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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
when I’m masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don’t think I’m very good at first-person visualization? The content of the fantasy is about me being a woman (I mean, having a woman’s body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn’t the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I’m mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be me. Wanting my body to be shaped like that, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even necessarily to do anything overtly “sexy” in particular, but just to exist like that.
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:
The notion that typical natal females are erotically aroused by—and sometimes even masturbate to—the thought or image of themselves as women might seem feasible if one considers only conventional, generic fantasies of being a beautiful, alluring woman in the act of attracting a handsome, desirable man. It seems a lot less feasible when one considers the various other ways in which some autogynephilic men symbolize themselves as women in their masturbation fantasies. [...] I have listed other examples in previous articles: an autogynephile who was sexually aroused by the thought of helping the maid clean the house or sitting in a girls’ class at school, an autogynephile whose favorite masturbation fantasy was knitting in the company of other women, an autogynephile who was sexually aroused by the idea of riding a girls’ bicycle, and an autogynephile who got an erection when he went out cross-dressed and someone called him ‘‘ma’am.’
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.
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).
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:
Sometimes when I look in the mirror after shower, or when I have a good day, or I am just aroused – then I like to look at my naked body, my waist, breasts, just like this. And on top of that I especially love my hair, they are beautiful, brown, golden, auburn. And my beautiful blue eyes. Then I feel like a goddess. And it is arousing.
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.
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.
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.
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.