CW: I will not be doing a thorough editing pass for fairness, tone, etc, or anything remotely like that; otherwise I would never post the comment and I think it’s probably better to post than not.
Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition. Intuitively, they tend to be quite aware of what they do and don’t like about inhabiting their chosen bodies and gender roles. But when it comes to explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences, they almost universally to come up short.
Is this… true? If so, I did not know it was famous. Or, rather, it seems false that trans people are worse at explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences than most people are at explaining the origins and intensity of lots of preferences. Why do I dislike cantaloupe but love kiwis? No idea. Why do I hate the feeling of digging bare-handed in the garden but my husband loves it? No idea. Why do I adore the feeling of an all-over light sunburn, but most people have a, well, different relationship to pain? While I hate the feeling of a scratchy clothing tag but many people don’t seem to notice? No idea. Why did I experience gender euphoria when I changed my Google display name to Sarah on a whim and then after experimenting on another half dozen axes found so many other strong preferences I had not previously noticed for various reasons? No idea.
there are two main explanations for trans people’s failure to produce a good explanation for their own existence. One is that transgenderism is the result of an obscenely complex and arcane neuro-psychological phenomenon, which we have no hope of unraveling through normal introspective methods. The other is that trans people are lying about something, including to themselves.
Is this true? “main” explanations? Neither of these was ever my own explanation. It might be true that they’re popular, I have stayed away from immersing myself in what seems like pretty terrible discourse because it’s, uh, pretty terrible. Blanchard’s stuff in particular seemed obviously ridiculous when I first read about it, well before I had any idea I was trans.
my alternative to autogynephilia theory
Please. Everyone. Do not privilege Blanchard’s “hypothesis” as anything remotely like a default explanation. I mean I’d go so far as to say ignore it entirely. It is extremely easy to come up with psychological “theories” which touch on some aspects of some people’s experience, come up with a “typology”, claim that it’s causal rather than a story about what might cause the observations that motivated it, claim that it covers all (or the vast majority) of the phenomenon, and then downplay or dismiss heaps of evidence that it doesn’t and write convincing-sounding articles and papers about your shiny “theory”. We get that all the time in so many domains. And then you look into it, notice that some of their observations resonate with you (’cause they’re legit observations!), and accidentally think all that causal stuff and typology stuff has any worth and whoops there goes your sanity.
This whole post? Sounds like a plausible impetus for you choosing to transition, but (to me) not at all a plausible reason that transitioning didn’t feel like a terrible idea to you.
My own theory is this:
Human minds are surprisingly different from each other, on more axes than we are conditioned to expect. If we project a map of this high dimensional space onto a one-dimensional space there are lots of ways to do it which result in a mostly two-humped distribution where most XX-havers are solidly in one and most XY-havers are solidly in the other; in practice societies usually draw boundaries around two fairly arbitrary volumes in the high dimensional space, constrained only by “the two volumes should end up solidly within the two humps in most of those projections, or be reasonably easily moved there through deniable individual choices”, and call these volumes “the two genders”. Then, having reified the concepts, they apply implicit and explicit pressure for everyone to mold themselves to appear to be solidly within one of the two volumes.
Depending on which aspects of yourself you have ignored, pressured, mutilated, transformed, etc to make yourself conform, you will be more or less okay with this; many will not even notice! (That single constraint does do a lot of work.) Trans people are those who are particularly harmed by conforming. Yes, of course, this is a spectrum. Yes, sometimes it’s biological, sometimes it’s psychological (primarily-brain biological plus upbringing plus social context), sometimes it’s cultural, usually it’s some mix. Yes, it can be different in different cultures, often because different arbitrary volumes in that high dimensional space were chosen; yes it can (clearly!) change over time. One common reason someone is particularly harmed by conforming is when, for some reason, their brains are much happier with the body parts common to the volume they weren’t assumed to be inside.
Transitioning consists of moving closer to where you feel good about in that high-dimensional space, which can occur on one or many axes, can occur by relaxing the conforming you were attempting to perform, can occur by transforming yourself in a different direction, etc. Any individual can likely, with sufficient introspection, identify a substantial subset of the reasons for their discomfort with their original conformity; it seems likely to me that there are large correlations, unlikely that there are a small handful of “types” which are in any way fundamental (though we may of course draw boundaries around more volumes in that high-dimensional space and label them! we love to do that). We might want to privilege a few of the axes, for various reasons, like “people who are particularly better off by transforming that brain/body disconnect into something that is much less disconnected”, if only to tell trans people “hey if taking hormones for a while didn’t Solve All Your Problems or seem to help you as much as it helped that other trans person you’ve observed, like whatever, that’s common, that too is on a spectrum”.
Isn’t this an instance of
obscenely complex and arcane neuro-psychological phenomenon
? I don’t think so. To me it feels like business as normal, for the human brain. It’s lots of fairly simple (though maybe unexpected) separate neuro-psychological phenomena, many correlated with each other, all mushed together because humans lumped ’em together in those arbitrary volumes constrained only to contain big clusters of humans, which in particular contain a few phenomena directly and clearly related to sexual dimorphism. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, but that doesn’t make it obscenely complex and arcane. Metabolic pathways, on the other hand… :D
the issues you take with the first two paragraphs of my post are valid, and largely the byproduct of me rushing my post out since otherwise i’d never have published it at all. my psychological default is to be kind of cruel towards trans people, and the editing passes over this post i did bother to do managed to tone that down a lot, but artifacts of it remain. “either transness is incomprehensibly convoluted or trans people are lying to themselves” was very much an artifact of me trying to appease the part of me that’s hostile to trans people. (and, judging by the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people, it was a pretty effective rhetorical choice, albeit unconscious.)
re: the rest of your comment: the paragraphs in my post about my personality having something of a natively cutesy component, and my mention of having penis dysphoria, do point at potentially intersex-ish parts of my brain, which potentially pushed me somewhat closer to transition. i don’t think these alone would have been enough to motivate or justify transition on my part though. indeed, i’ve been pretty heavily considering detransition for the past year or so, and especially since July (at which point i did MDMA about this and accepted that some of me really does deeply want to detrans). i’d just been suppressing this for years, for fear of being rejected by the trans community + having to awkwardly re-integrate into the world of cis people.
in other words, i was kind of being steered by neurosis and denial of reality, when i chose to transition. it made me happier for awhile, because the trans community gave me lots of wanted i wanted. but what i wanted back then was a kind of pica, something that i technically desired, and appreciated on some level, but which didn’t really address my underlying psychological needs very well. currently, i’m mostly trying to address those psychological needs (e.g developing social skills and self-love). mostly separately, i might detrans if i ever decide the costs of losing my relationship and access to the trans community and so on are lower than the befits of going back to a social role my authentic self would probably be better suited to.
Psychologically speaking, I wouldn’t expect your loathing of trans people to stick after you properly resolved such a big mental knot. If your theories were correct, trans people would be victims of a mental health crisis scarcely more accountable than people with untreated schizophrenia or agoraphobia. Pity, grief, and horror would make more sense than cruelty.
So I don’t think you’ve gotten to the heart of your own emotional matter. There is clearly part of you that loathes your current place in life, but I don’t think you’ve identified what it is yet. My ~70% confidence guess based on this post would be that you feel like you can only be safe if you’re socially accepted by loathing/denying yourself, either directly or by letting a group identity subsume yours.
Gender dysphoria and self-loathing can easily reinforce each other, but most trans people I know who experienced self-loathing before transitioning (myself included), the transition process alleviates the dysphoria enough that the self-loathing can be resolved with little or no therapy. I too visited /r/traa and /tttt/ early in my process, but I left those spaces once I felt more comfortable with myself.
I would recommend you go to therapy rather than try to find comfort in the support of others who “understandably have some animosity towards trans people”, because if I’m right that would just continue the cycle and get you to another place where you hate yourself. Self-love won’t come from being showered with upvotes for being cruel to your past self.
I’ve read that autistic people (who tend to have poor introspective abilities) are about 10 times more likely to be trans. The whole topic is related to crisis of identity, and young people naturally engage in self-discovery in ways which are easily disturbed by peer pressure. With post-modernism dissolving the traditional labels with which people of the past could identify themselves, I think it’s natural that identity has become more fluid. I also think it’s quite common for people to rebel in a way which isn’t true rebellion, but rather just the appearance of such (we’re social creatures, so if we don’t fit into mainstream communities, we tend to find niches. But this is still a kind of conformity. True non-conformity is much more rare).
I have to disagree with your idea that trans people are hurt by conforming. There has been a great increase in transsexualism as a result of transsexualism becoming socially acceptable. There seems to be a bit of a bandwagon effect, similar to the self-diagnosis of neurodivergency caused by TikTok.
The biggest reason for taking the theory of autogynephilia seriously is that it’s sexual in nature. Your explanation would explain transsexualism, but not the things which with it correlates. Transsexual people fixate more on sexual aspects of life, as do homosexuals and furries. Non-standard sexual orientations are more involved in fetishism. There’s more correlations which will seem even stranger if your model doesn’t include deep psychological mechanisms. For instance, all three group mentioned previously seem more likely than average people to prefer strong or unnatural colors. There are even times where I can guess somebodies sexual tendencies on the art styles which they draw or are drawn to. Similar to this, so I’m not the only one who has picked up on these correlations. I also believe that it’s these correlations which gives certain labels their negative connotations. People don’t care what genitals you prefer, what gender you feel like, or what your skin color or hair color is, but if they’ve met other people who shared these traits with you, then you will be judged according to the behaviour of those who share said traits with you).
CW: I will not be doing a thorough editing pass for fairness, tone, etc, or anything remotely like that; otherwise I would never post the comment and I think it’s probably better to post than not.
Is this… true? If so, I did not know it was famous. Or, rather, it seems false that trans people are worse at explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences than most people are at explaining the origins and intensity of lots of preferences. Why do I dislike cantaloupe but love kiwis? No idea. Why do I hate the feeling of digging bare-handed in the garden but my husband loves it? No idea. Why do I adore the feeling of an all-over light sunburn, but most people have a, well, different relationship to pain? While I hate the feeling of a scratchy clothing tag but many people don’t seem to notice? No idea. Why did I experience gender euphoria when I changed my Google display name to Sarah on a whim and then after experimenting on another half dozen axes found so many other strong preferences I had not previously noticed for various reasons? No idea.
Is this true? “main” explanations? Neither of these was ever my own explanation. It might be true that they’re popular, I have stayed away from immersing myself in what seems like pretty terrible discourse because it’s, uh, pretty terrible. Blanchard’s stuff in particular seemed obviously ridiculous when I first read about it, well before I had any idea I was trans.
Please. Everyone. Do not privilege Blanchard’s “hypothesis” as anything remotely like a default explanation. I mean I’d go so far as to say ignore it entirely. It is extremely easy to come up with psychological “theories” which touch on some aspects of some people’s experience, come up with a “typology”, claim that it’s causal rather than a story about what might cause the observations that motivated it, claim that it covers all (or the vast majority) of the phenomenon, and then downplay or dismiss heaps of evidence that it doesn’t and write convincing-sounding articles and papers about your shiny “theory”. We get that all the time in so many domains. And then you look into it, notice that some of their observations resonate with you (’cause they’re legit observations!), and accidentally think all that causal stuff and typology stuff has any worth and whoops there goes your sanity.
This whole post? Sounds like a plausible impetus for you choosing to transition, but (to me) not at all a plausible reason that transitioning didn’t feel like a terrible idea to you.
My own theory is this:
Human minds are surprisingly different from each other, on more axes than we are conditioned to expect. If we project a map of this high dimensional space onto a one-dimensional space there are lots of ways to do it which result in a mostly two-humped distribution where most XX-havers are solidly in one and most XY-havers are solidly in the other; in practice societies usually draw boundaries around two fairly arbitrary volumes in the high dimensional space, constrained only by “the two volumes should end up solidly within the two humps in most of those projections, or be reasonably easily moved there through deniable individual choices”, and call these volumes “the two genders”. Then, having reified the concepts, they apply implicit and explicit pressure for everyone to mold themselves to appear to be solidly within one of the two volumes.
Depending on which aspects of yourself you have ignored, pressured, mutilated, transformed, etc to make yourself conform, you will be more or less okay with this; many will not even notice! (That single constraint does do a lot of work.) Trans people are those who are particularly harmed by conforming. Yes, of course, this is a spectrum. Yes, sometimes it’s biological, sometimes it’s psychological (primarily-brain biological plus upbringing plus social context), sometimes it’s cultural, usually it’s some mix. Yes, it can be different in different cultures, often because different arbitrary volumes in that high dimensional space were chosen; yes it can (clearly!) change over time. One common reason someone is particularly harmed by conforming is when, for some reason, their brains are much happier with the body parts common to the volume they weren’t assumed to be inside.
Transitioning consists of moving closer to where you feel good about in that high-dimensional space, which can occur on one or many axes, can occur by relaxing the conforming you were attempting to perform, can occur by transforming yourself in a different direction, etc. Any individual can likely, with sufficient introspection, identify a substantial subset of the reasons for their discomfort with their original conformity; it seems likely to me that there are large correlations, unlikely that there are a small handful of “types” which are in any way fundamental (though we may of course draw boundaries around more volumes in that high-dimensional space and label them! we love to do that). We might want to privilege a few of the axes, for various reasons, like “people who are particularly better off by transforming that brain/body disconnect into something that is much less disconnected”, if only to tell trans people “hey if taking hormones for a while didn’t Solve All Your Problems or seem to help you as much as it helped that other trans person you’ve observed, like whatever, that’s common, that too is on a spectrum”.
Isn’t this an instance of
? I don’t think so. To me it feels like business as normal, for the human brain. It’s lots of fairly simple (though maybe unexpected) separate neuro-psychological phenomena, many correlated with each other, all mushed together because humans lumped ’em together in those arbitrary volumes constrained only to contain big clusters of humans, which in particular contain a few phenomena directly and clearly related to sexual dimorphism. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, but that doesn’t make it obscenely complex and arcane. Metabolic pathways, on the other hand… :D
the issues you take with the first two paragraphs of my post are valid, and largely the byproduct of me rushing my post out since otherwise i’d never have published it at all. my psychological default is to be kind of cruel towards trans people, and the editing passes over this post i did bother to do managed to tone that down a lot, but artifacts of it remain. “either transness is incomprehensibly convoluted or trans people are lying to themselves” was very much an artifact of me trying to appease the part of me that’s hostile to trans people. (and, judging by the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people, it was a pretty effective rhetorical choice, albeit unconscious.)
re: the rest of your comment: the paragraphs in my post about my personality having something of a natively cutesy component, and my mention of having penis dysphoria, do point at potentially intersex-ish parts of my brain, which potentially pushed me somewhat closer to transition. i don’t think these alone would have been enough to motivate or justify transition on my part though. indeed, i’ve been pretty heavily considering detransition for the past year or so, and especially since July (at which point i did MDMA about this and accepted that some of me really does deeply want to detrans). i’d just been suppressing this for years, for fear of being rejected by the trans community + having to awkwardly re-integrate into the world of cis people.
in other words, i was kind of being steered by neurosis and denial of reality, when i chose to transition. it made me happier for awhile, because the trans community gave me lots of wanted i wanted. but what i wanted back then was a kind of pica, something that i technically desired, and appreciated on some level, but which didn’t really address my underlying psychological needs very well. currently, i’m mostly trying to address those psychological needs (e.g developing social skills and self-love). mostly separately, i might detrans if i ever decide the costs of losing my relationship and access to the trans community and so on are lower than the befits of going back to a social role my authentic self would probably be better suited to.
Psychologically speaking, I wouldn’t expect your loathing of trans people to stick after you properly resolved such a big mental knot. If your theories were correct, trans people would be victims of a mental health crisis scarcely more accountable than people with untreated schizophrenia or agoraphobia. Pity, grief, and horror would make more sense than cruelty.
So I don’t think you’ve gotten to the heart of your own emotional matter. There is clearly part of you that loathes your current place in life, but I don’t think you’ve identified what it is yet. My ~70% confidence guess based on this post would be that you feel like you can only be safe if you’re socially accepted by loathing/denying yourself, either directly or by letting a group identity subsume yours.
Gender dysphoria and self-loathing can easily reinforce each other, but most trans people I know who experienced self-loathing before transitioning (myself included), the transition process alleviates the dysphoria enough that the self-loathing can be resolved with little or no therapy. I too visited /r/traa and /tttt/ early in my process, but I left those spaces once I felt more comfortable with myself.
I would recommend you go to therapy rather than try to find comfort in the support of others who “understandably have some animosity towards trans people”, because if I’m right that would just continue the cycle and get you to another place where you hate yourself. Self-love won’t come from being showered with upvotes for being cruel to your past self.
I’ve read that autistic people (who tend to have poor introspective abilities) are about 10 times more likely to be trans. The whole topic is related to crisis of identity, and young people naturally engage in self-discovery in ways which are easily disturbed by peer pressure. With post-modernism dissolving the traditional labels with which people of the past could identify themselves, I think it’s natural that identity has become more fluid. I also think it’s quite common for people to rebel in a way which isn’t true rebellion, but rather just the appearance of such (we’re social creatures, so if we don’t fit into mainstream communities, we tend to find niches. But this is still a kind of conformity. True non-conformity is much more rare).
I have to disagree with your idea that trans people are hurt by conforming. There has been a great increase in transsexualism as a result of transsexualism becoming socially acceptable. There seems to be a bit of a bandwagon effect, similar to the self-diagnosis of neurodivergency caused by TikTok.
The biggest reason for taking the theory of autogynephilia seriously is that it’s sexual in nature. Your explanation would explain transsexualism, but not the things which with it correlates. Transsexual people fixate more on sexual aspects of life, as do homosexuals and furries. Non-standard sexual orientations are more involved in fetishism. There’s more correlations which will seem even stranger if your model doesn’t include deep psychological mechanisms. For instance, all three group mentioned previously seem more likely than average people to prefer strong or unnatural colors. There are even times where I can guess somebodies sexual tendencies on the art styles which they draw or are drawn to. Similar to this, so I’m not the only one who has picked up on these correlations. I also believe that it’s these correlations which gives certain labels their negative connotations. People don’t care what genitals you prefer, what gender you feel like, or what your skin color or hair color is, but if they’ve met other people who shared these traits with you, then you will be judged according to the behaviour of those who share said traits with you).