No, Women Are NOT Autogynephilic!

For at least two decades, transwomen have been attempting to confuse the issue of the role of autogynephilia in the etiology of non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuality / gender dysphoria. Some have simply stated that it doesn’t exist. Other try to say that it only exists in transvestites, never in transsexuals. Yet other’s don’t deny it exists, but insist that it is not a unique paraphilia, but actually part and parcel with being women. That being autogynephilic proves that they are just like natal females because natal females are normally autogynephilic. A popular means of invoking this confusion is to deliberately misdescribe the phenomena as “female embodiment fantasy” insisting that women also experience such, as in their erotic imaginings they correctly relate that of course, being natally female, they see themselves as female.

This has been shown to be a clever semantic trick, invoking a classic cognitive error, in which one confuses the map for the territory. The words may be similar, but the concepts behind them are not. Autogynephiles deliberately imagine themselves as female because that is sexually arousing in and of itself. Natal women see themselves as female because they are only incidentally female. Natal women do not become sexually aroused to imagining, or contemplating their own femaleness.

Still, pointing this out has not been enough. The confusion sown by this silly insistence that natal women are also autogynephilic persists. Some have even tried to create “proof” that this is so by creating / editing instruments that bear only a passing resemblance to instruments developed to actually measure autogynephilia, questionnaires that have been carefully crafted to create positives that their crafters falsely declare is proof that natal women are also autogynephilic, and thus, non-androphilic transwomen are just like natal female women in their sexuality.

But now we have a study that is NOT gamed. Instead of creating such bogus instruments, Bailey and Hsu used Blanchard’s original. (The instrument is comprised of eight statements that one either agrees with or not and the score is found by simple counting those which received an agreement. That is to say, all items are equally weighted. Thus, the score may vary between zero and eight.) Further, in the study they validated that it can differentiate autogynephilic males from non-autogynephilic males, at the population level, an important step in showing that it can be used to determine if natal female woman look more like one group or the other, on a population level.

A comment here is needed. No instrument that asks people to be honest about such a sensitive topic as their innermost sexual longings has ever been devised that is 100% perfect at diagnosing individuals. People misinterpret the items. The items don’t perfectly match their experiences (even if they are similar and experience the underlying construct being measured). And because of Social Desirability Bias, some don’t answer fully honestly. And some just never answer honestly no matter what the question. But in research like this, we are able to use statistics looking at population responses to tease out the underlying truth. (Don’t try to quibble on this matter, we all know this is true.)

So, turning to Bailey and Hsu’s recent study, from the abstract,

“We compared four samples of autogynephilic natal males (N = 1549), four samples of non-autogynephilic natal males (N = 1339), and two samples of natal females (N = 500), using Blanchard’s original measure: the Core Autogynephilia Scale. The autogynephilic samples had much higher mean scores compared with non-autogynephilic natal males and natal females, who were similar. Our findings refute the contention that autogynephilia is common among natal females.”

Looking at a graph of the data, we can visually see just how different that the known autogynephilic sample groups scored than both the known non-autogynephilic males and natal female women. And how similar such women are to known non-autogynephilic men.

As well as looking at the graphs, we can also perform statistical analysis such as the Effect Size, a key measure of the difference between two populations: Cohen’s d. I chose Sample 4 to compare against Sample 9, a large known autogynephilic sample to a large natal female sample and calculated that Cohen’s d = 2.8, a HUGE effect size (anything over 1.0 is considered large, and with such ample sample subjects, statistically very trustworthy). Conversely, comparing Sample 7, known non-autogynephilic males to Sample 9; d = 0.04, almost zero, essentially no statistical difference!

There can be absolutely no honest denial of the data and the natural conclusion. Natal female women are simply NOT autogynephilic.

Further Reading:

Autogynephilia Explained

Disingenuous Attempt To “Prove” Natal Female Women are Autogynephilic

Why “Female Embodiment Fantasy” Is Bogus

Reference:

Bailey, J.M., Hsu, K.J., “How Autogynephilic Are Natal Females”, Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8

Bailey, J.M., Hsu, K.J., “Autogynephilia and Science: A Response to Moser and and Serano, and Veale”, Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-022-02482-6

Lack of In Utero & Perinatal Testosterone Exposure Leads to Childhood Gender Atypicality in Males

In a sad “experiment of nature” in which phenotypically normal appearing males are unable to produce gonadotropin, essentially naturally duplicating the effect of puberty blockers, but experiencing this lack since the beginning of the second trimester in the womb. Most importantly, these males do not experience the so called, “mini-puberty” that occurs perinatally, the time just before birth and the first three months after birth.

Given that we have already seen data from a proxy measure of the level of testosterone production and exposure during this developmentally critical period correlates with later childhood gender typicality / atypicality, (Pasterski 2015) we would predict that these individuals would also report having been more gender atypical than control men. That is exactly what we see in the recently published study by Shirazi, et al. This was especially true of those who had cryptochordia (undescended testicle) at birth, indicating even lower T production in utero. Thus, indicating that T exposure before the birth is also important for brain masculinization.

Demographic Statistics Variable Control (n = 463) IGD-clinical (n = 30) IGD-Web (n = 35)
Mean childhood gender atypicality –0.04 (0.33) 0.24 (0.44) 0.34 (0.59)

Mean sexual orientation (Kinsey 0-6) 0.25 (0.94) 0.31 (0.71) 0.94 (1.48)

Interestingly, the effect sizes were not as large as one might expect. To me, this suggests that fetal gonadotropin levels alone may not truly indicate just how much T is being produced given that the fetal adrenal glands are unaffected. Alternatively, it may be that there are Y chromosome canalization effects that we haven’t discovered and accounted for.

It is odd that given that the earlier Pasterski study concerns the same exact subject, and comes to the same conclusion, it wasn’t referenced by Shirazi.

Further Reading:

Essay on Effect of Mini-Puberty on Childhood Gendered Behavior in Boys

References:

Shirazi, et al., “Low Perinatal Androgens Predict Recalled Childhood Gender Non-Conformity in Men”, Psychological Science (2022) https://doi.org/10.1177%2F09567976211036075

Pasterski, V., et al., “Postnatal penile growth concurrent with mini-puberty predicts later sex-typed play behavior: Evidence for neurobehavioral effects of the postnatal androgen surge in typically developing boys”, Hormones and Behavior (2015)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X15000033#f0005