Blanchard debunked: Surveys show that all kinds of people experience "autogynephilia"

 

Online surveys show that gender embodiment fantasies (called "autogynephilia" and "autoandrophilia" by transphobic researchers) are common among all groups of people: transgender and non-transgender, men, women and those nonbinary.

Anyone who follows the intense anti-trans propaganda of the day, will have made note of the way the "autogynephilia" theory is used to invalidate transgender women and other gender variant people. "Gender critical" TERFs love the theory, as it allows them to present trans women as perverted predators. 

The theory has been falsified and dismissed over and over again, both by scientists and those that truly know something about being trans: transgender people. The tactic of the theory's supporters is often to confuse and obfuscate, or they double down on the analytical basis for the theory, ignoring the fact that it is this world view that has been falsified. Moreover, there is always a small detail somewhere you can use to confuse readers that do not know the topic well, or you can simply lie. 

In this post I am going to present data from several online surveys, some of them quite extensive, that have not been part of the academic discussions about the "autogynephilia" concept, but which nevertheless provide a rich amount of data about gender, gender variance and sexualities.  

They document that erotic crossdreaming (as in imagining yourself being the "other" gender relative to the one assigned at birth) are quite common in all relevant groups of people, straight and gay, women and men, transgender and those that are not trans. The fact that such fantasies are so common, destroys the credibility of the "autogynephilia" theory, which states that only male assigned people who are attracted to women can have such fantasies.

And what is truly interesting is that these surveys look at erotic crossdreaming as part of a much broader phenomenon: Embodiment fantasies in general, where people get turned on by the idea of having a body of any gender, including the one they identify as. This proves that the erotic cross-gender fantasies found in some trans women and other MTF (male to female) gender variant people represent a subcategory of a common human trait.

Crossdresser, Transgender, Bigender: In Search of an Explanation

A gender variant person explores their gender identity, their sexuality and what has made them who they are, with a special emphasis on being bigender.

By Guest Author Jemimah/Jeremy

Recently I bought my first reasonably lifelike wig. This, together with some good concealer I bought a little earlier, are my first steps towards creating an ‘en femme’ persona which is not laughable. Good – but is it taking me into a different world.

Two or three years ago, when I first realised that I was at least attracted by the idea of crossdressing, I wrote a rather wild note entitled ‘why me, why now’.

I now feel the need to do something more rational and try to work over the ideas which relate to where I am – which I think for the moment is bigender. Lots of wandering the web and reading books has provided lots of theories and opinions and probably most of it is covered somewhere on the Crossdreamers web site but I wanted to work it out myself.

Brain types

Also I wanted my understanding to be based on academic, or at least unemotional, sources.

Looking for students and scientists who want to study transgender issues

Dr. Jaimie Veale is looking for students and researchers who would be interested in studying transgender  issues.

Jaimie Veale

Dr. Jaimie Veale has done some extremely important research in transgender people, documenting, for instance, a diversity and a complexity that goes far beyond the traditional dichotomies between two types of male to female transgender people.

In this context she has delivered compelling evidence that undermines the so-called "autogynephilia" theory of Dr. Ray Blanchard of Toronto, a theory that effectively reduces transgender identities to paraphilias.

I have presented some of her research here  and here, and you can find more material over at her own web site.

Having spent some time in British Columbia, Jaimie is now back in New Zealand, in a faculty position at the School of Psychology at the University of Waikato.

In time Jaimie hopes to be able to build up a team of researchers interested in everything transgender (crossdreaming included). If you are interested in this kind of research, and would even like to contribute yourself, do not hesitate to contact her. She may even supervise students from a distance.

New Study Dismisses the Autogynephilia Approach to Transgender Experience

Are there really two types of transgender people, or are there only different blends of characters and personality traits? This may seem like a purely academic question, but the answer has actually strong repercussions for how people look at both crossdreamers and transsexuals.

Different but the same
Illustration photo by Tomwang112/thinkstock.

In a new paper, Dr. Jaimie F. Veale, brings new evidence that the various shades of male to female transgender are indeed variants of something related, and not two distinct categories.

The two types of trans women

One common idea regarding male bodied transgender people (including transsexual women) is that there are two distinct types.

Since most of this research is on transsexual women the types are often referred to as late onset and early onset, referring to when they used to go to the heath system to get help transitioning.

Both health personnel and researchers noticed early on that the ones transitioning late in life where more likely to be sexually attracted to women, while the early onset were more likely to be attracted to men.

Since all healthy women were supposed to be attracted to men, the early onset ones soon became the model for the perfect transsexual woman. Indeed, as some transsexual women scrambled to get access to the group of real women, the two categories became more than practical descriptive categories used to discuss the different variations of transgender. Now they were referring to tow distinct phenomena, with completely different causes, an A team and a B team.

Are the differences categorical or dimensional?

In her new paper on Dr. Ray Blanchard's variant of the two type typology, Dr. Jaimie F. Veale refers to this as the difference between what she calls categorical constructs (as in the difference between cats and dogs) and dimensional constructs  (as in the difference between black and white cats). A categorical difference is one of either/or, while a dimensional difference refers to a continuum.

The Massey University Study of Transgender People

When the gender shoe does not fit (photos.com)

In my post Jaimie Veale's study of gender variant people throw new light upon crossdreamers I presented the high lights from one of the most important new studies of gender variant people. In this post I give a more in depth assessment of the findings.

The study

What makes the underlying study  from Masset University of New Zealand and her Ph.D: thesis much more reliable than similar research, is the number of respondents.

Ray Blanchard, who coined the term "autogynephilia", used the database of the Clarke Institute in Toronto for his studies of transsexuals. His ""Heterosexual and Homosexal Gender Dysphoria" paper of 1987, for instance, refers to a selection of 197 respondents, all of them patients at the university clinic.

Veale, on the other hand, is working on a sample of 2277 respondent, gender variant and gender typical, recruited via the internet.

There is still a bias towards white, "western", respondents, but she manages to cover a much wider group of gender variant people, also people who have not and will not seek out gender therapists.

In other words: Veale does to a much larger degree include non-transsexual transgender and crossdreamer people.

Gender Variant

Veale defines gender variant as "a subjective sense of not belonging  completely to the gender of one's birth-assigned sex." 

Note the word "completely". The term gender-variance is used to refer to the behavioral expression of this  identity which could range from occasionally dressing as one's identified gender to  living full-time in this gender. 

She has deliberately chosen to look into biological, psychological and cultural factors that other researchers have argued may influence the development of gender identity.

She explains this in this way:

"Previous research has found that genetics, prenatal hormone exposure, neuroanatomy, handedness and dermatoglyphics  [studies of fingerprints] (proposed to be related to susceptibility to developmental disturbances), fraternal birth order, and abuse are related to gender identity. While a number of investigators have studied these variables individually, the present study is the first know research to examine the inter-relationships between these variables." (p. 2).

Her point is that variations in gender identity and the intensity of alternative gender experiences may be the end result of an interaction between various factors -- genetic, hormonal, psychological and cultural. Moreover one variable might "hide" another influential cause of gender variance.

How to intepret results

When one read studies like this one, it is extremely important to keep in mind that she is writing about statistical aggregates, and not absolutes that apply to all people of a certain category.

Jaimie Veale's study of gender variant people throw new light upon crossdreamers

Jaimie Veale believes in the diversity of
humanity (photo from Photos.com)

Extensive study confirms spectrum of gender variance and debunks the autogynephilia theory.

Jaimie Veale is a New Zealand scientist who has spent quite some time on understanding transgender and transsexual conditions, including what I call crossdreamers.

I 2011 she published her doctoral thesis on gender variant identities, a follow up on earlier work that had also discussed Blanchard's autogynephilia theory about birth assigned males who get aroused by the idea of having a woman's body.

In her Master thesis from 2005 she warned strongly against Blanchard's idea of dividing male to female transsexuals into two distinct groups ("autogynephiles" who are attracted to women on the one hand and "homosexual transsexuals" who are attracted to men on the other.).

Her own research supported a model with a wide diversity of gender identity and gender expressions, all with some kind of common core.

Her doctoral thesis efficiently debunks the whole model of Blanchard's. She finds none of the patterns he has projected upon the transgender populations. The sexual orientation of transsexual women (or transgender male bodied persons in general) cannot be used to sort them into two distinct groups with different origins.

Her study is based on a a survey of  of 2277 respondent, gender variant and gender typical, recruited via the internet. This makes it, to my knowledge, the largest survey of this kind, and the fact that she has included non-transsexual transgender persons as well, makes it much more reliable as a source of knowledge about crossdreamers.

By the way, the survey covers both female bodied and male bodied respondents. Later on, I will see if we can use the survey to learn more about female to male crossdreamers.