Phenomena and Theory…

…or how to confuse fact and fiction

One of the things that drives me nuts in trying to have a conversation with anyone on the topic of the two type taxonomy of transsexual etiology is those who oppose it confuse theory and phenomena, often trying to paint the presentation of autogynephilia, which is an observable phenomena, as “merely a theory”.  This reminds me greatly of the tactic of Creationists, to paint the observable phenomena, “evolution” as “only a theory”!  Seriously, one first observes phenomena, then develops a theory that places this phenomena into a greater picture of how it operates and interrelates to other observed phenomena.

For example, we observe that all mass objects here on earth “fall down”.  We observe that big objects in space orbit each other.  Two phenomena, one theory, gravity.  Through much observation, testing, calculation, etc.  Newton developed his “Universal Theory of Gravity” which stated that all masses attract all other masses proportionally to their masses and inversely proportionally to the square of their distances.  The theory has a predictive power.  This is an important point of science.  A theory should have both the ability to explain the already observed phenomena and to predict other, potentially as yet, unobserved phenomena, so that we can test this theory.  In the case of Newton’s gravity, that seemed to pass all tests until the early 20th Century when the orbit of Mercury didn’t agree perfectly… but a new theory of gravity, called “General Relativity” proposed by Albert Einstein, did explain all previously observed phenomena, including the issue of the orbit of Mercury.  Plus, it made a rather startling new prediction, one that could only be observed when a solar eclipse was observed, that the light of distant stars would be bent by the intense gravity found near the surface of the sun.  This was observed, and General Relativity became the new and improved theory to understand how gravity behaved.

So, back to autogynephilia.  This is an observed phenomena.  NOT a theory.  I’ve already explained how one hypothesis has met several tests… that there are two types of transsexuals who have been shown statistically to have certain common traits with-in each type and two correlated and mutually exclusive traits.  As a reminder, those traits that correlate are gynephilia and autogynephilia.  The traits that are anti-correlated are exclusive androphilia and autogynephilia.

This correlation leads to proposing another hypothesis, namely, that for autogynephilia to exist, there must be an underlying gynephilia.  For someone who is androphilic, there is no existing gynephilia to lead to autogynephilia.  The data would support this hypothesis extremely well.  In fact, as I have shown in my earlier post, analyzing Leavitt and Berger’s study, that correlation is very, very high… perhaps showing an effect size that is higher than many experimental results in psychology that are accepted and not considered in any way controversial.  Just to remind ourselves just how strong the effect size is, let’s revisit the data, looking at only the issue of reported autogynephilia and a history of sex with females:

AGP:         6.7%         33.3%          50%

Sex w/f:  0%            33.3%         58%

This data, as all real data sets, is expected to have some “noise” in it.  That is, real human lives are messy.  We all have things that make us a little different than anybody else in the world.  But, this data set is amazing in that the groupings were made on an entirely different basis, yet we discover, that the more transsexuals that are in a group that have had sex with women, the more that group will have transsexuals that also report being autogynephilic.  Further, the ratio, from the data, is nearly one to one.  Again, given the noise, and the relatively small number of subjects  (n=81), this is an amazingly strong correlation.  I feel perfectly confident that we can now create the “formula” that for a transsexual to be AGP, they must also have gynephilia.  As I already pointed out in my earlier post, another hypothesis is that for a gynephilic male to be “transsexual”, that male must also be autogynephilic.

So, that’s a testable and now tested hypothesis.  But not quite a theory.  The theory which has been developed is that autogynephilia is related to another phenomena in a theory called “Erotic Target Location Error”.  Although, perhaps the word “error” is both unnecessary and potentially judgmental.  I would have suggested “auto-mapped”, that is that the erotic target is mapped back onto the self, which is both accurate, descriptive, and free of pre-judgment.  So, how does this larger theory fit?

The theory of Erotic Target Location Error states that there is an independent dimension to erotic desire in which for each erotic target that is observed in the human population, there will be those minority of people who will remap that erotic target back onto themselves.  That is, if there are men that are attracted to women, there will be a small minority of them that remap that image onto themselves, i.e., exhibit autogynephilic arousal.  That also means that if one is attracted to something as esoteric as amputees, there will be a smaller group who will also remap that onto themselves, and exhibit the erotic desire to appear to be, or actually be, amputees.  This is in fact observed.

Shown below is a table of a few possible erotic targets and their associated Erotic Target Location Error  behaviors:

So, according to this theory, we can explain the appearance of apotemnophilia, the erotic desire to become an amputee.  It also explains the appearance of pedovestism (erotically dressing as children), and the erotic desire to surgically alter one’s appearance to more closely approximate that of a child’s (Michael Jackson comes to mind).  It also predicts the appearance of autoandrophilia in men.  This last one was suggested as possibly being found in body-building gay men, but it would be difficult to detect and differentiate from simple desire to better one’s sexual appeal to other gay men.  However, Lawrence has found an example and published his case history:

Lawrence, A. A. (2009). Anatomic autoandrophilia in an adult male. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38, 1050-1056.

This theory also predicts the existence of autoandrophilia in female bodied people.  It has been noted that female bodied people are much less likely to show any sort of “other” sexuality, when compared to male bodied people.  However, in large numbers, we should be able to find examples… and in fact we do.  There have been any number of documented cases of female transvestism, erotic cross-dressing in very masculine clothing.  There is also the interesting phenomena of “transfags”, Female-to-Male (FtM) transsexuals who are primarily interested in men.  Although considerably less numerous than gynephilic MtF TS, they do exist.  Further, studies show that they, in an exact mirror parallel with their autogynephilic MTF counter-parts, show greater femininity in childhood than their gynephilic FtM compatriots, etc.

On a personal note, I have personally met and conversed with over a dozen such autoandrophilic FtM transsexuals since first encountering one in 1977.  Although the plural of anecdote is not data, these conversations have convinced me that they are indeed the mirror of the far more common AGP MTF transsexual.  And in the case of two of them, in a conversation in 1996, in company with a masculine gynephilic FtM,  independently noted the similarity of themselves to AGP MTFs, and the similarity of the gynephilic FtM and myself, using the terms, “early” vs. “late” transitioning, how refreshingly honest and insightful, compared to today’s near universal denial found in the AGP TS community.

Further Reading:

Essay on Apotemnophilia and Autogynephilia Co-morbidity

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/11/heres-a-new-discovery-about-pedophiles.html