If I am to summarize my understanding of your model, it goes something like:
“Gender identity” as trans people use the term mostly refers to a preference to have a male vs female body. We know from various intersex conditions and such that this is affected by biological masculinization/feminization, and we don’t really have any other explanations of what could affect it, so it is probably mostly determined by biological masculinization/feminization mechanisms.
However we also know that it is not 100% linked to masculine/feminine personality or sexual orientation, so there is probably something complicated going on with these masculinization/feminization mechanisms. This likely involves varying levels of masculinization/feminization, inferential distances, and other things.
IMO, a critical factor that needs to be addressed is that gender identity/preference to have a male vs female body is more of a continuum than an absolute binary. Scott Alexander talked about this in the rationalist community in the post Typical Mind and Gender Identity, but to make it more concrete, here is the distribution of gender satisfaction I saw in a survey of cis men I did where I asked them a whole bunch of questions about how they feel about being male and would feel about being female:
Around half felt that it would be clearly bad to be a woman, and half felt that it might be OK, with a few feeling that it would be actively appealing. This seems roughly in line with what you see in other contexts.
This needs to be squared with the presumption that gender identity is mostly determined by biological masculinization/feminization mechanisms. I can see a few different ways of squaring it:
Maybe there is substantial variation in those mechanisms even within the ordinary range of variation, to the point where it accounts for the variance in male gender identity
Maybe it’s actually wrong that the biological masculinization/feminization mechanisms are the major cause of gender identity, and there are other factors affecting people’s gender identification that are not covered here
Maybe the thing I’m assessing is different from “true gender identity” in some way
A more favorable starting point for Blanchard would be with accepting that many if not most later-onset trans women actually do have a lot of autoerotic fantasies about womanhood; Blanchard has done surveys on this himself, and for a less biased source I defer to data scientist Aella and her massive Kink Survey, which found that trans women have more sexual interest in the thought of masturbating as women than any other surveyed demographic. (I personally have this kink myself, for whatever that’s worth.)
However, the same Aella survey also found that on average, cis men also have some erotic interest in this fantasy (more than they do in the thought of masturbating as men, in fact), and cis women get off on the thought of masturbating as women to an even greater degree than their opposite-sex counterparts.[14] I think this suggests that “autogynephilia” in a loose sense is very common for psycho-cultural reasons, and that to some degree it’s normal that trans people get involved in this fantasy, especially since they’re living it.
So just for context I was the one who suggested adding a survey question like this to Aella’s survey.
Aella dropped by in a discord I was in and asked if I had any suggestions for the survey, offering to add up to 5 questions that I suggest. I wrote a huge wall of text with ideas I had.
As for autogynephilia in cis men, there are some things you should know. If you comprehensively ask about their autogynephilia (in the diagram sometimes acronymized as “cross-gender sexuality”/”cross-gender sexual fantasies), you get a HIGHLY skewed distribution:
A substantial portion of men don’t report finding it arousing at all and say that they’ve never had any sexual fantasies about it. And then there’s a long range of people with weak/inconsistent autogynephilia. While weak/inconsistent autogynephilia is not terribly uncommon, very strong autogynephilia appears quite rare.
We can also plot this against the gender identity scores. It turns out that autogynephilia is pretty much the strongest nontrivial psychological correlate of gender identity:
This distribution of (autogynephilia, gender identity) in cis men seems like the sort of thing one would expect if there was some to autogynephilia theory. As such I don’t really get why it gets interpreted as evidence against autogynephilia theory.
Well sort of. Because Blanchardians say a lot of nonsense, and among the nonsense is vague allusions that the thing I’m measuring is not “true autogynephilia” in some sense. And if we grant them that, then that would prove Blanchardians wrong because there is something vaguely resembling autogynephilia which correlates with gender identity and the Blanchardians are probably mixing up their notion of autogynephilia with that in their studies.
They then cite sources saying that by this metric, trans women actually are vastly different from other demographics;[15]
Speaking of Blanchardians being absolutely deranged, terrible, lying and bad, this study is extremely dishonest and people who promote it and don’t back down after getting it debunked ought to be purged from the debate for being bad-faith.
this is then used as evidence that later-onset trans women enact what Blanchard calls an erotic target location error, in which the arousing part of being female isn’t anything like force-fem humiliation or the thrill of sexual liberation, but rather something aberrational: An AGP paraphile scans the environment for someone to be attracted to, and defectively ends up attracted to himself, specifically a hypothetical version of himself as a woman. The dissatisfaction of not being able to fuck/embody this erotic persona then goes on to cause gender dysphoria.
I’m not sure what you mean by aberrational or why force-fem humiliation wouldn’t be considered something aberrational to be into.
But since we’re at this topic, I thought I should mention that Blanchardians typically misrepresent what autogynephilic sexuality is like. Some relevant resources:
A dataset of common AGP/AAP fantasies: typical autogynephilic sexual fantasies involve having sex with a man as a woman, masturbating or caressing or admiring one’s body as a woman, or having sex with a woman as a woman.
Autogynephilia and masochism: A tale of two assessment biases: Blanchardians typically present autogynephilia as being closely linked to masochism, but actually it appears that forced feminization and similar is merely the coincidence of autogynephilia and masochism, and if you control for the general tendency of abnormal sexual interests to go together, then there is no particular correlation between autogynephilia and masochism.
Contra Blanchard and Dreger on Autogynephilia in Cis Women: Blanchardians argue that menstruation fetishism is a reliable distinction for true autogynephilia vs pseudoautogynephilia, but actually menstruation fetishism is rare among trans women and cis men who are aroused by the thought of being female, so this implies a flaw in their perspective somewhere.
Generally, there is a pattern of Blanchardians either misrepresenting what autogynephilia is or talking about something narrower/rarer which their studies don’t support. This consistent misrepresentation of autogynephilia should probably get them purged from the debate for being bad-faith, but unfortunately I don’t set the rules.
However, I can think of a few data points this argument has a hard time explaining. Most notably, as trans women get further into their transition, they tend to have autogynephilic fantasies much less often;[16]
No, this study doesn’t ask about the frequency of autogynephilic fantasies, it asks about the count. If e.g. trans women who’ve just had SRS have lived much longer prior to transition than after transition, then assuming constant frequency we would expect a much lower count.
In the ACX reader research survey, I find that trans women generally don’t feel they’ve used to be autogynephilic and that that has gone away. Two plots of particular relevance:
That said it raises a whole bunch of other questions.
Given all this, the probability mass I reserve for autogynephilia being a main reason most later-onset trans people transition is at most ~6%
Relevant prediction market:
You seem to buy into the least probably of the three popular theories in this market.
If I am to summarize my understanding of your model, it goes something like:
IMO, a critical factor that needs to be addressed is that gender identity/preference to have a male vs female body is more of a continuum than an absolute binary. Scott Alexander talked about this in the rationalist community in the post Typical Mind and Gender Identity, but to make it more concrete, here is the distribution of gender satisfaction I saw in a survey of cis men I did where I asked them a whole bunch of questions about how they feel about being male and would feel about being female:
Around half felt that it would be clearly bad to be a woman, and half felt that it might be OK, with a few feeling that it would be actively appealing. This seems roughly in line with what you see in other contexts.
This needs to be squared with the presumption that gender identity is mostly determined by biological masculinization/feminization mechanisms. I can see a few different ways of squaring it:
Maybe there is substantial variation in those mechanisms even within the ordinary range of variation, to the point where it accounts for the variance in male gender identity
Maybe it’s actually wrong that the biological masculinization/feminization mechanisms are the major cause of gender identity, and there are other factors affecting people’s gender identification that are not covered here
Maybe the thing I’m assessing is different from “true gender identity” in some way
So just for context I was the one who suggested adding a survey question like this to Aella’s survey.
Aella dropped by in a discord I was in and asked if I had any suggestions for the survey, offering to add up to 5 questions that I suggest. I wrote a huge wall of text with ideas I had.
I had interpreted it as her asking for suggestions of things I was wondering about, not as her expecting me to give her the One True Autogynephilia Measure. While I have dabbled in attempts to measure autogynephilia in cis women, I think it is not so straightforward because things which might indicate autogynephilia in males might be present without autogynephilia in females, or might fail to be present even with autogynephilia in females. Ideally I’d like a survey which goes in much greater detail, but that has not been done yet. Until then I am kind of skeptical about supposed findings of autogynephilia in cis women.
As for autogynephilia in cis men, there are some things you should know. If you comprehensively ask about their autogynephilia (in the diagram sometimes acronymized as “cross-gender sexuality”/”cross-gender sexual fantasies), you get a HIGHLY skewed distribution:
A substantial portion of men don’t report finding it arousing at all and say that they’ve never had any sexual fantasies about it. And then there’s a long range of people with weak/inconsistent autogynephilia. While weak/inconsistent autogynephilia is not terribly uncommon, very strong autogynephilia appears quite rare.
We can also plot this against the gender identity scores. It turns out that autogynephilia is pretty much the strongest nontrivial psychological correlate of gender identity:
This distribution of (autogynephilia, gender identity) in cis men seems like the sort of thing one would expect if there was some to autogynephilia theory. As such I don’t really get why it gets interpreted as evidence against autogynephilia theory.
Well sort of. Because Blanchardians say a lot of nonsense, and among the nonsense is vague allusions that the thing I’m measuring is not “true autogynephilia” in some sense. And if we grant them that, then that would prove Blanchardians wrong because there is something vaguely resembling autogynephilia which correlates with gender identity and the Blanchardians are probably mixing up their notion of autogynephilia with that in their studies.
Speaking of Blanchardians being absolutely deranged, terrible, lying and bad, this study is extremely dishonest and people who promote it and don’t back down after getting it debunked ought to be purged from the debate for being bad-faith.
I’m not sure what you mean by aberrational or why force-fem humiliation wouldn’t be considered something aberrational to be into.
But since we’re at this topic, I thought I should mention that Blanchardians typically misrepresent what autogynephilic sexuality is like. Some relevant resources:
A dataset of common AGP/AAP fantasies: typical autogynephilic sexual fantasies involve having sex with a man as a woman, masturbating or caressing or admiring one’s body as a woman, or having sex with a woman as a woman.
Autogynephilia and masochism: A tale of two assessment biases: Blanchardians typically present autogynephilia as being closely linked to masochism, but actually it appears that forced feminization and similar is merely the coincidence of autogynephilia and masochism, and if you control for the general tendency of abnormal sexual interests to go together, then there is no particular correlation between autogynephilia and masochism.
Contra Blanchard and Dreger on Autogynephilia in Cis Women: Blanchardians argue that menstruation fetishism is a reliable distinction for true autogynephilia vs pseudoautogynephilia, but actually menstruation fetishism is rare among trans women and cis men who are aroused by the thought of being female, so this implies a flaw in their perspective somewhere.
Generally, there is a pattern of Blanchardians either misrepresenting what autogynephilia is or talking about something narrower/rarer which their studies don’t support. This consistent misrepresentation of autogynephilia should probably get them purged from the debate for being bad-faith, but unfortunately I don’t set the rules.
No, this study doesn’t ask about the frequency of autogynephilic fantasies, it asks about the count. If e.g. trans women who’ve just had SRS have lived much longer prior to transition than after transition, then assuming constant frequency we would expect a much lower count.
In the ACX reader research survey, I find that trans women generally don’t feel they’ve used to be autogynephilic and that that has gone away. Two plots of particular relevance:
That said it raises a whole bunch of other questions.
Relevant prediction market:
You seem to buy into the least probably of the three popular theories in this market.