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.
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
In my opinion, this is not necessarily a problem. Not all variation is equal; if the goal is to describe the etiology of trans women, then it is not necessary to capture variation that happens for other reasons than etiology, such as personality.
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
I am ambivalent about this; clearly Blanchardians push this assertion too much, but also anti-Blanchardians don’t acknowledge it enough.
the original study
What study do you have in mind?
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.
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.
Phil is well-aware that trans activists are lying about trans etiology, that is sort of which schtick. It seems strange for you to acknowledge widespread deception while also dismissing accusations of deception earlier in your comment. Sure, Blanchardians probably don’t hit 100% correctly with their guesses as to when trans people are lying, but hitting 100% correctly in identifying lies is hard.
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.
I kind of struggle with buying this theory, at least without more explication. How am I supposed to square this with people I’ve seen who seem to fit the HSTS archetype?
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.
I mean I can be sympathetic to this point. The standard response by Phil and other Blanchardians when trans women doubt the typology is “Well then why did you transition??” / “What model is better than Blanchardianism??”, and in practice this seems to play out pretty abusively. You can’t really expect someone to solve a tricky causal inference problem for you for no reason.
But on the other hand, most methods of evaluating evidence (e.g. Bayesianism) work best when there are multiple theories to contrast. If e.g. you could list some factors where you differ from cis men, which plausibly caused you to transition, then I could add them to a survey sent to the sample from my comprehensive study, and we could see whether there is any statistical patterns of interest. But otherwise it is really hard to figure out any objectively informative tests.
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.
In my opinion, this is not necessarily a problem. Not all variation is equal; if the goal is to describe the etiology of trans women, then it is not necessary to capture variation that happens for other reasons than etiology, such as personality.
I am ambivalent about this; clearly Blanchardians push this assertion too much, but also anti-Blanchardians don’t acknowledge it enough.
What study do you have in mind?
Counterpoint: Towards a comprehensive study of potential psychological causes of the ordinary range of variation of affective gender identity in males
Phil is well-aware that trans activists are lying about trans etiology, that is sort of which schtick. It seems strange for you to acknowledge widespread deception while also dismissing accusations of deception earlier in your comment. Sure, Blanchardians probably don’t hit 100% correctly with their guesses as to when trans people are lying, but hitting 100% correctly in identifying lies is hard.
I kind of struggle with buying this theory, at least without more explication. How am I supposed to square this with people I’ve seen who seem to fit the HSTS archetype?
I mean I can be sympathetic to this point. The standard response by Phil and other Blanchardians when trans women doubt the typology is “Well then why did you transition??” / “What model is better than Blanchardianism??”, and in practice this seems to play out pretty abusively. You can’t really expect someone to solve a tricky causal inference problem for you for no reason.
But on the other hand, most methods of evaluating evidence (e.g. Bayesianism) work best when there are multiple theories to contrast. If e.g. you could list some factors where you differ from cis men, which plausibly caused you to transition, then I could add them to a survey sent to the sample from my comprehensive study, and we could see whether there is any statistical patterns of interest. But otherwise it is really hard to figure out any objectively informative tests.