Your intellectual dishonesty is showing again, here is the response you actually received which is a sound refutation of the claim you made:
Do you agree that 95% of women are homosexual because they are aroused by the thought of having sex with men?
I was referring to Rolfe's response as I generally don't spend much time on your posts.
No,
but they both would be androphilic, and it would be moronic to list that as a
metric of difference between them. The way Blanchard formulates his hypothesis this would have to be a an element of
difference between cis women and trans women, while the data shows almost the exact opposite.
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.
A proper control would have used cis gender men. A good diagnostic test is to compare to the results when applied to cis gender women, which isn't exactly a control.
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)
Check the links,
I just reposted them again.
There's nothing "no you" about my response to that post. There's a "no", however, but that isn't what you're talking about.
The comma is important.
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.
That's an extreme dichotomy you're presenting, and while it is a true one, it isn't very useful. Almost no one, for all contexts, says self-identity the ultimate. It is necessary but not sufficient in some contexts. In some contexts it's the only practical mechanism (because butch cis women and trans men exist, and even grabbing crotches might not be very accurate nor desirable in the bathroom queue). Switching contexts on the fly or expecting all details to be the same across all contexts is fatally simplistic. gender variance model
But even when the intent behind the Chopper invocation (great metal band name) isn't mean spirited, it shows a lack of understanding of what research has shown, not only about trans gender people, but about mental disorders. It's grouping them together in a way that simply isn't valid, and won't be because the best practices of addressing trans gender people and treating those chopper style mental disorders are not related. They don't spring from the same source. The kinds of accommodations suited to each of those groups are not going to be the same because of that.
It would be like being against putting in wheelchair ramps because some people identify as attack helicopters. Hell, it's worse because accommodations for trans gender people almost never mean construction of any sort.
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.
That is definitely not what Serano argues. There are a plethora of flaws in his research for one, and secondly, there are in fact some individual flaws that can be (and are) fatal to research.
People should really read a bit on this, but I'll give one major example; he uses an invalid set. The people in the research are not only not anonymous, they are all clients at a single clinic
who know their continued treatment was controlled by Blanchard himself.
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?
I suppose we shall see. It's my (admittedly limited) experience that Blanchard's theories are downright heterodox in most modern LGBTQIA+ spaces.
I don't believe the way Blanchard formulates autogynephilia in total is valid (not a thing), but he groups a lot of things and requirements together (remember that under his autogynephilia there are ONLY two kinds of trans women both motivated by a sexual desire, which is disproven by asexual trans women alone, and the age at which cross identification began). The aspect that is cross-gender arousal is certainly a thing.
But correlation is not causation, and he didn't even show correlation. His own data does not support him there. Cross gender arousal could indeed be
an effect of gender dysphoria (as supported by gender affirmation therapy decreasing the philia elements of cross gender arousal where the reverse is absolutely not true). It isn't the only source of cross gender arousal of course, but that just hits Blanchard's hypothesis more.
Evidently you don't travel in woke circles, wherein mention of autogynephilia is
questionable science at best, conversationally taboo at worst.
Happy to see ISF isn't the sort of place where this conversation gets shut down by a wave of public shaming, but I don't have enough time or expertise to tell whether Blanchard or his critics (e.g.
Charles Moser) happen to have the better supported argument. Come to think of it, I’m not sure whether it really matters, so long as people just keep it in their pants.
The problems with Blanchard's research alone should shame anyone supporting their reasoning with it. Again, people should really read the information, but he uses bad methodology, lacks appropriate controls, has sampling errors, had technical statistical analyses errors (he doesn't employ any tests of normality!), has multiplying hypotheses errors (his reasoning is circular, AGP causes X, X is a factor in causing AGP), poorly designed questions (not controlling for either age nor intensity),
the hypothesis as proposed is non-falsifiable. Gynephilic, bisexual and asexual trans women exist, which disproves his hypothesis, but the hypothesis deals with this by asserting they are delusional or lying. Even his own data debunks him, and he denies autoandrophilia even though he proposed it to the DSM himself (he didn't change his mind later; he made a self-confessed bad faith submission). His hypothesis lacks predictive power or treatment utility.
That is not to say absolutely all aspects and individual elements are completely wrong, but taken as a whole, it's not useful or true. He should be given credit for the attempt, it's a harsh field, but not for the hypothesis itself.