I think Michael Bailey’s dismissal of my autogynephilia questions for Scott Alexander and Aella makes very little sense
I am autogynephilic, and there’s been a lot of autogynephilia talk lately. One subject that sometimes comes up, but hasn’t been discussed much on LessWrong, is how common autogynephilia is in cis women.
Two datasets that are sometimes used for this question are Scott Alexander’s and Aella’s. Part of how they happened to be made is that I reached out to Scott and Aella, suggesting experimental questions for assessing autogynephilia, in ways that might function in cis women too and not just cis men[1]:
Picture a very beautiful woman. How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being her?
Do you find the thought of masturbating alone as a woman to be erotic?
This is somewhat different from usual autogynephilia measures, which contain questions such as:
Did you ever feel sexually aroused when putting on females’ underwear or clothing?
Have you ever become sexually aroused while picturing your nude female breasts?
The reason I didn’t include these latter questions is because it seems likely to me that they will be interpreted differently for males and females (e.g. if males do not have female anatomy, then they cannot be aroused by it literally, so instead they get aroused by imagining some other female anatomy that they don’t actually have), and because these usual questions seem very bad if taken literally (“ever” and “while” rather than “how frequently” and “by” seem like there could be a lot of ways to get affirmative answers while not actually being autogynephilic—though the low rate of endorsement among women suggests to me that they are not taking it literally?).
Anyway, Michael Bailey (activist researcher for autogynephilia ideology) responds in Aporia Magazine, saying “It’s important not to confound y’know being seen as a woman or having a female body from having sex with a partner while having a female body or the prospect of going out on a date while wearing sexy clothes”.
I don’t think this makes any sense. “Do you find the thought of masturbating alone as a woman to be erotic?” explicitly states that one doesn’t have a partner around. “Picture a very beautiful woman. How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being her?” doesn’t suggest a partner any more than “Did you ever feel sexually aroused when putting on females’ underwear or clothing?” or “Have you ever become sexually aroused while picturing your nude female breasts?” does. This seems like a completely unfounded critique.
I think people who dismiss these questions should admit that they are starting with The Bottom Line that cis women are not autogynephilic, and reasoning backwards about what sorts of measures they do or do not want to endorse, rather than pretending that they are driven by evidence and desire for good measurement.
As a cis woman I experience both autogynephilia and autoandrophilia and I agree this should be talked about more. For me it’s part of more generalised “power fantasies”, with the power of being attractive to men (as any gender) being exciting in the same way e.g. the idea being worshipped as a goddess is exciting.
One of my oldest and strongest fantasies is of going to a frat party and being the most beautiful woman anyone there has ever seen. I’d imagine for other people it is less about power and more about whatever their personal psychology enjoys.
It seems weird to me that these discussions are being framed on all sides in terms like “are cisgender women often autogynephilic?”, when part of the issue is that different people have different ideas of what “autogynephilic” ought to mean.
There would be more chance of useful outcomes if the disputing parties could agree on some more concrete questions that are about how the world is rather than about what a particular neologism means.
Suppose A says “many trans women, and few cis women, are autogynephilic; this suggests that many trans women are that way because they are autogynephilic”; and B replies “on the contrary, many cis women are autogynephilic too; this suggests that autogynephilia is one of the ways in which trans women and cis women are alike”. Their real disagreement (assuming both are smart and intellectually honest) isn’t mostly about where the boundaries of “autogynephilic” should be drawn, it’s about whether there is some thing that (1) is markedly more common in trans women than in cis men or cis women, where (2) the most plausible explanation for 1 is that whatever-it-is causes trans-ness, and (3) the thing is in the same general ballpark as the things that get called autogynephilia.
If there is some such thing, then the Blanchard/Bailey theory is onto something, even if on reflection it turns out that “autogynephilia” would be better used to mean something different. If there isn’t, then Blanchard/Bailey is basically wrong, even if it’s true that many trans women are “autogynephilic” in Blanchard’s and Bailey’s sense.
As I understand it, Blanchard and Bailey have devised a thing, and an instrument to measure the thing, that has the property that more or less by definition it will be found much more among trans women than among cis women (though it could, in principle, apply to cis men too, and his instrument would pick that up). And then he measures trans women and cis women and cis men, and says: look, this thing turns up in trans women and not in the other groups, so I bet it causes trans-ness.
To which tailcalled replies: no, look, your instrument is focusing on experiences that would be more sexual in nature for trans women than for cis women, even if there were nothing sexual about trans-ness and the thing you’re focusing on had no causal role in making trans women the way they are; you’d get the same result if trans women were in this respect exactly like cis women except for the shape of their bodies; so how about asking these other questions instead, which don’t have that problem?
And then Bailey says: but those questions explicitly insert sexual elements into the scenarios being asked about, which will tend to lead to positive answers even from people who don’t have the specific feature I’m looking for, so the fact that surveys with the Aella/tailcalled questions in them give positive results for cis women doesn’t mean much.
And rather than arguing about what exactly “autogynephilia” Really Means, everyone involved should be looking for questions that (unlike the Blanchard/Bailey ones, according to tailcalled) can distinguish “X is a thing that trans women, specifically, have, which distinguishes them from cis women and cis men” from “X is a thing that women, generally, have, but our questions trying to find it will fail to see it in cis women because they focus on experiences that X will cause in trans women but not in cis women”; but that (unlike tailcalled’s questions, according to Bailey) don’t introduce extra elements that would be arousing to cis women for reasons separate from the picturing-oneself-as-female aspect.
It seems possible that actually there are no such questions. For instance, it might be that (1) many people, regardless of sex or gender or trans-ness, find some sort of satisfaction in thinking about themselves-as-having-their-preferred-sort-of-body, but that (2) this only becomes outright arousing if it goes beyond what they experience every day from actually having their preferred sort of body, so that (3) you can’t distinguish “many trans women get turned on by thinking of themselves as having female bodies, and so would many cis women if transplanted into male bodies” (which would suggest that “autogynephilia” is a consequence rather than a cause of trans-ness) from “many trans women get turned on by thinking of themselves as having female bodies, and no one else does or would” (which would suggest that “autogynephilia” might indeed be a cause).
All of this assumes that the dissenting parties are all genuinely trying, in good faith, to figure out what’s going on, rather than (e.g.) {gleefully grasping at / desperately denying} anything that might make trans people look like perverts. I’m pretty confident that that’s so for tailcalled. I’m not so convinced in Bailey’s case.
Some complications:
I’m not sure the Core Autogynephilia Scale “more or less by definition” could be inferred to be found much more among trans women than among cis women. My main issue with the scale is that it seems really weird to even compare across the groups, not because I think it by definition would be found more among trans women. But some people disagree with my assessment on this.
Blanchard never studied cis women; his claims about cis female sexuality must come from other places, though I’m not sure where exactly as he hasn’t really discussed it in detail. Instead, Blanchard studied trans women and found the endorsement rates to be high among gynephilic trans women and low among androphilic trans women. Bailey references a study that he performed in the clip, but in this study he didn’t compare trans women and cis women, he compared highly active mostly cisgender male members of online erotic AGP communities to cis women. I think substituting highly active members of online erotic AGP communities for trans women is biased and somewhat misleading, but for various reasons I don’t expect it to have a decisive influence on the results, though I do think the fact that Bailey obscures this should have a decisive influence on our respect for Bailey, as well as people who support him.
The “I bet it causes transness because it is more common in trans women than cis women” is not the sole or main argument for why autogynephilia should be causal, it is one out of many. I’m dissatisfied with a lot of the other ones too though, but I mostly agree with the conclusion.
My initial reply was “come on, it’s ridiculous to swap out highly active members of online erotic AGP communities for trans women”, which Blanchard blocked me for on twitter. While I have issues with the Core Autogynephilia Scale, I’m not confident in any story that it is wrong, only confident that it is weird/awkward to compare on.
My comment is more in response to Bailey, asserting seemingly without evidence, that “confound y’know being seen as a woman or having a female body from having sex with a partner while having a female body or the prospect of going out on a date while wearing sexy clothes”.
I think part of the reason that he gets away with this is that a previous study titled Autogynephilia in women did have such questions, such as “I have been erotically aroused by dressing in lingerie or sexy attire for a romantic evening or when hoping to meet a sex partner”. So there’s a sort of culture of dismissing these sorts of findings with these sorts of arguments already.
I should also say that I don’t personally consider this to be a fruitful area of research, because of many of the inherent difficulties, and have therefore criticized the general idea in the past. When I sent my item to Scott Alexander, I warned him that it was an experimental one with unclear validity.
I think he’s being kind of ambiguous about what kind of argument he is making here.
Typical autogynephiles get off to sexual fantasies about being women that have explicit sexual elements. However, at times, the sexual elements might be strange to non-autogynephiles. Zack gives an example here:
This is explicitly sexual insofar as the image of a nude woman is sexual, which I think it is generally considered to be? But it is not sexual in the usual alloerotic way. So Bailey might be saying, hey, when you suggest to women “Picture a very beautiful woman. How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being her?”, they might not be picturing this, but instead picturing something where they have sex with another person.
Alternatively, sometimes Blanchardians do make the argument that autogynephiles get off to things that are not conventionally sexual. For instance Blanchard asserted:
I think this sort of thing is how many of the viewers interpret Bailey’s argument, because there are a lot of people who emphasize these sorts of things as being archetypal autogynephilia. This fits under a certain model of autogynephilia, where one imagines autogynephilia as a general factor that causes arousal to all sorts of scenarios involving being a woman; under this model, the “being a woman” element is itself understood to be the core causal factor that makes it erotic. But in my opinion, the examples given do not reflect typical autogynephilic male sexuality; instead, typical autogynephilic male sexuality involves fantasies about engaging in sexual activities as a woman. So I think if one interpreted Bailey’s argument in this latter sense, then yes he is right that my items don’t assess this, but I also think Blanchard’s items don’t assess it either, and I don’t think this is the relevant thing to assess for this debate.
In my opinion, it’s even more difficult than this.
I think the ideal questions would be getting at the “phenomenology” of autogynephilia (or sexuality more generally). By phenomenology I mean, they would be asking about what sorts of feelings, thoughts, actions, and other concrete experiences people are engaging in, with respect to these topics. Similar to what Zack described, except ideally even more concretely and detailed. The reason we should be measuring the phenomenology is because this is the “native” aspect of human experience, so anything on top of the phenomenology is an abstraction.
But I think a core problem for this approach is that even if autogynephilia exists in cis women, the phenomenology of its expression would probably be different from that of when it exists in cis men. In fact, because most cis male autogynephilic fantasies are similar to standard cis female sexual activities, it is not even guaranteed that we could measure autogynephilia in women as distinct from female sexuality. So the first task is to find differences in phenomenology.
The most promising possibility seems to me to be in what is called “autosexual AGP”, which is what my items in the OP intended to assess. By “autosexual AGP”, I mean the phenomenon where many autogynephilic men are sexually aroused by the thought of being women and treating their own female bodies as a target of sexual interest, such as by looking at their own female bodies, or by masturbating as women. One might hypothesize that for cis women, equivalent autosexuality becomes erotic. For instance, in one survey where I intended to get at autogynephilia (using a totally different measure), a cis woman wrote:
One challenge with autosexual AGP is that it’s not actually clear it would present in the above way among trans women. I find it rare for trans women to report autosexual AGP after transitioning, and Blanchardians have mostly disregarded autosexual AGP, indicating that they don’t really find it to be a thing either. Some people suggest that some sort of habituation explains it; that it is less arousing to simply have a female body once one gets used to it. I don’t know whether this is true; I had hoped the ACX survey would enlighten me, but actually trans women didn’t report much drop in autosexual AGP (labelled “Autosexual FEF fantasies”—admittedly this doesn’t ask about direct arousal about one’s own body for consistency) over time:
So I don’t know what to make about autosexual AGP, but assuming it persists, it seems like pretty much the sole phenomenal difference that is guaranteed to be there.
Next, the question is, how to assess autosexual AGP? An ideal question would:
Be clear and unambiguous in meaning for all groups (trans women, cis women, cis men), referring to phenomenology that they can all either map to their own experiences, or accurately reject as not being present in their own experiences.
Be invariant across groups, e.g. neither having a male body nor having a female/feminized male body should cause it to decrease; which can probably most easily be tested by checking whether it is consistent across transition.
I think these criteria makes it impossible to measure autosexual AGP through actions, as the different groups are very different in terms of what actions they could take to express autosexual AGP. Instead, this is why I focus on sexual fantasies, as these seem like they could (maybe!) be expressed evenly across the groups.
The best approach might include having a paragraph of text describing the sexual fantasy, as that could make it more crisp in the respondent’s minds. But that makes it much longer, and also I suck at writing erotica. One time I started looking into hiring people to write erotica for me for this exact purpose, but the transaction didn’t go through because I got distracted. Now that we’ve got LLMs, it might be worth revisiting if one can find an uncensored LLM to query.
Though even with erotica, it is unclear how meaningful of a comparison one can make. Male and female sexuality is very different in lots of other ways. Still it feels like it is worth a shot.
Personally, I often find that Bailey does an investigation in a biased way (think stuff like substituting highly active members of online erotic AGP communities for trans women). One could imagine that this is just an innocent mistake because he hasn’t been thinking deeply about it, but in that case I would expect him to be interested in information about what biases there might be, so that he could collect data in unbiased ways. This is not what I find; when I do give such critiques, he tends to ignore them, and when I ask him for justifications for why he does it in the ways that he does, he doesn’t tend to have any reasons.
This is clearly a rejection of rational discourse about these topics. It seems plausible that the reason he rejects rational discourse is because he feels certain that something like Blanchardianism is right, and he just wants to convince the world of this, rather than having to deal with a bunch of bureaucracy and bothersome activists, so that the world will stop threatening him with accusations of transphobia for endorsing Blanchardianism. Furthermore, I think the reason that he finds Blanchardianism so important to talk about, even though trans women generally oppose it, is that it provides a counternarrative against feminine essence theories, where AGPTSs and HSTSs are supposed to both share a feminization condition that immutably causes transness.
That is, rather than being a good-faith truth seeker who is trying to figure out what is going on, he is trying to make propaganda to counteract other propaganda (which in turn was created in response to other propaganda, in a seemingly endless cycle of propaganda wars). Doing so benefits from obscurity about what is going on, so rational discussion with its tendency to make things crisp and clear becomes an enemy.
A scientist who sits on the board of a tobacco company, and who publishes a study that finds tobacco to be perfectly harmless, will have his or her study treated with extra skepticism, owing to their study’s inevitable bias. If the scientist fails to disclose their conflict of interest, they’ll be immediately ostracized from the scientific community. A failure to disclose a conflict of interest is an affront if not a direct attack on the credibility of science itself. It is unacceptable.
The author of this post, tailcalled, is self-admittedly autogynephilic. (See: https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/about/). Whatever pretenses of scientific merit his study and his findings may have, he failed to disclose his conflict of interest when presenting his results. He has demonstrated gross scientific negligence.
If police launch an internal investigation and find themselves blameless, we roll our eyes. If an autogynephilic man launches a study on autogynephlia, and he finds himself free of socially undesirable traits, we as rationalists… accept his favorable findings about himself without skepticism? God, I hope not.
tailcalled inventing his own questions smelled a little funny. It’s a rudimentary element of epistemology to know that, despite your best efforts to remain impartial, you will always be interpreting the world around you with your thumb on the scale in your own favor. This is why we go to great lengths to create double-blind studies.
The fact that tailcalled, and to a lesser extent Scott Alexander (who publicized and brought significant attention to tailcalled results), failed to disclose tailcalled’s conflict of interest is shameful. The truth, and the methods to arrive at the truth, must be held sacrosanct at lesswrong, or we’re wasting our time.
Scott Alexander can do better, and tailcalled should apologize.
Additionally, all publications surrounding tailcalled results should be amended with a disclosure. If you’re pissed that you had to scroll to the bottom of this post to find out that tailcalled is himself autogynephilic and on HRT, you should be.
Added disclosure that I am autogynephilic to the beginning of my post.
Also, since you consider people’s positionality important, what is your relationship to this? You write like an HSTS attempting to sound scientific; is that true, and if so, why didn’t you disclose that you were HSTS? If you are not HSTS, what is your background? Sex, trans status, autogynephilia, sexual orientation, political views?
What study and socially undesirable traits do you have in mind?
Your argument that I am self-admittedly autogynephilic is a link to a page on my research blog where I admit to being autogynephilic. This seems like disclosure to me? Is there any place where you would like me to add additional disclosure?
If you have issues with my questions, I would be open to adding questions that you prefer so we can compare the results of them. Beyond the case of questions, unlike Blanchardians I generally make my data available, so if you have issues with the analyses/interpretations, I would be ready to share my data with you so you can give your own interpretations to it.
Scott Alexander did not publish my results. Scott Alexander did his own study using methods that deviated from my recommendations in order to produce his own results.
Also, insofar as Scott Alexander has an error here, I think it is broader than not representing my situation fully. I can’t even get Scott Alexander to pay enough attention to my position to realize that I think autogynephilia matters for trans topics and that autogynephilia in cis women doesn’t change that fact. Scott Alexander probably should do better to disclose that he is basically not paying attention to this stuff.
I can add a disclosure of this to this post. Are there any other posts where you think it matters?
For the purpose of reading my tone, I’m grateful that you added the disclosure. My priors have been adjusted, and you’re alright in my book.
(I’ve been welcomed into the LessWrong community, after my high effort comment, with negative karma and the inability to even vote, but I’d otherwise give you an upvote.)
I think disclosures of conflicts of interest are important when you’re authoritatively presenting conclusions, or when you’re authoritatively rebutting scientific conclusions. We don’t need to know our personal details when we’re just talking to each other, and not standing on a metaphorical stage making proclamations. Nevertheless, to reciprocate, I’m not a HSTS. (For the audience, HSTS = homosexual transsexual, a transwoman who is attracted to men. For further context, sometimes HSTS’s believe that AGP’s aren’t “true” transsexuals, hence tailcalled’s guess.)
I’m a straight, cis-male, registered Democrat. In terms of bias, I think Blanchard is brilliant; he’s poured much of his life into this stuff, and I don’t like people glibly taking shots at his work. Regardless of what Twitter would have you believe, Blanchard is highly respected in the scientific community.
The following study, for which you are credited, has its conclusion in the title: “Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender” (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender)
I am suggesting that there is a conflict of interest that hasn’t been disclosed for this study. Scott Alexander apparently didn’t work with you for the analysis/conclusion, so the bias may be strictly limited to the methods: the questions on the survey. (Unless, as I’ve read, Scott Alexander is romantically involved with a trans person, which makes the whole study highly suspect.)
I believe you in that you had little to do with it, other than coming up with the AGP questions. Nevertheless, in science, if you believe that a study is erroneous, it is standard to request that your name be removed from authorship, so as to not tar your career. The extent to which we stray from that standard is the extent to which our community loses credibility.
Everyday sexualities, like homosexuality or fetishes like BDSM, are increasingly acceptable to society. Strange sexualities, however, make even progressives uncomfortable. Adult diaper people, for instance, struggle to find friends. But if your sexuality is normal, if most humans have a considerable degree of AGP, (as is concluded by the study that bears your name), then you can expect to be embraced in the kumbaya circle of circle. We all have AGP, let’s hold hands!
On the other hand, if AGP is as Blanchard and Bailey understand it, then you’re in for (greater) social difficulty. Blanchard and Bailey believe that AGP is analogous to apotemnophilics, also called “transabled” people. These folks are aroused by the idea of getting their limbs amputated. If Blanchard and Bailey are correct, both AGP’s and apotemnophilics are consequences of an erotic target location error (ETLE).
Foot fetishists are another example of ETLE, and they’re probably the most socially accepted ETLE. Many of us don’t care if a friend has a foot thing, as long as he keeps it to himself and doesn’t publicly ogle feet. Transabled people, meanwhile, are freaky to almost all of us. Having a sexual desire to chop off parts of your body would fit in a horror movie: an unacceptable sexuality to most.
I think AGP people would fall somewhere between foot fetishists and transabled people, were Blanchard AGP theory widely understood and accepted as valid.
Thus, what’s on the table: whether your sexuality is normal or an oddity. And consequently, whether your sexuality is acceptable or highly uncomfortable. The latter would push you (deeper) into the social margins.
The specter of ostracization is a powerful source of bias — a lot is at stake for you! I believe that you have scientific integrity, but as I said in my previous comment, the odds are stacked against you on this topic. Your mind is going to try to find a way to believe the favorable thing and to reject the highly unfavorable thing. To compensate for that inevitable bias, the standards of your work in the field must be higher. It’s a pragmatic consideration, not a judgmental one (as long as disclosures are provided!)
I cannot comment on flaws in your questions, as I’m not an expert in the field. I can tell you, though, that Bailey is a warm guy, and he’s more accessible than you might expect. If Scott Alexander has slighted you, and it sounds like he has, you could probably steal his thunder. Beat him to a follow-up study done in conjunction with Bailey. I think Bailey might be happy for the chance to make a scientific convert.
For what it’s worth, I’m sorry you got a shitty set of cards in the sexuality department. I hope you’re able to find a satisfying way to get your kicks and be happy.
Your original comment may have been high effort, but it was high effort put into covering up the overall badness of the comment. It contained no substantive object-level argument, and just meta-level sneering about “bias”.
Why? It sounds to me like you have some special model for something “authoritative” that isn’t as central to my model? Can you expand?
My view is that if you think there is something wrong with my rebuttal, you can just criticize it and show what’s wrong, so there’s not much need to worry about bias.
(My guess was more based on having seen one or two HSTSs use grammatical constructions like “tailcalled results”, and on some HSTS’s primary reaction to a lot of this discourse being to ignore object-level arguments and just make fun of their interlocutors for being AGP.)
Something about this doesn’t add up to me. How does a person like this get deeply involved with Blanchard? Parent of gender dysphoric kid? Some supersexual/TiA type thing? Via racism? Secretly AGP?
At this point it feels like you’re advocating severe cancel culture. This isn’t “be extra skeptical about scientists who sit on the board of a tobacco company”, it’s “be extra skeptical about scientists who have talked with tobacco companies about research”. It’s like you are treating the mere act of receiving information from AGPs as a danger.
I mean first of all, this is literally false; I’ve read a bunch of social science and discussions between social scientists, and they often admit to changing their minds without retracting the papers. (This isn’t the only literally false thing you’ve said. The points about science requiring sexual minorities who study their sexual interests to disclose and having extra high standards towards their research is incorrect, at least after the influence of wokeness, where the perception is often reversed, that it is majorities who are suspicious.)
First, I reject the claim that common=OK. Second, I have regularly argued against most people being AGP, e.g. Contra Serano and Lehmiller on Autogynephilia Prevalence. Third, I think it is gaslighty (in a bad way) for Society to make bullshit dismissals of my work (as Bailey does) and then threaten me with ostracism (as you are doing) and then argue that I only disagree because I am irrationally biased. Just make an actual good object-level argument.
Scott Alexander hasn’t really slighted me that much, he’s just inattentive. I can just correct him in the comments and in discussions.
I used to moderate a subreddit about Blanchardianism, often focused on my research, and this lead to Michael Bailey adding me to SEXNET, and sometimes sharing some research work with me. However, when I asked questions I generally found him dismissive, but to some extent I assumed that at least sometimes he had some deeper reasons that he was hinting at. At the time I was talking a lot about autoandrophilia, bringing it up as an alternate model to ROGD, and doing research partly based on my own ideas and partly inspired by various critiques and takes by Bailey & co. A lot of my research was pretty bad, and some of the things I said at the time were over the line, but mostly Bailey didn’t seem to mind.
A major turning point came with Meta-attraction cannot account for all autogynephiles’ interest in men, where I found a major claim made by Blanchardianism to be false. Bailey’s response was superficially encouraging, saying that it is good I am doing the work and claiming that he’d be willing to test subjects phallometrically for me if I send them to his lab, but ultimately his response was also dismissive, saying that it is not believable because the androphilic AGPs probably lied about their arousal, and claiming my title is far too certain about the result.
At the time he also made statements like this about me:
Anyway, that this major claim about meta-attraction was wrong reduced my trust in Blanchardians, and so I went in reinvestigating some claims that I had been too quick to accept, leading to a stream of critical posts, such as:
The mathematical consequences of a toy model of gender transition
Age of onset as the origin of discrete types of gender dysphoria?
Contra Blanchard and Dreger on Autogynephilia in Cis Women
Contra James Cantor on desistance
Controlling for the general factor of paraphilia / Autogynephilia and masochism: A tale of two assessment biases
Furthermore, gradually throughout the time, I had been leveling up my psychometrics, statistics and causal inference skills.
Eventually, it reached the point where we had some disagreements where I had unambiguous proof that I was right. However, he kept writing brief dismissals, despite me writing pages of explanation of the statistics as well as simulation studies showing the result. I took this as proof that he was bullshitting. (Unfortunately it was about a secret project that I have promised not to tell anyone the details about, so I can’t give you the proof yet. He is supposedly gonna publish soon though, and I plan on writing up my proof immediately after that.)
Michael Bailey has a tendency to complain about ideological bias and insist that people should be truthseekers like him. To try to pressure him into not bullshitting, I started responding to such cases by calling him out on his bullshit. I think this was very embarrassing/annoying for him, and he demanded I stopped.
I accepted to pause the public comments on him while we sorted out who was in the right or in the wrong, but I had interpreted the pause to not cover a semi-private discord server with some of my friends, so I discussed what was happening with people in there. But he had someone in the discord server who sent him the discussion, and he decided I had broken our deal and therefore banned/blocked me wherever he could.
This also lead to him cancelling the previous promise about being willing to physiologically test putative androphilic AGPs.
Later, in response to Michael Bailey’s critiques of my items, Scott Alexander suggested that Bailey and I should do an adversarial collaboration to evaluate my items. I explained that I wasn’t totally opposed to it, but it would be hard because we can’t stand each other because I believe that discussions should be founded on rational argument and justifiable evidence, while Bailey believes they should be founded on civility. Bailey declined, on the basis that he didn’t like me because I questioned his integrity as a scientist, and suggested to Scott Alexander that I might have a Cluster B personality disorder.
(I don’t have a Cluster B personality disorder, at least not in the sense that personality disorders are usually defined, of being enduring, unstoppable, pervasive maladaptive patterns of behavior. Yes I have a conflict with Michael Bailey that I have fanned into a bunch of drama, which is superficially like Cluster B, but it is not pervasive as it is limited to Michael Bailey and maybe some adjacent trans/research-topics, and it is not unstoppable as I could choose to stop whenever I want.)
So no, it is not a good idea to work with Michael Bailey. His reasoning procedure seems to consist of pointing out that progressive stuff doesn’t at up, vaguely gesturing that he knows some deep truths, and then dismissing those who have results that contradict his preconceptions. He does not seem to engage in rational argument.
Apparently both Bailey and I agree about your bias. Accounting for (and making disclosures of conflict of interest about) biases isn’t “meta-level sneering”. It’s a fundamental part of science.
Per Disclosure of conflict of interest in scientific publications (2020):
Failing to disclose COI’s relegates research to the bottom 10% of scientific publications: shit-tier, quack-adjacent “science”. (And yes, wokeness / Social Justice Fundamentalism has infected that bottom 10% of shit-tier publications, and yes, it’s cancerously eating up more of the social sciences. As you’ve suggested, many circles in social science won’t mind if you’re publishing papers that surreptitiously promote your own agenda. What they’re engaged in is no longer science.)
Outside of woke corruption, and for deeper context, modern science cares about bias, because it’s been repeatedly burned by it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_experiment
So, if you care about science, and you’re not just play-acting at it, then I’m afraid that you have to care about bias.
Unrelatedly, I’m now downvoted to oblivion, and LessWrong has elected to time-limit my ability to make comments. I’ve been issued a dunce cap and put in the corner. This treatment is rather beneath my sense of my own dignity, so this is my last message here.
Foreign body removed: purification of the echo chamber complete.
Studying a subject is the most important part of science. If a research area degenerates into pure accusations of bias and nonsense arguments (as distinct things; yes I agree that bias can be relevant as long as it’s not the only topic), then it is pretty worthless.
Let’s take a concrete example of a journal with a conflict of interest disclosure policy, namely Archives of Sexual Behavior, the main journal Blanchardians use. One autogynephilic trans woman who has published papers about autogynephilia in ASB is Anne Lawrence, but I don’t think she tended to declare a conflict of interest. For instance, skimming through Veale’s (2014) Critique of Blanchard’s Typology Was Invalid, I don’t immediately see any dislosures by Lawrence that she is autogynephilic or transgender.
I don’t know why she didn’t disclose. One possibility is that the disclosure policy doesn’t obligate her to. I’m not sure though as it was quite vague:
I don’t see any explicit mention of demographic membership, though, so probably it isn’t required?
But all of your comments currently have positive karma? (The left number is karma; the right number is agree/disagree voting, which exists precisely to express disagreement without it being a rebuke.)
I’m glad somebody’s willing to say this. It’s been apparent to me that Anne Lawrence has been reasoning backwards for years now (cf. the series of 2011 letters-to-the-editor between her and the Nuttbrock group.)
Now, to get up on my soapbox for a minute. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff within the ocean of trans sexuality (two words) to be studied. But I also see an ethical conflict in doing so when there is a massive media apparatus currently laser-focused on decrying people like me. I and every other trans person in the US that I personally know have contingency plans for the near future, because there are a worrying number of people that in no uncertain terms want us dead, whether physically or functionally. I would never begrudge self-described autogynephiles their identity, but I worry that trying to move past the anecdotal into the scientific will give the genocide cannon more dakka. I would like to submit that we can study these things once we’re sure they’re not going be used to criminalize our existence or severely curtail our bodily autonomy. Unfortunately my personal opinion is that that time is not coming soon.
I disagree strongly and think we should accelerate almost all forms of scientific progress and inquiry, even when it might find truths that are politically inconvenient. For all the parochial reasons why progress and truth are good (better models of the world, higher standards of living, more slack, all via better tech, like better medicine, even when not explicitly searching for it...). And for those of us who believe the world is in peril, all the more reason to take on risk.
Also it is bad game-theory to give into threats, including hypothetical future threats. Respectability politics saves oppressors from having to do the work of oppressing and instead outsources it onto the oppressed group. This makes it cheaper to oppress trans people.
Also am skeptical of the strategy. If trans people don’t do the science, then cis people will. Unless trans people pressure our cis allies not to, in which case the haters will do the science or make stuff up, which I think is worse.
The existing Blanchardian research program is guilty of egregious research methodology dishonesty. If you are worried about oppressors creating bad research, I think attacking the character of the researchers would be a more appropriate response, as that justifies dismissing their work without needing to spend additional resources.
The main issue with this strategy is that most of the activists in the field don’t understand the research well enough to emphasize the flaws properly. Plus even if they do, they will likely make extremely questionable assertions too. And while I do understand the research well enough to emphasize the flaws, I’m uncompromising about also pointing out the places where the researchers actually have a point, so this makes activists uninterested in boosting my critiques.
What? The media is pretty much completely positive towards trans. At least any media with a budget.
I think it would be helpful if on both sides of this argument, people listed the media companies they have in mind. This would make it easier for onlookers to spot-check the claims.
Well, Gotham Knights started this year. It has a trans character and everyone’s assuming that being trans is perfectly normal. Characters talk about paying for top surgery as if it was an everyday thing like discussing who should pay for lunch. There’s also Quantum Leap, which had its trans episode where it was assumed that the audience is sympathetic, and Vanya in Umbrella Academy.
I have no idea whatsoever what in the media the OP was thinking of.
I would expect xe is thinking of the news, which are supposed to inform people about factual events that are happening in the world, rather than thinking of fictional television series depicting supernatural or fantastic events, which are supposed to entertain people.
The trans parts of the TV series are not part of the supernatural/fantastic events in the series. The series are clearly trying to normalize being trans.
I agree with what you say in this comment. I don’t know whether the comment is intended as an argument, but if so I don’t think it changes things, as I think entertainment that is trying to normalize being trans can coexist with news that is trying to decry trans people.
This National Review article is a pretty good summation of how we’re portrayed in conservative news media. It gets much worse.
(Fixed the mangled link.)
You’re going to have to be more specific about why you think that counts as laser focused and massive when it’s a small part of the media (much less reach than a TV show) and describes events that actually happened, although in a way you don’t like.
That was the first article I found. Delving too deeply into what these people say about me tends to be hazardous to my health.
Here are some well-cited Wikipedia articles that should serve as good jumping-off points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_grooming_conspiracy_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_anti-LGBT_movement_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libs_of_TikTok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transphobia_in_the_United_States
I may be wrong, but until Elon Musk bought Twitter, I’m not really sure it is fair to call this a “massive media apparatus”. The wikipedia articles here makes it sound like it is mostly driven in a decentralized way, with popular social media influencers such as Libs of TikTok pushing it, and most of the media companies in question trying to keep it down. It seems like structural forces have generally been opposed to this discussion.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter, the “massive media apparatus” phrasing makes sense; I’m pretty sure a large part of Elon Musk’s motivation was to change the discourse on trans topics to be more negative towards transness, and Twitter is in fact a truly colossal media apparatus.
Or maybe I’m thinking about it wrong. I guess the articles are more saying that it started out as a decentralized conservative activist thing which resonated with a lot of people, and then mainstream conservative media picked up on it?
I don’t know if “decentralized” is quite right. For example, the Alliance Defending Freedom specifically has been an instrumental driving force behind legislative pushes in many states in the last few years. Legislation, election messaging, and media cycles more generally tend to be driven by a handful of conservative/evangelical nonprofits with long-established national operations, also including, for example, the Independent Women’s Forum and the Family Research Council. I would also characterize it as more of a wedge issue than a resonant one, although that’s more complicated.
So maybe an accurate model is something like:
For a while, there have been conservative organizations working on legal foundations etc. to challenge the trans movement, mostly working in the background. As the trans movement has grown, so has decentralized populist opposition to it, until recently where the concerns of influencers such as Libs of TikTok have become so big that they have been picked up by a lot of conservative media. And finally, something happened in Elon Musk’s family which probably involves Elon Musk wanting to prevent Vivian Jenna Wilson from transitioning and wanting to treat her as male, or Elon Musk being mad at Grimes, and therefore using a big chunk of his wealth for buying a major progressive media institution to push back against transgender ideology.
I was going to post this in my original comment, but decided not to: the quantum of belief is the story, not the study. “They’re going after the children” and “they’re pretending to be women so they can win sporting events” have shown to be two of the most easily-believed stories, so conservative media has been leaning on those angles. Even some people who are nominally cool with my existence believe the latter if pushed a bit, despite the preponderance of the evidence [0] showing that there’s no significant advantage after enough feminizing HRT.
Incidentally, there’s a dominoes meme I’ve been meaning to make for some time now, with “Someone posts a mathematical monograph on a new kind of decision theory to the Internet” at the small end and “Pop star leaves world’s richest man for transfemme hacker” at the big end.
We appreciate power.
[0] https://www.cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review
Regarding the claims about trans women’s advantage in women’s sports, I had heard the opposite, that studies had found trans women to have an advantage. So I decided to just quickly spot-check your given link, and it included this section:
This feels like Everest regression to me. I think you should have been more up-front about the fact that you are using this criterion, and it makes me less inclined to bothered with giant documents that you give in the future.
The Everest regression here is “when you control for height and lean body mass, cis men aren’t actually stronger than cis women”, yes? That would be a deal-breaker if they were comparing cis men and cis women, I agree, but they’re not. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody make that claim. The claim that’s being made is, as I follow it:
Feminizing HRT brings muscle mass and strength to “within the normal distribution...for cis women (Janssen et al., 2000)”, thereby controlling for LBM, and
the arena of elite sport selects in some way for height (note that greater height does not confer an advantage in all sports; the canonical example is powerlifting, in which shorter lifters have less distance to move the same weight);
hence the statistical application of those controls is justified; and
while there is a statistically significant difference in LBM and strength after feminizing HRT, it is within distribution (Janssen again) and not clearly more egregious than other biological differences at the elite level; e.g., those possessed by Michael Phelps and Caster Semenya; and
the Harms study shows (or purports to show; I haven’t scrutinized it too closely) that other commonly-cited factors (bone density, etc.) do not confer any significant advantage.
Am I following your contention?
I don’t really follow this. In the data I’ve seen, HRT brings trans women halfway between cis men and cis women. Janssen et al 2000 does not contain any trans women, and the place you are quoting from in the linked report is kind of convoluted and since the report has already been misleading one time I don’t really feel like wasting time following the report’s argument. Please lay out the argument for this if you want me to believe it.
I’m somewhat confused about what you are asking.
My understanding of the debate about trans women in sports is:
Competitive sports ranks people by athletic performance, which depends on innate capacities, hard work, and luck
Women are by and large biologically inferior to men with respect to athleticism, mainly due to being smaller and having smaller muscles
As a result, women can’t win in non-sex-segregated sports competitions
Some people feel that the point of women’s sports is to provide women with a competition they can participate in since they can’t win against men
Trans women want to participate in women’s sports so that they can be treated like women, but some people worry that trans women would retain some of the male advantage
One might suggest that it is fair if HRT makes trans women have the same biological capacities as cis women
You suggest that after controlling for height (which I think basically functions as a proxy for body size) and lean body mass (which I think basically functions as a proxy for muscle size), trans women have the same athletic capacities as cis women.
But I don’t think that people are concerned about innate capacity residualized for body size and muscle size; I think people are concerned about whether trans women keep some of their innate capacity due to being male, even if it is due to body size and muscle size.
Obviously people might differ on how they evaluate it, but I think those who are concerned about fairness here would make a distinction being tall due to being male vs being taller for other reasons. Like if you are explicitly making a competition for women because women are bad at sports, the ways in which women are bad sports would be logical to treat specially in the rules.
It’s like if you made a competition for mentally handicapped people, this competition is probably going to select for a better cognitive understanding of the rules and techniques of the sport compared to that of mentally handicapped people who don’t participate in the sport. But if some ordinary people want to identify as mentally handicapped and participate in the sport, this doesn’t obviously justify controlling for cognitive understanding of rules and techniques when trying to evaluate whether it’s fair for them to participate. I mean maybe you have some argument for why it does, but it’s not clear what that would be.
With respect to Michael Phelps, again like for height if you are explicitly making a competition for women, there is a distinction between the advantages he gets due to being male, vs the advantages he gets for various other genetic reasons/due to hard work/etc..
Caster Semenya is a difficult case that I don’t really understand fully. Many of the people who are critical of trans women in women’s sports also seem critical of Caster Semenya in women’s sports.
Here is my interpretation. The relevant data are contained in Table 6 of the 2022 report on page 25, and show that the relative muscle loss caused by 12 months of feminizing HRT in sedentary trans women is around 4 percentage points. Table 1 of Janssen 2000 gives the normal distributions the 2022 report seems to be referring to: for cis women, mean 30.6% and SD 5.5%; for cis men, mean 38.4% and SD 5.1%. This supports, I think, both your claim that a year of HRT puts trans women at about the halfway point and the 2022 report’s claim that this is nevertheless “within the normal distribution.” That’s a mathematically imprecise claim but I think they mean “within one sigma.”
I think all this is a wash. In particular, I agree with your halfway-point claim at 12 months, but disagree with it on longer timescales. I would like to see a paper examining a longer timescale.
One sigma feels like it would make a huge difference for something like competitive sports which is mostly about the tails of the distribution.
I certainly have the sense it could. But those comparisons are in sedentary people, not athletes, and it’s also possible that out in those tails training causes the differences to mostly disappear.
This has been a nice exercise but I think it’s tangential.
For all I know, it could be that training causes the differences to shrink, but it could also equally well be that it causes them to grow.
I’m speaking from memory of reporting here, but my understanding is that there was a specific turning point in 2019/2020 when one of these orgs focus tested a bunch of messages and found that trans youth issues worked well, particularly as a wedge. (That is, the opposition were split on it.) US Americans, when polled, have a bunch of weirdly self-contradictory answers to questions on trans issues but are generally more supportive than not, depending on how they’re asked. My guess is they mostly don’t think about it too much, since there are plausibly a million or two trans people in the US, many of whom pass or are closeted.
In the previous cycle, “bathroom bills” had failed and generated backlash. In the current cycle focused on trans youth, there’s more uncertainty among people who think of themselves as liberals, and for a variety of reasons large news media organizations like the NYT have been happy to play along with conservative agenda-setting. There’s some decentralized, populist opposition, but it’s largely activated by forces far out of proportion to the number of trans athletes or minors getting gender-affirming surgery.
No idea what Musk’s deal is. Unrelatedly, I’m also very skeptical that Libs of TikTok is primarily motivated by sincere concerns.
Edit: here’s a handful of sources just from looking around again.
NYT (2023): How A Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives (“it was also the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics”)
Axios (2023): The forces behind anti-trans bills across the U.S.
NBC News (2017), on ADF and bathroom bills: This Law Firm Is Linked to Anti-Transgender Bills Across the Country
The Guardian (2020), on other ADF activities and the new focus on student athletes: The multimillion-dollar Christian group attacking LGBTQ+ rights
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (2023): NYT’s Anti-Trans Bias, by the Numbers
I don’t endorse everything that’s written in these, but this is more or less the thing I’m talking about.
That’s correct.
If you scroll through the author’s twitter feed for a while, you will find that it was not just a random isolated news story, but that she shares critical stuff about trans people as a substantial part of her feed, many orders of magnitude more than the proportion of newsworthy stuff that trans people engage in. Beyond the stories criticizing trans women in women’s sports, I saw stories criticizing allowing trans teens privacy from their parents as they transition in schools, stories criticizing allowing mentally ill to transition, stories criticizing trans women flashing their breasts at pride events, and so on.
If Verona Lišková wanted to transition privately in school while keeping xer parents in the dark and not being stopped due to mental illness, flash xer breasts at pride events, and participate in women’s sports competitions, then having journalists who specialize in criticizing such events is quite inconvenient and disruptive for xer.
You can find a bunch of critical stuff about pretty much anything if you create a feed that is there specifically to collect it. But this is, by definition, not a representative sampling; it doesn’t show that the media, in general, are anti-trans, much less that there is a “massive media apparatus currently laser-focused on decrying” trans people.
(And newsworthy stuff that people don’t like is still newsworthy stuff.)
I don’t think “there is a massive media apparatus” implies a claim about all of the media, rather it is making an existence claim about fairly large bulk of media. Even if it is tiny as a fraction of the full media, there could still be thousands or tens of thousands of people having a core priority of decrying trans people in the media, and many more collaborating weakly, such as by supporting general conservative infrastructure.
I think the study of autogynephilia and similar is often used as a proxy for normalizing talking about certain issues, such as the difficulties women can face if their partners decide to transition in middle-age, or similar.
I think a Pareto improvement would be to move the scientific research to these issues, rather than focusing on autogynephilia, which people mostly don’t care about anyway.
If you compare how European countries handled abortion and how the US handled it one important contrast is that while the US decided in Roe vs. Wade for an extreme position, European countries mostly tried to find a middle way where abortion is allowed provided certain regulations are followed. That process took a lot of charge out of political fights over abortion given that everyone was okay with the consensus that was written down in the law.
If you push for public policy regarding how to handle trans-people that are disliked by a majority of the population that strengthens people who would want to push extreme policies against trans-people. Opposing scientific investigation gives a lot of fuel to conservatives who want to fight against trans-people.
The problem is that supporting scientific investigation is likely to do the same. Any sort of genetic marker of transness will be immediately turned against our community and used to fracture us. They want to fight against us no matter what the science says. There is no way for us to win by rational argument, or by anything else, really. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themself into.