Apologies in advance for any tonal issues in this.
I have serious issues with the autogynephilia analysis, both yours and more generally. You’ve likely heard the critiques that many cis women qualify as AGP if they take the same surveys, but I also think the questions and scenarios are simply not useful in terms of distinguishing a sexual motivation from any other sort of gender euphoria/dysphoria/identity. Someone with entirely non-sexual motivations for transition would still likely find a sexual fantasy where they are their transitioned gender in one way or another arousing and could thus easily be a false positive on your AGP/AAP scales, in as much as those are supposed to separate out a specific type of (trans) person or reason for transitioning. Many, many entries on your list of common AGP/AAP fantasies fall into that category and can only classed as abnormal by virtue of being had by someone of the “wrong” birth sex. Given that, I really do not understand why you believe it more likely that AGP/AAP is the upstream, causal condition and not gender identity, given the inability of the tests to distinguish between the two possibilities. It seems like you’re massively privileging the Blanchard/Bailey hypothesis in spite of the major issues (including arguable fraud) that you admit their research has (and I see little reason to assume Hsu’s research will be any better quality, given that he clearly works extremely closely with Bailey).
Parsimony isn’t everything, humans are as you say complicated, but when you’re working with a typology that claims two separate, distinct causes for a transgender identity and the surveys used to analyze the supposed phenomenon can’t easily distinguish between a normal variation in sexuality for someone’s (identified) gender and a primarily sexual motivation for that identity despite that being an explicit goal (on top of the other issues with the research), it seems likely that you have a problem with your hypothesis. It seems particularly likely that this is the case when there is another hypothesis that matches the data at least as well, doesn’t posit multiple causes for what seems like a single phenomenon, and also matches with the reported experiences of the vast majority of transgender people (where the Bailey/Blanchard typology being true would essentially require that the vast majority of trans people be lying to themselves).
And if AGP/AAP measures don’t really work for their intended population, trans people, why would they be useful measures in cis people, as you’re using them here?
One of the most frustrating things about the Blanchardian system for me is how it flattens a ton of variation into the “auto____philia” category, asserting the same “erotic target location error” cause for all of it, and the people pushing the theory tend to brush that off by asserting that trans people are lying (or grossly mistaken) about their own experiences and sexualities. That category in the original study was extremely heterogenous (and subsequent studies have been almost exclusively run on members of crossdressing fetish forums and similar, as you point out), but the sample size was too small in that initial study for any variation to rise to statistical significance. It’s not simply that auto____philia is a less satisfying narrative, it simply doesn’t track with many trans people’s actual experiences at all, and I think analyzing a larger dataset (especially if the analysis were done by a researcher less prone to motivated reasoning and questionable statistical practices) would demonstrate that.
Blanchard would likely call me an autogynephile simply by virtue of my being bisexual, not being very stereotypically feminine, and transitioning late (though as soon as I had the knowledge and ability), despite having essentially zero erotic feelings around being feminine and never really even cross-dressing, much less getting off on it. In fact, he would likely suggest that I was mistaken or lying about the latter.
I think Phil understands the trans position (or should I say positions, because in actuality trans people have a ton of different and conflicting ideas about gender, sexuality, sex, and so on) very poorly, or at least represents it very poorly in the quote you provided. What he’s presenting there is what I tend to call the “lies to cis children” version, intended to try and get the basic idea across to people who know nothing about transness and have no framework for understanding our experiences. It’s also to some degree a narrative which was imposed upon trans people by doctors like Harry Benjamin and (as the concept of “gender identity”) John Money (and made a prerequisite for accessing care, a strict template which for trans women included being stereotypically feminine, having zero interest in using one’s natal genitals, and being exclusively attracted to men, i.e. the HSTS category) more than one trans people created. In fact, the HSTS subset of the initial Blanchard study sample likely consists almost entirely of patients who were seeing him in order to access medical transition and had to either have or pretend to have experiences and motivations which fit the Harry Benjamin template in order to do so. Most other trans people I’ve talked to would call that quote from Phil a dramatic oversimplification of their beliefs at best.
One of the reasons why there isn’t a coherent position about gender, etc. among trans people, however, is because we’re mostly just trying to get by, we’re not nearly as concerned with theorizing. We’re working from our own experiences, we’re more concerned with practical things like access to the medical care which pretty demonstrably helps us even if we don’t understand exactly what’s going on under the hood, and we all have different experiences which inform how we think about this stuff. For some trans people that gender identity framework works pretty well, even if it’s oversimplified. For others, it couldn’t be more off-base. We’re all blind people touching an elephant and trying to explain it to blind people who’ve barely even heard of elephants and aren’t touching this one. Blind people who often prefer to ignore what we say and make up their own explanations, despite us being the ones touching the elephant. It’s not easy.
I do want to pick out one thing from that explanation though, the idea of transness as broadly a developmental error to be ameliorated rather than a psychological/psychosexual condition. I actually think that, based on how we are successfully able to alleviate gender dysphoria in actual people, that categorization makes a certain amount of sense. Gender dysphoria isn’t like almost anything else in the DSM in terms of how you treat it, and that treatment is dramatically more effective than the treatments available for pretty much anything else in the DSM. You basically treat it like an endocrine disorder and a birth defect, rather than a psychological condition, and that works. Treating it like the latter, or like a fetish (both of which tend toward pushing the person away from transition), doesn’t result in good outcomes.
I don’t think that necessarily implies a whole lot about the underlying causes, whatever they are (I have an autoimmune disorder, celiac disease, that I treat like it’s a severe allergy, these things exist), but in the absence of any real knowledge of the underlying causes, I think a “duck typing” sort of approach is a sensible one, and regardless of what the actual cause might be, it’s fairly clear what works and what doesn’t. You don’t put someone with celiac on standard immunosuppressants or immunoglobulin and have them keep eating wheat just because it’s an autoimmune disease and not an allergy. That would be a great way to harm them, not heal them. You have them cut out wheat completely and stay vigilant about cross-contamination, and they pretty much always get better. Likewise with gender dysphoria.