Autistic Sunset

As noted before, gynephilic transmen are not only “butch” but somewhat “hypermasculine” in some respects. This shows up in being more likely to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum. We now have another study that confirms this observation and some other observations regarding transwomen as I will explore in this essay.

The new study is out of the UK, which will be an important point, so keep in mind given that we know that the UK, like the US, has a very “individualist” culture and that in such cultures, autogynephilic transwomen significantly out number homosexual transwomen. Thus, this data for transwomen is very, very likely ONLY from autogynephilic transwomen. I point this out because the data clearly shows that transwomen in the study are nearly identical to control men and very different than control women; that autogynephilic transwomen has been shown before by Jones, et al. as the data documents.

Group:               Men                  Women       FTM                 Non-Androphilic           Androphilic
.                                                                                                     MTF  N=129                   MTF N=69

Score (SD):       17.8 (6.8)        15.4 (5.7)     23.2 (9.1)         17.4 (7.4)                         15.0 (5.6)

In this new study, the trend that transmen have high Autistic Quotient scores compared to everyone else remains, and thus can be considered to have been replicated.

	n	AQ	SD	n	EQ	SD	n	SQ	SD
Control women	21	19.43	9.93	19	21.05	10.82	19	13.74	9.68
Transmen	32	25.88	10.25	30	16.87	10.03	29	22.66	9.28
Control men	18	18.11	7.61	18	20.83	10.00	18	18.94	6.82
Transwomen (AGP)	18	20.17	9.06	18	22.06	9.01	17	21.24	9.54

The table shows the data for the mean Autism Quotient (AQ), the Emotional Quotient (EQ), and the Systematizing Quotient (SQ) scores and their standard deviations from the new Hendriks, et al. study.

As well the AQ scores being substantially different, the EQ and SQ scores for transmen are different than control women, but only slightly higher than for both the control men and notably, the transwomen. At this point, it might be well to ask, “how different” by calculating Cohen’s d for some of these population differences. The difference between control men and the transmen for AQ is d = 0.86, a fairly large, but not super large difference. It certainly does show that transmen are as a population, likely to be “on the spectrum”. But more importantly, it shows that the brains of exclusively gynephilic (as all these subjects were) are masculinized, even hypermasculinized, as one would expect them to be.

The other interesting point is how different the control women and transwomen are in their Systematizing Quotient with d = 0.77, reasonably large effect size indicating that women and (likely to be autogynephilic) transwomen are very different in this regard. How different are they from control men? First note that their score for transwomen is even more “masculine” than control men with d = 0.28, small but detectable. Again, as with the Jones study, this shows that autogynephilic transwomen are NOT very different than control men in these important, sexually dimorphic phenomena, and thus NOT feminized, nor even hypomasculine.

Further Reading:

Autistic Sky

References:

Jones, et al, “Female-To-Male Transsexual People and Autistic Traits”, J. Autism Dev. Discord. DOI: 10.1007/s10803-011-1227-8

Hendriks, et al, “Autist Traits, Empathizing-Systematizing, and Gender Diversity”, Archives of Sexual Behavior (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02251-x

Advertisement