For many years I've been a fan of a certain genre of, um, adult blogs featuring captioned photographs of women, where the captions tell fantasy stories about how the women used to be men before some magical or technological intervention. The titles of the blogs often contain the word transgender (or the abbreviation TG). I remember dimly thinking—never in so many words—Gee, I imagine actual transgender people would be pretty offended if they knew that the word used to refer to them was being used to describe this kind of material!
... why
What kind of pornography did I think pre-trans women used?
Why didn't anyone just tell me?!
"Mark, this is Alexa. Alexa, this is Mark."
"Pleased to meet you," she says.
"Pleased to meet you," I say. "You're very tall," I add.
"Thanks, I get that a lot," she says. "What's your shirt about?"
I look down at myself, to be reminded that today is the day I chose to wear my new custom "LATE-ONSET GENDER DYSPHORIA IN MALES IS NOT AN INTERSEX CONDITION, YOU LYING BASTARDS" T-shirt.
"Oh, that's the name of my favorite rock group," I say. "They're from Canada. You probably haven't heard of them."
This post is a response to Ozymandias's "On Autogynephilia", published on their (highly recommended!) blog, Thing of Things.
nothing in this post should be taken as an endorsement of the Blanchard-Bailey theory of autogynephilia, which is clearly untrue.
Clearly! Clearly!
The Blanchard-Bailey theory denies the existence of autoandrophilia
Ray Blanchard has said that he doesn't think autoandophilia is a thing ("No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism [...] I don’t think the phenomenon even exists"), and I agree that he's wrong. This does not have very much evidential bearing on the status of the two-type taxonomy of MtF transsexualism that happened to have been proposed by Ray Blanchard—which taxonomy, I should hardly have to add, is not a theory of trans men!
Autoandrophilia does have a little bit of evidential bearing insofar as it's argued that autogynephilia should be classified as a paraphilila, and so we should expect to see much less autoandrophilia in women than autogynephilia in men, because paraphilias in general are much less common (albeit not nonexistent) in women. But this is pretty tangential to the main point of the theory ...
the factors may or may not be correlated, but there are many exceptions
"May or may not be correlated"?! That's all you have to say?! Summarizing correlations is the entire point of making a taxonomy. Yes, psychology is complicated and people are individuals; no one is going to fit any clinical-profile stereotype exactly. But if we have studies that find correlations (not with correlation coefficients equal to one, but correlations nonetheless) between sexual orientation, age of transition, childhood femininity, and history of erotic cross-dressing—if, sheerly intuitively and anecdotally with no pretense of rigor, it seems plausible that the Laverne Cox/Janet Mock/Sylvia Rivera cluster of people is a distinct thing from the Julia Serano/Deirdre McCloskey/Caitlyn Jenner cluster of people—is it really that bad for someone to speculate, "Hey, maybe these are actually two and only two different psychological conditions with different etiologies"?
Like, maybe it's not true. Maybe there's some other, more detailed and expansive model that makes better predictions. But what is it, specifically? What's your alternative story?
denial about whether one is an autogynephile is a common trait in autogynephilia, making their theory (based primarily on self-report) utterly unfalsifiable– the definition of bad science.
If you categorically reject all hypotheses that predict that sometimes people deny true propositions about themselves, then you will never learn the truth if you happen to live in a world where people sometimes deny true propositions about themselves! Do you really believe that it's so rare for people to deny true propositions about themselves that a hypothesis that predicts that many people are doing so is bad science by definition?
I think the concept ‘autogynephilia’ combines [...] conceptually different things. [...] Second, autogynephilia may be a manifestation of gender dysphoria. Typical instances of this form of autogynephilia include [...] Third, there are what one might call ‘true autogynephiles.’ The majority of autogynephiles appear to have no particular desire to transition
In what way are those conceptually different things? You're describing a.m.a.b. people engaging in what at least superficially seems like the same behavior, jacking off to the same porn and having the same fantasies. For the ones who might consider transitioning, you say that the erotic behavior "may be a manifestation of gender dysphoria" although it's "unclear [...] how exactly the link [...] happens." For the others, it's not a manifestation of anything in particular. It's certainly possible that autogynephilic arousal in pre-trans women and non-dysphoric men are two completely different things that happen to involve common elements (much like how MtF transsexuality itself is two completely different things that happen to involve common elements!). But what's the specific evidence?
A brief note on why all this matters. Independently of whether the two-type taxonomy is in fact taxonic, there are obvious political incentives to dismiss the explanatory value of autogynephilia, because it could be construed as invalidating trans women. I get that.
But here's the thing: you can't mislead the general public without thereby also misleading the next generation of trans-spectrum people. So when a mildly gender-dysphoric boy spends ten years assuming that his gender problems can't possibly be in the same taxon as actual trans women, because the autogynephilia tag seems to fit him perfectly and everyone seems to think that the "Blanchard-Bailey theory of autogynephilia" is "clearly untrue", he might feel a little bit betrayed when it turns out that it's not clearly untrue and that the transgender community at large has been systematically lying to him, or, worse, is so systematically delusional that they might as well have been lying. In fact, he might be so upset as to be motivated to start an entire pseudonymous blog dedicated to dismantling your shitty epistemology!
Both! (And that's okay!)
(This post was originally published elsewhere, and has been retroactively cross-posted, with slight edits, to the Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought archives.)
So I was at "Portland" Comic Con the other day. I don't think I find conventions themselves to be as fun as a lot of other people seem to, but I had never cosplayed before, and had been thinking lately that I have exactly the right body type to play Pearl from Obnoxious Bad Decision Chil—I mean, Steven Universe, on account of being my being tall, thin, white, and having a big nose. (She's even pretty flat-chested!) So I ordered the Pearl dress from Hot Topic (I maybe should've gotten the XXXL instead of merely the XXL), a pink (really should be more peach, but close enough) wig, yellow gym shorts, and pink socks; improvised a gem from medical tape and the bowl of a plastic spoon; and set off Saturday morning to catch the train to the city and a short walk to the hotel.
The con itself was about what you'd expect, with the usual events and the usual vendor hall. The part that I found striking (enough so that I'm bothering to blog about it) was just how many compliments and photo requests I got for my costume, wholly disproportionate to its actual quality. (I enjoyed the opportunity to ham it up, proclaiming "We are the Crystal Gems!" or singing a few bars from the extended theme during photo ops.) Since this was my first time cosplaying, I don't have calibration, so it's quite possible that I got the ordinary amount of positive attention given costume quality and character popularity, but I suspect that there was something more than that going on having to do with gendered cultural expectations.
Femininity in males is stigmatized more than masculinity in females; that's why I changed in the bathroom at the con rather than wear a dress on the train, and why I don't feel like including any photos in this post despite having shared them on Facebook (visibility settings: "Custom: Friends; Except: Family") and sent them in for the next Beach City Bugle cosplay compilation post. So incompetent MtF crossdressing is "loud" relative to men playing male characters, women playing anyone, and the competent crossdressers (who were clockable on the timescale of ten seconds, but didn't instantly read as "man in a dress" the way I did), and loud things that would be stigmatized in everyday life (probably even everyday life in "Portland") are celebrated at Comic Con. Thus, "man Pearl is best Pearl," as I was told by a young woman (who was cosplaying a male character), even after I insistently pointed out that the other Pearl was way better than me.
When we're doing science to try to figure out how the human mind works, self-reports are certainly a very important source of evidence, albeit not the only source of evidence; it's often possible to measure what people do in addition to what they say about themselves.
As a social rule, it's very rude to tell someone that you think they're mistaken about something that they claim about themselves. Because we are nice people, we certainly do not want to be rude! At the same time, however, when we're doing science and trying to find out how things actually work independently of whether the truth conforms to the social rules we observe to keep harmony among ourselves, we cannot commit ourselves to the assumption that all self-reports must be taken as literally true, because—even if no one is deliberately lying, even if everyone is trying their very hardest to choose the words that will best express the ineffable truth of their subjective experience—that would exclude the vast swathes of hypothesis-space under which some people have false beliefs about themselves.
Indeed, if introspection were sufficient to reveal the true structure of human psychology, it's not clear why we would even need to do science; we would just know. It's precisely because careful observation and experiments can tell us things about ourselves that we didn't already know, that science is useful. Ultimately, finding out that something you believe is false—even something you believe about yourself—just isn't that bad. If you keep an open mind about it, having your identity invalidated by new information is an opportunity for growth: given the new knowledge about what you actually were all along, it might be possible to make better decisions in the service of your values.
Given the vastness of the diversity of human experience, there's always going to be someone who says that the angels spoke to them from a cloud promising the fountain of youth. And we can respect this person and trust that they're telling the truth about their subjective experiences, while at the same time stating confidently: those weren't actually angels.
Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall under one of two main archetypes: the "deceptive transsexual" or the "pathetic transsexual." While characters based on both models are presented as having a vested interest in achieving an ultrafeminine appearance, they differ in their abilities to pull it off. Because the "deceivers" successfully pass as women, they generally act as unexpected plot twists, or play the role of sexual predators who fool innocent straight guys into falling for other "men." [...] In contrast to the "deceivers," who wield their feminine wiles with success, the "pathetic transsexual" characters aren't deluding anyone. Despite her masculine mannerisms and five o'clock shadow, the "pathetic transsexual" will inevitably insist that she is a woman trapped inside a man's body.
—Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, Ch. 2, "Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels"
Serano is right to call out media producers for inventing and promulgating these harmful stereotypes! One really has to wonder, though, why the media, in the vicious and shallow baseness of its ignorance and transphobia, happened to confabulate those two and only two particular archetypes with which to stigmatize trans women. I mean, it's not as if the emergence of such toxic ideas could be in any way related to some underlying statistical reality, right??
