Of course, this line of argument is absolutely insane. Yes I agree that there’d be lots of potential for bias by polling my followers; that’s why I don’t poll my followers. My initial research on gAyGP was initially performed in surveys on /r/SampleSize that I explicitly instructed my followers not to answer. And before you go saying “BuT mAyBe ThE fOlLoWeRs AnSwErEd ThEm AnYwAy”, I’m getting the same results while asking more in-depth questions in samples that my followers have no contact with; a blog post with further details is on the way.
Blanchardianism is absurd! They can’t save their falling dogmas by engaging, so instead of engaging, they spread lies about their interlocutors’ research! Why should anyone trust an ideology like this?
TL;DR: In July, Michael Bailey, Kevin Hsu and Henry Jang published the paper Elaborating and Testing Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory in Three Paraphilic Samples, claiming to find a correlation 0.95; 1.00; and 1.01 between respectively apotemnophilia and BIID (among acrotomophiles); autozoophilia and cross-species identity (among zoophiles); and autolipophilia and yearning to be fat (among lipophiles). I immediately requested to get the data, and eventually in September, Michael Bailey sent me the data. I replicate their original results using their original methods. Then, I try to correct the methods to be somewhat more precise, and again I replicate their results, finding correlations of 0.95, 1.00 and 1.00 between the interests.
Background
Michael Bailey is the main academic proponent of erotic target identity inversion theory, which is probably most easily understood with an example. Consider the following three phenomena:
Male gynephilia, i.e. men’s tendency to be sexually attracted to women.
Michael Bailey believes that scientifically demonstrating this pattern of correlations for other targets of attraction than women is a key step in establishing ETIIs as a general phenomenon. Therefore he investigated men who are attracted to amputees, animals and fat people, to see if it generalizes.
In order to recruit people who were attracted to amputees, the researchers got data from many communities devoted to sexual attraction to amputees or to the desire to be an amputee. In order to recruit people who were attracted to animals, they recruited participants from various communities dedicated to zoophilia (and maybe also a few forums dedicated to furries?). In order to recruit people who were attracted to fat people, they recruited from various communities dedicated to that.
In terms of raw correlation between autosexual attraction and self-identity, the researchers found correlations of 0.78, 0.75, and 0.82. However, they felt that this was an underestimate due to measurement error, so they estimated that if it was not for measurement error, the correlations would have really been 0.95, 1.00, and 1.01.
What does this look like?
There is a kind of plot I’ve started to enjoy making:
Basically, I create a variable representing overall apotemnophilia/BIID by combining the scores from the various questions listed in the bottom of the plot. The units of this composite variable are arbitrary, but I have a histogram of it at the top of the diagram. The rows below the histogram show the median response to each question for a given level of the composite variable.
I find this sort of diagram useful because it gives a way to generate a concrete image for what a given level of the composite variable corresponds to; simply trace down vertically from some score and read off what the median response for that score is. So for instance someone who has an overall score of 2.5 would consider it very erotically important to imagine being an amputee in sexual fantasy, would have considered having a limb amputated, and so on.
Here is a similar diagram for zoophiles:
And lipophiles:
Anyway, these diagrams are just a bonus visualization, they are not my main topic of investigation, which instead is:
Is the paper’s method valid?
Disclaimer: I have only investigated the validity of their approach from a single angle, so I don’t know whether there are any problems from any other angles.
The initial thing I noticed with their results was that their correlations were really high. Correlations in the 0.7-1.0 range are reasonably common in psychometrics (though my prior investigations in this area had led me to expect correlations more in the 0.4-0.8 range), but it is mathematically impossible for a correlation to exceed 1, so since they got a result of 1.01, obviously their method must be broken somewhere.
The most obvious place to look is in their “correcting for attenuation”, which is basically a fancy statistics term for deciding that the correlation observed in the scores computed from the raw data is an underestimate due to measurement error, and bumping up the correlation relative to what you actually see in order to compensate for that.
This might sound somewhat fishy, but any research is going to be dependent on methods like that. The more interesting question to me is what assumptions it makes, and whether those assumptions apply in this case. In order to justify their use of the method, Bailey et al cite “Encyclopedia of Research Design”, which states correcting a correlation between two tests X and Y for attenuation has two assumptions:
The test scores consist of a mixture of “true score” (signal) and “measurement error” (noise).
The noise is independent of everything else.
If this seems impossibly abstract to you, then that’s good, because the list here entirely neglects what “measurement error” means or how one can reason about it. But that is important for understanding the method, so let’s dig in.
Internal reliability and Cronbach’s alpha
There are many different notions of “true score” vs “measurement error”. The one used by the researchers in this paper is called “internal reliability”, and it relies on the fact that the test consists of multiple different items.
As an example, the measure of apotemnophilia contains multiple questions, two of which are “Have you ever masturbated while imagining yourself as an amputee?” and “How important to your sexual excitement is fantasizing about being or pretending to be an amputee during SEX?”. In the data, these questions are not independent, but instead have a correlation of 0.56, which we assume is due to the fact that both reflect a sexual attraction to being an amputee. However, if both of the items were perfect indicators of sexual attraction to being an amputee, then they would also have been perfectly correlated with each other, so the fact that the correlation is 0.56 rather than 1.0 makes us infer that there must be some measurement error too.
Given this sort of situation, one of the oldest ways of quantifying measurement error can be used. It is called Cronbach’s alpha, and it works as follows: Suppose the test consists of n items, X1, X2, …, Xn. Let’s say that each item Xi is the sum of some true score X (e.g. the “true apotemnophilia level”) and some independent measurement error εi:
We are then interested in the properties of X̂, which we define to be the estimate of X obtained through averaging all of the Xi, which we can infer to consist of X plus some measurement error:
(The big Σ character is a greek S, and it stands for “sum”, because it represents summing all of the following things together. That is, by definition, ΣXi = X1 + X2 + … + Xn. Since an average is defined by adding a bunch of numbers together and then dividing by the amount of numbers you have, this means the average of Xi can be written as 1/n ΣXi, as above.)
A useful tool for talking about this subject is the statistic known as variance. It is the square of the standard deviation, and while it is hard to intuitively get a feel for, it has the important property that the variance of the sum of some independent variables is the sum of their variances2. We assume that the measurement error is independent of everything else (we’ll return to this assumption later), and this lets us express the variance of X̂:
(We end up with the 1/n2 factor rather than a 1/n because the original 1/n reduces the standard deviation by a factor of n, and since the variance is the square of the standard deviation, it thereby reduces the variance by a factor of n-squared.)
For further simplicity, we assume that var(εi) = var(εj); we will return to that assumption later, but it allows us to simplify:
If we now go back to our Xi = X + εi equation, compute the variance, scale it down by n, and subtract it from the above, we get:
And finally if we rearrange:
Now, why is the above equation important? Well, the right-hand-side, var(X)/var(X̂) is the ratio of true variance to total variance in the scores, so in a sense it represents the quality of our measurement. On the other hand, the left-hand-side is an expression which solely involves observable quantities in the data, and can therefore be computed directly given the dataset. So if you are willing to grant the assumptions made in the derivation above, this equation allows you to compute the quality of your measure from the statistics of your data.
Correcting for attenuation
OK, so there’s a bunch of times where Bailey et al want to correlate two variables X and Y, e.g. apotemnophilia (X) and body integrity identity disorder (Y). They create a bunch of questions to assess X and Y, e.g. for apotemnophilia:
Have you ever become sexually aroused while picturing yourself as an amputee?
Have you ever masturbated while imagining yourself as an amputee?
How important to your sexual excitement is fantasizing about being or pretending to be an amputee during MASTURBATION or FANTASY?
How important to your sexual excitement is fantasizing about being or pretending to be an amputee during SEX?
And e.g. for body integrity identity disorder:
Have you ever pretended to be an amputee?
Have you ever felt that you were meant to be an amputee?
Have you ever wished you could become an amputee?
Would you feel more complete and satisfied if you were an amputee?
Have you ever felt sad, frustrated, or unhappy because you are not an amputee?
Have you ever considered trying to become an amputee?
In the past 12 months, how often have you pretended to be an amputee for any reason, either in private or in public?
In the past 12 months, how often have you pictured yourself as an amputee for any reason?
Now let’s say we create scores X̂ and Ŷ by averaging the two sets of questions above. One obvious proxy for the correlation between X and Y would be the correlation between X̂ and Ŷ, which in this case I can compute to be 0.76. However, if I compute the Cronbach’s alpha for X̂ and Ŷ, I get αX̂=0.89 and αŶ=0.92. Since the alpha is less than 1, we can infer that we have measurement error, which means that 0.76 is an underestimate of the true relationship between X and Y. What can we do about that?
The solution is to divide the correlation by √(αX̂αŶ). I wish I had a quick proof of this that doesn’t rely on elaborate covariance algebra, but unfortunately I don’t. A quick heuristic argument is that a Pearson correlation is standardized by the standard deviation of the variables, and since αX̂=var(X)/var(X̂), √αX̂=std(X)/std(X̂), so by dividing by α, we switch out the standardization by the standard deviation of X̂ and Ŷ with a standardization by the standard deviation of X and Y, thereby removing measurement error.
Regardless of the reasoning, this gives us a corrected correlation of 0.76/√(0.89*0.92) = 0.84.
Parceling and correlated measurement error
The attentive among you may have noticed that this correlation of 0.84 is much lower than the correlation of 0.95 that Bailey et al reported between apotemnophilia and body integrity identity disorder. This is because of an additional step they did:
Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory specifes that a subset of males with every external sexual attraction develops an internalized sexual attraction, experiencing sexual arousal by the fantasy of being an instance of their external erotic target (Hypothesis 1). Table 2 includes descriptive statistics for the two brief subscales used to measure the existence (i.e., presence or absence) and sexual importance of the three respective internalized sexual attractions: apotemnophilia (sexual arousal by the fantasy of being an amputee), autozoophilia (sexual arousal by the fantasy of being an animal), and autolipophilia (sexual arousal by the fantasy of being an obese person). The correlations between the two subscales were 0.63, 0.53, and 0.61, respectively, for the three samples (ps<.001). Both subscales were standardized and averaged for each sample to produce a composite measure of internalized sexual attraction for subsequent analysis. Table 2 also includes Cronbach’s alpha for each sample’s composite measure.
(emphasis added)
Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory specifes that men with internalized sexual attractions will sometimes develop erotic target identity inversions, refecting a wish or desire to become their external sexual attractions (Hypothesis 2). Table 3 includes descriptive statistics for the two subscales intended to measure erotic target identity inversions in the three samples, which would correspond with apotemnophilia, autozoophilia, and autolipophilia. The first subscale assessed whether participants had ever experienced feelings or behaviors indicating erotic target identity inversions, and the second subscale assessed participants’ frequency of self-imagining or imitating their specifc atypical erotic target. The correlations between the two subscales were 0.78, 0.69, and 0.77 for the acrotomophilic, zoophilic, and lipophilic samples, respectively (ps<.001). Both subscales were standardized and averaged for each sample to produce a composite measure of erotic target identity inversion for subsequent analysis. Table 3 also includes Cronbach’s alpha for each sample’s composite measure.
(emphasis added)
This is very technical, which probably makes it unclear to laymen what they did, and they don’t really provide any justification for why they did it. However, I think I can tease some reason out of it myself.
Let’s take a look at the correlations for the apotemnophilia items, as an example:
These items form two groups, which internally have much higher pairwise correlation than there is between the groups. That is, “Have you ever become sexually aroused while picturing yourself as an amputee?” and “Have you ever masturbated while imagining yourself as an amputee?” have a correlation of 0.86, and “How important to your sexual excitement is fantasizing about being or pretending to be an amputee during MASTURBATION or FANTASY?” and “How important to your sexual excitement is fantasizing about being or pretending to be an amputee during SEX?” have a correlation of 0.83, while the remained of the correlations are all below 0.65.
This goes back to the “We assume that the measurement error is independent of everything else” assumption that I brought up with Cronbach’s alpha. If the measurement error is independent of everything else, then the different items should only be correlated due to them reflecting the true level of apotemnophilia, and therefore the pattern of correlations should be very “uniform”, such that you wouldn’t see such big gaps. Furthermore it just intuitively makes sense that there would be correlated measurement error here, because the items are pairwise much more similar than they are across the pairs.
One way to eliminate these kinds of correlated measurement error is to first compose together the items that have correlated measurement error. This is called parceling, and the the resulting subscales are called parcels. All of the correlated measurement error should get embedded within each parcel, so that the remaining correlations between the parcels are hopefully just due to them reflecting the true level of apotemnophilia. When computing the alpha, rather than taking the Xis to be the individual items, one then takes them to be the parcels.
Since we can clearly see from the correlations that there is correlated measurement error, I think this kind of parceling is very well-justified, and so I will also do the same for my calculations. For apotemnophilia, I get an alpha of 0.78, and for BIID, I get an alpha of 0.88, and the correlation between the scores is 0.78, which turns into 0.95 after correcting for attenuation. These are basically in line with the researcher’s results, as would be expected from a direct replication of their methods. The results for the other ETIIs are similar, with me getting exactly the same correlations of 1.00 and 1.01 as Bailey et al did.
Further weakening the assumptions of Cronbach’s alpha
One of the key assumptions we made in deriving Cronbach’s alpha was the following:
This not only requires each indicator to split up into true level and measurement error, but also requires each indicator to be equally strongly affected by the true level, which seems like an unreasonably strong assumption, considering the different indicators are different questions (or question parcels), which have no particular reason to have Exactly Quantitatively Identical relationships to the outcomes. We might instead want to relax the assumption to something like:
… where ai is some constant representing the degree of relationship between Xi and X.
Another key assumption was “we assume that var(εi) = var(εj)”. This similarly seems arbitrary; it says that the extent to which non-X factors influence each question must be the same regardless of what the question is. So for instance, questions about sex are not allowed to depend on any factors that questions about masturbation don’t also depend on. We might want to loosen things up by just dropping this assumption.
But if we drop these assumptions, then Cronbach’s alpha is no longer valid. There are some similar statistics, such as McDonald’s omega, which work similar to alpha without having such assumptions, but they are more involved and require too much linear algebra for me to even attempt to explain them here.
A simpler approach – albeit one that uses even heavier mathematical machinery than alpha or omega – is structural equation modelling. The idea in SEM is that you specify the relationships you think could be relevant, and then you let the computer find a model that fits the results.
Given the parceling that the researchers used, it seems like one can understand their model as being the following:
The fact that the researchers adjust for attenuation means that they see the items as being noisy indirect indicators of the underlying variables of Internalized Sexual Attraction and Identity Inversion, which we mark by placing them as distinct shapes and having causal arrows indicating that the latent variables influence the question responses. The fact that they do parceling means that they see the items as having correlated measurement error, which we mark by having bidirectional arrows between variables with measurement error.
I wrote up a computer program to do SEM, and entered this causal graph into the program. Unlike in the Cronbach alpha case, my program didn’t have arbitrary restrictions on the different indicators requiring them to have equal relationships to the latent variables, so it can compute the correction for attenuation in a more nuanced way.
Roughly speaking, the way SEM works is that it adjusts the numbers in the model until the model’s predicted correlation matrix matches the correlation matrix observed in the data. So for example, here is the empirical correlation matrix for the apotemnophilia data:
Meanwhile, after fitting the model to make similar predictions, I end up with this predicted correlation matrix:
This SEM model replicates the results found with Cronbach’s alpha, that there is a correlation of 0.95 between apotemnophilia and BIID. If I run it for the other ETIIs, I similarly replicate the researchers’ results, and find correlations of 0.99 for autozoophilia/cross-species identity and 0.99 for autolipophilia/fat identity. The specific numbers for the SEM models can be seen here.
More correlated measurement error
Consider again the correlations for apotemnophilia/BIID:
The items “Have you ever pretended to be an amputee?” and “In the past 12 months, how often have you pretended to be an amputee for any reason, either in private or in public?” have a fairly high correlation, at 0.52. It is certainly a higher correlation than the 0.47 that the model predicts, presumably because they both ask about pretending to be an amputee. Thus to improve the model, I can let these have correlated measurement error.
Looking through the correlations, there were other items that seemed to have correlated measurement error, listed below.
The internalized existence items seemed to have correlated measurement error with:
Have you ever pretended to be an X?
If you could try being an X for one week, would you do it?
Have you ever experienced sadness, frustration, or unhappiness because you wanted to be an X but could not be? (Negative correlation, mainly for lipophilia.)
Have you ever wished you could become an X?
The “In the past 12 months, how often have you pretended to be a fat person for any reason, either in private or in public?” item seemed to have correlated measurement error with “Have you ever tried to gain weight in order to become a fat person?” for lipophilia, and as previously mentioned also with “Have you ever pretended to be an X?”.
Finally, there seemed to be a correlated measurement error between “How important to your sexual excitement is fantasizing about being or pretending to be an X during sex?” and “Have you ever wished you could become an X?”.
Adding all of these to the model, I get correlations of 0.95, 1.00, and 1.00 for acrotomophiles, zoophiles and lipophiles respectively. This suggests that Bailey et al’s results replicate well, though I should say that there is a lot of subjectivity in guessing which things do and do not have correlated measurement error, and I might not have been thorough enough to catch all of it. Furthermore, it appears that the study’s dataset contains a lot of extra identity and sexuality variables that could be used to pin down the model more precisely.
The specific numbers for the SEM models can be seen here.
Appendix
To make this more feasible for others to investigate, here are the covariance and correlation matrices for the items used in the study:
The chain only occurs under unknown conditions, e.g. most gynephilic males aren’t noticeably autogynephilic, so for ETII theory to be true there must be some unknown moderator of the gynephilia -> autogynephilia connection. ↩︎
I don’t really have a sufficiently quick way to convince you of this, so I would like for you to take it on faith. ↩︎
This is a bit more of a meta post than what I usually write, but I think it is interesting anyway.
Recently, I watched a Youtube video where Diana Fleischman claimed that Michael Bailey is in denial about courting controversy. This isn’t a sentiment that’s unique to Diana Fleischman, as e.g. Contrapoints made a similar point in her video on autogynephilia, but it is perhaps especially notable in the case of Diana Fleischman because she is on the same “team” as Michael Bailey. I have also personally talked to multiple people on Michael Bailey’s “team” who think he likes drama, so I think it is a common sentiment. But I think that sentiment is completely the opposite of the truth; instead, here’s my opinion about how to think about him:
Michael Bailey loathes controversy, because he thinks ideologues use controversy as a weapon to get authorities to endorse ideological propaganda, and he thinks this is what is ruining social science. He gets involved in controversy precisely because he wants to resist ideological propaganda. This exposes him to a lot of controversy, yes, but the way he tends to enter into this exposure is by stating that people should stop being dramatic and that ideologues are wrong.
His expectation is that if people could recognize that controversy is just a weapon used by ideologues, then they could stop folding in response to controversy, and then controversy would stop working. And that this would then solve basically all the problems social science has, because then people could start using methods and knowledge that has been suppressed due to controversy. Even if ideologues remain, he thinks that non-ideologues could enter social science and fix the problems, as long as they are not kicked out
Bailey often reads and endorses controversial figures. This isn’t because he likes the controversy he’d face by supporting them, but instead because he perceives them to be allies in the fight against ideological propaganda. He can often be evasive about the specifics of why he supports them, which I think is because talking about the specifics is unnecessarily controversial to him.
And speaking of evasiveness, he can often be evasive about his scientific reasoning. As far as I can tell, this is often because he wants to avoid controversy, though maybe also because he thinks non-ideologues accept it just fine.
Rather than liking controversy, his tendency to get involved in controversial things rather than just fold is probably more down to being brave/foolhardy, or perhaps due to being socially stuck this way after having been already known for being The Controversial Guy.
Part of what makes this fascinating to me is that it means Bailey is basically surrounded by friends who’ve got his motivations ass-backwards.
In Discord, there was recently some discussion of erotic self-focus, with a participant bringing up a distinction between someone who gets off to and seeks out situations where they can do and say something to their partner, versus situations where their partner can do and say something to them.
I remembered that due to Pasha‘s awesome sexual fantasies survey, we actually had quite a bit of data on this (even if it wasn’t super high-quality because it wasn’t designed for this purpose). He had collected tons of responses from /r/SampleSize, where people rated various sexual fantasies for their hotness on a 0-4 scale. Among them, there were several pairs of other- and self-focused items:
Other-focused
Self-focused
Shortened name
Telling your partner how sexy you find them
Your partner telling you how sexy they find you
Sexy talk
Taking off your partner’s clothes
Your partner taking off your clothes
Taking off clothes
Feeling up your partner’s body
Your partner feeling up your body
Feeling up body
Your partner doing a strip tease; them slowly and seductively taking off their clothes
Doing a strip tease for your partner; you slowly and seductively taking off your clothes in front of them
Strip tease
Kissing your partner all over their body
Being kissed all over your body
Kissed all over
Your partner wearing some clothing that you find sexy
Wearing some clothing your partner finds sexy
Sexy clothes
Drawing a sexy picture of your partner
Having your partner draw a sexy picture of you
Sexy picture
Touching your partner gently
Being touched gently by your partner
Gentle touch
Sucking your partners nipples
Having your nipples sucked
Nipple suck
Having your partner guide your hand down their pants
Guiding your partners hand down your pants
Guide hand
Giving a hickey to your partner
Receiving a hickey, from your partner
Give hickey
Touching your partner intimately while you are both fully clothed
Being touched intimately by your partner while you are both fully clothed
Touching clothed
Playing with your partner’s bellybutton
Your partner playing with your bellybutton
Bellybutton
Contemplating your partner in the nude
Contemplating yourself in the nude
Contemplating nude
Giving oral sex to your partner while they are trying to concentrate on doing something
Receiving oral sex from your partner while you try to concentrate on doing something
Oral tease
A subset of the self/other-focused items under consideration.
Overall, all of the items were strongly correlated with each other, implying the presence of a strong general factor:
One way to address this is to subtract them pairwise. I.e., rather than considering how arousing “Your partner telling you how sexy they find you” is, one could consider how much more (or less) arousing it is compared to “Telling your partner how sexy you find them”. Doing so yields the following matrix:
The person on Discord suggested that erotic self-focus was a feminine form of sexuality and also was correlated with autogynephilia. For this to make sense, erotic self-focus has to vary both within and between the sexes, so I computed the factor loadings for each sex as well as the Cohen d sex difference for each item:
Item
Loading (men)
Loading (women)
Sex difference
Sucking nipples
0.55
0.39
1.62
Strip tease
0.60
0.32
1.04
Kissing all over
0.34
0.55
0.70
Sexy clothes
0.31
0.34
0.83
Contemplating nude
0.51
0.27
0.49
Taking off clothes
0.23
0.62
0.44
Feeling up body
0.29
0.50
0.41
Bellybutton
0.17
0.22
0.29
Give hickey
0.17
0.23
0.19
Sexy picture
0.16
0.18
0.24
Sexy talk
0.01
0.38
0.18
Touching gently
0.17
0.13
0.16
Guide hand
0.19
0.03
0.26
Touching clothed
0.04
0.30
0.14
Oral tease
0.00
0.17
-0.23
Factor loadings and sex differences, with the three largest values in each column highlighted.
This data is pretty fishy because it is very much not measurement invariant. But I’ll ignore that because I can’t think of any good way of dealing with it and this is just a very quick post, and instead just continue with the analysis, using naive mean scores as a measure of overall self-vs-other focus.
The standardized sex difference was massive, at a whopping 1.29 (and possibly even bigger when accounting for measurement error – one calculation I did suggested 1.5, though I wouldn’t trust it much), though do beware that in absolute terms, it boils down to only half a point on the 0-4 scale.
Scores (sample size) by sexual orientation and gender identity can be seen below:
Androphilic
Gynephilic
Bisexual
Cis men
-0.13 (43)
-0.51 (370)
-0.25 (60)
Cis women
0.17 (220)
-0.06 (57)
0.05 (165)
Trans men
-0.11 (26)
-1.13 (3)
-0.57 (9)
Trans women
0.16 (3)
-0.03 (15)
-0.02 (9)
Another question is whether it correlates with autogynephilia. A lot of people, including my interlocutor, intuit that it does. Restricting my considerations to cis men, here’s how the correlations with various AGP-related items in the dataset looked:
Seems like erotic self-focus is essentially unrelated to AGP.
I can’t guarantee that I’ve covered everything with this analysis. If you would like to investigate more thoroughly, you should reach out to Pasha and then I am sure he can give you the dataset.
They recruit their participants from highly active male members of internet forums dedicated to the sexual interests in question, and overall they find something like ETII theory to apply. For instance, they find that members of these groups are likely to be sexually attracted to being amputees, animals and fat people respectively, and that those who are sexually attracted to this are also much more likely to have corresponding personal preferences/identities about becoming amputees, animals and fat people.
Overall, I am not surprised by these findings. They align with what Pasha and I have found in previous similar studies. But as usual I feel like the full scope of this phenomenon is underappreciated by ETII theory. It is not just that attraction to certain sexual targets correlates with sexual attraction to being those targets. What I’ve generally observed is that this pattern extends far beyond classical ETII phenomena. For instance, in my research, it appears that sadism and masochism are highly correlated, as are desire to give and receive oral sex. These are not usually thought of as ETII pairings, but they seem like they would fit the same overall pattern.
Correlation of 1?
One of the surprising things about the study is that they claim to have found a correlation of 1 between eroticism towards being something vs corresponding overall preferences to be that thing. This is surprising to me, because I usually find such correlations to lie in the 0.5-0.7 range, rather than to be 1. Furthermore, it is surprising because correlations of 1 are really really high, so it is rare to see them.
Part of how they achieved a correlation of 1 was through a statistical technique called “correcting for attenuation”, which I am quite familiar with. However even when doing this, I generally don’t find correlations this high for these topics, and furthermore the study’s uncorrected correlations were also quite high, in the 0.7-0.88 range.
The easiest way I know of that something like this could be caused is if there’s something up with the measurement, so I have requested the data to check how it looks like for the measurement. I will give an update once I receive the data.
Does this make Blanchardianism the leading theory?
Due to the similar results from the similar research by Pasha and myself, I feel like we already basically knew the results here. (Except for the correlation of 1, but I don’t believe that correlation, so that doesn’t make a difference.) As such, it doesn’t really change my mind about anything.
But other people might not be familiar with it, and so might need to change their minds. The authors suggest that it provides a superior explanation to the alternative models:
Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory as a Parsimonious and Unifed Explanation
Findings from our study were generally consistent across the three paraphilic samples, and they are also generally consistent with prior research findings regarding autogynephilia (an internalized sexual attraction) and nonhomosexual male gender dysphoria (the extreme form of its associated erotic target identity inversion) (Lawrence, 2009b, 2013, 2017). To the extent that Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory can provide a unifed explanation of these phenomena, positing different explanations for each of them is less parsimonious. For example, attempting to explain autogynephilia, Serano (2020) implicated cultural emphasis on female beauty and “the male gaze”: “a mindset wherein men are viewed as sexual subjects who act upon their own desires, whereas women are viewed as passive sexual objects of other people’s desires” (p. 770). But “the male gaze” is irrelevant to any conceivable explanation of apotemnophilia, autozoophilia, or autolipophilia, which all follow from Erotic Target Identity Inversion Theory. Nor can we imagine a plausible analogue to “the male gaze” for apotemnophilia, autozoophilia, or autolipophilia.
Similarly, attempting to explain the phenomenon of adults seeking amputation of healthy limbs, Ramachandran and McGeoch (2007) theorized that it resulted from “dysfunction of the right parietal lobe” leading to “uncoupling of the construct of one’s body image in the right parietal lobe from how one’s body physically is” (p. 250). Their hypothesis was motivated by observations of patients who have suffered somatoparaphrenia, a rare condition following a right parietal stroke, leading to rejection of the left arm. However, neither this nor any similar model can plausibly explain phenomena highly analogous to the desire for limb amputation that some men with apotemnophilia experience, such as the desire for sex reassignment surgery in some autogynephilic males, or the desire to become fat that sometimes accompanies autolipophilia.
I’m not gonna comment on the neurological theory, because my impression is that it is just kind of unfounded. But since they phrase their study’s findings as if it was to be in contradiction with Serano’s theory, I feel like I should point out that this contradiction doesn’t seem to be there to me.
Specifically, if an individual is attracted to femaleness and femininity in a more general sense (e.g. they find such qualities erotic in their partners), then these same attributes might also be sexually salient with regard to their own embodiment, leading to more frequent or intense FEFs. (A similar correlation between attraction to maleness and masculinity, and MEFs, might also be expected.) Or to phrase this conversely: If an individual is not attracted to female or feminine attributes more generally, then they may be less likely to find FEFs arousing or compelling.
So the predictions seem to match those of Serano.*
Of course, one might say that the additional phenomena like “male gaze” are additional complexities to Serano’s theory, they are burdensome details which need additional evidence. I think this is true to an extent, but I think it is necessary to break it down further.
There is certainly sufficient evidence to conclude that some people have “a mindset wherein men are viewed as sexual subjects who act upon their own desires, whereas women are viewed as passive sexual objects of other people’s desires”. For instance, I’ve unsuccessfully tried to debate with people who believe that males have an internally-driven sexual orientation and females don’t. So that part of Serano’s theory doesn’t seem to be discardable by parsimony.
However, even if that mindset exists, it seems unlikely to me that it would cause autogynephilia. But if you read her paper carefully, that is not what she is arguing. Rather, she says “another reason why many cisgender men are able to take their bodies for granted is because they are men”, arguing that cis men and trans men often have sexual fantasies in which they have male bodies while engaging in sexual activities*, yet that people are not inclined to call this “autoandrophilia”. Her reasoning is that the reason people are not inclined to call it autoandrophilia is due to the male gaze. This seems relatively plausible to me, but also I don’t think it really changes that much with the rest of the field.
The key point where Serano’s theory differs from ETII is not in predicting a correlation between these two aspects of sexuality, but rather in how she characterizes the direction of causality between gender issues and FEFs (autogynephilia); she argues that cross-gender identity causes one to have sexual fantasies in which one imagines that one is a woman.
The ETII study somewhat addresses this, pointing out: “A second justification for believing that internalized sexual attractions cause erotic target identity inversions rather than the reverse is the fact that adolescent boys have a variety of strong identities (as fans of sports teams or music groups, for example) and identity-related fantasies (to become actors, astronauts, athletes, doctors, and lawyers, among many others), but there is no evidence that most of these identities and fantasies are sexually arousing”.
This response makes sense as a response in isolation, but since Serano argues that attraction to women is also an ingredient that plays a role in producing FEFs/autogynephilia, it seems like this can fit perfectly fine within her theory. She could simply say that people who want to be astronauts do not have sexual fantasies about being astronauts because they do not find astronauts particularly erotic. ↩︎
Her favorite example of this is blowjobs, which I suppose can make a good example because the central image in a blowjob is the man’s own penis. ↩︎
Blanchardians tend to deny that women can have paraphilias, often coming up with stories that seem bizarre and unfounded to me. For instance that apparent female paraphilias are actually caused by them having contact with boyfriends who had that paraphilia, with the girlfriend adopting them from the boyfriend, rather than internally. I’ve had a hard time imagining what could drive Blanchardians to propose such theories, as it’s not ordinarily the case that women who report sexual interest in autoandrophilia etc. blame these sexual interests on their boyfriends or anything like that.
But due to a conversation in a twitter chatroom, I’ve just thought of a way in which it might appear this way to Blanchardians. Blanchardians primarily choose to study paraphilias in spaces that already select for maleness for other reasons, e.g. in the context of porn sites, crime, etc.. It seems plausible that some paraphilic men might invite sexually open-minded girlfriends to participate on porn sites. So even if unusual sexual interests for women aren’t usually caused by their boyfriends, plausibly participation in male erotic communities might be.
I haven’t studied women in male erotic communities, so for all I know they might in fact claim to have non-paraphilic motives or stories for being there.
This review was originally written for the Astral Codex Ten Book Review Contest. Unfortunately it didn’t make it as one of the finalists. I have posted it to my blog here to make it publicly available. It can also be found on LessWrong.
If I ask ChatGPT to explain transgender people to me, then it often retreats into vague discussions of gender identity. It is very hard to get it to explain what these things mean, in terms of actual experiences people might have. And that might not be a coincidence – the concepts used to understand transness seem to be the result of a complicated political negotiation, at least as much as they are optimized to communicate people’s experiences.
Some people claim to do better, using elaborate words like autogynephilia and gynandromorphophilia and so on. They speak of typologies, science and history. Of developmental pathways and genetics. This ideology is sometimes called Blanchardianism, named after Ray Blanchard, a sex researcher who contributed many influential ideas within the sphere.
While the book also talks about other things, both Phil and I are probably most familiar with the concept of autogynephilia, so let’s start there. A substantial part of the book is about the feelings and experiences of autogynephiles.
Some individuals, born male, feel a deep happiness when imagining themselves as a woman and a deep sadness being a man, and this is often due to autogynephilia. Phil Illy explains that autogynephilia can be seen as an inverted form of sexual attraction to women, where the individual’s attraction to women is applied to themselves. Autogynephilia is ultimately about sexuality, but Phil emphasizes that many of the feelings and experiences he describes are not driven by lust, but instead by strong emotional attachments. In some cases it can cause them to have medical treatment and make social changes to live as women.
Phil suggests that this accounts for most trans women in the US. Some people with strong autogynephilia might feel as if they have female body parts, like breasts or a vagina, even if they haven’t undergone any medical procedures to obtain these features. The book also looks at how autogynephiles might act more like women in the way they talk and move, and how they might want to prefer spending their time around women rather than men.
Phil Illy talks about how autogynephiles enjoy the feeling and look of women’s clothes. Wearing these clothes can sometimes replace friendships and socializing for them. Autogynephilia can also make someone feel like they have a period, even though they don’t (because they want to have a female body). The book also talks about autogynephiles stealing clothes from female family members.
The author looks at many different parts of autogynephilia to help readers understand it better, including the sexual side. He explains that autogynephiles have sexual fantasies about becoming a woman through magic or science fiction, or about being embarrassed by wearing women’s clothes and being sexually submissive to men. They might also have fantasies about having sex with dominant women who make them submit. During sex, they may wear women’s clothes or special devices called chastity cages. These sexual parts of autogynephilia help us understand the whole experience and desires of people with this orientation.
As mentioned before, Phil claims autogynephilia accounts for most trans women in the US. But most trans women, and the trans community in general, disagree with this assessment, and claim that trans women don’t transition because of autogynephilia. So why does he believe that? He bases this on multiple different sources.
First, he draws heavily on some of the very earliest collections of case studies we have on transfeminine identity. He says that the transvestites in these studies are unlikely to face the political pressures that most modern trans women face, and therefore more likely to be honest about their autogynephilia. These include texts from the books Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, Havelock Ellis’ Studies In The Psychology Of Sex (Eonism), and Hirchsfeld’s Transvestites. One case he draws a lot on is the case he calls the Hungarian physician (case 129), which I would summarize as follows:
He was born into a family with a history of mental illnesses and, as a child, was small, pretty, introverted, and intelligent. He shared a close bond with his mother and was treated like a girl by her sisters.
As he grew older, the Hungarian physician started to feel ashamed of and resistant to being treated like a girl. He developed an obsession with soldiers and was often bullied for his feminine appearance. Secretly, he harbored a strong fascination with women’s gloves, often trying them on in private. His skin became very sensitive as he matured, causing irritation from his pants.
In adulthood, the physician grew a beard, which gave him a more masculine appearance and lessened his concerns about bullying. Although he was sexually attracted to women, he also desired to wear women’s clothes. Women enjoyed his company, but he tried to avoid them to prevent appearing feminine. Once, he confided in a friend about his wish to be a woman but couldn’t explain why. As was common during that time, he felt ashamed about masturbating.
During his first sexual encounter with a woman, he wished he could be a woman too. He eventually engaged in heavy drinking, dueling, and attempted suicide twice. He suffered from insomnia, which led to hallucinations, and went on to study and become a doctor. He married an extroverted woman and had five children, all of whom had mental illnesses.
The physician developed gout and sought treatment through medical baths. One of these baths involved a particularly large dose of extract from Indian hemp. This treatment led to intense hallucinations, including the sensation of having a female body. He also experienced anemia, chest pain, cramps, and bizarre feelings as though he was giving birth. Afterward, he continued to have hallucinations and felt as if he had become a woman.
He experienced muscular weakness and heightened sensitivity to intense stimuli, such as loud noises. He believed that he could only consume what he called “a female diet” and felt that he regularly experienced period symptoms.
Another key source of evidence is Ray Blanchard’s studies. Based on their clinical experience, researchers had previously speculated about types of trans women, with various patterns. Often these proposals have included a fetishistic type and a feminine/homosexual type.
One of Blanchard’s contributions was studying this on an unprecedentedly large scale. He found that among trans women who were exclusively sexually attracted to men, autogynephilia was rare, but among trans women who reported being attracted to women, being bisexual, or being asexual, the majority had reported some autogynephilic tendencies, such as having become sexually aroused while wearing women’s clothes. This research has since been replicated by others, though some of the details have not yet 100% converged.
Blanchard also performed studies which found that the autogynephilic/nonandrophilic trans women were more similar to each other than to androphilic trans women in characteristics such as age of transition. He also studied trans women who seemed to contradict his theories more closely, and found that upon further inspection they might actually fit; for instance sometimes the trans women turned out to be lying, which he found out by asking their wives about things.
One key thing that might be interesting to know about autogynephilia is how common it is. Phil looks at various studies that investigate the prevalence of autogynephilia, such as a single question about whether participants have a preference of “imagining being of the opposite sex to obtain sexual arousal”. By looking at various statistics from various studies, Phil estimates that the prevalence of strong autogynephilia is around 2%, comparable to the prevalence of male homosexuality, which he also estimates to be around 2%.
Pseudo autogynephilia vs true autogynephilia
The biggest problem with the book is that many of its core points are wrong. One way to think of this* is by looking at how the studies in the book tried to find out how common autogynephilia is. They asked people a few questions about whether they felt sexually excited by the idea of having a female body or wearing women’s clothes.
In order for this to work, the main reason people would answer “yes” to those questions should be because they have the true form of autogynephilia described in the book. However, based on questions I’ve asked of men who say they have this sexuality, they often have a different condition, which I’ll call “pseudo autogynephilia.” This condition differs from true autogynephilia in several ways, some of which can be seen here:
(You shouldn’t think of the above as necessarily following a specific pattern. The “true autogynephilia” column just contains the characteristics that Phil has collected which are descriptive of autogynephilia. “Pseudo autogynephilia” are just the characteristics (e.g. sexual fantasies) I have collected which are descriptive of men who score high on measures intended to get at true autogynephilia. Maybe there is a pattern, but it’s not the point.)
This error makes me question the core claims of the book. For instance, how do we know that the trans women Blanchard studied had true autogynephilia, rather than pseudo autogynephilia (or some third thing)? We don’t, really.
I also don’t think I buy into the book’s characterization of true autogynephilia, even beyond the distinction from pseudo autogynephilia. For instance, while there no doubt are males who are into being forcibly feminized and having their penises locked in chastity cages, is that really best thought of as a self-directed form of attraction to women? That is deeply counterintuitive to me, because it doesn’t seem similar to typical attraction to women.
An alternate theory of the origins of forced feminization would be the following: Maybe some find it shameful to be feminized (… perhaps because of societal stigma against male femininity?), and for some people shame becomes erotic. This would explain not just their eroticization of forced feminization, but also their eroticization of things like chastity cages, which don’t seem particularly feminizing.
I think what happened is that there were some trans women who just happened to be masochistic (lots of people are masochistic!), and people jumped on lumping this into the category of autogynephilia, without thinking about whether it was really better explained by other factors. There are many examples of this, where the book picks up a thing from an old story, suggests it originates from an inversion of heterosexuality, but where the thing really seems better explained by other factors, e.g.:
Does inverted heterosexuality supplant the need for friendship, or is it just that someone had some introverted tendencies or social difficulties which may or may not independently correlate with transness?
Was the Hungarian physician’s perceptions of having a female body really due to autogynephilia, or did it have something to do with their drug use and mental illnesses?
Anyway, pseudo autogynephilia vs true autogynephilia is one thing, but perhaps more important is the direction of causality between autogynephilia and transness. This is a highly controversial question, because it determines whether autogynephilia can be seen as the cause of transness or just a byproduct of it.
I’m not really satisfied with Phil’s treatment of the question of causality. It seems to me that there are good arguments to be made, but instead he makes bad ones. Specifically, Phil has a chapter of the question, where he makes six arguments:
Some critics argue that autogynephilia cannot be causal for transness because cis women are autogynephilic too. But actually those people are wrong because cis women aren’t all that autogynephilic, and even if they were, that has nothing to do with what is going on in trans women.
Some critics argue that trans women might have autogynephilia-like sexuality because they want to be female and dislike being male. But if that is true, then how does one explain the following facts:
a: Autogynephilia-like sexuality is less common among trans women exclusively attracted to men,
b: There are men with autogynephilia-like sexuality who don’t transition,
c: Sexual orientation labels like “gay” are usually causally downstream from sexual attractions like getting boners when seeing hunks, so by analogy gender identity labels like “trans” should be causally downstream of sexual autogynephilic attraction.
Trans women often have experiences in their childhood where they wanted to be girls, before their autogynephilic sexual arousal in puberty. This is analogous to how people of other sexual orientations often have childhood crushes, so this supports autogynephilia being causal.
I’ll address these in reverse order; 3-2c-2b-2a. I’ll skip responding to 1 because the whole debate on it is a giant mess that would take a long and convoluted text to sort out while mainly concluding that I am too confused about the matter to know anything about it**.
3: I was really confused when reading argument 3. You might think I’ve made a mistake when explaining it – usually when you see a correlation between A and B, you’d think the one that comes first is the cause. But instead the author is arguing the opposite, that this shows autogynephilia to be the cause.
Phil’s argument seems to be in response to people arguing the opposite, obvious thing: that cross-gender ideation coming before autogynephilia means that autogynephilia is a side-effect and not a cause. I am sympathetic to Phil’s argument that childhood crushes that develop before one has unambiguous sexual arousal seem common, and that therefore the argument from timing isn’t as strong as one would think.
However, I think Phil goes too far when he concludes that the ordering is therefore evidence for autogynephilia being causal. This seems to be an error that I often see him making: he often jumps from the fact that one can shoehorn a phenomenon into his model, to the assumption that this phenomenon is therefore evidence for his model.
2c: I think the argument about the causality of labels misses the point. Yes, it is true that labels like “homosexual” are causally downstream of experiences of sexual attraction to men. But what people are suggesting is not that an arbitrary gender label causes trans women to have sexual fantasies involving themselves as women, but rather that trans women’s dysphoria about being male and desire to be female causes this sexuality.
In the section where he makes the argument, Phil is very focused on the idea that gender identity labels change but sexual orientations do not change. He argues that since the change in self-identity happens much later than the autogynephilic arousal, identity cannot be taken to cause autogynephilia.
But in my experience, even way prior to transition, if you go out and ask autogynephiles how they feel about being male, they will give very different answers from what you get if you ask ordinary men. For instance one study found effect sizes of d=1.86 to d=2.85 (depending on how you count).
2b: It is true that there are autogynephiles who don’t transition. Some of them really want to transition and dislike being male; for instance I’ve seen one of them say the following:
I have always felt deep down that I would prefer to be female. I prefer the way they dress and act and it always made me a bit jealous of girls. I feel I would be more comfortable in my own skin as a female. I have come to terms with the way that I feel and accept that I wouldn’t want to go through a transition. I am okay with the way that I feel now and have learned to accept those feelings.
I don’t feel that I am traditionally very manly and feel more comfortable around girls
I think people who advocate the theory that gender dysphoria causes autogynephilia would be perfectly happy to bite the bullet that this guy’s gender feelings caused him to eroticize feminization, even though he doesn’t literally label himself as a woman.
On the other hand, there seems to be some autogynephiles who this doesn’t apply to; whose autogynephilia seems to exceed what could be explained by their desire to be a woman. But that just means that autogynephilia and gender identity are not deterministically correlated. As nondeterminism is a symmetric relationship, it doesn’t disprove that gender identity influences autogynephilia any more than it disproves that autogynephilia influences gender identity. It just means that there are other factors in play.
You can make up stories about what those factors are – ideology, sexual success, experience, etc. – but the opposing side can also make up stories about what the alternate factors that could cause autogynephilia are (e.g. I am pretty sure I’ve seen someone suggest that curiosity may play a role in causing autogynephilia without feminine gender identity).
2a: The argument goes that if autogynephilia was influenced by gender identity, then it should be as common among trans women who are attracted to women as it is among trans women who are attracted to men.
I don’t understand this argument. Elsewhere in the book, Phil says that attraction to women is a contributor to autogynephilia because this attraction gets “inverted” onto oneself in some sense. This seems intuitively sufficient to explain sexual orientation differences in autogynephilia among trans women by sexual orientation.
✱ Another way to think of this problem is to say that the author’s method for diagnosing autogynephilia is correct, but that the author is wrong about what autogynephilia is like. I would usually use this latter frame, of thinking of the problem as people being wrong about what autogynephilia is like. But Phil’s description of autogynephilia is common elsewhere, and it’s such a struggle to enforce an alternate description of autogynephilia that I am giving up.
If I’m willing to think of pseudo autogynephilia as being the real form of autogynephilia, with Phil just getting some facts about the characteristics of autogynephilia wrong, then I would not be surprised if my point sounds nitpicky to some of the readers. Who cares if it got a few details of autogynephilia wrong? But think of it from this perspective: throughout the book, Phil often has a narrative that trans women are in denial about autogynephilia, but that science will eventually prove him right. However if he gets most of the characteristics of autogynephilia wrong, then 1) it’s no surprise that trans women fail to relate to his descriptions, and 2) science will presumably prove him wrong.
When I asked Phil, he also said he preferred the pseudo autogynephilia vs true autogynephilia characterization to a characterization of him just being totally wrong about autogynephilia.
There is so much more that could be said about the flaws of this book. I’ve put a list of what I consider to be the most egregious flaws at the second-last part of this review. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that it often uses the same voice for ultra-speculative things as it does for well-established things, rather than properly acknowledging uncertainty. And it regularly makes strange assertions that seem to be strongly picking political sides, while neither acknowledging the political element nor rationally justifying the statements.
However, the book is not all bad.
Most importantly, the book talks about autoandrophilia, which is the female equivalent of autogynephilia. While autogynephiles are males who feel attracted to being female, autoandrophiles are females who feel attracted to being male. In my experience, people often don’t think this kind of sexuality is important when talking about transgender issues. Some say they think that only men can have unusual sexual desires. But autoandrophilia is real! And it’s likely an important factor for trans men (as well as for women who privately wish they were men but don’t transition)!
As part of this, it gives examples of various aspects of autoandrophilia. These examples are sorely needed, as there are currently very few places that talk about what autoandrophilia is like. It includes discussion of how transvestism is more of a thing among autogynephiles than autoandrophiles, as well as discussion of how some autoandrophiles enjoy taking on the male role and picking up women.
That said, I think the book can end up treating things in an overly symmetric way. Unlike men, women seem to face very strong gender norms about looking good and being warm to others, and women who have male-typical interests often face problems as a result. I think this can lead to gender dissatisfaction driven not by sexuality, but by avoidance of gender norms.
While I complained earlier about aspects of its portrayal of autogynephiles, there are also aspects of its portrayal that are great. Its description of autogynephilic transvestism is detailed and informative. It gives lots of examples, and it is clearly a topic the author is passionate about.
It is also very informative about an adjacent topic, namely ‘traps’ – which it defines as feminized males with an intact penis*. Did you know that men who are attracted to traps are usually more attracted to cis women than to cis men? Did you know that men who are attracted to traps are also often autogynephilic? I knew that ahead of time, but many people might not. By reading the book, you can learn much more about this sort of attraction.
One concept he brings up is erotic target location errors. Basically, consider the controversy of Rachel Dolezal, a woman who became the center of a controversy for identifying as black when she was born white. Phil suggests that she may be “autophylophilic”, sexually attracted to being black, a sort of racial analogue of autogynephilia. Phil suggests that for any trait one can be sexually attracted to in others, there can be a corresponding self-directed sexual attraction, and he gives examples of this, including furries and body integrity identity disorder.
I am not sure I buy Phil’s story about autophylophilia and erotic target location errors. However, the chapter on transracialism is interesting, as it gives more details about Rachel Dolezal’s background. Did you know that she had a strong, lifelong attraction to black culture? Unfortunately, due to the many errors elsewhere in the book, I am not sure whether I can trust Phil to accurately represent Rachel Dolezal’s background, but it certainly is fascinating if true.
Finally, the book has some chapters on politics. Its chapter addressing general trans politics seems balanced and compassionate. It addresses questions such as how we should accept transition for autoheterosexuals, or what to make of transrace people. It also emphasizes the need for trans people to respect if cis people aren’t sexually attracted to them. It is not perfect, as some of its positions are dubious and there are a lot of unanswered questions, but it strikes a nice balance.
✱ Often these would be trans women rather than cis men. However figuring out the right categorization is tricky for all sorts of reasons. I’m using the term ‘traps’ because it is the most convenient term I know of which encompasses everyone in the group in question regardless of gender identity, and because this is the term the book uses for this section. However you should be aware that the term is usually considered offensive within the trans community.
Evaluation
Even if the book gets some things wrong, might it still be getting the big picture right? Should you read it? Let’s start with whether it gets the big picture right.
I am sympathetic to the idea that sexuality often plays a big role in transition. However, as you can see by the pseudo autogynephilia vs true autogynephilia distinction I came up with, I think Phil gets many of the details wrong. But it doesn’t seem that those specifics are what most people object to.
From asking around, I’ve found that most people believe in a theory that if people repress their desires, then those desires may come out sexually. I call this theory “masochistic CEO theory” because the archetypal example is an overworked CEO who goes to a dominatrix to release control after being overstressed at work.
If you believe in masochistic CEO theory, then the idea that something like autogynephilia plays a causal role in transitioning is probably very questionable, because people have done almost nothing to rule out the reverse causality, that repressed transgender identity causes autogynephilia-like sexuality. I personally don’t believe in masochistic CEO theory because I have never seen evidence for it and it doesn’t align with my theory of why sexuality exists or how sexuality works.
Other than autoheterosexuality, there are basically two alternative positions in the debate of how transness works. One is the feminine essence narrative (for MtFs; I suppose the corresponding FtM version could be called the masculine essence narrative). In this narrative, trans people transition because they are in some mental sense really like the opposite sex, and this inevitably leads to gender dissatisfaction. This is the narrative the book is in response to:
If someone’s deepest, most heartfelt wish was to be the other sex, which of the following explanations for their gender feelings would feel more emotionally satisfying?
They want to be the other sex because:
In truth, they are actually more like the other sex in mind and spirit, but a mistake in development led them to have the wrong anatomy.
They have an autosexual version of heterosexuality that makes them happier when they feel similar to the other sex or embody traits they associate with it.
It’s a no-brainer, right? The first one is obviously more emotionally satisfying.
This is why hearing about autoheterosexuality is so upsetting to many trans people. It suggests to them that their desire to be the other sex is ultimately because they are not that sex. Furthermore, their drive to be the other sex comes from a type of heterosexuality—the least queer kind of sexuality.
The autoheterosexual explanation can undermine the hard-earned sense of identity they’ve painstakingly constructed over years. Many loathe the concepts of autoandrophilia and autogynephilia, as well as the two-type typology that categorizes them as autoheterosexual if they aren’t solely same-sex attracted.
However, only a minority of autoheterosexuals transition to live as the other sex.
What about the rest of us? Don’t we deserve a fair shot at making sense of our experiences?
If either theory is true, it may eventually be provable using neuroscience to identify autogynephilia or brain feminization and show the direction of causality. This means that we can use prediction markets about future neuroscience findings to establish a consensus. I have made a market about this on Manifold Markets, which at the time of writing gives the theory 21%-23% probability, much more than the 12% probability of the feminine essence narrative:
(This is a thinly traded market. If you know anything about the topic, please trade to improve the probabilities!)
However, it appears that the most popular answer (at least for now) is that neither feminine essence nor autogynephilia theory is correct. I don’t think I’ve seen any satisfying alternate theories despite thinking about this subject a lot, so it is basically the “we don’t know yet” option.
And that makes it hard to evaluate, because it would require us to come up with fundamentally new ideas about gender identity, and I don’t know how those ideas would change my mind on existing issues.
But should you read the book? Phil suggests that instead of phrasing it as a yes/no question, I should think of it in a more open-ended way: If a person is autogynephilic or autoandrophilic, then what could they be asked to read to develop a better understanding of themselves?
The fact is, I don’t know of any great alternative writings on the topic. From that perspective, it is possible that Phil’s book is the “least bad” option, giving an overview of things from a sympathetic point of view. My fear is that the many flaws create confusion, and that the often strange or misleading arguments will lead critics to (rightly) conclude that this book is in bad faith. But I can’t deny his point that there is a lack of good alternative resources.
(If you know of any alternative resources, then please post them in the comments.)
So, if the topic seems relevant to you, then yes, it may be a good idea to read the book. Just beware of taking it too seriously, or you will probably end up caught on one of its many mistakes. Make sure to read widely (the book contains some references to get you started), and also make sure to be aware that the science in this area is overall very questionable.
Phil has this idea that his book will lead to a revolution, where many people come out as autogynephilic or autoandrophilic, and people discover the many applications of autoheterosexuality theory. I am skeptical of this.
Most of the direct applications of the autoheterosexuality concept “cut across” the category of autoheterosexuality, separating it in two. For example, autoheterosexuals who don’t transition need some name for their situation, and at times I’ve seen them identify as having “just a fetish”, which seems to me like a natural idea that they would spontaneously come up with, even without any activism.
But the notion of “I am not trans, I just have a fetish” is memetically similar to the concept of “I do not have a feminine essence, I am autogynephilic”, to the point where in my experience people have a hard time distinguishing between the two. And the distinction is critically important if we want to treat autoheterosexuality as the primary explanation of transness, because in that case we cannot treat the notion of autoheterosexuality as the opposite of being trans.
Phil tries hard to work against this in his book. However I think he will fail because he is working against natural memetic evolution. For example, it doesn’t seem to me that it is useful for people’s primary identity label to be one that lumps together private transvestites with public transsexuals, because it doesn’t relate to people’s lives. Instead I expect people to end up categorizing based on lifestyle.
Years ago, I was challenged to come up with practical applications of autoheterosexuality theory. I never succeeded. I am reminded of the post Extreme Rationality: It’s Not That Great. Aspects of autoheterosexuality theory may if you are lucky bring some clarity-of-mind benefits, but nobody has been able to come up with convincing applications that help you in practice. Still, you may appreciate the clarity-of-mind benefits anyway.
I also think fans of autogynephilia theory make their own research mistakes because they try hard to avoid distinguishing between autogynephilic cis men and gynephilic trans women. They generalize things inappropriately back and forth between trans women and autogynephilic cis men, without checking whether the generalizations are valid.
For instance, many autoheterosexuals seem to end up with an intuition that their feelings can be repressed through romantic relationships, Phil claims it has been found to not work. He may be right about the conclusion of it not working, however the primary evidence is based on trans women’s experiences, and since trans women by definition didn’t end up repressing, it would seem that if it sometimes works, you wouldn’t have heard about it through the methods he used.
Some of the most egregious flaws
This is a list of some very basic facts which I think affect how you interpret lots of other facts and which I think the book either gets wrong or does not sufficiently inform people about.
Meta-attraction: There is a phenomenon called meta-attraction, where autoheterosexuals develop a sort of desire to have homosexual sex, which is distinct from standard homosexuality. That is, an autogynephilic male might be interested in crossdressing and then having sex with males. I basically buy that it exists and is distinct from ordinary androphilia.
However, the concept of meta-attraction can end up being a form of gaslighting; on the one hand, the book emphasizes that meta-attracted autogynephiles are not truly attracted to men’s bodies, but instead fantasize about them as ‘faceless men’ who might as well be disembodied penises.
But on the other hand, the book emphasizes that it can be difficult to tell the difference between meta-attraction and classical attraction. These seem hard to square to me, and in my impression when communities apply the concept of meta-attraction, it is often done in a gaslighty manner, where they tell people that they are deluded about their sexual experiences.
This problem feels especially noticeable in the chapter on juvenile transition. The book argues that when minors transition, they are usually homosexual rather than autoheterosexual.
However, if homosexual males typically end up perfectly happy with being male*, why is transition a good idea for them? Do the ones who end up transitioning have a fundamentally different condition than ordinary homosexuality? Do they transition because of factors like bullying, which might be better addressed by other means?
I don’t know, and these are the questions that make me most ambivalent about transition for minors, but they aren’t addressed.
Heritability: The book discusses heritability in a way that is basically invalid, due to the phenotypic null hypothesis. It treats heritability as a proof that things are biological, when really basically everything is heritable in a tautological way.
Apophenia: The book often makes very questionable inferences, involving linking things that are barely even related.
For instance, you may have heard that there is a very large sex difference on the people-things dimension of work interests, which means that men are more interested in jobs such as carpentry which involve working with things, while women are more interested in being social workers or similar, which involves working with people.
Phil makes the leap that this also makes men more sexually attracted to objects such as clothing, potentially explaining the sex difference in transvestic fetishism.
I would be extremely surprised if Phil turns out even remotely close to right in this prediction. And this is not the only case of similar apophenia.
Motte-Bailey in the romance hypothesis: One controversial concept within autogynephilia theory is called the “romance hypothesis”.
The motte version of this theory is a response to people arguing that autogynephilia theory must be wrong, because you would predict that as trans women start antiandrogen therapy, their reduction in libido should make them stop wanting to transition. Here, the romance hypothesis asserts that autogynephiles develop an emotional attachment to being female, analogous to romantic love, which causes them to want to stay women, even without lust.
I think many trans women’s experiences can be shoehorned into the motte theory, and so it is hard to argue against. Though because it states things so weakly, it can also be hard to argue in favor of it.
To defend the romance hypothesis, Phil argues that it has been observed for decades, citing researchers such as H. T. Buckner, who finds that transvestites treat their crossdressed selves as a sort of girlfriend. This includes buying gifts for themselves, talking about themselves in a dissociated/dualized way, etc.. Phil also cites the example of Lou Sullivan, a trans man who would speak of his union between his male and female self, and sing about his self-love:
Seven years prior to his gender transition, Lou Sullivan touched on this theme of internal union in his diary. Just before he got his first leather jacket and began to commit more deeply to transvestism, he wrote: I love to blend female and male—I think of myself as two people finally coming together in peace with each other. Of my other half, I sing, ‘Nobody loves me but me adores you!’”
This is the bailey version of the romance hypothesis: that autogynephiles create a female identity and in a very literal sense treat this female identity as a girlfriend that they are dating. The issue I have with this bailey version is that it doesn’t seem like the way the supposedly-autogynephilic trans women I know relate to themselves, so rather than being evidence for autogynephilia theory, it more seems like evidence against it.
✱ Unlike autogynephiles, who are usually at least somewhat skewed towards wanting to be women, even if they don’t transition.
Philosophy of science
My review has been quite critical of the book. I am concerned that this might make people falsely think that Phil doesn’t know anything about what he is writing about, so I want to address that here, as well as getting into some more general questions of science.
Phil is very enthusiastic about this research area, and is very well-read in a lot of old-school gender research. He’s somewhat biased in his selection of research, but much less so than the proponents of feminine essence theory that I have seen.
While writing this review, I had the thought that the real problem is that Phil believes in science. And the problem with science is that it is often a fractal of wrongness.
Let’s take an issue where Phil agrees with me: autoandrophilia is real. But if autoandrophilia is real, then why didn’t the scientists he cites emphasize it as much as they do with autogynephilia?
I think the answer to this question is messy, but likely involves many of the following concepts:
Because autoheterosexuality was for a long time named “transvestic fetishism”, researchers thought it was about the clothes,* and autoandrophilia is somewhat less transvestically focused than autogynephilia is, so they would be less likely to notice it.**
Autoandrophilia is somewhat rarer than autogynephilia, so they would have been less likely to notice it.
Researchers have long had a preconception that unusual sexual motivations are a male-only thing, so they would have been less likely to notice it.
Many studies have been performed on autogynephiles, but few studies have been performed on autoandrophiles, so they would have been less likely to notice it.
Women face stronger gender norms than men, so the autoandrophiles who transition will likely also have masculinity as a secondary motivator, making it less unclear whether autoandrophilia is even needed as an explanation, and therefore making them less likely to notice it.
Basically, the way I see it is, researchers were not paying enough attention to notice autoandrophilia. But in my opinion, autoandrophilia is sort of obviously a thing. If researchers are not paying attention to really notice it, then there are lots of other things that they also fail to realize. (In this perspective, it’s almost no wonder the prediction market participants expect the true answer to be a theory that hasn’t been put forth yet.)
There’s a lot of places in reading the book where I’ve been ambivalent. For example, consider furries. Furries are a community of adults who are enthusiastic for anthropomorphic animals. They often make artwork (especially, at least according to stereotypes, porn) of anthropomorphic animals, and one of their main hobbies is “fursuiting”, where they dress up as animals.
In the book, Phil suggests that furries have an erotic target location error, analogous to autoheterosexuality, where they have a sexual attraction to anthropomorphic animals, and then this attraction in some sense becomes self-directed.
To support this, Phil draws on some surveys (e.g. The “Furry” Phenomenon) which find that a lot of furries report sexual attraction to anthropomorphic animals, sexual attraction to being an anthropomorphic animal, and that the kind of anthropomorphic animal they are attracted to being is commonly the same as the kind they are attracted to as partners.
However, when I look at the furry surveys, I notice a lot of oddities that makes it questionable whether it is analogous to autoheterosexuality. For instance, in the case of autogynephilia, most men are gynephilic (attracted to women) but only a few are autogynephilic. But with furries, most furries are both attracted to anthros as partners and most furries are attracted to being anthros. If the mechanisms were the same, shouldn’t the pattern for furries be the same as the pattern for gynephiles? (With most furries being attracted to anthros as partners, but not to being anthros themselves.) And this is not the only example of internal contradictions in the theories about furries.
Does it seem plausible that there’s something going on with furries that is analogous to transness? Yes. But also, maybe it’s not analogous, maybe the similarities are superficial. I think it’s worth collecting more information on it, but also I can’t blame people for not engaging with his theories about furries, when those theories contain so many weak arguments and internal contradictions, and so little data.
And speaking of data, it is my impression that a lot of the characterization of what autogynephilia is like was created by stitching together anecdotes from trans women. But I worry that people are more likely to share unusual or extreme anecdotes, which would skew the characterization of autogynephilia towards the unusual or extreme end. And as mentioned earlier in the review, I worry that trans women may have other characteristics (either systematically or by coincidence) which get misattributed as inverted attraction to women.
I don’t think these problems are unsolvable. You’d go a long way by just taking all the autogynephilia stereotypes you’ve come up with, collecting data on them in a large general population sample, and performing factor analysis of this data. This would automatically disentangle coincidence from correlation, and it would be able to tell whether the stereotypes are getting at a single unified thing, or a mishmash of independent characteristics. This is fairly standard methodology, but researchers who work on autogynephilia seem strangely averse to doing it.
But I don’t think the negativity of this review can be entirely blamed on the research in these areas being weak, rather than on Phil. As you saw earlier in the review (such as with the arguments about direction of causality), I thought some of his own arguments were very bad. This can’t just be a data error.
I find this to be a deeply anti-rational approach, and I think is not viable if we want to do incremental science. Local Validity is a Key to Sanity and Civilization. If we accept poor and invalid arguments as long as they lead to the “right” conclusion, we will end up immersing ourselves into a thick mist of invalid and misleading arguments. This will be confusing, and when new surprising evidence comes along, I think the habit of making incorrect arguments will lead to making incorrect arguments about that evidence too. I have tried talking to some of the people doing research in this area, and I find this to be a serious problem in practice, which prevents them from doing course-corrections when needed.
✱ This also suggests another critique: since autoheterosexuality is not about the clothes, the fact that scientists thought so is indicative of a pretty serious problem with science.
✱✱ This argument is also made by Phil in the book.
Thank you to Justis Mills, Phil Illy, Zack Davis and Pasha for proofreading and feedback.
I just realized transvestism and gender dysphoria are different?
And it’s a good question. There’s a certain sense in which they are “the same”, but also a certain sense in which they are distinct.
Moser has a section in the study where he explains the distinction he is trying to get at, but his explanation is kind of dense and leaves a lot of questions unanswered:
There is a group of individuals who do report autogynephilia (or at least something like autogynephilia as Bailey and Hsu understand it) as a core of aspect of their erotic interests. These are “erotic cross-dressers” or individuals with “transvestism,” who report persistent erotic arousal to the thought or fantasy of being a woman when cross-dressed. In general, individuals with transvestism or transvestic disorder do not meet the DSM-5-TR (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2022) diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria and do not pursue vaginoplasty, hormonal treatments, antiandrogens, or identify as female at all times. Individuals with gender dysphoria and individuals with transvestic disorder are discussed in separate chapters in the DSM-5-TR.2 It should also be noted that unlike the DSM, the International Classifcation of Diseases, 11th edition, published by the World Health Organization, both gender incongruence (dysphoria) and transvestic disorder are no longer classifed as mental disorders.
I of course cannot speak for Moser, but I agree that in certain contexts, particularly the one Moser was talking about, one should distinguish between some of these concepts, so I can speak for myself.
I suspect when people read this, they think stuff like “Wait, so how are you saying should we do differential diagnosis of gender dysphoria and transvestism?”. For autogynephilic trans women, this thought might be expressed as “Oh no, I wonder if tailcalled thinks I’m not trutrans.”. So I should clarify: in my view, this is not a question of differential diagnosis, it is much more superficial than that.
Distinctions vs differential diagnosis
Consider headaches and coughs. A headache is when someone feels pain in their head (and often also neck region), of various different degrees. A cough is when you forcefully push air out from your lungs through your mouth, usually because something’s irritating your throat or lungs.
Headaches and coughs are conceptually distinct; you can have a headache without having a cough, or a cough without having a headache. But sometimes they cooccur, often due to sharing a cause. It is straightforward to tell whether you have a headache or a cough, because they are totally different symptoms which look nothing alike. The fact that they are distinct means that insisting on using the same label for them or equivocating between people who have headaches and people who have coughs would be confusing, but the fact that they can cooccur and that they are straightforward to tell apart means that there is no point in doing careful differential diagnosis between them.
This is in contrast to something like a viral infection vs a bacterial infection. Both viral infections and bacterial infections can cause similar symptoms, but they need to be treated in different ways, and they rarely cooccur (unless you are particularly unlucky, have a weakened immune system, or have visited some medically dangerous area such as a hospital). Therefore to handle infections, you have to try to figure out which kind of infection, ruling out one and figuring out the true one.
When I say gender dysphoria and transvestism are distinct, I mean in the sense of a cough vs a headache. Not in the sense of a bacterial infection vs a viral infection.
Many correlated distinct characteristics
Charles Moser made a simple binary of transvestism vs gender dysphoria. I don’t really agree with that binary because I think there are many more distinctions of things that genderbendy AMABs can express1:
Dressing up as a woman (which can be further distinguished between public and private)
Being sexually aroused by the thought of being a woman
Wanting to be a woman
Disliking being a man
Feeling that one is unmanly and doesn’t fit in as a man
Taking estrogen/androgen blockers
Getting feminizing surgery (which can be further broken down into neovagina vs breast implants vs facial feminization)
…
Many of these are obviously correlated with each other, and I would not be surprised to learn that all of them are correlated with each other. In a lot of contexts, one can just think of the overall tendencies here as a sort of “transfemininity”, without going into the specific distinctions.
However, if an argument is about the nuances of these distinctions – for instance whether trans women are as autogynephilic as cis women – then one cannot just swap them in and out without taking care about the distinction. These variables are correlated, but they are not deterministically correlated, so the results you get will depend on which ones you focus on.
This is what I take Moser to be pointing out: when people talk about “trans women”, they are usually talking about someone who is medically and socially transitioning genders, and who as part of this has been diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” which basically boils down to “wants to be a woman/dislikes being a man. If you filter AMABs for the criteria of being a trans woman, then it is an empirical (… and theoretical) question how autogynephilic they will be. It is not tautologically guaranteed that they will be maximally autogynephilic, because you are not filtering directly on autogynephilia itself; there are good empirical reasons to think that they will have elevated levels of autogynephilia, but the degree of elevation is dependent on complex factors.
There was a new infection going around, which laymen called “the coughs”. Its symptoms involved coughs and headaches. Dr. White was studying The Coughs, and he came up with the hypothesis that it was caused by a bacterion called Generobacter. Generobacter is most strongly known for causing sleepiness, so one of Dr. White’s suggested diagnosis methods was to look at the amount of time spent in bed (though his preferred diagnosis method was just to rule out all other possible causes of headaches).
Dr. Moss suggested that Dr. White’s diagnosis method might be biased, because maybe people with headaches feel sick and don’t want to get out of bed, even if their headache is not caused by Dr. White’s Generobacter. To illustrate this, he polled some sick people, and found that they generally reported some tendencies to not get out of bed. He had a lot of distinct ways of asking about this, getting much more nuanced view than “amount of time spent in bed”, though his way of quantifying them were pretty sketchy, and he did not actually have a comparison group of people with the coughs to compare to.
Dr. Whiskey and Dr. Zora took objection to Dr. Moss’s claim. Yes, sick people don’t want to get out of bed, but this effect is modest and what they had in mind is something much stronger. So they wanted to do a more proper comparison, with a group of people that they were certain had Generobacter.
So they went to the Pulmonology Department in a hospital and found some people who were hit hard by coughs, and asked them how much time they spent in bed. And then they compared it to the people who were just ordinarily sick, and to the people who were not sick at all, and found that ordinarily sick people and people who were not sick at all answered similarly to each other and distinct from the people who were in the hospital. They concluded that Dr. Moss must’ve been wrong.
Dr. Moss found this ridiculous, so he published a paper in response. However, Generobacter is sot of Dr. White’s pet theory, and most people in the field including Dr. Moss don’t accept it; instead they just use the lay term “the coughs”. So he titled “It helps if you distinguish the coughs and headaches”, pointing out that by sampling people with severe coughs at a hospital, of course he’s gonna find people who spend a lot of time in bed, because you lie in hospital beds while recovering from your sickness.
In response, Dr. Whiskey released a paper saying that they weren’t investigating anything to do with headaches, they were investigating Generobacter, because Dr. Moss had suggested that sick people might spend as much time in bed as people with Generobacter do.
Explanation of the analogy
In the above analogy, Dr. White is Ray Blanchard, Dr. Moss is Charles Moser, Dr. Whiskey is Michael Bailey, Generobacter is true autogynephilia, being in bed is autogynephilia-like sexuality, coughing is wearing women’s clothes and “the coughs” is transvestism, people getting treated for the coughs at the Pulmonology Department are autogynephiles highly engaged in online erotic AGP communities, headaches are gender dysphoria/transsexuality, and sick people are women.
😅 This analogy came off as being bizarrely pathologizing. I should note that this is meant to capture the abstract causal structure as accurately as feasible, not all of the greater implications.
The point is, in the story, Dr. White and Dr. Moss were arguing about people with headaches (trans women) and the amount of time they spend in bed (autogynephilia-like sexuality). Dr. Whiskey decided to replace this argument with a tangentially related argument about people in hospitals with the coughs (highly active members of online erotic AGP communities). But there is a special relationship between being in the hospital and spending time in bed (being a highly active member of online erotic AGP communities and having autogynephilia-like sexuality), due to patients recovering in hospital beds (online erotic AGP communities providing material for the expression of autogynephilia-like sexuality), which presumably dominates whichever effects they could find and so makes it uninformative about people with headaches (trans women).
The maddening thing about this debacle is, it’s right there in the text of the studies! Like, Michael Bailey is in denial about it, and that’s to be expected because Michael Bailey is an absolutely ridiculous person, but the fact that some other people let it slide really seems to show how they don’t care about valid inference and just care about pushing the typology with whatever means are necessary.
Footnote 1: I suspect Moser also understands that there are many different variations that can occur, and that he was just trying to be brief. Also I suspect Moser doesn’t really have a precise idea about the exact distribution of cooccurrences, and so just goes with the official handbooks even though they are obviously not complete.
There is an idea in some places that men’s and women’s sexuality are totally different. If you do research using surveys with fixed response options, there’s something weird about that idea, because while men’s and women’s answers do differ, for most variables there still seems to be some overlap.
I’ve come to wonder if this is because surveys are asking about the wrong questions, so I thought I would do a qualitative survey to explore what questions are more appropriate to ask about. I did this survey a while ago, but I haven’t really gotten around to blogging about it. Here is the question I asked:
How do you experience your sexuality?
I plan to study differences in people’s sexuality, and in order to make sure that I get comprehensive data, I would like to collect some stories of people’s experiences with their sexuality. In this survey you will be asked to qualitatively describe a situation that illustrates how you experience your sexuality. (Minimum 300 characters.)
How do you experience your sexuality?
Please describe some situation that illustrates how you experience your sexuality. What was happening in the situation, how did you feel/think/want to act, and what did you do? (Minimum 300 characters.)
(freeform text field)
My logic for phrasing it based on situations is that it is in situations that one experiences ones sexuality. That is, while one can abstract sexuality into broader situation-independent preferences and similar, this will not necessarily zoom into the specifics of what one feels, and so if we want to be sure that we get as much information as possible prior to abstracting, we need to focus on the situational aspects.
Men’s results
Some men reported direct physical attraction to potential partners, usually women:
I experience my sexuality as heterosexual, I have had many experiences with my heterosexuality. Some of them more obvious than others. For example if I see someone attractive of the opposite sex I will get excited which is less obvious. Whereas if me and my partner were to have sex, that would a much larger feeling.
31 year old mostly straight man in a long term relationship
Walking down the street passed a good looking athletic blonde woman, thinking what underwear she was wearing and if she was attracted to me and if the thoughts I was having about her were going through her head as we locked eyes as we walked passed one another. What does she do and does she like animals?
32 year old totally straight man in a long term relationship
I experience my sexuality through pornography. I discovered my sexuality when I watched my first porn film when I was teenager. It was a new an exciting experience for me. I’ve never seen a woman naked. It was also my first time masturbating. I found the woman very attractive. I recall she was a beautiful blond. This experience shaped my sexuality because I am still a virgin to this day. I have never met a beautiful woman who shared mutual attraction with me.
33 year old totally straight man who is single
I am a straight male but I have a massive fetish for men’s feet and socks. Therefore, I like to watch lots of gay porn which involves men worshipping each others feet (e.g. sucking their toes) and giving each other footjobs. I also like watching videos of men having sex where at least one partner leaves their socks on.
36 year old mostly straight man who is single
I am straight single and often think I’m not bothered about having a partner. I recently had a day with a friend who I’ve not seen for ages but we used to be pretty flirty. I had in my head that I wouldn’t be flirty and make sure the meeting wasn’t like that because I didn’t wan tot complicate things and not in a place where I want a partner at the moment. This all went out of the door as soon as we met up, she was looking great and I pretty much immediately was thinking about sex. I wanted sex and she seemed flirty again too. We ended up spending the night together I felt pretty guilty as I know its going to start a relationship. Although she may not be bothered about this. I often feel this way, a human need for sex and some companionship but not relationships. My plans often don’t match my feeleings
36 year old totally straight man who is single
I ‘experience’ my sexuality when I have sex or when I am prompted to have sexual thoughts, for example by noticing someone I find sexually attractive. This isn’t a big deal for me. I happen to be homosexual, but do not regard my orientation as a pivotal part of my life or personality – or, frankly, a topic worthy of much discussion.
63 year old totally gay man in a long term relationship
Although I’m quite old, I’d still like to have normal hetrosexual sexual relations. I would appreciate a reasonably adventurous younger partner, sadly my current partner of 47 years now shows no interest in the sexual side of the relationship and has not done so for the last ten or so years. I apppreciate the female form and enjoy females that dress provocatively
74 year old totally straight man in a long term relationship
The first time that I remember was when I was 15 years old and I was attracted to a girl in my class because of the way she looked, her skin color, her smile and her laughter. After striking the first conversation I started to enjoy the manner in which she spoke to me and how the other boys felt envious. I remember how that made my heart beat fast and every time I saw her my mind went blank. The first time we hugged was at a common friends house. That instance made me realize my feelings for her and I wanted to ask her on a date. I went ahead and asked her out the next week.
29 year old totally straight man in a long term relationship
i enjoy my sexual experince alot, most especially when it is with someone i really love and care for, i feel sensational and happy, i start by softly rubbing my hands all over her body slowly fom the head to her toes and later sucking her breast and rubbing my hands on her breast, i move my mouth to hers and start kissing her and simultaneonsly rubbing my fingers on her breast before later insecting my dick in her virgina
25 year old totally straight man who regularly has casual sex
It was a simple flight to go on holiday: I was sitting in my allocated seat and was minding my own business looking at my phone, reading the advertisement papers etc, just general fidgeting until the flight took off. Then the air host started the demonstration, and for the entire time I could only think of how handsome he was, the way his nose centred on his face, his eyes, hair etc.
I was enamoured: my heart rate quickened and I smiled whenever he came to ask if I needed anything. I wanted to call him over just to look at him more, continue a conversation, just simple to have him talk at me so I could smile and nod.
As a generally straight male, this was eye opening to me. It made me realise that gender, at least in my experience, means little when it comes to the attraction one can have to another. The simple looks, the shape of ones face, even the styling of their hair, can have such a massive impact on what one feels when considering their sexuality.
28 year old straight-leaning bisexual man in a long-term relationship
The above seems well aligned with how male sexuality is usually portrayed, as well as with how I’ve mostly thought of it. So that is nice and convenient.
That said, not everyone reported this straightforwardly physical attraction. Some emphasized their relationships:
Any quality alone time that I spend with my significant other. There’s this inherent feeling of purpose. It’s something that drives you to want to succeed so that you can make them proud of you, make them happy. It’s a mutual feeling of trust and respect – being ready to be present for the other and to care and protect. It might not be an overtly physical act for me but I think it’s more of the social element that comes through. I think I express it best via thoughtfulness and empathy, being there in the difficult times and the mundane, offering humour and attention and a pillar of support. No particular situation comes to mind because I perceive it as more of a lifestyle than a moment.
23 year old totally straight man who is single
How I experience my sexuality is thought my love for my wife and son that I can help them grow and be a pillar of my family and also my sexuality already gives me to many pluses as it is and I’m happy where I am really I do hope that I can still be the man I am today that’s for sure also I have had some chewits today
34 year old totally straight man in a long term relationship
I feel I am who I am meant to be in my sexuality as a heterosexual male. I express this in the forms of love I share physically, spiritually and mentally with my female flame. This makes me feel happy and makes my life fulfilled with memories and makes me want to enjoy more experiences to come in the near future.
25 year old totally straight man in a long term relationship
Finally, some men who go into reproduction and sexual ideology:
I experience my sexuality as a heterosexual male nothing else has entered my train of thoughts by being who I am I was able to procreate with a female woman which is my wife now and have two beautiful children which are my life.
I have had numerous male men approach me in the past and made me feel quite uncomfortable and they did not respect who I was. I was disturbed by this and disappointed that respect did not work two ways
37 year old totally straight man in a long term relationship
To begin with, my sexualities is the normal sexuality of my gender regardless of what other person think or desire to act.
I feel the best/act/think the way my gender opt to behave in life.
Other person can choose the way they want with world be opened to different sexuality. Despite some culture or country frowns at some new way of things other embraces them.
The end point is each person can think/act/feel the way they want irrespective of the society they find themselves.
36 year old totally straight man in a long term relationship
Women’s results
There were a few women who reported something like a direct attraction as their main mode of sexuality. However, their experiences were typically marginal and unusual in some way, rather than it being a straightforward heterosexual expression:
I experience my sexuality simply as an integral part of who I am. I have never experienced anything other than my attraction to women. The first time that I really wanted to explore my sexuality with a woman was when I was at university and an older lesbian who was very out on the scene came to visit our house. I was thrilled by the fact that I knew she was also attracted to women and I was desperate to impress her and attract her attention. My experience was positive and reinforced the feeling that my sexuality was right and good.
52 year old totally lesbian woman who is single
I am someone who identifies as demisexual. I need a strong friendship and string intellectual relationship with someone before I am able to feel sexual attraction twoards them. A good example is I had a friend in my life who was flirty and all my other friends would point out their advances but I did not feel that way twoards them until one day it hit me. I slowly started to feel sexual attraction to them as the intellectual relationship grew and grew. When I started to reciprocate and we started a sexual relationship my sexual urges were stronger and only twoards them. I could look at others who were steryotypical attractive and feel nothing but when I looked at them it was like the only person in the world. I would lose those sexual feelings at times but would be able to get them back when our intelectual relationship struggled but I only felt it twoards them.
29 year old totally straight women with low libido who is single
I am often assumed to be straight and, although I had one female partner in my teens, this is generally assumed to have been a “bi-curious” phase and not a consistent part of my sexuality. I have never known how to answer my sexual orientation in adulthood, as I fancy women (I am a woman) and have frequently kissed women, but my primary preference is men. I recently watched a video by a content creator I follow titled “I am bi-sexual”. She described feeling the way I do and have throughout my teens and adulthood, and had finally come to realise that this meant she was bi-sexual. This was an eye-opening experience for me, and I have been more certain and forthcoming about this being how I would define my sexuality since this time.
31 year old straight-leaning bisexual woman in a long term relationship
These days, rarely as not in a relationship and past 60. Occasionally read smut – straight, bi and gay. Occasionally have a ‘lazy lech’ over a particularly beautiful (to me) person (i.e. both males and females). Consider self as bi although only one same-sex relationship. Currently have very little self-confidence which makes it unlikely I will have another relationship although I do yearn after a ‘cozy’ one.
62 year old bisexual woman who is single
My husband and I met each other online when we were in our 40’s, after both being in abusive marriages where sex was a chore and something we both felt we had to do to to keep our partner satisfied and reduce their abusive behaviour towards us. Because we’d both suffered through years of this, we both had very low self esteem and felt very unattractive and that our sexual performance was terrible, specially my husband whose ex wife constantly insulted his penis size, performance etc at the same time as constantly pestering him for sex and getting really aggressive if he tried to refuse. When we first met face to face, the attraction was immediate and we had a few drinks and ended up sleeping together. We were both very nervous though didn’t realise the other felt like that at the time, but the experience was wonderful, it felt so right and we felt a deep emotional connection as well as a physical one. For me (and later I found out it was the same for him), it was like we’d both had amazing, meaningful sex for the first time in our lives in our 40’s and we had a very active sex life for many years until we both developed health problems which made it difficult. We experimented a little with things like dressing up, taking videos which were exclusively for us to watch and never shared anywhere, having sex outdoors in remote places where we wouldn’t be seen, and although we’re restricted now because of our health problems, we do still enjoy sex though not nearly as often or as adventurous as we were. In my experience, sex with someone you love and have a deep emotional connection with and trust 100% is the best. I miss the sex life we once had, but we love each other deeply, still find each other very sexually attractive and are best friends, and when we do manage sex, it’s still wonderful even if we’re restricted in what we can manage.
57 year old totally straight woman in a long term relationship
I am female and have had girls flirt with me before. I didn’t know how to act. I am heterosexual. But this was more of a complement than if I guy would flirt. I would never want to date a woman but do find some woman attractive – but only to look at and wouldn’t want anything more at all. I have also always felt this way
23 year old totally straight woman in a long term relationship
There were also women who described being heterosexual in a way that might be compatible with straightforward physical attraction, but where they were too vague and didn’t really get into the details enough to say:
I have only ever been it heterosexual relationships and since I was 15/16 I’ve only ever been in long term relationships (1-3 years) with no real periods of ‘singleness’. I’ve always loved all of my partners, but often reflect back and wish I’d spent some time being single and ‘finding myself’. My mental health and personality type means I’m always relying on someone else’s life experiences to keep me alive and worth living. Now I’m realising this is only relating to my relationships and not my sexuality. I’ve been interested in women but only from a sexual perspective and feelings. I only enjoy the pleasuring part of sex, not the receiving part. I like making my partner feel good and know that I’m valuable if I can do that for them. Being the one out of control makes me uncomfortable and it’s not their fault that I have a disconnect with my own pleasure so I don’t want to disappoint them.
25 year old straight-leaning bisexual woman in a long term relationship
My sexuality is heterosexual. I have a boyfriend and I have always been attracted to men. MY sexuality isn’t something that really defines me, I wouldn’t say it’s the first thing I think about in the morning and before I go to sleep. It’s just a way of life, however I think for people of other sexualities, they are able to define themselves with their sexuality, which I think is such a lovely thing, to be included with a bunch of people that are the same as themselves. I feel rather boring sometimes for being heterosexual.
25 year old mostly straight woman in a long term relationship
my experience on my sexuality is pretty much limited, im in a commited relationship of 10 years and building a life together, but i feel that i could have more, but dont want to actually dive in to it with my partner. i guess it best kept in side my head, before my relationship, i was with other people
30 year old bisexual woman in a long term relationship
Instead of a straightforward attraction to partners, it was common for women to report a sexuality focused on exhibiting attractive features:
i experience my sexuality through being an empowered feminine woman who sees her sexual role in society as one that is stereotypically female. For example, in a club scenario, I dance with my hips in a feminine way as it makes me feel sexy and strong, and i feel really in tune with myself on that level. I find that it doesn’t bother me anymore if a boy is interested or not, as it makes me feel like i’m in tune with my sexual energy and the powers that come with that. e.g. feeling pleasure, biologically understanding that this energy brings about life as an end result which is part of my own gift and capabilities as a person with ovaries.
25 year old straight-leaning bisexual woman in a long term relationship
I was on holiday on a cruise and i wanted to look really nice so that my husband was really proud of me. I had bought a new dress and new underwear for that night. I put them on and I immediately felt more confident and feminine. My husband said how nice I looked which made me feel good and that it was worth the effort. I felt more attractive and there was more of a chemistry between the two of us
72 year old mostly straight woman in a long term relationship
Time for a night out with the love of my life. Dressing in heels, my best dress, minimal make up and long hair flowing. I feel in control, special, feminine. I want to strut and without a word inside I am screaming look at me, everyone turn my way. I feel safe yet vulnerable on his arm. . When is it time to go home? I want to be held close.
54 year old totally straight woman in a long term relationship
Another woman focused on her sexuality in a reproductive context:
I am female and for me that is bound up with being a mother. The situation I am thinking of is being pregnant and looking at my body in the mirror. Although some people see pregnant women as being fat I found it was the richest expression ever of my sexuality as a giver and sustainer of life. I remember running my hands over the taut skin of my belly, noticing how long and thick my hair had grown and feeling more desirable than I ever had.
58 year old mostly straight woman in a long term relationship
Another woman focused on her experiences growing up:
I was very young probably around 12yrs in the summer I was wearing a vest top to go to the shop for my parents. I suppose I was developing my chest and not wearing a bra as it was early in my development and i had long blonde hair. Two men working in the garden centre made comments about me which I found weird at the time. I was young and sheltered from anything to do with sexuality.
54 year old totally straight woman in a long term relationship
Finally, a woman focused on the way society relates to her sex:
Salespersons at the door saying they would return when “hubby” was home, assuming that, as a woman, I am unable to make decisions about services within my own home. I find it patronising that they make these assumptions.
As a woman receiving a 2nd breast cancer diagnosis and being told that the only recommended treatment is a mastectomy and that reconstruction is not an option affects one’s self-image and sexuality because the media, and societal norms lay great store and emphasis on the size of breasts and imply that a breastless woman is somehow inferior and unattractive. This is a situation that is not within a woman’s control.
It is sometimes suggested that persons over a certain age should not be sexually active . I was told, by a younger woman that “people over 50 shouldn’t have sex, it’s wrong”. It is somehow deemed more acceptable for men to have sexual desires and seek treatment for any problems.
I hope these are the sort of examples you are seeking. It was not really clear
68 year old totally straight low libido woman in a long term relationship
Conclusion
Men’s central experience of sexuality is in seeing some physically attractive woman and wanting to have sex with her. When women report something similar as a central experience of their sexuality, it is rarely so straightforward; the women reporting it may be lesbian, or single and prone to reading smut, or trauma bonding, or straight but focusing on women as the sex to look at. The women who do report being straightforwardly heterosexual are either quite vague in their experiences of sexuality, or instead report a focus on displaying their feminine sexuality or similar. There also seem to be sex differences in the sociological/ideological context, but it was rare for either sex to focus on that, so the survey doesn’t reveal much about it.
The biggest issue I have with my survey is that, due to its qualitative design, it can only prove the presence of an experience, and not characterize the overall degree or pattern of experiences for a person at an individual level. This makes it harder to compare the participants to each other, and thereby characterize e.g. the magnitude of the sex differences. My original desire with this survey was to follow it up with a psychometric questionnaire and factor analysis to understand things in more detail, but while the survey has given me some ideas for how to do this psychometrically, I haven’t come up with anything concrete yet.
One thing that makes it difficult to study with a rigid questionnaire is that some of the stories are based on situations that are far from universal, e.g. trauma bonding or pregnancy. Another thing that makes it difficult is that the remaining situations probably differ a lot from person to person in a nonstructured way. It may be helpful to switch to focusing on sexual fantasies instead of sexual experiences, as that makes it less dependent on lifestyle – but IME this also suppresses sex differences a bunch. Probably the best approach would be to combine the two.
Blanchardianism makes claims about trans women which trans women disagree with. For instance that trans women are primarily motivated by autogynephilia.
Given this disagreement, it’s possible to analyze it in a cooperative manner, for instance maybe Blanchardians and trans women have observed different pieces of the puzzle, and by sharing information with each other, they can get a more accurate picture of things. However the fact that the disagreement has been stuck for a while now suggests that this is not a very likely explanation.
So another possibility is that one of the sides is trolling the other side. If one of the sides is trolling, then we should expect that side to make bizarre and misleading arguments. And I would claim that the Blanchardian side regularly does so, e.g. with emphasizing menstruation fetishism, or by doing deceptive sampling.
These are the sorts of things that would make me go “You’ll Never Persuade People Like That”.
You counterargue:
This would seem to be an odd change of topic. If I was arguing for this-and-such proposition, and my interlocutor isn’t, themselves, convinced by my arguments, it makes sense for them to reply about why they, personally, aren’t convinced. Why is it relevant whether I would convince some third party that isn’t here?
What’s going on in this kind of situation? Why would someone think “You’ll never persuade people like that” was a relevant reply?
In this sort of case, I personally have a bunch of evidence about the validity of autogynephilia theories that makes me unlikely to change my mind a lot on the topic. However, I might be able to provide feedback of what sorts of arguments normatively should change people’s minds, among those on the fence.
And in these cases, the arguments are really trollish. So normatively, when people see those arguments, they should go “huh, I guess the Blanchardians are a trollish side in this debate”, and un-update away from whatever they’ve “learned” from the Blanchardians.
Originally I was annoyed by the trollish arguments, since I was trying to argue for autogynephilia theory. However I have mostly given up with pushing for autogynephilia theory, for various reasons including the fact that the people involved are terrible trolls. But it’s kind of frustrating because I didn’t originally have much way of proving the trollishness, since I had learned that they were trollish through trollish arguments private emails/private conversations and through their lack of updates on my critiques. So at this point I feel a sense of reassurance and validation when Blanchardians push obviously trollish points and I get to point them out in a low-context way.
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