men’s room.

Indeed, I would argue, there are many cis men in the former category. Even today, and much more so in the past, men’s bathrooms are not equipped with changing tables for babies. When in such a poorly-designed bathroom, some fathers will go into the women’s bathroom and use the changing table there. While obviously we should put changing tables in the men’s bathroom, I think that this use does not erode the protection women’s bathrooms have against harassers. Harassers do not carry around babies in order to have plausible deniability in the event that the woman they are harassing enters a woman’s bathroom at the same time the baby happens to poop.

Similarly, early-transition trans women can be placed into the former category. In our culture, it is generally very stigmatized for men to wear dresses, skirts, makeup, and other signifiers of womanhood. In particular, catcallers and sexist harassers essentially never do: if you’re a catcaller or a sexist harasser, it is probably because you are invested in a particular style of masculinity that is completely incompatible with wearing a skirt. Therefore, allowing all dress-wearing people to use the women’s bathroom has minimal risk of allowing catcallers in. In the event that men wearing dresses and makeup is completely destigmatized to the point that even sexist assholes do so, I am happy to reexamine this statement.

In fact, because of the usefulness of female clothing as a signifier of transness, there is far more danger to norms from early-transition trans men and some butch and gender-non-conforming cis women using the women’s bathroom. If followed to its logical conclusion, this argument suggests that some cis women should be using the men’s room. If strangers regularly refer to you as “sir’, then you may resemble a street harasser or a catcaller far more closely than the average early-transition trans woman, and according to the premises of this argument should use the men’s room. It’s true that cis women in the men’s room might be harassed, no matter their gender presentation, but trans women in the men’s room might be harassed too.

This is not, of course, what I believe. While public bathrooms as refuge from harassment is an important purpose, more important is the primary purpose of public bathrooms, that is, a place to pee. Every person should have the ability to use the bathroom in public. Many trans people and some cis people (both assigned male at birth and assigned female at birth) are not read consistently as male or as female. People who harass and assault other people are far more likely to use the men’s room than the women’s room– that is the point of this entire discussion. If the choices are (a) never pee in public at all, (b) pee in a place where you run a moderate chance of being harassed or assaulted, or (c) slightly erode the norm that people who resemble sexual harassers should not use the women’s bathroom, I think (c) is the only ethical choice.

Finally, I would like to discuss the category I think we should allocate that would make all the discussion of transness much clearer.

Think about money. What do Bitcoin, gold, the little pieces of paper you get from the US government, and cigarettes in a prison have in common? What is the thing that makes all four of those things– all seemingly very different– money?

The answer is that everyone agrees that they’re money. Because everyone agrees that they’re money, you expect that you will be able to exchange them for valuable things in the future. You have an incentive to accumulate cigarettes, gold, or dollar bills even if you don’t smoke, have no interest in making jewelry, and already have perfectly good toilet paper.

I don’t mean to imply that there is no fact of the matter about whether things are money. Clearly there is. Dollar bills are money; Beanie Babies are not. It just happens that the reason that dollar bills are money is that everyone agrees they are money.

I also don’t mean to imply that the definition of money is “things we agree upon to be money.” That would be circular. The definition of money is “any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular country or socio-economic context.”

Social gender is like money. For example, some cultures have more than two social genders, because everyone agrees that more than two social genders exist.

Social gender is distinct from sex: no cultures have more than two sexes because they decided they did. Social gender is distinct from gender presentation: if you meet a woman with a shaved head and a fondness for cars who has cried twice in her entire life, you will not experience the slightest confusion about whether she’s a woman.

Social gender is useful for prediction. Here are some things you can predict about a person based on their social gender:

• Pronouns
• Which gendered terms (“husband”, “groom”, “father”) they use
• Which gendered insults are used against them
• Which gendered holidays (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day) they celebrate
• Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup
• How vicious the harassment they receive is, if they are Internet famous
• Whether people feel comfortable letting them hold their baby
• Whether they experience street harassment
• How many messages they get on a dating site
• Whether people expect them to know how to cook, clean, lift heavy things, or fix cars
• How likely they are to be considered a “slut” if they have lots of casual sex
• Whether they change their name upon getting married
• Whether they are expected to make career sacrifices to take care of their children

And so on and so forth.

Returning to the money example: if a person says that fiat currency isn’t real money, what do they mean? Obviously, they aren’t saying that you can’t exchange fiat currency for goods and services: taking them to the local WalMart will not change their opinion. Our goldbug friend isn’t suggesting that fiat currently isn’t money; they’re suggesting that it shouldn’t be money. They think that everyone should stop agreeing that fiat currency is money, and instead agree that only gold is money. It’s not a definition of what is money; it’s a criterion for what should be considered money.

Similarly, “you’re a woman if you identify as a woman!” is not a definition of womanhood. It is a criterion for who should be a woman. It states that our social genders should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says “I would like to be put in the ‘woman’ category now,” you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied: a trans person’s social gender generally depends on their presentation, their secondary sexual characteristics, and how much the cis people around them are paying attention. But perhaps it would improve things if it were.

Since it is not, properly speaking, a definition, the decision of who should be socially gendered male or female, and how many social genders we should have is not an epistemic decision. This decision can and should be made on purely utilitarian grounds.

Do Some Trans People Pass? The Results

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

The first five pictures were of cisgender women; the second five pictures were of transgender women.

(Yes, I’m lazy.)

The cisgender pictures are from r/selfie; the transgender pictures are from r/transpassing, a subreddit where people post pictures of themselves to see whether they pass. Both were from the most upvoted pictures of the last month. The trans girl who hadn’t taken HRT was #8, the second girl with a flower crown; an astonishing 37% of voters thought she was cisgender.

Of the five cisgender girls, two were conclusively identified as cisgender, while three had less than sixty percent of voters identify them as either cis or trans. In two cases, the voters leaned towards cisgender, while in one case, the voters leaned towards transgender. Of the five transgender girls, three were conclusively identified as transgender, one was conclusively identified as cisgender, and the remaining girl was not conclusively identified either way, although voters leaned towards her being transgender.

My initial predictions were wrong; I thought that people would be far more likely to misidentify transgender people as cisgender and vice versa than they actually were. In fact, with two exceptions (one cis and one trans), the lean of the vote was in the correct direction.

However, I found the lack of consensus striking. I defined “lack of consensus” as failing to get at least sixty percent of voters to agree on whether you’re cisgender or transgender; by this relatively narrow definition, four women’s pictures were unidentifiable. Using a broader definition, in which fewer than two-thirds of voters agree, six women’s pictures were unidentifiable as cisgender or transgender. As qualitative evidence, several commenters mentioned that, if they hadn’t known that five of the pictures were of trans women, they would have assumed all or nearly all the pictures were of cisgender women.

My interpretation of this data is that base rates matter. Many people– I would roughly guess about half the population– are not readily identifiable as cisgender or transgender if there’s a 50/50 chance that they’re cis or trans. However, in the real world, 99.7% of people are cisgender; for this reason, pretty much all ambiguous people are read as cisgender all the time.

What matters, of course, is not the actual base rate but the perceived base rate. Sophia Kovaleva commented on the original post:

I recently spent 20 minutes arguing with Russian border control agents that my passport is mine, and the incorrect gender marker in it is not a result of “a technical mistake on the part of the organization that issued the passport”. Never mind bone structure or height or the pitch and resonance of the voice – they couldn’t clock me despite seeing my passport and having me literally saying “I’m trans” (well, technically I was saying “I’m changing my sex” in order for this statement to be accessible to them).

Of course, Russia is a very traditional and transphobic country, so the perceived base rate of trans people is extraordinarily low, perhaps zero. No amount of evidence would cause people to update in favor.

I myself have noticed that context matters. When I lived in a Southern state, I passed as male if I cut my hair, wore a button-down shirt, and didn’t talk very much– except when I went to anime conventions. Since many people crossplay at anime conventions, people didn’t expect that someone in male clothing would be male. Now that I live in San Francisco, I rarely pass: people expect butch women to exist. (Inexplicably, having green hair caused me to be read as male, until I started carrying around a baby a lot of the time, at which point people started reading me as female again. I have attempted to persuade my husband to wear a dress in an attempt to confuse people into gendering me as male, but no dice.)

This suggests an unfortunate tradeoff for transgender people. The feminist, trans-friendly places where being perceived as trans is least dangerous are exactly the places where it is most difficult for us to go stealth.