When I saw the paper the other month, this line stuck out to me: "Because we placed advertisements in a large number and wide range of online sources, we do not report them individually here." This rationale for witholding information from readers of the paper doesn't make sense to me: the method of recruitment is relevant for assessing the generalizability of the results, and it's hard to imagine that a list of a few dozen subreddits and Discord servers would take up prohibitively many column-inches somewhere in the paper (or an online supplement if it came to that).
-I don't think this is merely a theoretical concern. In [a critique of the paper](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2025/01/24/hsu-and-morandinis-fraudulent-autogynephilia-study/), (former SEXNET subscriber) Carl "Tailcalled" Dybahl links to [Hsu's Reddit profile](https://www.reddit.com/user/kevinjhsu/submitted/), consisting of submissions of the survey to /r/Crossdressing_support (20K subscribers), /r/CrossDressRealism (28K subscribers), /r/Crossdress_Expression (55K subscribers), /r/girlschool (37K subscribers), /r/asiansissification (184K subscribers), /r/SissificationProject (215K subscribers), /r/genderotica (52K subscribers), /r/sissydressing (226K subscribers), /r/SissyHeaven (143K subscribets), /r/gendertransformation (73K subscribers), /r/ForcedFeminization (476K subscribers), /r/Feminization (409K subscribers), /r/Sissies (970K subscribers), /r/Sissy (260K subsctibers), /r/sissyplace (286K subscribers), /r/sissyhypno (464K subscribers), /r/sissyology (133K subscribers), /r/TGandSissyRecovery (16K subscribers), /r/askAGP (5K subsctibers), /r/Transmedical (10K subscribers), and /r/truscum (32K subscribers).
+I don't think this is merely a theoretical concern. In [a critique of the paper](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2025/01/24/hsu-and-morandinis-fraudulent-autogynephilia-study/), (former SEXNET subscriber) Carl "Tailcalled" Dybahl links to [Hsu's Reddit profile history](https://www.reddit.com/user/kevinjhsu/submitted/), consisting of submissions of the survey to /r/Crossdressing_support (20K subscribers), /r/CrossDressRealism (28K subscribers), /r/Crossdress_Expression (55K subscribers), /r/girlschool (37K subscribers), /r/asiansissification (184K subscribers), /r/SissificationProject (215K subscribers), /r/genderotica (52K subscribers), /r/sissydressing (226K subscribers), /r/SissyHeaven (143K subscribets), /r/gendertransformation (73K subscribers), /r/ForcedFeminization (476K subscribers), /r/Feminization (409K subscribers), /r/Sissies (970K subscribers), /r/Sissy (260K subsctibers), /r/sissyplace (286K subscribers), /r/sissyhypno (464K subscribers), /r/sissyology (133K subscribers), /r/TGandSissyRecovery (16K subscribers), /r/askAGP (5K subsctibers), /r/Transmedical (10K subscribers), and /r/truscum (32K subscribers).
That is, by my categorization, it looks like the Reddit advertisements were targeted at 3.8 million members of specifically sissy/forcefem communities, 103K crossdressers, 130K other autogynephiles (/r/genderotica, /r/gendertransformation, and /r/askAGP), and 42K transmedicalists.
Strikingly absent from this list are "mainstream" trans subreddits like /r/MtF (310K subscribers) and /r/transgender/ (170K subscribers). (I would imagine the authors likely tried posting there, but it got deleted by moderators idelogically opposed to the study of AGP?)
-This seems like a big problem! If the goal is to study male-ID'd crossdressers and transfeminine people to see whether they're "cut from the same cloth", but your recruitment channels focus heavily on groups _for sharing AGP erotica_ (and to a large extent the "sissy" subtype specifically), how do you know you're getting a representative sample of transfeminine people? You're probably not, right? If there _were_ a secret "third type" of MtF transsexual, or just [other causal factors besides AGP that influence the decision to transition (even if some amount of AGP is a necessary factor)](http://unremediatedgender.space/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/), this recruitment strategy would miss them: people like that might hang out on /r/MtF, but not /r/Sissies.
+This seems like a big problem! If the goal is to study transfeminine people and male-ID'd crossdressers to see whether they're "cut from the same cloth", but your recruitment channels focus heavily on groups _for sharing AGP erotica_ (and to a large extent the "sissy" subtype specifically), how do you know you're getting a representative sample of transfeminine people? You're probably not, right?
-This issue seems like it could severely limit the generalizability of the results, but the discussion of it in the paper seems inadequate. The "Limitations and Future Directions" section says (emphasis mine):
+I imagine that to some, this objection might seem overly nitpicky. You might think: look, we know from previous work (Blanchard 1988, Bailey 2003, Lawrence 2017, Smith et al. 2005, _et cetera ad infinitum_) that non-androphilic MtF transsexuals are AGP, so if we go to /r/genderotica and recruit a bunch of AGPs, and then take the ones who have transitioned, that's not going to introduce any serious sampling bias, because non-androphilic males who have transitioned but don't happen hang out on /r/genderotica are basically the same people. (As the authors say, "We find it implausible that any online sample of transfeminine individuals, especially from Western countries, would comprise a meaningful subset motivated by reasons other than autogynephilia.")
+
+I mean, maybe! But in the spirit of transparency, that assumption (that transfeminine people in AGP erotica-sharing interest groups are representative of transfeminine people in general) is something that that should be made explicit in the paper, so that readers who don't already share that assumption can think for themselves about how to interpret the results, rather than being stuck trusting the authors' interpretations.
+
+We do have some indications that recruitment method matters to some extent. In Bailey and Hsu 2022 ["How Autogynephilic Are Natal Females?"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bailey_hsu-how_autogynephilic_are_natal_females.pdf), Sample 1 was recruited from AGP erotica-sharing groups, whereas Sample 3 was recruited by asking people to take a survey about atypical sexual interests and filtering for males who answered Yes to whether they had ever wondered whether they might be transgender—and as one might have expected, Sample 1 had a significantly higher mean on the Core Autogynephilia Scale (7.00) than Sample 3 (4.27). Does that 7.00 vs. 4.27 difference matter? What does it mean?
+
+[...]
+
+In light of this, the discussion of sampling bias in the paper seems inadequate. The "Limitations and Future Directions" section says (emphasis mine):
> Because we wanted to maximize our sample sizes of male cross-dressers and transfeminine individuals as much as possible, our recruitment strategy involved indiscriminately posting advertisements to a wide range of Facebook groups, Reddit communities, Discord servers, and other websites or forums where they could be found and _where we also had access and permission to recruit_. Considering that this recruitment strategy was not likely to produce representative samples of male cross-dressers and transfeminine individuals, we acknowledge the possibility that any differences found between those two groups and control samples might be confounded by differences in recruitment strategy. _Those who visit online communities through Facebook, Reddit, and Discord might differ from those who complete studies on Prolific_ in ways that are unrelated to whether they are male cross-dressers, transfeminine, or cisgender.
To be fair, if it was difficult to recruit from "mainstream" trans groups (because people who are loyal to the trans-activist subculture consider the study of AGP to be a threat and refuse to take or share a survey administered by Michael Bailey's student), then that's not the authors' fault ... but whether the result generalizes beyond the surveyed population doesn't depend on whose fault it is! If MtFs as a group are _making themselves harder to study_ for political reasons, I think that's something that the paper needs to dicuss explicitly rather than ignoring, even if it's not usual for psychology papers as a genre.
I might want to write a blog post about this, but I thought I'd check with the authors and SEXNET first. Kevin, James, anyone—thoughts?
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff