nazgulnarsil: “What is bad about this scenario? the genie himself [sic] said it will only be a few decades before women and men can be reunited if they choose. what’s a few decades?”
That’s the most horrifying part of all, though—they won’t so choose! By the time the women and men reïnvent enough technology to build interplanetary spacecraft, they’ll be so happy that they won’t want to get back together again. It’s tempting to think that the humans can just choose to be unhappy until they build the requisite technology for reünification—but you probably can’t sulk for twenty years straight, even if you want to, even if everything you currently care about depends on it. We might wish that some of our values are so deeply held that no circumstances could possibly make us change them, but in the face of an environment superinelligently optimized to change our values, it probably just isn’t so. The space of possible environments is so large compared to the narrow set of outcomes that we would genuinely call a win that even the people on the freak planets (see de Blanc’s comment above) will probably be made happy in some way that their preSingularity selves would find horrifying. Scary, scary, scary. I’m donating twenty dollars to SIAI right now.
Hey, Z. M., you know the things people in your native subculture have been saying about most of human speech being about signaling and politics rather than conveying information? You probably won’t understand what I’m talking about for another four years, one month, and perhaps you’d be wise not to listen to this sort of thing coming from anyone but me, but … the parent is actually a nice case study.
I certainly agree that the world of “Failed Utopia 4-2” is not an optimal future, but as other commenters have pointed out, well … it is better than what we have now. Eternal happiness in exchange for splitting up the species, never seeing your other-sex friends and family again? Certainly not a Pareto improvement amongst humane values, but a hell of a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. So why didn’t you notice? Why am I speaking of this in such a detached manner, whereas you make a (not very plausible, by the way—you might want to work on that) effort to appear as horrified as possible?
Because politics. You and I, we’re androgyny fans: we want to see a world without strict gender roles and with less male/female conflict, and we think it’s sad that so much of humanoid mindspace goes unexplored because of the whole sexual dimorphism thing, and all of this seems like something worth protecting, so whenever you read something that your brain construes as “sexist,” your brain makes sure to get offended and outraged. Why does that happen? I don’t know: high IQ, high Openness boy somehow picks up a paraphilia, falls hard for the late-twentieth-century propaganda about human equality and nondiscrimination, learns about transhumanism, feminism, evolutionary psychology, and rationality in that order? But look. However it happened, there are probably better strategies for protecting whatever-it-is we should protect than feigning shock. Especially in this venue, where people should know better.
I was with you until “paraphilia”. I don’t see how “wanting to see a world without strict gender roles” has anything to do with sexuality… and did you seriously just link to the Wikipedia article for autogynephilia‽ That’s as verifiable as penis envy. (By which, I mean “probably applies to some people, somewhere, but certainly isn’t the fully-general explanation they’re using it as”. And no, I don’t think I’m doing the idea a disservice by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics; it pays no rent at its best and predicts the opposite of my observations at worst.)
Usually, when I dismiss an idea with links, I try to make sure that the links are directly about the idea in question, rather than having a higher inferential distance.
For example, when debating a creationist, I think it would be more productive to link to a page about the evidence for evolution, rather than to link to a comic about the application of Occam’s razor to some other issue. To be sure, Occam’s razor is relevant to the creation/evolution debate!—but in order to communicate to someone who doesn’t already believe that, you (or your link) needs to explain the relevance in detail. The creationist probably thinks intelligent design is “the simplest explanation.” In order to rebut them, you can’t just say “Occam’s razor!”, you need to show how they’re confused about how evolution works or the right concept of “simplicity”.
In the present case, linking to Existential Comics on falsifiability and penis envy doesn’t help me understand your point of view, because while I agree that scientific theories need to be falsifiable, I don’t agree that the autogynephilia theory is unfalsifiable. An example of a more relevant link might be to Julia Serano’s rebuttal? (However, I do not find Serano’s rebuttal convincing.)
I don’t see how “wanting to see a world without strict gender roles” has anything to do with sexuality
That part is admittedly a bit speculative; as it happens, I’m planning to explain more in a forthcoming post (working title: “Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems”) on my secret (“secret”) blog, but it’s not done yet.
How much have you read about the idea from its proponents?
Loads from angry mean people on the internet, very little from academics (none, if reading the Wikipedia article doesn’t count). So I’m probably trying to learn anarchocommunism from Stalin. (I haven’t heard much about it from its detractors, either, except what I’ve generated myself – I stopped reading the Wikipedia article before I got to the “criticism” section, and have only just read that now.)
In case this is the reason for disagreement, I might be criticising “autogynephilia / autoandrophilia explains (away) trans people” instead of what you’re talking about – although since the Wikipedia article keeps saying stuff like:
Blanchard states that he intended the term to subsume transvestism, including for sexual ideas in which feminine clothing plays only a small or no role at all.
(the implication being that cross-dressing is a sex thing, which is just… not accurate – though perhaps I’m misunderstanding what “transvestite” means), I’m suspicious. Pretty much all of the little I’ve read of Blanchard’s is wrong, and while other people might’ve done good work with the ideas, it’s hard to derive truth from falsehood. And stuff like:
Blanchard and Lawrence state that autogynephiles who report attraction to men are actually experiencing “pseudobisexuality”
seems very Freudian (in the bad sense, not the good sense); if you’re constructing a really complex model to fit the available evidence, I don’t want to hear you drawing conclusions about inaccessible things from it. And I especially don’t want to hear you trying to fit the territory to the map…
[Julia Serano] criticised proponents of the typology, claiming that they dismiss non-autogynephilic, non-androphilic transsexuals as misreporting or lying while not questioning androphilic transsexuals, describing it as “tantamount to hand-picking which evidence counts and which does not based upon how well it conforms to the model”, either making the typology unscientific due to its unfalsifiability, or invalid due to the nondeterministic correlation that later studies found.
Yeah, the label “autogynephilia” probably applies to a few people, but as an explanation of trans people it’s not quite right – and the field of study is irrecoverably flawed imo. (And for describing trans people, the simple forms don’t fit reality and the more complex forms are not the simplest explanations.)
But this criticism might merely be motivated by the actions of its proponents; if there’s a consistent, simple version of the theory that doesn’t obviously contradict reality, I’m happy to hear it.
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Note: I’ve tried to edit this section for brevity, but feel free to skip it. I removed many allusions to flawed psychoanalysis concepts, but if you like, you can imagine them after pretty much every paragraph where I point out something stupid. Translate “you” as “one”.
I’m not so sure about the paper you linked…
Biologic males with transsexualism, referred to as male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals, significantly outnumber their female-to-male (FtM) counterparts
No citation, and I’m pretty sure this is false. I’ve seen “more trans men” and “no significant difference” – with references to studies and surveys – but this is the first time I’ve ever seen “significantly more MtFs”.
From what I can tell, it’s dividing trans women into “straight” and “gay” (actually, homosexual and nonhomosexual, respectively, sic), and calling these categories fundamental subtypes. Now, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure not everyone is either straight or gay.
The left-hand side of the second page seems to just be a long list of appeals to authority. Appeal to the authority of the DSM. Appeal to the authority of “looking at lots of evidence before coming to a conclusion”. I’ve also noticed enough typos that I suspect this hasn’t been peer-reviewed.
Androphilic MtF transsexuals were extremely feminine androphilic men whose cross-gender identities derived from their female-typical attitudes, behaviors, and sexual preferences.
What’s a “female-typical sexual preference”? How are “female-typical attitudes [and] behaviors” determined? Are these properties possessed by {a group of cis lesbians selected in a similar way}? If the effects noticed are real, then that does suggest there’s something there – but at present, I don’t see the difference between this and what’s described in The Control Group is Out of Control part IV.
Even if I take the claims at face value (which I’m not – but I might ought to; I don’t know), the paper so far is providing only slightly more evidence for “autogynephilia explains trans women” as for “autogynephilia is based in 70s-era attitudes to homosexuality”.
This latter finding sug-gested that bisexual MtF transsexuals’ “interest in male sexual partners is mediated by a particularly strong desire to have their physical attractiveness as women validated by others”
There are many other things this could suggest! Why choose this one‽ I actually went back to the Blanchard paper (doi:10.1097/00005053-198910000-00004) to check the actual evidence:
This was the finding that bisexual subjects are more likely than all others to report sexual stimulation from the fantasy of being admired, in the female persona, by another person.
Immediately, I think of two alternative hypotheses:
People in the bisexual group are more horny than people in the other groups.
Bisexual people are inherently more horny (doubtful, but possible).
The people Blanchard considered as bisexual are inherently more horny (except I don’t think Blanchard was responsible for dividing people up in this study).
People who are attracted to multiple disparate sex characteristics are more likely to call themselves “bisexual” if this attraction is stronger.
Something weird about 1989 (this is too broad to be a hypothesis).
People being closeted messing up the study.
Something about the question prompted this difference. (I can’t check this, because I can’t find the text of the questionnaire.)
Perhaps it said “by a male or a female”, or something, which might produce a different average reaction across the different groups?
There are probably many others, but… would the hypothesis that “their bisexuality is just homosexuality plus a desire for validation by others” have been promoted so quickly if there wasn’t a framework for it to fit into?
In each of these studies, however, many ostensibly androphilic MtF persons reported experiencing autogynephilia, whereas many ostensibly nonandrophilic persons denied experienc-ing it. How could Blanchard’s theory account for these deviations from its predictions?
I’ll just note that this “deviation” is adequately predicted by the “trans people are just trans, and are likely to be aroused by the same sorts of things as cis people” hypothesis.
Blanchard, Racansky, and Steiner (1986) measured changes in penile blood volume
Oh, come on! People can get erections at all sorts of random times, including when relaxed or excited – this test (doi:10.1080/00224498609551326) does not distinguish between “sexual arousal” and “strong emotional reaction”.
And any theory that assumes “and the participants are lying – or else don’t know what they really think” loses points in my book.
Moreover, Blanchard, Clemmensen, and Steiner(1985) reported that in nonandrophilic men with gender dysphoria, a tendency to describe oneself in a socially desirable way was correlated with a tendency to deny sexual arousal with cross-dressing, suggesting an explanation for the under reporting of autogynephilic arousal.
… That’s not an explanation, that’s an observation. “Sexual arousal with cross-dressing” was not socially desirable in 1985. (If there’s strong evidence, why is weak evidence being put forward? This feels a little like mathematician-trolling.) And it doesn’t distinguish between autogynephilia and other hypotheses.
Walworth (1997) reported that 13% of 52 MtF transsexuals she surveyed admitted having lied to or misled their therapists about sexual arousal while wearing women’s clothing.
Regains some points for the “lying” thing, but not all of them; the “trans people are trans” theory also predicts attempts to manipulate gatekeepers by playing to favourable stereotypes, whereas the explanation later in this paper still smells of Freudian repression.
Incidentally, “trans people are trans” doesn’t predict that such people would lie about this sort of thing off the record, or with friends (unlike the theory set out in this paper), but I don’t know of a way to test that.
It is likely that, depending on the criteria of access to treatment in a specific treatment facility, applicants adjust their biographical data with regard to sexuality. This makes the quality of the information, especially when given during clinical assessment,questionable. (p.507)
Yup.
Cohen-Kettenis and Pfäfflin even proposed that resistance to the concept of autogynephilia might itself be responsible for some of the unreliability in the reporting of sexual orientation
Perhaps, but not significantly. There is resistance to the idea, but I doubt it’s on most people’s minds much of the time – the few who obsess over it I’ve had the displeasure of interacting with aren’t trans. Avoiding stigma seems a more likely explanation, to me. (And “people don’t like my theory, which is why the data doesn’t match it” is a really fishy explanation.)
Some cases of MtF transsexualis mare associated with and plausibly attributable to other comorbid psychiatric disorders, especially psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder
Skipping past this entire section as irrelevant.
When Blanchard first introduced the term autogynephilia, he described it as not merely an erotic propensity but as a genuine sexual orientation, theorizing that “all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented toward men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women” (Blanchard,1989a,pp.322–323).
More 70s-era attitudes to homosexuality. A trans woman being straight is normal, but a trans woman being gay? Needs to be psychoanalysed. Even accepting the premise, this attitude will classify as “autogynephilic” people who aren’t.
(And this is only compatible with such attitudes to homosexuality – and the total erasure of bisexuals. Why posit two different mechanisms for people being trans, based on their sexuality, if homosexuality is sometimes “normal”? Why not assume homosexuality is always normal – or, at least, no less abnormal than heterosexuality?)
For autogynephilic MtF transsexuals, this implies the potential to feel continuing attraction to and comfort from autogynephilic fantasies and enactments that may have lost much of their initial erotic charge.
Explains too much. If I feel affection for the idea of being, say, a respected physicist, does that mean it used to be an erotically-charged fantasy? Or is it just something I’d prefer to the status quo? (This is the weakest argument in my rebuttal, but I think it could be strengthened.)
It is therefore feasible that the continuing desire to have a female body, after the disappearance of sexual response to that thought, has some analog in the permanent love-bond that may remain between two people after their initial strong sexual attraction has largely disappeared.
So why not apply this argument consistently, and consider it feasible that all similarly-shaped psychological events or patterns could be analogous? Like, say, the continuing drive to excel in a…
Hang on. I’ve started engaging with the premise. Most of my anecdotal evidence and personal experience directly contradicts this premise. I feel like I’m patiently arguing with a flat-earther about how the Bible doesn’t actually say the planet is a disc, which is hard to prove without Biblical Hebrew and knowledge of Biblical hermeneutics… and utterly irrelevant to the question of the planet’s shape.
Autogynephilia appears to give rise to the desire for sex reassignment gradually and indirectly, however, through the creation of cross-gender identities that are eventually associated with gender dysphoria and then provide most of the proximate motivation for the pursuit of sex reassign-ment.
Predicts the non-existence of:
Pre-pubescent trans children;
Asexual trans people;
No-op trans people;
Trans men (without the autoandrophilia extension);
Non-binary people.
Again, we have factual evidence indicative of the considerable time required for the development of the cross-gender identity.
Or the existence of a “closet”.
In a study of 422 MtF transsexuals, Blanchard, Dickey,and Jones (1995) found that androphilic MtFs were signifi-cantly shorter than nontranssexual males and significantly shorter and lighter in weight than nonandrophilic MtFs,with the latter comparisons showing small-to-medium effect sizes.
Irrelevant, unless you’re proposing that this is an intersex-related condition.
Smith et al. did observe, however, that androphilic MtFs had a more feminine appearance than nonandrophilic MtFs.
The fact that this was deemed relevant is characteristic of this theory’s proponents. (Oh, snap!)
Androphilic MtFs also report more childhood cross-gender behavior than their nonandrophilic counterparts(Blanchard,1988; Money & Gaskin,1970–1971; Whitam,1987).
At least compare to cis lesbians, or you’re not even trying to rule out confounders.
The review of the available data seems to support two existing hypotheses: (1) a brain-restricted intersexuality in homosexual MtFs and FtMs and(2) Blanchard’s insight on the existence of two brain phenotypes that differentiate “homosexual” [androphilic] and“nonhomosexual” [nonandrophilic] MtFs. (p.1643)
Interesting… This is the first genuinely interesting thing in this paper. But, again, compare to cis gay people instead of just to “average cis”, or you can’t be confident you’re measuring what you think you are.
Clinicians who recognize that the gender dysphoria of autogynephilic MtFs derives from their paraphilic sexual orientation can more easily understand why these clients “are likely to feel a powerful drive to enact their paraphilic desires (e.g., by undergoing sex reassignment), sometimes with little concern for possible consequences”(Lawrence,2009,p.198), which can include loss of employment, family, friends, and reputation.
“Sometimes with little concern for possible consequences”… ? I am left speechless; the only sentiment I can verbalise is: made up – doesn’t match my observations.
I predict that this worsens clinical outcomes. This is a strong, strong prediction – my entire reason for believing what I believe says my belief should depend on this. Show me the data, if you have it.
The concept of autogynephilic interpersonal fantasy can help make sense of the otherwise puzzling fact that gynephilic MtFs sometimes develop a new found interest in male partners late in life.
It’s.Not. Puzzling. And not really something you should be fixated over; this is normal human behaviour.
Many of the substantive criticisms of autogynephilia, however, can be presented andexamined in a concise manner.
3. Blanchard’s autogynephilia-based typology is descrip-tively inadequate: There are too many observed exceptions to its predictions.
My main criticism here is closer to 3, if anything. (7 is a concern, but shouldn’t stand in the way of research; just in the way of stuff like Bailey’s book. Discover truth, and figure out the consequences later, unless you’re messing with world-ending threats where the knowledge in the wrong hands could doom everybody.)
In the opinion of the critics, there are simply too many deviations from the predicted relationship between autogynephilia and sexual orientation.
Woah, woah, woah. Is that a strawman? *reads further* No, just them not addressing my specific criticism, which is that there are too many deviations from the class of people autogynephilia assumes to exist and the class of people who exist.
Opponents of Blanchard’s theory have replied that such counterarguments effectively make Blanchard’s typology “unfalsifiable” (Winters,2008,para.6), because any departures from the theory’s predictions can simply be dismissed as attributable to misreporting, measurement errors, sampling problems, or psychiatric comorbidity. As Lawrence (2010a) noted, however, Blanchard’s typology is not in principle unfalsifiable
This is a good criticism, and a good response: it isn’t, in principle, unfalsifiable… it’s just that its proponents are good at arguing against the evidence against it. (I, likewise, am good at arguing against things – though not quite as good, because I don’t know much about frequentist statistics.)
But as measurable clinical phenomena, these entities are not statistically independent in MtF transsexuals.
“Confounders,” I cry.
Reading this paper has slightly increased my credence in the idea of autogynephilia, though not by much at all, and convinced me that most of its proponents – not just Blanchard – are stuck in the 70s when it comes to ideas about sexuality and gender. I expect the next generation to drop this direction of study – perhaps in a century, when it’s nearly forgotten, somebody will spot similar patterns, come up with a similar core idea, come to less stupid conclusions about it, and it’ll be embraced.
Or perhaps the whole thing will turn out to be statistical anomalies perpetuated by people insistent on labelling shadows.
Edit +1d: my credence in autogynephilia has gone back down again; reading the paper in detail and engaging with its premises accidentally screened off an entire class of conflicting observations and experiences from my attention; when I remembered them, my credence immediately fell.
My sympathy for its serious proponents has gone up, though, because I (think I) see them making the same mistakes that I used to make, and undoubtedly still make: every experiment tries to confirm their theory, never falsify it, and they only measure the class of things that they know already accords with the framework of ideas.
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I don’t agree that the autogynephilia theory is unfalsifiable.
I can’t see how some of the “strongest predictions” in that link follow. Take, for instance,
Autogynephilia in trans women is strongly negatively associated with exclusive attraction to men and femininity.
Where does this come from? And:
Autogynephilia is strongly associated with desire to be female.
But from my observations, desire to be female (in trans women, anyway) is not strongly associated with any particular aspect of sexuality; there are even plenty of ace trans women, which should be a blow for the “trans women are actually autogynephilic men” theory.
You’re the first autogynephilia proponent I’ve interacted with who cares about being right (not that I’ve been seeking such people out); I’d be interested in double-cruxing at some point if you’re interested. (Not here, though; somewhere with real-time communication.)
Also, I weirdly respect you more, in a way, even though I’m confident you’re wrong. Perhaps it’s because you being right nearly all the time is more impressive.
We might wish that some of our values are so deeply held that no circumstances could possibly make us change them, but in the face of an environment superinelligently optimized to change our values, it probably just isn’t so
Now that you mention it, how could it possibly take ten years? I bet a skilled human could do it in a week, without even separating the couples in the first place.
Admittedly, it’s not like the superintelligence is breaking them up, but if a sufficiently skilled human can do it, so can a verthandi.
I take it the name is a coincidence.
nazgulnarsil: “What is bad about this scenario? the genie himself [sic] said it will only be a few decades before women and men can be reunited if they choose. what’s a few decades?”
That’s the most horrifying part of all, though—they won’t so choose! By the time the women and men reïnvent enough technology to build interplanetary spacecraft, they’ll be so happy that they won’t want to get back together again. It’s tempting to think that the humans can just choose to be unhappy until they build the requisite technology for reünification—but you probably can’t sulk for twenty years straight, even if you want to, even if everything you currently care about depends on it. We might wish that some of our values are so deeply held that no circumstances could possibly make us change them, but in the face of an environment superinelligently optimized to change our values, it probably just isn’t so. The space of possible environments is so large compared to the narrow set of outcomes that we would genuinely call a win that even the people on the freak planets (see de Blanc’s comment above) will probably be made happy in some way that their preSingularity selves would find horrifying. Scary, scary, scary. I’m donating twenty dollars to SIAI right now.
Hey, Z. M., you know the things people in your native subculture have been saying about most of human speech being about signaling and politics rather than conveying information? You probably won’t understand what I’m talking about for another four years, one month, and perhaps you’d be wise not to listen to this sort of thing coming from anyone but me, but … the parent is actually a nice case study.
I certainly agree that the world of “Failed Utopia 4-2” is not an optimal future, but as other commenters have pointed out, well … it is better than what we have now. Eternal happiness in exchange for splitting up the species, never seeing your other-sex friends and family again? Certainly not a Pareto improvement amongst humane values, but a hell of a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. So why didn’t you notice? Why am I speaking of this in such a detached manner, whereas you make a (not very plausible, by the way—you might want to work on that) effort to appear as horrified as possible?
Because politics. You and I, we’re androgyny fans: we want to see a world without strict gender roles and with less male/female conflict, and we think it’s sad that so much of humanoid mindspace goes unexplored because of the whole sexual dimorphism thing, and all of this seems like something worth protecting, so whenever you read something that your brain construes as “sexist,” your brain makes sure to get offended and outraged. Why does that happen? I don’t know: high IQ, high Openness boy somehow picks up a paraphilia, falls hard for the late-twentieth-century propaganda about human equality and nondiscrimination, learns about transhumanism, feminism, evolutionary psychology, and rationality in that order? But look. However it happened, there are probably better strategies for protecting whatever-it-is we should protect than feigning shock. Especially in this venue, where people should know better.
I was with you until “paraphilia”. I don’t see how “wanting to see a world without strict gender roles” has anything to do with sexuality… and did you seriously just link to the Wikipedia article for autogynephilia‽ That’s as verifiable as penis envy. (By which, I mean “probably applies to some people, somewhere, but certainly isn’t the fully-general explanation they’re using it as”. And no, I don’t think I’m doing the idea a disservice by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics; it pays no rent at its best and predicts the opposite of my observations at worst.)
Thanks for commenting! (Strong-upvoted.) It’s nice to get new discussion on old posts and comments.
Hi!
How much have you read about the idea from its proponents? (“From its proponents” because, tragically, opponents of an idea can’t always be trusted to paraphrase it accurately, rather than attacking a strawman.) If I might recommend just one paper, may I suggest Anne Lawrence’s “Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies”?
Usually, when I dismiss an idea with links, I try to make sure that the links are directly about the idea in question, rather than having a higher inferential distance.
For example, when debating a creationist, I think it would be more productive to link to a page about the evidence for evolution, rather than to link to a comic about the application of Occam’s razor to some other issue. To be sure, Occam’s razor is relevant to the creation/evolution debate!—but in order to communicate to someone who doesn’t already believe that, you (or your link) needs to explain the relevance in detail. The creationist probably thinks intelligent design is “the simplest explanation.” In order to rebut them, you can’t just say “Occam’s razor!”, you need to show how they’re confused about how evolution works or the right concept of “simplicity”.
In the present case, linking to Existential Comics on falsifiability and penis envy doesn’t help me understand your point of view, because while I agree that scientific theories need to be falsifiable, I don’t agree that the autogynephilia theory is unfalsifiable. An example of a more relevant link might be to Julia Serano’s rebuttal? (However, I do not find Serano’s rebuttal convincing.)
That part is admittedly a bit speculative; as it happens, I’m planning to explain more in a forthcoming post (working title: “Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky’s Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems”) on my secret (“secret”) blog, but it’s not done yet.
Loads from angry mean people on the internet, very little from academics (none, if reading the Wikipedia article doesn’t count). So I’m probably trying to learn anarchocommunism from Stalin. (I haven’t heard much about it from its detractors, either, except what I’ve generated myself – I stopped reading the Wikipedia article before I got to the “criticism” section, and have only just read that now.)
In case this is the reason for disagreement, I might be criticising “autogynephilia / autoandrophilia explains (away) trans people” instead of what you’re talking about – although since the Wikipedia article keeps saying stuff like:
(the implication being that cross-dressing is a sex thing, which is just… not accurate – though perhaps I’m misunderstanding what “transvestite” means), I’m suspicious. Pretty much all of the little I’ve read of Blanchard’s is wrong, and while other people might’ve done good work with the ideas, it’s hard to derive truth from falsehood. And stuff like:
seems very Freudian (in the bad sense, not the good sense); if you’re constructing a really complex model to fit the available evidence, I don’t want to hear you drawing conclusions about inaccessible things from it. And I especially don’t want to hear you trying to fit the territory to the map…
Yeah, the label “autogynephilia” probably applies to a few people, but as an explanation of trans people it’s not quite right – and the field of study is irrecoverably flawed imo. (And for describing trans people, the simple forms don’t fit reality and the more complex forms are not the simplest explanations.)
But this criticism might merely be motivated by the actions of its proponents; if there’s a consistent, simple version of the theory that doesn’t obviously contradict reality, I’m happy to hear it.
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Note: I’ve tried to edit this section for brevity, but feel free to skip it. I removed many allusions to flawed psychoanalysis concepts, but if you like, you can imagine them after pretty much every paragraph where I point out something stupid. Translate “you” as “one”.
I’m not so sure about the paper you linked…
No citation, and I’m pretty sure this is false. I’ve seen “more trans men” and “no significant difference” – with references to studies and surveys – but this is the first time I’ve ever seen “significantly more MtFs”.
From what I can tell, it’s dividing trans women into “straight” and “gay” (actually, homosexual and nonhomosexual, respectively, sic), and calling these categories fundamental subtypes. Now, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure not everyone is either straight or gay.
The left-hand side of the second page seems to just be a long list of appeals to authority. Appeal to the authority of the DSM. Appeal to the authority of “looking at lots of evidence before coming to a conclusion”. I’ve also noticed enough typos that I suspect this hasn’t been peer-reviewed.
What’s a “female-typical sexual preference”? How are “female-typical attitudes [and] behaviors” determined? Are these properties possessed by {a group of cis lesbians selected in a similar way}? If the effects noticed are real, then that does suggest there’s something there – but at present, I don’t see the difference between this and what’s described in The Control Group is Out of Control part IV.
Even if I take the claims at face value (which I’m not – but I might ought to; I don’t know), the paper so far is providing only slightly more evidence for “autogynephilia explains trans women” as for “autogynephilia is based in 70s-era attitudes to homosexuality”.
There are many other things this could suggest! Why choose this one‽ I actually went back to the Blanchard paper (doi:10.1097/00005053-198910000-00004) to check the actual evidence:
Immediately, I think of two alternative hypotheses:
People in the bisexual group are more horny than people in the other groups.
Bisexual people are inherently more horny (doubtful, but possible).
The people Blanchard considered as bisexual are inherently more horny (except I don’t think Blanchard was responsible for dividing people up in this study).
People who are attracted to multiple disparate sex characteristics are more likely to call themselves “bisexual” if this attraction is stronger.
Something weird about 1989 (this is too broad to be a hypothesis).
People being closeted messing up the study.
Something about the question prompted this difference. (I can’t check this, because I can’t find the text of the questionnaire.)
Perhaps it said “by a male or a female”, or something, which might produce a different average reaction across the different groups?
There are probably many others, but… would the hypothesis that “their bisexuality is just homosexuality plus a desire for validation by others” have been promoted so quickly if there wasn’t a framework for it to fit into?
I’ll just note that this “deviation” is adequately predicted by the “trans people are just trans, and are likely to be aroused by the same sorts of things as cis people” hypothesis.
Oh, come on! People can get erections at all sorts of random times, including when relaxed or excited – this test (doi:10.1080/00224498609551326) does not distinguish between “sexual arousal” and “strong emotional reaction”.
And any theory that assumes “and the participants are lying – or else don’t know what they really think” loses points in my book.
… That’s not an explanation, that’s an observation. “Sexual arousal with cross-dressing” was not socially desirable in 1985. (If there’s strong evidence, why is weak evidence being put forward? This feels a little like mathematician-trolling.) And it doesn’t distinguish between autogynephilia and other hypotheses.
Regains some points for the “lying” thing, but not all of them; the “trans people are trans” theory also predicts attempts to manipulate gatekeepers by playing to favourable stereotypes, whereas the explanation later in this paper still smells of Freudian repression.
Incidentally, “trans people are trans” doesn’t predict that such people would lie about this sort of thing off the record, or with friends (unlike the theory set out in this paper), but I don’t know of a way to test that.
Yup.
Perhaps, but not significantly. There is resistance to the idea, but I doubt it’s on most people’s minds much of the time – the few who obsess over it I’ve had the displeasure of interacting with aren’t trans. Avoiding stigma seems a more likely explanation, to me. (And “people don’t like my theory, which is why the data doesn’t match it” is a really fishy explanation.)
Skipping past this entire section as irrelevant.
More 70s-era attitudes to homosexuality. A trans woman being straight is normal, but a trans woman being gay? Needs to be psychoanalysed. Even accepting the premise, this attitude will classify as “autogynephilic” people who aren’t.
(And this is only compatible with such attitudes to homosexuality – and the total erasure of bisexuals. Why posit two different mechanisms for people being trans, based on their sexuality, if homosexuality is sometimes “normal”? Why not assume homosexuality is always normal – or, at least, no less abnormal than heterosexuality?)
Explains too much. If I feel affection for the idea of being, say, a respected physicist, does that mean it used to be an erotically-charged fantasy? Or is it just something I’d prefer to the status quo? (This is the weakest argument in my rebuttal, but I think it could be strengthened.)
So why not apply this argument consistently, and consider it feasible that all similarly-shaped psychological events or patterns could be analogous? Like, say, the continuing drive to excel in a…
Hang on. I’ve started engaging with the premise. Most of my anecdotal evidence and personal experience directly contradicts this premise. I feel like I’m patiently arguing with a flat-earther about how the Bible doesn’t actually say the planet is a disc, which is hard to prove without Biblical Hebrew and knowledge of Biblical hermeneutics… and utterly irrelevant to the question of the planet’s shape.
Mu.
Predicts the non-existence of:
Pre-pubescent trans children;
Asexual trans people;
No-op trans people;
Trans men (without the autoandrophilia extension);
Non-binary people.
Or the existence of a “closet”.
Irrelevant, unless you’re proposing that this is an intersex-related condition.
The fact that this was deemed relevant is characteristic of this theory’s proponents. (Oh, snap!)
At least compare to cis lesbians, or you’re not even trying to rule out confounders.
Interesting… This is the first genuinely interesting thing in this paper. But, again, compare to cis gay people instead of just to “average cis”, or you can’t be confident you’re measuring what you think you are.
“Sometimes with little concern for possible consequences”… ? I am left speechless; the only sentiment I can verbalise is: made up – doesn’t match my observations.
I predict that this worsens clinical outcomes. This is a strong, strong prediction – my entire reason for believing what I believe says my belief should depend on this. Show me the data, if you have it.
It’s. Not. Puzzling. And not really something you should be fixated over; this is normal human behaviour.
My main criticism here is closer to 3, if anything. (7 is a concern, but shouldn’t stand in the way of research; just in the way of stuff like Bailey’s book. Discover truth, and figure out the consequences later, unless you’re messing with world-ending threats where the knowledge in the wrong hands could doom everybody.)
Woah, woah, woah. Is that a strawman? *reads further* No, just them not addressing my specific criticism, which is that there are too many deviations from the class of people autogynephilia assumes to exist and the class of people who exist.
This is a good criticism, and a good response: it isn’t, in principle, unfalsifiable… it’s just that its proponents are good at arguing against the evidence against it. (I, likewise, am good at arguing against things – though not quite as good, because I don’t know much about frequentist statistics.)
“Confounders,” I cry.
Reading this paper has slightly increased my credence in the idea of autogynephilia, though not by much at all, and convinced me that most of its proponents – not just Blanchard – are stuck in the 70s when it comes to ideas about sexuality and gender. I expect the next generation to drop this direction of study – perhaps in a century, when it’s nearly forgotten, somebody will spot similar patterns, come up with a similar core idea, come to less stupid conclusions about it, and it’ll be embraced.
Or perhaps the whole thing will turn out to be statistical anomalies perpetuated by people insistent on labelling shadows.
Edit +1d: my credence in autogynephilia has gone back down again; reading the paper in detail and engaging with its premises accidentally screened off an entire class of conflicting observations and experiences from my attention; when I remembered them, my credence immediately fell.
My sympathy for its serious proponents has gone up, though, because I (think I) see them making the same mistakes that I used to make, and undoubtedly still make: every experiment tries to confirm their theory, never falsify it, and they only measure the class of things that they know already accords with the framework of ideas.
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I can’t see how some of the “strongest predictions” in that link follow. Take, for instance,
Where does this come from? And:
But from my observations, desire to be female (in trans women, anyway) is not strongly associated with any particular aspect of sexuality; there are even plenty of ace trans women, which should be a blow for the “trans women are actually autogynephilic men” theory.
You’re the first autogynephilia proponent I’ve interacted with who cares about being right (not that I’ve been seeking such people out); I’d be interested in double-cruxing at some point if you’re interested. (Not here, though; somewhere with real-time communication.)
Also, I weirdly respect you more, in a way, even though I’m confident you’re wrong. Perhaps it’s because you being right nearly all the time is more impressive.
Now that you mention it, how could it possibly take ten years? I bet a skilled human could do it in a week, without even separating the couples in the first place.
Admittedly, it’s not like the superintelligence is breaking them up, but if a sufficiently skilled human can do it, so can a verthandi.