I’m trying to make sense of this. If I’m not mistaken you claim:
Autogynephilic sexual fantasies are causally responsible for late-onset not-purely-androphilic trans women’s motivations for transition
Some late-onset trans women have never had autogynephilic sexual fantasies
This obviously doesn’t make sense as-is. You briefly went into a theory of early-onset HSTS, late-onset not-otherwise-specified gender dysphoria, and you raised internalized misandry as a possible alternate instantiation of that “not-otherwise-specified”. And that could resolve the issue I’m pointing at.
This explanation makes a testable prediction. I’ve noticed that late-onset trans women tend to fall remarkably close together along a number of characteristics that aren’t obviously related to gender dysphoria or autogynephilia. Let me know if you don’t think that’s right, and I can go into more detail, but as a basic example, this group has way higher rates of ASD, and more people who were excellent programmers at a young age, compared to the male baseline. If you’re proposing that non-autogynephilic late-onset trans women have significantly different causal explanations for transitioning, then we wouldn’t expect to find them also in this autistic computer-kid cluster.
I notice that when offering Ziz as an example of a non-autogynephilic late-onset trans woman, you chose to mention that she’s “unusual along a lot of dimensions.” So I’m hopeful that I’m on the right track in inferring your thinking here.
From my perspective as a late-onset, not-purely-androphilic trans woman who’s on the spectrum and was an excellent programmer at a young age, but who lacks a history of autogynephilic sexual fantasies, I find the “not-otherwise-specified” explanation hard to believe.
Instead of supposing that most late-onset trans women were motivated to transition by their fetish, while I was motivated by some other factor, and that it’s just a coincidence that we happen to also share a lot of peculiar features, it would be more parsimonious to say that among these characteristics that we share is some psychological factor that motivated all of our transitions, and which also causes most of us to develop autogynephilic fetishes.
Maybe I’m wrong, and what I perceive as a clear cluster of unusual traits isn’t actually enough of a statistical anomaly to support my conclusions (I think it’s really anomalous though). Or maybe I’m a victim of social contagion — I ended up friends with a bunch of autogynephiles because we share all these characteristics, then they transitioned because of their autogynephilia, and then I did because I wanted to be ingroup (I’m quite happy with my transition though).
My explanation also has the advantage of matching the reports by most late-onset trans women about the relation between their gender dysphoria and autogynephilic fantasies. I agree there’s plenty of evidence that nobody is thinking sanely on this subject — motivated self-delusion is a believable explanation! But it does still incur a complexity penalty.
Autogynephilic sexual fantasies are causally responsible for late-onset not-purely-androphilic trans women’s motivations for transition
Not necessarily sexual fantasies themselves! Sexual fantasies are an indicator of the presence of an underlying sexual orientation towards that which is depicted in the fantasies.
This obviously doesn’t make sense as-is.
His point in bringing up trans women like Ziz who supposedly had no signs of autogynephilia is to say that he is open to there being additional factors which explains those trans women. So he suggests that autogynephilia is a factor among those who have indicators of autogynephilia, and other things than autogynephilia are factors among those who do not have indicators of autogynephilia.
Instead of supposing that most late-onset trans women were motivated to transition by their fetish, while I was motivated by some other factor, and that it’s just a coincidence that we happen to also share a lot of peculiar features, it would be more parsimonious to say that among these characteristics that we share is some psychological factor that motivated all of our transitions, and which also causes most of us to develop autogynephilic fetishes.
I still need to look into the ASD programmer situation some more, but let’s consider nerdy progressivism as another example that I know something more about. Macho men feel like it would be humiliating to be women. Plausibly, this makes them less likely to transition. Un-macho / nerdy-progressive men would thus be more likely to transition; even if being un-macho is not on its own sufficient to transition, when it becomes combined with other factors that contribute to transition, it can end up allowing those factors to be expressed rather than repressed.
In particular, this would presumably also apply among autogynephiles, with macho autogynephiles being more likely to repress.
So from a multicausal model you’d expect to see autogynephilic trans women differ from autogynephilic cis men along the same non-autogynephilia causes that contribute to other trans women.
Not necessarily sexual fantasies themselves! Sexual fantasies are an indicator of the presence of an underlying sexual orientation towards that which is depicted in the fantasies
I see! This is something I associate with Ann Lawrence’s contribution to the theory. I had Lawrence on my reading list last year, but I felt it was wise to pull back from that reading for a bit, so sorry if my criticism is a bit basic. I’ll be going off just your comment here and what I’ve heard second hand from Lawrence’s critiques, who might not be the best of rationalists.
I’ll say that I’ve remarked before that “autogynephilia,” if you looked at just the etymology and not its origin in describing cross-sex sexual fantasies (that’s definitely how Blanchard used it initially), seemed like as good a description of myself as any. Mostly because it sounds pretty deflationary: I chose to transition because I… like myself as a woman (or more feminine, I’d prefer to say). The alternatives seem like they’d be either cynical-strategic or self-harm.
But “sexual orientation” sounds like it comes with a lot more baggage than that. What account of “sexual orientation” allows calling autogynephilia without concordant sexual fantasies a “sexual orientation?” I’ve heard people talk about “the desire to become a woman and fall in love with yourself” in the context of Lawrence (and Zack made reference to that here, so I assume it’s not made up). But “desire to become a woman” without the “and fall in love with yourself” part doesn’t sound like something you’d want to call a “sexual orientation,” and the falling in love with yourself part… I don’t think I fell in love with myself or that I’m likely to. From my second-hand impressions of Lawrence’s work, I think that part is supposed to be involved in explaining why post-transition trans women tend to no longer experience much autogynephilic sexual fantasy, by analogy to a stale sexless marriage.
The classic autogynephile is a male who has a sexual desire to both be a woman and to have sex with other women. But the theory also has to account for asexuals like me, so it describes us as exclusively autogynephilic. So autogynephilia is a sexual orientation that can be present on its own, or in combination with homosexual or bisexual attraction (w.r.t. natal sex). If autogynephilia were something that people had in the place of conventional sexual orientations, then I could see the elegance of calling it a sexual orientation. But not if we’ve established that it can be found in the place of or in addition to other orientations.
I don’t think we get any explanatory value out of this account of autogynephilia-as-a-sexual-orientation without necessary sexual components. Remember that we invoked it in order to explain why some males want to transition and live as women — if “autogynephilia” amounts to nothing more than a desire to be a woman, then we’re just begging the question!
And again, if autogynephilia fails to provide an explanation for my desire to transition, then even if it seems to explain other people’s it leaves unexplained why I seem so damn similar to them along a spooky number of dimensions, and that should cast the entire claim into doubt.
And there are hypotheses that perform better. Scott explains cross-sex gender identification as causally posterior to ASD:
My guess is something like joint issues → poor proprioception → all sensory experience is noisy and confusing → the brain, which is embodied and spends most of its time trying to process sensory experience, learns a different reasoning style → different reasoning style is less context-dependent (producing symptoms of autism) → different reasoning style when trying to interpret bodily correlates of gender (eg sex hormones) → transgender.
Or the hypothesized Meyer-Powers Syndrome, which purports to explain several of the observed commonalities among late-onset trans women, including gender dysphoria, in terms of a disorder of steroidogenesis. I’m skeptical of its empirical validity, but I bet that whatever the true explanation is, it’ll involve a similar-looking causal graph.
What account of “sexual orientation” allows calling autogynephilia without concordant sexual fantasies a “sexual orientation?”
I think it makes sense to posit some underlying latent variable as a cause of things like sexual fantasies about the target of attraction and courtship behaviors towards the target of attraction, even if those effects don’t necessarily manifest in, e.g., someone with unusually low libido.
Lawrence points out that signs of eventual sexual orientation are often evinced by children long before such feelings take on an explicitly erotic tone at puberty, both in typical cases (in the form of affection towards opposite sex peers) and in cases of unusual sexual interests (like rubber fetishists who reported an interest in the material as small children).
it leaves unexplained why I seem so damn similar to them along a spooky number of dimensions
As far as social implications go, I think this cuts both ways. The reason autogynephilia is controversial is because it’s an alternative to the “woman trapped in a man’s body” trope, an etiological story that undermines the “trans women are women” slogan and makes MtFs seem more relevantly M than F, despite their/our efforts.
I have another post that’s just about my experiences, not trying to steal probability-mass from anyone else’s story. (That was a lot easier to write, which is why it appeared two years earlier.) It would be one thing if the standard Reddit-tier response to that was, “Yes, Zack’s story is textbook AGP, which is a totally different thing from what we actual trans women feel.”
But that’s generally not what I hear! If the spooky number of dimensions I have in common with trans women (like being spectrumy programmers) aren’t things we have in common with actual females, that still undermines the slogan, even if a relatively greater fraction of the correlation ends up being explained by a different parent in the causal graph than I thought in 2017.
I could believe that sensitive, shy, spectrumy male programmers tend to find the trans community narrative appealing separately from whether they happen to be AGP, but I really, really have trouble believing in a bone fide intersex condition that has no particular symptoms other than a mysterious desire to be female. I think actual intersex conditions either come with unambiguous medical symptoms (like androgen insensitivity or 5α reductase deficiency) or behaviorally look like HSTS.
The reason autogynephilia is controversial is because it’s an alternative to the “woman trapped in a man’s body” trope, an etiological story that undermines the “trans women are women” slogan and makes MtFs seem more relevantly M than F, despite their/our efforts.
I don’t agree that’s the reason that autogynephilia theory is controversial! Not that it isn’t part of the story, but I’m pretty sure the main reason for the controversy is that it contradicts trans women’s own understanding of their motivations for transitioning, and is often presented as to imply trans women are either deceiving themselves or others
In reddit-tier discourse, people do get mad that autogynephilia theory contradicts “trans women are women,” but I have no idea how to coherently interpret reddit-tier discourse. When people of the same ideological persuasion as the reddit “trans women are women” crowd want to be coherent, I’ve seen them often cite Julia Serano on the topic:
In recent papers, proponents of autogynephilia have argued that the theory should be accepted because it has more explanatory potential than what they call the “feminine essence narrative”—that is, the idea forwarded by some transsexuals that they are rather uncomplicatedly “women trapped in men’s bodies”. According to this argument, while the feminine essence narrative may hold true for androphilic transsexual women (whose feminine gender expression and attraction to men allows them to come off as sufficiently “womanly”), nonandrophilic and/or nonfeminine transsexual women fail to achieve conventional ideals of womanhood and, therefore, must comprise a different category and arise from a distinct etiology. However, pitting autogynephilia against an overly simplistic “feminine essence narrative” ignores a more nuanced view that I will refer to here as the gender variance model, which holds that gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and physical sex are largely separable traits that may tend to correlate in the general population but do not all necessarily align in the same direction within any given individual. According to this model, transsexuals share the experience of discordance between their gender identity and physical sex (which leads to gender dysphoria and a desire to physically transition) but are expected to differ with respect to their gender expression and sexual orientation (just as nontranssexuals vary in these aspects).
As far as I can tell, “women trapped in men’s bodies” hasn’t been put forth as a serious model of transness since the theory of sexual inversion in the 19th century. In the ideological framework of mainstream trans activists, autogynephilia doesn’t actually threaten “trans women are women,” because what makes trans women women is “gender identity,” which autogynephilia is entirely orthogonal to. I think the reason that redditors act like it does is because its proponents have a tendency to deny that (at least autogynephilic) trans women are women, not anything to do with the theory itself.
If the spooky number of dimensions I have in common with trans women (like being spectrumy programmers) aren’t things we have in common with actual females, that still undermines the slogan
I have no particular attachment to the slogan or its metaphysical agenda, but I want to point out that in my own life, it’s seemed like spectrumy trans women sure have a lot in common with spectrumy cis women. Most of my friends growing up were spectrumy cis women, and I think these friends of mine fit into the spectrumy trans woman stereotypes pretty well. I don’t know to what degree this is peculiar to me and the people I encountered, but I’m not the first to observe it.
As a spectrumy programmer whose gametes are presumably ova, like 50% of my physical life and 75% of my online community friends are spectrumy trans people. My experience is also that we have a ridiculous amount in common, yes.
As far as I can tell, “women trapped in men’s bodies” hasn’t been put forth as a serious model of transness since the theory of sexual inversion in the 19th century.
This is somewhat unconvincing on its own, because clearly at the very least the trans community does some Motte/Bailey on it. I think a more directly convincing point is my prediction market, which only assigns 23% probability to feminine essence, and 61% probability to something that is neither feminine essence nor Blanchardianism:
This is somewhat unconvincing on its own, because clearly at the very least the trans community does some Motte/Bailey on it.
Yeah I bet that does happen. A more charitable lens that explains some of what might come across that way, though, is that “women trapped in men’s bodies” is a neat and succinct way to explain trans women to someone who it would otherwise take too long to explain to, in situations where an extended lecture would be impractical, inappropriate or unappreciated.
I think autogynephilia is correlated with gender identity?
In extension, it’s true that learning that someone experiences autogynephilic sexual fantasies should increase your credence that they will report a feminine gender identity.
What I mean is that the Blanchardian model and the gender variance model barely make reference to the same concepts. Orthogonal in theory space, not in people space. But another way of putting my point is that endorsing autogynephilia as an explanation for most trans women’s motivation for transition in no way binds you to any position on whether trans women are women.
A more charitable lens that explains some of what might come across that way, though, is that “women trapped in men’s bodies” is a neat and succinct way to explain trans women to someone who it would otherwise take too long to explain to, in situations where an extended lecture would be impractical, inappropriate or unappreciated.
In “The Man Who Would Be Queen”, Michael Bailey said that “men who desperately want to become women” was a much better way of thinking about AGP(TS)s, and this seems similarly succinct. Why go with “women trapped in men’s bodies” over that?
I agree that it is unlikely that people who do not have autogynephilic sexual fantasies are autogynephilic. I’m not making the distinction between orientation vs fantasies as some sort of loophole to call trans women AGP without them showing any overtly erotic signs of autogynephilia, but instead to point out that I don’t think the gender feelings would disappear just because one repressed the fantasies themselves (which in itself would be difficult because of how sexuality works).
I think observations of how trans women share a bunch of traits are approximately worthless without a factor analysis that pins down whether those traits are related to each other or independent.
I’m trying to make sense of this. If I’m not mistaken you claim:
Autogynephilic sexual fantasies are causally responsible for late-onset not-purely-androphilic trans women’s motivations for transition
Some late-onset trans women have never had autogynephilic sexual fantasies
This obviously doesn’t make sense as-is. You briefly went into a theory of early-onset HSTS, late-onset not-otherwise-specified gender dysphoria, and you raised internalized misandry as a possible alternate instantiation of that “not-otherwise-specified”. And that could resolve the issue I’m pointing at.
This explanation makes a testable prediction. I’ve noticed that late-onset trans women tend to fall remarkably close together along a number of characteristics that aren’t obviously related to gender dysphoria or autogynephilia. Let me know if you don’t think that’s right, and I can go into more detail, but as a basic example, this group has way higher rates of ASD, and more people who were excellent programmers at a young age, compared to the male baseline. If you’re proposing that non-autogynephilic late-onset trans women have significantly different causal explanations for transitioning, then we wouldn’t expect to find them also in this autistic computer-kid cluster.
I notice that when offering Ziz as an example of a non-autogynephilic late-onset trans woman, you chose to mention that she’s “unusual along a lot of dimensions.” So I’m hopeful that I’m on the right track in inferring your thinking here.
From my perspective as a late-onset, not-purely-androphilic trans woman who’s on the spectrum and was an excellent programmer at a young age, but who lacks a history of autogynephilic sexual fantasies, I find the “not-otherwise-specified” explanation hard to believe.
Instead of supposing that most late-onset trans women were motivated to transition by their fetish, while I was motivated by some other factor, and that it’s just a coincidence that we happen to also share a lot of peculiar features, it would be more parsimonious to say that among these characteristics that we share is some psychological factor that motivated all of our transitions, and which also causes most of us to develop autogynephilic fetishes.
Maybe I’m wrong, and what I perceive as a clear cluster of unusual traits isn’t actually enough of a statistical anomaly to support my conclusions (I think it’s really anomalous though). Or maybe I’m a victim of social contagion — I ended up friends with a bunch of autogynephiles because we share all these characteristics, then they transitioned because of their autogynephilia, and then I did because I wanted to be ingroup (I’m quite happy with my transition though).
My explanation also has the advantage of matching the reports by most late-onset trans women about the relation between their gender dysphoria and autogynephilic fantasies. I agree there’s plenty of evidence that nobody is thinking sanely on this subject — motivated self-delusion is a believable explanation! But it does still incur a complexity penalty.
Not necessarily sexual fantasies themselves! Sexual fantasies are an indicator of the presence of an underlying sexual orientation towards that which is depicted in the fantasies.
His point in bringing up trans women like Ziz who supposedly had no signs of autogynephilia is to say that he is open to there being additional factors which explains those trans women. So he suggests that autogynephilia is a factor among those who have indicators of autogynephilia, and other things than autogynephilia are factors among those who do not have indicators of autogynephilia.
I still need to look into the ASD programmer situation some more, but let’s consider nerdy progressivism as another example that I know something more about. Macho men feel like it would be humiliating to be women. Plausibly, this makes them less likely to transition. Un-macho / nerdy-progressive men would thus be more likely to transition; even if being un-macho is not on its own sufficient to transition, when it becomes combined with other factors that contribute to transition, it can end up allowing those factors to be expressed rather than repressed.
In particular, this would presumably also apply among autogynephiles, with macho autogynephiles being more likely to repress.
So from a multicausal model you’d expect to see autogynephilic trans women differ from autogynephilic cis men along the same non-autogynephilia causes that contribute to other trans women.
I see! This is something I associate with Ann Lawrence’s contribution to the theory. I had Lawrence on my reading list last year, but I felt it was wise to pull back from that reading for a bit, so sorry if my criticism is a bit basic. I’ll be going off just your comment here and what I’ve heard second hand from Lawrence’s critiques, who might not be the best of rationalists.
I’ll say that I’ve remarked before that “autogynephilia,” if you looked at just the etymology and not its origin in describing cross-sex sexual fantasies (that’s definitely how Blanchard used it initially), seemed like as good a description of myself as any. Mostly because it sounds pretty deflationary: I chose to transition because I… like myself as a woman (or more feminine, I’d prefer to say). The alternatives seem like they’d be either cynical-strategic or self-harm.
But “sexual orientation” sounds like it comes with a lot more baggage than that. What account of “sexual orientation” allows calling autogynephilia without concordant sexual fantasies a “sexual orientation?” I’ve heard people talk about “the desire to become a woman and fall in love with yourself” in the context of Lawrence (and Zack made reference to that here, so I assume it’s not made up). But “desire to become a woman” without the “and fall in love with yourself” part doesn’t sound like something you’d want to call a “sexual orientation,” and the falling in love with yourself part… I don’t think I fell in love with myself or that I’m likely to. From my second-hand impressions of Lawrence’s work, I think that part is supposed to be involved in explaining why post-transition trans women tend to no longer experience much autogynephilic sexual fantasy, by analogy to a stale sexless marriage.
The classic autogynephile is a male who has a sexual desire to both be a woman and to have sex with other women. But the theory also has to account for asexuals like me, so it describes us as exclusively autogynephilic. So autogynephilia is a sexual orientation that can be present on its own, or in combination with homosexual or bisexual attraction (w.r.t. natal sex). If autogynephilia were something that people had in the place of conventional sexual orientations, then I could see the elegance of calling it a sexual orientation. But not if we’ve established that it can be found in the place of or in addition to other orientations.
I don’t think we get any explanatory value out of this account of autogynephilia-as-a-sexual-orientation without necessary sexual components. Remember that we invoked it in order to explain why some males want to transition and live as women — if “autogynephilia” amounts to nothing more than a desire to be a woman, then we’re just begging the question!
And again, if autogynephilia fails to provide an explanation for my desire to transition, then even if it seems to explain other people’s it leaves unexplained why I seem so damn similar to them along a spooky number of dimensions, and that should cast the entire claim into doubt.
And there are hypotheses that perform better. Scott explains cross-sex gender identification as causally posterior to ASD:
Or the hypothesized Meyer-Powers Syndrome, which purports to explain several of the observed commonalities among late-onset trans women, including gender dysphoria, in terms of a disorder of steroidogenesis. I’m skeptical of its empirical validity, but I bet that whatever the true explanation is, it’ll involve a similar-looking causal graph.
I think it makes sense to posit some underlying latent variable as a cause of things like sexual fantasies about the target of attraction and courtship behaviors towards the target of attraction, even if those effects don’t necessarily manifest in, e.g., someone with unusually low libido.
Lawrence points out that signs of eventual sexual orientation are often evinced by children long before such feelings take on an explicitly erotic tone at puberty, both in typical cases (in the form of affection towards opposite sex peers) and in cases of unusual sexual interests (like rubber fetishists who reported an interest in the material as small children).
As far as social implications go, I think this cuts both ways. The reason autogynephilia is controversial is because it’s an alternative to the “woman trapped in a man’s body” trope, an etiological story that undermines the “trans women are women” slogan and makes MtFs seem more relevantly M than F, despite their/our efforts.
I have another post that’s just about my experiences, not trying to steal probability-mass from anyone else’s story. (That was a lot easier to write, which is why it appeared two years earlier.) It would be one thing if the standard Reddit-tier response to that was, “Yes, Zack’s story is textbook AGP, which is a totally different thing from what we actual trans women feel.”
But that’s generally not what I hear! If the spooky number of dimensions I have in common with trans women (like being spectrumy programmers) aren’t things we have in common with actual females, that still undermines the slogan, even if a relatively greater fraction of the correlation ends up being explained by a different parent in the causal graph than I thought in 2017.
I could believe that sensitive, shy, spectrumy male programmers tend to find the trans community narrative appealing separately from whether they happen to be AGP, but I really, really have trouble believing in a bone fide intersex condition that has no particular symptoms other than a mysterious desire to be female. I think actual intersex conditions either come with unambiguous medical symptoms (like androgen insensitivity or 5α reductase deficiency) or behaviorally look like HSTS.
I don’t agree that’s the reason that autogynephilia theory is controversial! Not that it isn’t part of the story, but I’m pretty sure the main reason for the controversy is that it contradicts trans women’s own understanding of their motivations for transitioning, and is often presented as to imply trans women are either deceiving themselves or others
In reddit-tier discourse, people do get mad that autogynephilia theory contradicts “trans women are women,” but I have no idea how to coherently interpret reddit-tier discourse. When people of the same ideological persuasion as the reddit “trans women are women” crowd want to be coherent, I’ve seen them often cite Julia Serano on the topic:
As far as I can tell, “women trapped in men’s bodies” hasn’t been put forth as a serious model of transness since the theory of sexual inversion in the 19th century. In the ideological framework of mainstream trans activists, autogynephilia doesn’t actually threaten “trans women are women,” because what makes trans women women is “gender identity,” which autogynephilia is entirely orthogonal to. I think the reason that redditors act like it does is because its proponents have a tendency to deny that (at least autogynephilic) trans women are women, not anything to do with the theory itself.
I have no particular attachment to the slogan or its metaphysical agenda, but I want to point out that in my own life, it’s seemed like spectrumy trans women sure have a lot in common with spectrumy cis women. Most of my friends growing up were spectrumy cis women, and I think these friends of mine fit into the spectrumy trans woman stereotypes pretty well. I don’t know to what degree this is peculiar to me and the people I encountered, but I’m not the first to observe it.
As a spectrumy programmer whose gametes are presumably ova, like 50% of my physical life and 75% of my online community friends are spectrumy trans people. My experience is also that we have a ridiculous amount in common, yes.
This is somewhat unconvincing on its own, because clearly at the very least the trans community does some Motte/Bailey on it. I think a more directly convincing point is my prediction market, which only assigns 23% probability to feminine essence, and 61% probability to something that is neither feminine essence nor Blanchardianism:
https://manifold.markets/tailcalled/if-a-solid-neurological-study-of-tr?r=dGFpbGNhbGxlZA
Not sure what you mean by this. I think autogynephilia is correlated with gender identity?
Yeah I bet that does happen. A more charitable lens that explains some of what might come across that way, though, is that “women trapped in men’s bodies” is a neat and succinct way to explain trans women to someone who it would otherwise take too long to explain to, in situations where an extended lecture would be impractical, inappropriate or unappreciated.
In extension, it’s true that learning that someone experiences autogynephilic sexual fantasies should increase your credence that they will report a feminine gender identity.
What I mean is that the Blanchardian model and the gender variance model barely make reference to the same concepts. Orthogonal in theory space, not in people space. But another way of putting my point is that endorsing autogynephilia as an explanation for most trans women’s motivation for transition in no way binds you to any position on whether trans women are women.
In “The Man Who Would Be Queen”, Michael Bailey said that “men who desperately want to become women” was a much better way of thinking about AGP(TS)s, and this seems similarly succinct. Why go with “women trapped in men’s bodies” over that?
I agree that it is unlikely that people who do not have autogynephilic sexual fantasies are autogynephilic. I’m not making the distinction between orientation vs fantasies as some sort of loophole to call trans women AGP without them showing any overtly erotic signs of autogynephilia, but instead to point out that I don’t think the gender feelings would disappear just because one repressed the fantasies themselves (which in itself would be difficult because of how sexuality works).
I think observations of how trans women share a bunch of traits are approximately worthless without a factor analysis that pins down whether those traits are related to each other or independent.