Apologies in advance for any tonal issues in this.
I have serious issues with the autogynephilia analysis, both yours and more generally. You’ve likely heard the critiques that many cis women qualify as AGP if they take the same surveys, but I also think the questions and scenarios are simply not useful in terms of distinguishing a sexual motivation from any other sort of gender euphoria/dysphoria/identity. Someone with entirely non-sexual motivations for transition would still likely find a sexual fantasy where they are their transitioned gender in one way or another arousing and could thus easily be a false positive on your AGP/AAP scales, in as much as those are supposed to separate out a specific type of (trans) person or reason for transitioning. Many, many entries on your list of common AGP/AAP fantasies fall into that category and can only classed as abnormal by virtue of being had by someone of the “wrong” birth sex. Given that, I really do not understand why you believe it more likely that AGP/AAP is the upstream, causal condition and not gender identity, given the inability of the tests to distinguish between the two possibilities. It seems like you’re massively privileging the Blanchard/Bailey hypothesis in spite of the major issues (including arguable fraud) that you admit their research has (and I see little reason to assume Hsu’s research will be any better quality, given that he clearly works extremely closely with Bailey).
Parsimony isn’t everything, humans are as you say complicated, but when you’re working with a typology that claims two separate, distinct causes for a transgender identity and the surveys used to analyze the supposed phenomenon can’t easily distinguish between a normal variation in sexuality for someone’s (identified) gender and a primarily sexual motivation for that identity despite that being an explicit goal (on top of the other issues with the research), it seems likely that you have a problem with your hypothesis. It seems particularly likely that this is the case when there is another hypothesis that matches the data at least as well, doesn’t posit multiple causes for what seems like a single phenomenon, and also matches with the reported experiences of the vast majority of transgender people (where the Bailey/Blanchard typology being true would essentially require that the vast majority of trans people be lying to themselves).
And if AGP/AAP measures don’t really work for their intended population, trans people, why would they be useful measures in cis people, as you’re using them here?
First, just to be clear, I do not agree fully with Blanchard’s/Bailey’s typology and have written numerous critiques of it on my blog. It could very well be that the Blanchard/Bailey typology is wrong while autogynephilia is still a major cause of gender identity. For instance, the Blanchard/Bailey model would be wrong if exclusively androphilic trans women are also autogynephilic, or if cis women are autogynephilic, or if autoandrophilia is a common cause for trans men, or many other reasons; however the listed possibilities could be the case even if autogynephilia is a major factor in gender identity. So I don’t think we should evaluate the “big picture” theories, but instead look at the justification for each piece individually.
Someone with entirely non-sexual motivations for transition would still likely find a sexual fantasy where they are their transitioned gender in one way or another arousing and could thus easily be a false positive on your AGP/AAP scales
The ideal result I had hoped to get from these surveys was a deterministic account of gender identity. If I had gotten that, it could be far clearer, as we could explicitly look at all the other causes and investigate the validity of this argument.
Unfortunately but perhaps expectedly, I didn’t end up with a deterministic model. And the alternative factors I came up with were annoyingly ambiguous, often having a slight correlation with autogynephilia as would be expected if autogynephilia was causally downstream of gender identity, but also often not being sufficiently strongly correlated as would be expected if the causality genuinely went other factor → gender identity → autogynephilia. But one potential reason why the qualitative surveys didn’t find non-autogynephilia factors that could explain most of the variance in gender identity is simply because such factors don’t exist.
I still suspect that you are wrong though. For instance, one of the other factors I found was gender conservativism. Suppose I explicitly intervened on that, e.g. I took a bunch of willing autogynephiles I tried to give them the best case for gender conservativism, and to submerge them in gender conservative culture and values. Could this succeed in turning them more gender conservative? Probably not always, but sometimes. Could turning them more gender conservative make them feel that they wouldn’t so much want to be women? Based on this survey data, and on various anecdotes, and on the theory in my analysis above, I’d say perhaps yes. Would it also reduce their autogynephilia? Anecdotally and theoretically I suspect “no”, though of course it’s up to the experiment if you disagree.
Many, many entries on your list of common AGP/AAP fantasies fall into that category and can only classed as abnormal by virtue of being had by someone of the “wrong” birth sex.
What do you mean by “abnormal” and how is their normality relevant?
and I see little reason to assume Hsu’s research will be any better quality, given that he clearly works extremely closely with Bailey
Well, Hsu still sometimes listens to and talks with me, unlike Bailey who blocked and banned me for “being an asshole”.
Parsimony isn’t everything, humans are as you say complicated, but when you’re working with a typology that claims two separate, distinct causes for a transgender identity and the surveys used to analyze the supposed phenomenon can’t easily distinguish between a normal variation in sexuality for someone’s (identified) gender and a primarily sexual motivation for that identity despite that being an explicit goal (on top of the other issues with the research), it seems likely that you have a problem with your hypothesis. It seems particularly likely that this is the case when there is another hypothesis that matches the data at least as well, doesn’t posit multiple causes for what seems like a single phenomenon, and also matches with the reported experiences of the vast majority of transgender people (where the Bailey/Blanchard typology being true would essentially require that the vast majority of trans people be lying to themselves).
I don’t think it is a particularly big claim that people might be wrong about the factors they attribute as causal for their gender identity. For instance in this study, many of the men mentioned kindness/understanding other’s emotions/nurturance/etc. as reasons they might have a flexible gender identity, but that didn’t seem to matter at all.
Also, I don’t really agree with the notion that you can’t have multiple causes for a single phenomenon. The key idea here is the notion of a mediator: if multiple causes feed into the same variable (such as into “gender identity”/”utility of transitioning”), then that variable can induce correlated effects for all of those causes. So I don’t think there’s any reason to infer that there’s a single unified cause, like a “trans gene” or something; that doesn’t ever seem to happen.
And if AGP/AAP measures don’t really work for their intended population, trans people, why would they be useful measures in cis people, as you’re using them here?
A lot of the critiques of the validity of the measures only seem to straightforwardly apply to the very far trans end of the gender identity spectrum. For instance, sure, maybe if someone thinks of themselves as being a woman, then that would make her picture herself as female in sexual fantasies; but none of the participants here explicitly thought of themselves as being women, so this factor cannot apply.
Apologies in advance for any tonal issues in this.
I have serious issues with the autogynephilia analysis, both yours and more generally. You’ve likely heard the critiques that many cis women qualify as AGP if they take the same surveys, but I also think the questions and scenarios are simply not useful in terms of distinguishing a sexual motivation from any other sort of gender euphoria/dysphoria/identity. Someone with entirely non-sexual motivations for transition would still likely find a sexual fantasy where they are their transitioned gender in one way or another arousing and could thus easily be a false positive on your AGP/AAP scales, in as much as those are supposed to separate out a specific type of (trans) person or reason for transitioning. Many, many entries on your list of common AGP/AAP fantasies fall into that category and can only classed as abnormal by virtue of being had by someone of the “wrong” birth sex. Given that, I really do not understand why you believe it more likely that AGP/AAP is the upstream, causal condition and not gender identity, given the inability of the tests to distinguish between the two possibilities. It seems like you’re massively privileging the Blanchard/Bailey hypothesis in spite of the major issues (including arguable fraud) that you admit their research has (and I see little reason to assume Hsu’s research will be any better quality, given that he clearly works extremely closely with Bailey).
Parsimony isn’t everything, humans are as you say complicated, but when you’re working with a typology that claims two separate, distinct causes for a transgender identity and the surveys used to analyze the supposed phenomenon can’t easily distinguish between a normal variation in sexuality for someone’s (identified) gender and a primarily sexual motivation for that identity despite that being an explicit goal (on top of the other issues with the research), it seems likely that you have a problem with your hypothesis. It seems particularly likely that this is the case when there is another hypothesis that matches the data at least as well, doesn’t posit multiple causes for what seems like a single phenomenon, and also matches with the reported experiences of the vast majority of transgender people (where the Bailey/Blanchard typology being true would essentially require that the vast majority of trans people be lying to themselves).
And if AGP/AAP measures don’t really work for their intended population, trans people, why would they be useful measures in cis people, as you’re using them here?
First, just to be clear, I do not agree fully with Blanchard’s/Bailey’s typology and have written numerous critiques of it on my blog. It could very well be that the Blanchard/Bailey typology is wrong while autogynephilia is still a major cause of gender identity. For instance, the Blanchard/Bailey model would be wrong if exclusively androphilic trans women are also autogynephilic, or if cis women are autogynephilic, or if autoandrophilia is a common cause for trans men, or many other reasons; however the listed possibilities could be the case even if autogynephilia is a major factor in gender identity. So I don’t think we should evaluate the “big picture” theories, but instead look at the justification for each piece individually.
The ideal result I had hoped to get from these surveys was a deterministic account of gender identity. If I had gotten that, it could be far clearer, as we could explicitly look at all the other causes and investigate the validity of this argument.
Unfortunately but perhaps expectedly, I didn’t end up with a deterministic model. And the alternative factors I came up with were annoyingly ambiguous, often having a slight correlation with autogynephilia as would be expected if autogynephilia was causally downstream of gender identity, but also often not being sufficiently strongly correlated as would be expected if the causality genuinely went other factor → gender identity → autogynephilia. But one potential reason why the qualitative surveys didn’t find non-autogynephilia factors that could explain most of the variance in gender identity is simply because such factors don’t exist.
I still suspect that you are wrong though. For instance, one of the other factors I found was gender conservativism. Suppose I explicitly intervened on that, e.g. I took a bunch of willing autogynephiles I tried to give them the best case for gender conservativism, and to submerge them in gender conservative culture and values. Could this succeed in turning them more gender conservative? Probably not always, but sometimes. Could turning them more gender conservative make them feel that they wouldn’t so much want to be women? Based on this survey data, and on various anecdotes, and on the theory in my analysis above, I’d say perhaps yes. Would it also reduce their autogynephilia? Anecdotally and theoretically I suspect “no”, though of course it’s up to the experiment if you disagree.
What do you mean by “abnormal” and how is their normality relevant?
Well, Hsu still sometimes listens to and talks with me, unlike Bailey who blocked and banned me for “being an asshole”.
I don’t think it is a particularly big claim that people might be wrong about the factors they attribute as causal for their gender identity. For instance in this study, many of the men mentioned kindness/understanding other’s emotions/nurturance/etc. as reasons they might have a flexible gender identity, but that didn’t seem to matter at all.
Also, I don’t really agree with the notion that you can’t have multiple causes for a single phenomenon. The key idea here is the notion of a mediator: if multiple causes feed into the same variable (such as into “gender identity”/”utility of transitioning”), then that variable can induce correlated effects for all of those causes. So I don’t think there’s any reason to infer that there’s a single unified cause, like a “trans gene” or something; that doesn’t ever seem to happen.
A lot of the critiques of the validity of the measures only seem to straightforwardly apply to the very far trans end of the gender identity spectrum. For instance, sure, maybe if someone thinks of themselves as being a woman, then that would make her picture herself as female in sexual fantasies; but none of the participants here explicitly thought of themselves as being women, so this factor cannot apply.