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Trans Women are not Women

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caveman1917 said:
If you (a woman) can have a sexual fantasy (either heterosexual or lesbian) in which you are the woman, then you are classified as autogynophilic by the author of that paper.
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Wanting to be what you are is not the same as wanting to be different than you are. You can't use women as a control group for men in that manner, it doesn't make sense. The significance behind autogynophilia simply doesn't apply to women. A proper analogue would be autophalophilia, which would apply to women and not men.
 
Ziggurat said:
Wanting to be what you are is not the same as wanting to be different than you are. You can't use women as a control group for men in that manner, it doesn't make sense. The significance behind autogynophilia simply doesn't apply to women. A proper analogue would be autophalophilia, which would apply to women and not men.
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Yes that is exactly my point, as I had already pointed out way back when tyr first made that post:
caveman1917 said:
That reference was the best laugh in a while. Of course women will get arousal from the thought of themselves as women because they are women. The equivalent definition for the paraphilia for women is not "are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a woman?" but "are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a man?" You can't just take a definition which was specifically designed for one sex (male transsexuals in this case) and apply it to the other sex without correcting for that. By your logic I can claim that 95% of women are homosexual:

Step 1: I restrict consideration to male persons, and state a definition for homosexuality appropriate for that group, namely "are you aroused by the thought of sex with a man?"

Step 2: I now apply that definition to the other sex without correcting for that, and ask a bunch of women "are you aroused by the thought of sex with a man?" I find almost all of them say "yes."

Step 3: Profit! I've just proven that most women are homosexual.
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Blanchard was specifically studying male transsexuals, so his questionaire was "Are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a woman?" Which the author of the paper tyr referenced then literally applied to women without correcting for that.
 
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tyr_13 said:
I think the above post has most of the primary points I've seen that are simply not consistent with current evidence
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Which evidence, exactly? What you posted in the first of those two posts? You mention criteria for being trans. What are they, if not merely self-identification (and forgive me for asking; in these conversations it might not be easy to keep track of each poster's claims or conclusions on this)
 
caveman1917 said:
What does lesbian porn have to do with this? The question is: Are you aroused by the thought of yourself as a woman?
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And I'm saying that for me at least, the answer is yes. And yet I do not have gender dysphoria.

I don't have to watch porn, btw, I just threw that out as an example. I can do it all in my head and imagine the whole thing. In the fantasy, I am a woman. That's pretty normal too.
 
Puppycow said:
And I'm saying that for me at least, the answer is yes. And yet I do not have gender dysphoria.

I don't have to watch porn, btw, I just threw that out as an example. I can do it all in my head and imagine the whole thing. In the fantasy, I am a woman. That's pretty normal too.
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Exactly, it's pretty normal for a woman to imagine herself as a woman in sexual fantasies and that has nothing to do with gender dysphoria. Just like it is pretty normal for a man to imagine himself as a man in sexual fantasies. So Blanchard's point stands and the paper tyr referenced to refute it is literal nonsense.
 
caveman1917 said:
Exactly, it's pretty normal for a woman to imagine herself as a woman in sexual fantasies and that has nothing to do with gender dysphoria. Just like it is pretty normal for a man to imagine himself as a man in sexual fantasies. So Blanchard's point stands and the paper tyr referenced to refute it is literal nonsense.
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I'm a man though. Did you think I was a woman? Maybe I should have mentioned that. I thought it was known, or should be clear from the context, but apparently not.
 
Puppycow said:
I'm a man though. Did you think I was a woman? Maybe I should have mentioned that. I thought it was known, or should be clear from the context, but apparently not.
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Oh, apologies, I thought you were a woman because you used yourself as an example in the discussion about that paper over whether women can be autogynophilic - I must have misunderstood the context there.

But now I understand what you meant, that because you can imagine yourself as a woman in a lesbian sexual fantasy it doesn't mean you have gender dysphoria. That would of course be true but not of much relevance because it's not clinical and the study and theory is regarding the clinical population of people with gender dysphoria. I sometimes swear but it doesn't mean I have Tourette's, I sometimes sleep badly but it doesn't mean I have insomnia, I may at some point wrongly think someone has it in for me but that doesn't mean I have paranoid schizophrenia, etc. It's perfectly normal for the general population to have low-degree similarities with clinical populations, what matters is more the degree to which symptoms appear than a binary "they exist or don't exist."
 
Autogynaephilia doesn't always progress to the point of the man wanting to change sex. Many never go further than cross-dressing in private.
 
tyr_13 said:
Oh, the above links don't address the 'well I identify as Napoleon!' refrain that displays, at this point, a willful ignorance of trans gender mental health.
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I'm not a massive fan of the "Hardy har I identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter" stuff either, (too mean spirited for my taste) but there is a reason this sort of thing keeps popping up in this discussion, because "Because they say so, stop asking questions" keeps being the only level we get any explanation of what exactly people who "identify" as another gender are actually saying.

Either self identity is ultimate and unquestionable or it isn't. A simple statement of "I understand and believe them when they say 'I feel like I'm an man or woman' without literally agreeing with them that that statement changes reality" has to at least be something we can put on the table without getting shouted down as bigots.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
I'm not a massive fan of the "Hardy har I identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter" stuff either, (too mean spirited for my taste) but there is a reason this sort of thing keeps popping up in this discussion, because "Because they say so, stop asking questions" keeps being the only level we get any explanation of what exactly people who "identify" as another gender are actually saying.

Either self identity is ultimate and unquestionable or it isn't. A simple statement of "I understand and believe them when they say 'I feel like I'm an man or woman' without literally agreeing with them that that statement changes reality" has to at least be something we can put on the table without getting shouted down as bigots.
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Exactly. The way I see the Apache Attack Helicopter meme is not, at least in the context of this thread, to belittle trans people or to deny their existence, but to point out that mere self-identification is not enough to overturn something that has, throughout all of our history, been determined objectively and externally. Having a belief about one's characteristic does not make that characteristic objectively true.
 
caveman1917 said:
Exactly, it's pretty normal for a woman to imagine herself as a woman in sexual fantasies and that has nothing to do with gender dysphoria. Just like it is pretty normal for a man to imagine himself as a man in sexual fantasies. So Blanchard's point stands and the paper tyr referenced to refute it is literal nonsense.
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I actually missed that paper. You are right. It is ridiculous.

I read through one of the other papers Tyr cited, the one by Serano, and that one is not ridiculous. I think it has some legitimate criticism of Blanchard's work, but it also has some issues. Unfortunately, I never managed to find the right combination of time and interest to really try and analyze what it said. My reading of it was superficial. The thing that struck me about it was that it seemed to kind of misrepresented Blanchard's work, and seemed to say that if there were any flaws at all, Blanchard's work could be discounted. Blanchard was working in the late 1980s. I would be amazed if anyone of that era managed to get everything 100% correct.


My own take is that autogynephilia is certainly a thing. There's no doubt about it. Serano even acknowledges it by subdividing what Blanchard called autogynephilia into two different phenomena, and labelling one of them as cross-gender arousal, and noting that no one would deny the existence of that phenomenon.


I think the real controversy is about the extent to which these autogynephilic fantasies contribute to a desire to change genders in late onset transgender individuals. Perhaps I will take another crack at that paper and see if I can make sense of Serano's criticisms.

As an amateur, it just seems to me that if a lot of people experience cross gender arousal, wouldn't at least a handful of them decide to take it to the extreme?
 
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Yes, I think that's the point. Nobody denies that autogynaephilia exists. Blanchard coined the term, but only to replace an earlier term he thought was a bit demeaning or needlessly negative. Automono-something-or-other. Plenty men achnowledge that they have it. Plenty transwomen acknowledge that this is at the root of their drive to become women. Many, many women have distressing accounts of their partner's autogynaephilia.

The apparently contentious part of Blanchard's hypothesis - which as Myriad said, dates back to the 1980s and would not be expected to be complete and immune from modification - is that almost all MtF trans people fit into one of two categories, of which AGP is one. There seems to be little or no controversy over the other category, homosexual transsexuals, who are very effeminate homosexual males who usually grew up as very effeminate little boys. It's the other category, the men who grew up as boyish boys but some time after puberty - sometimes a very long time after puberty, also after marriage and children and a masculine career, often in the armed forces - decide to transition, which is contentious.

Some of these men are autgynaephiles, without any doubt. Blanchard, who spent a career studying this, says he can count on the fingers of one hand the number of post-puberty-presenting trans-identifying males he has encountered who are not autogynaephiles. (He also says there's a lot of denial going on in many of these patients.) The question seems to be, is he wrong about that? Is there another, substantial, group of trans-identifying men who are neither HSTS nor AGP?

Blanchard, although retired, still keeps up with his subject and still maintains that he has seen no credible evidence to that effect. The trans activist lobby disagrees, and has put considerable effort into trying to discredit Blanchard. However, their efforts are propaganda and not science. They concentrate on trying to deny that AGP is a thing, or that it's involved in trans-identifying behaviour at all. What they have never done is to present credible evidence for the existence of this third group, and a scientific hypothesis about what's going on psychologically if it's not AGP.
 
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Basically I think the question is does every new variation require an entire new identity, or what "identity" even means outside of anything it's... ya know identifying.

But again until we get something, anything beyond "Shut up and just nod your head at what ever they say" we can't take this discussion anywhere.
 
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