I was actively introspecting about AGP as a possibility so I don’t consider it repressed/unconscious.
Please correct me if you disagree but my understanding is the following:
- Standard model: brain sex mismatch causes FEF, dysphoira, and transition
- Blanchard: ETLE causes FEF, dysphoira, and transition
Blanchard still says AGPs should transition. He doesn’t propose a mechanism for what causes ETLE. So these theories look the same to me. I don’t think there is an experiment we can run to determine which is true, and I don’t know if that experiment would have consequences for clinical practice or policy.
So my understanding is that AGP the theory is only potentially useful at an individual therapeutic/psychological level.
Presumably female brain sex would imply more female-typical psychological traits, which would have lots of implications for clinical practice and policy to the extent that clinical practice and policy are sensitive to psychological sex differences. Much of the value of AGP-the-theory is that it provides a plausible explanation for why some males would want to become female other than “already” being female in some psychological sense.
Seems like evidence that the HSTS vs. just-HS difference is dimensional (and maybe culturally determined) rather than taxonic, which supports the “brain sex” gloss in some ways, but not others (gay men are still men for a lot of clinical and policy purposes)?
Why not just index on the psychological traits directly then?
I’m not an expert on this but ETLE seems more like a hypothesis than an explanation to me. Let’s suppose ETLE is true. What else would we expect to then be true then as a consequence of ETLE that wouldn’t be true under the standard “brain sex” model?
Let’s set the clinical and policy implications aside for a moment. You said “I don’t think there is an experiment we can run to determine which is true”, and I’m saying that the theories make different predictions: for example, ETLE has no problem explaining why so many trans women are lesbians (that’s exactly what you would expect if most trans women are paraphilic males), whereas brain sex theories have a harder time.
Evidence for other putative ETLEs like furries or apotemnophilia makes it more plausible that ETLE is what’s going on with most gynephilic trans women. (Why would these groups look so much alike along so many dimensions, but have completely different etiologies?)
Can you give me an example of a testable prediction that isn’t something we already know? Or an example from the past where ETLE made a falsifiable prediction that was either proved or disproved by empirical research?
It’s easy to fit a theory to existing data. That doesn’t mean the theory is true or useful.
I mean, I transitioned MtF at 31 and I’m posting on LessWrong. I’m not beating the allegations. lol. I called myself an AGP in my [substack linkpost](https://quinoam.substack.com/p/why-i-transitioned-a-response) because it’s funny. I have no problem doing so.
Also, I can honestly say that I transitioned because my health was falling apart, I had a lot of repressed psychological desires to act and be more feminine, a lot of dysphoria over my body, and most important, taking estradiol dramatically improved my happiness and cognitive function.
The person I was at the start of transition—he was more sexually gratified staying as a man.
Some MtFs do find AGP relatable and that doesn’t bother me. But Blanchard/Bailey et al appear, to me, needlessly cruel, and deliberately inflammatory. That doesn’t mean the theory is false. But circumstantially their behavior looks detrimental to truth-seeking.
So the predictive power of the theory better be really good for me to want to spend time on it.
I find the Gender Mosaic theory (cf Daphna Joel) to be the most plausible, but I see it as a Sex Mosaic where there are male-typical and female-typical neural wirings for different brain regions. It’s very high-dimensional and the sex of each region can vary independently and (mostly) continuously based on the prenatal hormone wash. This easily explains the vast phenotypic variation in gendered behavior, and why it seems like we have every different possible combination of person.
The reason we don’t see “male” or “female” brains with neuroimaging is that the vast majority of these regions are for general cognition (neocortex), where prenatal estrogen/androgen signaling does influence structure but not in ways that have any effect on subconscious sex. I expect the brain regions / wiring patterns that cause dysphoria are small. If we knew the connectomes for a bunch of trans people, I predict we could find them. The imaging tools we have now are extremely rudimentary.
All of this can coexist with ETLE, but again, as far as I know, ETLE doesn’t have any mechanistic basis in neuroscience. So it’s very uninteresting to me. If Blanchard actually predicted furries, then please link me to the source for that. What is surprising about furries is not the bestiality of it all (humans have been having sex with animals since the dawn of domestication), but the anthropomorphic cartoon aesthetic.
hi Zack, thank you for the comment :)
I was actively introspecting about AGP as a possibility so I don’t consider it repressed/unconscious.
Please correct me if you disagree but my understanding is the following:
- Standard model: brain sex mismatch causes FEF, dysphoira, and transition
- Blanchard: ETLE causes FEF, dysphoira, and transition
Blanchard still says AGPs should transition. He doesn’t propose a mechanism for what causes ETLE. So these theories look the same to me. I don’t think there is an experiment we can run to determine which is true, and I don’t know if that experiment would have consequences for clinical practice or policy.
So my understanding is that AGP the theory is only potentially useful at an individual therapeutic/psychological level.
Presumably female brain sex would imply more female-typical psychological traits, which would have lots of implications for clinical practice and policy to the extent that clinical practice and policy are sensitive to psychological sex differences. Much of the value of AGP-the-theory is that it provides a plausible explanation for why some males would want to become female other than “already” being female in some psychological sense.
What’s your thoughts on my finding that HS/TS-spectrum gay men were only minimally shifted in gender-related psychological traits compared to wholly cis gay men? https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/major-survey-on-the-hs-ts-spectrum-and-gaygp/ Except for aesthetic traits.
Seems like evidence that the HSTS vs. just-HS difference is dimensional (and maybe culturally determined) rather than taxonic, which supports the “brain sex” gloss in some ways, but not others (gay men are still men for a lot of clinical and policy purposes)?
Why not just index on the psychological traits directly then?
I’m not an expert on this but ETLE seems more like a hypothesis than an explanation to me. Let’s suppose ETLE is true. What else would we expect to then be true then as a consequence of ETLE that wouldn’t be true under the standard “brain sex” model?
Let’s set the clinical and policy implications aside for a moment. You said “I don’t think there is an experiment we can run to determine which is true”, and I’m saying that the theories make different predictions: for example, ETLE has no problem explaining why so many trans women are lesbians (that’s exactly what you would expect if most trans women are paraphilic males), whereas brain sex theories have a harder time.
Evidence for other putative ETLEs like furries or apotemnophilia makes it more plausible that ETLE is what’s going on with most gynephilic trans women. (Why would these groups look so much alike along so many dimensions, but have completely different etiologies?)
Can you give me an example of a testable prediction that isn’t something we already know? Or an example from the past where ETLE made a falsifiable prediction that was either proved or disproved by empirical research?
Was Blanchard aware of furries when he did his research? That might count.
Though I’m puzzled by why it is necessary to come up with something new.
It’s easy to fit a theory to existing data. That doesn’t mean the theory is true or useful.
I mean, I transitioned MtF at 31 and I’m posting on LessWrong. I’m not beating the allegations. lol. I called myself an AGP in my [substack linkpost](https://quinoam.substack.com/p/why-i-transitioned-a-response) because it’s funny. I have no problem doing so.
Also, I can honestly say that I transitioned because my health was falling apart, I had a lot of repressed psychological desires to act and be more feminine, a lot of dysphoria over my body, and most important, taking estradiol dramatically improved my happiness and cognitive function.
The person I was at the start of transition—he was more sexually gratified staying as a man.
Some MtFs do find AGP relatable and that doesn’t bother me. But Blanchard/Bailey et al appear, to me, needlessly cruel, and deliberately inflammatory. That doesn’t mean the theory is false. But circumstantially their behavior looks detrimental to truth-seeking.
So the predictive power of the theory better be really good for me to want to spend time on it.
I find the Gender Mosaic theory (cf Daphna Joel) to be the most plausible, but I see it as a Sex Mosaic where there are male-typical and female-typical neural wirings for different brain regions. It’s very high-dimensional and the sex of each region can vary independently and (mostly) continuously based on the prenatal hormone wash. This easily explains the vast phenotypic variation in gendered behavior, and why it seems like we have every different possible combination of person.
The reason we don’t see “male” or “female” brains with neuroimaging is that the vast majority of these regions are for general cognition (neocortex), where prenatal estrogen/androgen signaling does influence structure but not in ways that have any effect on subconscious sex. I expect the brain regions / wiring patterns that cause dysphoria are small. If we knew the connectomes for a bunch of trans people, I predict we could find them. The imaging tools we have now are extremely rudimentary.
All of this can coexist with ETLE, but again, as far as I know, ETLE doesn’t have any mechanistic basis in neuroscience. So it’s very uninteresting to me. If Blanchard actually predicted furries, then please link me to the source for that. What is surprising about furries is not the bestiality of it all (humans have been having sex with animals since the dawn of domestication), but the anthropomorphic cartoon aesthetic.