Autogynephilia Revisited

In my previous blog posts and books, I have dismissed autogynephilia as a psychiatric, non-scientific idea about transgender people who were originally determined to be male at birth. I have not changed my opinion, the idea does not qualify as a scientific theory, nor does the evidence cited by proponents adequately support it. But there is something going on here because some transgender people that I have talked to find the idea appealing or at least do not reject it.

Being the hard nose scientist that I try to be, I have pointed out that the definition of this supposed “theory” has taken many forms which range from the idea that it involves falling in love with oneself as a woman to a fetish and a paraphilia. Science suspects that love and affiliation might be mediated by the hormone oxytocin or other hormones. We also know that the object of sexual arousal is learned. Well, which is it — love based on hormone release or learned sexual arousal, or both, or something else? The definition has changed so many times without any rationale for the changes that it is impossible to know what the proponents are talking about. Science is a way of knowing that requires clear definition of any theory and the capability to operationalize or make the theory concrete enough to make predictions and to study it. It is okay that a given theory is overturned by evidence and replaced by another. That is a strength of the normal scientific process. But this is not the case with autogynephilia. It has no clear definition and is not science.

One might deduce what the proponents of autogynephilia are talking about from the experimental evidence that they cite. But there is only one objective study and it involves studying sexual arousal using a penile volume measurement device (phaloplethysmograph). Subjects were strapped in and shown various visual stimuli of women and other things. And low and behold, trans women responded with arousal to women, just like many other people who went through male puberty. This experimental technique has been shown to be unreliable, principally because the measuring device can by itself be arousing, and the experimenter has no control over what the subject is really paying attention. Instead of, say, attending to a presented image of a woman in order to induce love, the subject could well be thinking about some sexually meaningful detail of the image that triggers arousal, or about whether they will have chicken or steak for dinner. The experimenter simply does not have control over the actual test stimulus. The experiment design leads one to believe that autogynephilia is meant to be a fetish or paraphilia which refers to sexual arousal to unusual objects. And it has previously been classed in the DSM with BDSM and sexual arousal due to pornography.

The man who created autogynephillia, Dr. Ray Blanchard.

Enough of scientific definitions and rigor. The question is why is autogynephilia appealing to some trans women? I can only provide a few hypotheses.

First, some trans women undoubtedly find relief that they do not fit into the postulated alternative category to autogynephilia which is known as “childhood onset gender dysphoria” or the sissyboy syndrome. Children in this category are known as pre-homosexual children and their adult outcomes are overwhelmingly homosexuality (attraction to males). These children behave in a totally different manner than transgender children do. They are described as “hypersexual” and frequently seek sex with other children. (No wonder parents sent them to a clinic). Transgender children usually present as preoccupied with gender and are typically withdrawn.

Pre-homosexual children are not transgender and, in fact, the clinicians know full well that they are not. They make no bones about it in their publications. These children are coded as transgender because in 1972, the DSM code for being homosexual was deleted. The clinicians needed a code to pay the bills for treating these children, so they used a convenient transgender code which they eventually reworded to cover pre-homosexual kids. Whether this practice was ethical, I will leave to others, but it continues to mess up our understanding of transgender children and their outcomes. Bending the rules of coding are not unusual. I have never received any code for being transgender from any mental health professional, yet I have been to several. They used different codes — “usually mixed anxiety and depression” in order to preserve my privacy. And there was enough to be anxious and depressed about, still being in the closet. The proponents of autogynephilia maintain that being transgender disappears automatically with age based mostly on studies of pre-homosexual children who, of course, become homosexual and not transgender as adults. Seems like real transgender kids have only come into the clinic in recent years. There is one recent study which seems to involve correct diagnosis of transgender children. It indicated that children remained transgender at least through early adulthood.

The next reason that autogynephilia may appeal to transgender males is that the proponents of autogynephilia indicate that it emerges clinically in later life. This is certainly true for many transgender people who have been in the closet for decades. The point here is that many adult transgender people were practicing transgender behavior in secret long before they came out. I started when I was 4 and there are plenty of studies which say that I was not unique in that respect. Late emergence to providers does not mean that the behavior was not there all along. We have seen a recent upsurge of the numbers of declared transgender people both here and in Europe. This is undoubtedly due to the backlog of transgender people living in secrecy who now are coming out because cultural rejection has lessened. Today, many trans kids are coming out at earlier ages because and avoiding the stress of secrecy. Their existence is a challenge to the definitions of autogynephilia/sissyboy, so the proponents have attempted to publicly diagnose prominent   (e.g. Jazz) as pre-homosexuals without ever examining them. This type of remote psychiatry is condemned by the ethical code of the American Psychiatric Association.

The next reason that the idea of autogynephilia may appeal to transgender people is that most transpeople experience sexual arousal when they first crossdress. This fits with transgender experience, so that may be the reason for the appeal. Sexual arousal is nothing to be ashamed of because sexual arousal is obviously normal and is learned. The learning process is similar to Classical Conditioning, also known as Pavlovian conditioning in which stimuli come to trigger sexual arousal when paired with sexual arousal from other sources.  Older transgender males just have a longer opportunity to learn, having gone through puberty in which sexual arousal is rampant and occurs spontaneously. It is an ideal time to learn sexual arousal to objects and people. We also know that strong stimuli are more easily associated with sexual arousal and females in Western culture currently seem to have grabbed most of the strong stimuli available. But sexual arousal can go away or extinguish with exposure and most transgender people report that they continue transgender behavior, not because of sexual arousal, but because of authenticity and relaxation. This brings me to my last hypothesis.

Some, maybe most, trans women simply do not care about labeling their motivations or the details of whether their behavior is considered pathological. They just know that they enjoy being free to express transgender behavior and they do not care about how some stuffy psychiatrists or hatemongers make their livings. Most never go to see psychiatrists unless they want to transition and they can control the hatemongers with their TV remotes and computer mice — CLICK! While Western culture might reject and condemn transgender people for violating its gender system, there is a countervailing element of Western culture that argues that all people should be free to express themselves as long as they are not hurting others.  The proper role of government in all this is to protect people from harm or threat of harm, not to enforce the Western culture gender system.

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Tags: autogynephilia, featured, Identity, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul