It’s Just Not Fair!
That’s what I heard as a child and I learned deep down that it’s true. Life just isn’t fair.
For years now, I’ve seen news articles, blog posts, and internet fora discussions around the issue of transfolk and of course intersex folk and athletics. The word that keeps coming up, especially from those who oppose allowing them to participate in sports, is that it isn’t fair to women. But as I hope to convince my reader, sports and athletics have never been about what’s fair. And its not really about transfolk per se.
First, lets talk about “fair” and how life isn’t. When I was nine years old, my mother, a serious jock herself, decided to enroll my brothers and I in competitive swimming. We joined the Mountain View Dolphins coached by Mr. Tom Bottom. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you may have read that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were also on the Dolphins. But I mostly hung out with Patti Jobs, also on the team. I tried for months to get faster. But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t swim fast. Eventually, Coach Bottom told my mother that it was useless and I was asked to leave the team. I would never be an athlete. My heart was in it, but my heart wasn’t. Life just isn’t fair.
Yes, I know that sounds odd, but one has to understand, that my cardio-pulmonary system just couldn’t deliver. I had severe exercise induced asthma and poor heart-lung capacity. I also lacked overall muscle strength. I was poor at every sport. I was a short, skinny slip of a thing that couldn’t run, couldn’t throw, couldn’t bat. At school, I knew instantly which team I would be on the moment that they started to pick teams, since I would be picked dead last, after all of the girls (though two of the girls were near the top of the pick list many weren’t good at sports either). No one wanted me on their team and they made it very obvious, derisively so. Children can be cruel and some adults aren’t much better. Life just isn’t fair.
To make it even more cruel, my three siblings as well as my mother were good athletes. My father had been keen on sports as well, active until a heart condition forced him to cut back. My memories of family dinner table conversations are dominated with discussions of times and scores for swimming, volleyball and softball (our mother), gymnastics (my sister), water polo, and diving. While I sat silent, not participating, as I was just not an athlete. Life just isn’t fair.
The younger of my two brothers was a elite athlete. He was winning races since he was four years old. Eventually, he would compete in the Universiade and if Carter hadn’t insisted that we boycott the Olympics in Moscow, he would have competed there as well. That had been his burning ambition for years. He even had the number ’80 in big characters on his bedroom wall growing up. But… Life just isn’t fair.
Regardless of whether the above is true, opponents of transfolk, especially of MTF transwomen, competing in athletic events and sports, are right about a key fact. Men, on average, do have greater physical strength and cardio-pulmonary capacity ON AVERAGE. That is to say, that both men and women, boys and girls, vary in their natural athleticism on Gaussian curves that largely overlap but are offset from one another. I don’t have the data handy so I can’t list the effect sizes. But my point is that because of this offset, the elite men will beat the elite women, nearly every time, unless something about being female is privileged in a given event (e.g. figure skating advantages shorter, lighter women with a lower center of mass). One never hears complaints about transkids like me who lose at every event to all of the girls. We only hear complaints about transkids and adults who win at the elite level. And yes, statistically, we do expect that, especially for “late transitioners”, that at the elite level, transwomen will have the advantage of having a long history of higher testosterone exposure that begins to privilege males begining in utero. While HRT and SRS will reduce current levels of androgens and result is decreased muscle mass, it will not erase the advantage of earlier exposure, most especially upon cardio-pulmonary capacity. Life just isn’t fair.
Here is where I change the subject a bit and introduce a conjecture that I have long been exploring. I can’t really call it an hypothesis, since I don’t really know how to test it. I don’t believe that athletics and sports in general are about “fair” in the ethical sense because if it was, we wouldn’t be so freaked out about “doping”. I know, you think that makes no sense, but bear with me.
First, consider professional sports. At the deepest level, these are entertainment businesses, first and last. One would think that anything that increased the entertainment value would be encouraged. After all, action movies aren’t anything like real life, they are pure entertainment. So why does the fact that Barry
Bonds using medical advances to improve his performance on the field bother his fans, and thus his employers. This can’t be about “fairness” because the value of the entertainment is improved by his increase in the ability to hit home runs. It can’t be about “fairness” because all of the other players could also have access to this technology which would further improve the entertainment value of the performances. Yet, the public and thus the businesses collectively ban their use. We actually do want Barry Bonds to have lots of testosterone fueled muscle. But we want that testosterone to come from his testicles, not a test tube.
It always struck me as odd that in all sports and athletic events, the participants can use any and all crazy training and health regimes to improve their performance except for those that actually work. We ban steroids. We ban stimulants. We ban blood oxygen carrying capacity enhancers. Again, everyone could use them, so this isn’t about “fairness”.
No, something deeper is going on. I believe that something is related to peacock feathers and deer antlers. It is related to the deep time evolutionary need to compete for mates and to evaluate the genetic fitness of potential mates. We don’t want amazing athletic performance for its own sake. We want the ability to stack rank potential mates on their genetically endowed performance. In ancient times, the young people of a community would have had events which allowed comparisons with each other. And it would be obvious who was the healthiest, who was most likely to sire or bear the healthiest and strongest children. We evolved to have such contests and to observe such contests, to be rewarded for such participation and observation. This explains why we don’t like ‘doping’ or transfolk and intersex folk winning these contests (again, no one complains about them losing). On some deep level, we feel anger and disgust at anything that interferes with our ability to rate potential mates or allow others to so rate us, because our children will only carry 50% of our own genes, and we want those 50% to have the best genetic partners as we can find. At this deep level, athletics is about having sex.
Since deep down, this is about sex, competing for mates, and evaluating mates, intersex and transsex people need not apply. If this was truly about fairness, we would say, well… that MTF transkid did win the genetic lottery… if in an unusual path. But because we know that she can’t actually bear children, we feel disgust, revulsion, and tell everyone “it isn’t fair”.
Life just isn’t fair… and we instinctively want our children to have the best chance at success. We don’t want our athletics and sports to be truly “fair”… no we want them to be as cruel as possible… to weed out the weak and inferior and reward only the strong, healthy genetic stock who will give us strong healthy children and grandchildren. Life just isn’t fair.
Life just isn’t fair.
But life can bring surprising twists. Less than a decade after I was kicked off the Dolphins by Coach Bottom, I would again see him nearly every day. Mr. Bottom taught history at my second high school, he coached that school’s swimming and water polo teams. He was also one of my saviors, as he approached me during my Senior year with an opportunity I sorely needed. I had been diagnosed as transsexual at the Stanford Clinic. I was coming out to friends, classmates, and a select few of my teachers. I was getting ready to refuse to participate in boys’ P.E., stealing up my strength to face down officialdom about being trans… when Coach Bottom offered to let me teach the one and only student who didn’t know how to swim, instead. Coach Bottom knew that I spent summers teaching little kids to swim. He knew I knew how to be a strong and fast swimmer… but that I just couldn’t swim fast myself. So, I spent the last term of my highschool years, as a swimming instructor, a P.E. teacher in effect, with one student. Life may not always be fair, but it can sometimes be, in the end.
Further Reading:
“Reading the Body: Finger Length Ratio Predicts Athletic Ability” by Martijn van Mensvoort
“As We Rightfully Applaud Yearwood, We Must Acknowledge Many Questions Remain” by Jeff Jacobs
“How Steve Jobs swimming failure became unlikely source of inspiration” by David Pierini
Cognitive Dissonance and Vector Transform Miscalculations in Transgender Tensor Space
Tension said the Tensor
Tension Apprehension and Dissention have begun
I am turning 60 years old this week. This means that it has been 42 years since I transitioned full time the same week I turned 18, graduated from high school, and was informed that I was being kicked out. Much has happened since then, both personally and within the transsexual and transgender communities. In the vein of “ya either laugh or cry”, offered for your consideration are random dialogs and events over the decades. The events were real, only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Kay Brown in college
I’m at a “Seminar” at the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Clinic in the late ’77. I attend in the hopes of getting my “letter” approving me for SRS. One of the events specially scheduled for this day is a make-over session in which a make-up expert has been brought in to demonstrate how to use make-up to allow one to pass. She asks for a volunteer. As the only ‘young transitioner’ in the audience, well known to the others to wear almost no make-up beyond mascara and eye-liner, I was by general acclamation “volunteered” with much cat-calling and barely suppressed jealous jeering, as I was literally compelled toward the stands by gentle pushes and shoves. When I joined the make-up artist on the stage, this young woman did a serious double-take. She looked at me, looked at her make-up selection, and despaired. I later learn from her that she had been told to expect that she would have to cover heavy five-o-clock shadows and course ruddy complexions. She examines my face, noting that I was as smooth skinned as she is without a trace of beard (I had never grown one, never needed electrolysis either.) She asks,
“You have such lovely complexion, what do you use to cleanse and moisturize?”
“Cold cream and rubbing alcohol.” I answer honestly. I could barely afford to eat, much less buy expensive skin creams!
“Really?” she asks incredulously, pausing to consider what to do, ” I don’t know what to do. I don’t have the right make up for your face!” Which brings more titters and cat-calls from the far older transwomen in the audience who are clearly enjoying her discomfiture, likely haven anticipated this development. I feel my face blush pink from embarrassment. “Hold on, I know…” as she grabs her purse and pulls out her own personal travelling make-up kit. Turns out, we have identical coloring. She makes-up my face such that I look like a beauty magazine model.
“Where is your Significant Other?”
“I’m single.”
“Oh, then who did you come with?”
“My roommate,” pointing at me.
“I’m confused. Then why are you here? Most of us only came to support our SO’s,” having decided that I wasn’t transsexual.
“I’m a member of the committee.”
“Oh wait, you mean that YOU are TS? OMG! I’m sorry, I thought you were one of us.” (meaning, one of the natal female wives and girlfriends)
At an FtM conference in late ’99, where I had been invited to give a talk on TransHistory, a very similar dialog occurs as a transman and his wife ask,
“Where is your husband?”
“He’s at home. He’s not interested in these sorts of events.”
“Ummm… then when are you planning to transition?” as looks me over, obviously both admiring my trim figure in a cute feminine outfit while frowning in confusion and some disapproval.
“Transition? I did that over twenty five years ago!”
“You’re MTF? Wow!” as he gives me an even more admiring gaze, “Wow!”
Young transitioning, androphilic transwomen, being a small minority, get this all of the time. We don’t look “transgender” and even other transfolk aren’t that familiar with us.
Late transitioning transwomen believe that there is only one type, so they tend to make invalid assumptions. During a group discussion where all of the ‘late transitioning’ transwomen are discussing their military service, one snags me and asks,
“So when were you in the military?”
“What? They don’t let TS folk in the military!”
“Of course not, I meant before the change…”
“They don’t let minors join either.”
CedarStar
On another day it is the early ’90s and I’m having a discussion with a transwoman I invited over for coffee at my house. She makes a comment about my roommate, assuming that she is my wife, wondering aloud if she will mind that she is there.
“What makes you think that she and I are an item?”
“Well, you live together. And it’s obvious that you are affectionate with each other.”
“We have separate bedrooms.”
“But….”
“We have separate bedrooms. I’m not into women. I’ve been dating men since I was a teenager.”
“But, if you are only into men, how come you’re hanging out with me?”
“Because I thought you were interesting as a person. This isn’t a date!”
Serious misunderstandings between myself and late transitioning transwomen have happened repeatedly in my life. It is understandable, if one knows that people tend to project their own motives and world view upon others as their working assumption until proven wrong.
Kay Brown with her adopted daughter Liz
I’m with my adopted daughter, Liz, at a large social gathering at the private home of a much older transwoman, literally a rocket scientist, that includes a fair number of late transitioning transwomen in Silicon Valley. Everyone there is “cool” about transgender folk and I’ve been introduced, and thus ‘outed’ as being trans before I got there. A middle-aged woman approaches me,
“Your daughter is so well behaved and lovely and looks so much like you.”
“Yes, it’s amazing. I guess we both just got lucky that way.”
“So where is her mother? Is she here, or is this your weekend to babysit?”
“I’m her mother.”
“Oh… oh yes, of course you are. I meant her real mother.”
“If you mean her birth mother, I wouldn’t know, I’ve never met her.”
“Huh?”
“I adopted Liz. I’ve never met her birth parents. And no, this isn’t my weekend to ‘babysit’. I’m her mother!”
I wanted to scream at this woman who was so completely clueless on multiple levels. First, she assumed that I was Liz’s sire. I wanted to scream, “NO, I’m not her FATHER. I’ve never even FUCKED a woman in my entire life! Oh for fuck’s sake, I transitioned a decade before Liz was even born!”
Jeff and Kay saying their vows
I’m at a trendy wine bar in 2013 in Sacramento the evening after having spoken, by invitation, on a panel at a women’s conference earlier. The conference organizer is drunk, loudly outs me to several other women, then tells me that she has dated transwomen before, making it very clear that she finds me attractive. She and her friend stand on either side of me, penning me in as they proceed to hit on me, her friend taking my hand and suggestively stoking it for a moment, then puzzled, notes my wedding and engagement rings, soldered together as one, asks,
“What’s this?”
“My wedding ring. I’m married.”
“You’re married?”
“Yes, I’m married. His name is Jeff. We have a daughter, Liz.”
“I thought you were transgender…”
I wave my hands, shaking my head, as I pull away to make a timely exit to walk back to the B&B for the night. The next morning, I have a very serious talk to the conference organizer about her inappropriate behavior, explaining why it is not cool to out transwomen in public, nor to hit on them, assuming that we are all sexually attracted to women. She was shocked. She sincerely thought that ALL transwomen were attracted to women.
Over forty years of embarrassing misunderstandings. I sincerely hope that with greater visibility of transkids, they will experience far fewer of these…
Further Reading:
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Mommy, Where Do Autogynephiles Come From?
Everyone who has an unusual quirk in their psyche asks one time or another what made them that way. Most people in our modern society look to their past for psychogenic causal factors. For example, people who are depressed look for events in their lives that were depressing. This is likely the result of the pseudoscientific pontifications of psychoanalysts and their spiritual offspring, always trying to explain all behavior in psychodynamic terms. As we shall see, these explanations don’t hold up when examined against the evidence.
Perhaps the most easily debunked hypothesis is that autogynephilia is caused by too much exposure to pornography. Yes, I’ve seen this being seriously put forth. It’s not totally a crazy idea in that autogynephiles often are interested in erotica, especially autogynephilic erotica. But this is confusing cause and effect. Interviews with a large number of autogynephilic men reveals that their autogynephilic ideation and interest began around puberty, before they had exposure to erotica or porn, and usually long before they had access to autogynephilically oriented erotica. When they do find such erotica, their interest is rewarded be their previous experiences of cross-dressing or cross-dreaming associated sexual arousal and masturbation.
Interestingly, for both autogynephilic and autoandrophilic youth, certain genres of anime and manga offer a soft-core, romantic, erotica. This too has been suggested as the source of their sexual interests. One can well imagine coming across and finding such material interesting and rewarding viewing/reading before one becomes fully aware of one’s sexuality. But again, it is the cause? Would a young person with no underlying erotic target location error proneness find such material sexually arousing or romantically rewarding? I sincerely doubt it.
We know, from direct observation and from parental report, that autogynephilic arousal can occur before puberty, before learning to read even. Thus, exposure to material around puberty and subsequently seeking further material is likely to be a result, rather than a cause.
One of the most bizarre neo-freudian hypothesis that is fervently supported by a small minority of autogynephiles is that it is the result of “emasculinization trauma”. In this model, sometime in a male child’s past, a little boy has his fragile masculine ‘feefees’ so badly hurt that he retreats to romantic and later sexualized fantasies of not only being female but being forced to be female or feminized. This hypothesis seeks to explain both why they are autogynephilic, but also masochistic, combining the two. It is true that “forced feminization” is a very common autogynephilic/masochistic fantasy. However, the evidence for actual childhood trauma associated with autogynephilia is weak to non-existent. Further, while it is well known that paraphilias tend to cluster, and that autogynephilia and masochism is one of the most well documented of such clustering, only 25% to 30% of autogynephiles also exhibit masochism, while the converse is also true, that only 30% of masochistic men are also autogynephilic. But, for the rest?
Another problem with these psychogenic hypothesis is that they don’t explain the rather well known phenomena of familiar clustering of both autogynephilia and autoandrophilia wherein if we find one proband in a family, the odds of finding another are very high. For example, consider the Wachowski family with two siblings that are both “late transitioners”. Given that only 90,000 people out of over 300,000,000 people in the US transition, this would seem to be far above random chance, and it is.
Of course, the majority of autogynephilic transgender folk, from serious cross-dressers to post-op transwomen, reject the above hypothesis in favor of those they deem ‘gender affirming’. There are a number of them ranging from the non-specific idea that somehow being gender dysphoric leads one to become autogynephilic in some unspecified mechanism to the odd notion that all women are autogynephilic, that autogynephila is just part of normal female sexuality. Given that these obviously implausable hypothesis seem to be popular among autogynephiles themselves, when we see a minority of sexologists and transgender caregivers voice support for them, we naturally suspect that they may themselves be secretly autogynephilic.
Consider the notion put forth in the Nuttbrock study (which looking at the actual data otherwise fully supported the Two Type Taxonomy) that sexual arousal to cross-dressing is caused by finding cross-dressing to be “exotic”, invoking Daryl Bem’s “exotic becomes erotic” hypothesis.
Lawrence took exception to this misuse of Bem’s conception of the origin of sexual orientation that, “individuals can become erotically attracted to a class of individuals from whom they felt different during childhood’’. I would take this a step further and point out that Bem’s idea is invalid on the face of it. Same sex sexual orientation does indeed correlate with childhood gender atypicality, but is not caused by it. Although not a valid scientific nor logical argument, I do find it noteworthy to explore Daryl Bem’s career of proposing equally bogus hypothesis including his ludicrous support for psychic phenomena and violating accepting scientific research norms. In short, Bem is a pseudoscientific crank that has lead others to waste many thousands of research hours to debunk him.
But back to Nuttbrock, the idea that somehow an individual just happened to cross-dress one day and found it personally and/or culturally “exotic” leads to the obvious question… just how did this just happen? How do pubescent boys accidently fall into their mother’s or sister’s underwear drawer and come out wearing some of them? Seriously? Of course, Nuttbrock is actually assuming that “late transitioners” cross-dress because their “female gender identity”. But this also fails to match the evidence. Recall that nearly 5% of men find the thought of wearing women’s clothing potentially sexually arousing and that 0.7% “identify” as “transgender”, these men are NOT accidentally or incidentally coming to wear these items. Further, by these very numbers, we know that the vast majority of these transgender people are not gender dysphoric nor have female gender identities (yet), so it isn’t the case that they chose to wear these clothes as part of a sincere effort to pass as female (as is the case for androphilic transsexuals). The well documented case histories of hundreds of both non-dysphoric cross-dressers and gender dysphoric “late transitioners” includes voluntary private cross-dressing, usually in lingerie, as teens, accompanied by sexual arousal and masturbation, while “early transitioners”/androphilic transwomen do not have histories of such autogynephilic behavior. One would assume that for these androphilic transwomen, wearing women’s clothing would have been just as “exotic”. The evidence clearly shows that autogynephilia causes gender dysphoria in a minority of these males, not the other way around. Thus, Nuttbrock’s hypothesis fails to fit the evidence.
Putting oneself into the shoes of those who experience these phenomena, one could vaguely sense why these hypothesis might feel right given the specific nature of their experiences. But those on the outside must rely on evidence, not experience. The evidence does not support the hypothesis.
So if all of these ideas fail to explain or match the evidence, what does? Truthfully? We haven’t a clue.
We haven’t a clue.
Further Reading:
Essay on autogynephilic sexual arousal in childhood
Essay on autogynephilia causing “late transitioning” gender dysphoria
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Say That Again Please?
Just this week a new paper came out that suggests the HRT for menopause is correlated with increased risk of hearing loss. I don’t have access to the full paper and I haven’t figured out who is the corresponding author yet. But given that transwomen use HRT in higher doses and for longer periods of time, it may be important to look into this issue.
From the abstract,
Objective: Menopause may be a risk factor for hearing loss, and postmenopausal hormone therapy (HT) has been proposed to slow hearing decline; however, there are no large prospective studies. We prospectively examined the independent relations between menopause and postmenopausal HT and risk of self-reported hearing loss. … Conclusions: Older age at menopause and longer duration of postmenopausal HT are associated with higher risk of hearing loss.
Reference:
Curhan, et al., “Menopause and Postmenopausal Hormone Therapy and Hearing Loss” Menopause (May 2017) http://journals.lww.com/menopausejournal/Abstract/publishahead/Menopause_and_postmenopausal_hormone_therapy_and.97786.aspx
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Testosterone Poisoning Real?
Back in the early ’90s when I was staying home from work because of some bug, I recall watching daytime reruns of really dumb shows. I chanced upon a silly sitcom for ‘tweens where one of the plot elements was a math problem which was supposed to be challenging for the middle school students. It was a classic dual rate problem: How long it would take two boys washing cars if they did the next car together instead of separately. As I was bored, I set up and solved the simple (to me) algebra problem during the next commercial break. I looked forward to seeing that I was correct. As the show progressed, the kids were becoming more and more agitated that no one could solve it, not even the stereotypical “brain” of the class. Only the stereotypical airhead girl (obnoxious portrayals) seemed to be immune. At the climax of the show, no one has solved it, but the airhead… who states, “It can’t be solved.” “Right!” the math teacher concurs. WTF!?!?! I think. The “brain’s” head explodes.
I was dumbfounded. I checked my work. No, I could easily solve it. No, it didn’t take a genius. It was a very straight forward bit of algebra any first year high school algebra student could solve. How could the writers, producers, stage crew, and actors not know this? What the &^%$#@! were they doing telling their young audience; that it couldn’t be solved?
This episode (pun intended) stuck in my mind. I couldn’t understand it until I learned of the phenomena of Dysrationalia, researched by Keith Stanovich. It was a revelation. But I never thought this topic would find it’s way to my blog here, not being related to trans issues (save perhaps as one possible explanation for the irrational denial of the two type taxonomy). But, here it is…
High testosterone levels increase dysrationality. Seriously.
In a recent study, healthy men were randomly given T gel or placebo gel to apply to their skin. Hours later, their plasma T levels had doubled. They then took on a series of cognitive tests buried within them were three “trick questions” that measure “Cognitive Reflection”, a subset of the Stanovich’s original seven dysrationality questions. These three questions, mathematical in nature, are extremely easy, deceptively easy, in that unless one slows down and thinks, one will all to easily try to use irrational mental shortcuts that get the wrong answers. The key to being rational is that another part of the brain double checks one’s thinking to spot this and says to one’s self, “hey, hold on, that type of thinking is flawed.”
The results were dramatic. Those who had been given T got 20% more wrong answers than those given the placebo. The difference was quite robust ( Cohen’s d=0.41 ). High T levels seem to reduce the ability of the brain to spot irrational thinking processes.
This has implications for transmen as they begin and continue hormone replacement therapy (HRT) using testosterone, as transient high levels of T occur. Transmen should be counseled on this phenomena and given cognitive tools to compensate.
Researchers should also look at the effects of androgen suppression in transwomen. Does this effect go in reverse? Does low T make one less prone to cognitive reflection errors?
Further Reading:
Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss
Reference:
Nave, Gideon and Nadler, Amos and Zava, David and Camerer, Colin (2017) Single dose testosterone administration impairs cognitive reflection in men. Psychological Science . ISSN 0956-7976 . http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20170428-091020875
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SAGE Lies
Book Review: The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies
When I was a young teen in the early ’70s, I scoured our home library (larger than most middle-class households) for anything that could help me with my horrible feelings that we now label “gender dysphoria”. We had a number of college psychology, biology, human anatomy texts, and one medical encyclopedia. I found exactly one reference of interest, but it declaimed, “There is no such thing as a ‘sex change’.” That’s it, one line reference in the negative. Of course, it was both a true statement and a lie of omission. It failed to explain that there was medical help, if only superficial. But superficial or not, hormones and SRS were good enough to make my life worth living. But before I found much better, and truthful, references at our local public library, that one reference left me despairing and despondent for my future.
As I’ve researched our collective LGBT history and science (especially when I was teaching my class on Transhistory through the Harvey Milk Institute), and of course, through my decades of LGB – and especially – T activism, I’ve read and collected many books and references. So one could imagine my delight in finding the SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies. But that was very short lived.
The first thing I do when I look at such purportedly comprehensive works is to see how they treat transsexual and transgender subjects. In this case. OMG! What a &^%$#@! mess! It is more than simply disappointing. It is deja vu. Consider the section on “Controversies”, the only section that deals with the central nature of transgender etiology,
“Autogynephilia – The term autogynephilia was first used in 1989 by Ray Blanchard, a sexologist, to describe a purported class of transgender women. Classifications of transgender women prior to this time tended to divide this group into those who were sexually and romantically interested in men as “homosexual transsexuals” and those who were sexually and romantically interested in women were classified as “heterosexual fetishistic transvestites.” Critiques of these classifications noted that the “homosexual” and “heterosexual labels were applied incorrectly, failing to recognize the gender identities of transwomen themselves. – These classifications also reflected mainstream stigma around transgender identity as they resigned many transgender women to little more than sexual fetishists. The autogynephilia label only intensified this view of some transgender women as sexual fetishists. The theory of autogynephilia asserted that many of the trans women classified into the “heterosexual fetishistic transvestites” category were primarily attracted not to women but to the idea of themselves as women. In this way, autogynephilia was proposed as a type of primary sexual-identity category for transgender women. Subsequent research has found little empirical basis for such a classification, and many researchers have criticized the classification as transphobic. – One particular critique of this classification system concerns its failure to recognize the way in which all sexual attraction depends on one’s own gender identity. For example, a critical component of both homosexual and heterosexual attraction among many cisgender men involves an erotic charge around one’s own manliness or manhood. To assume that such attachments to (and sexual desire motivated through) one’s own gender identity and expression, in relatation to another’s, exists only among transgender women, is misguided. Despite a relative lack of empirical support for the diagnoses of autogynephilia among transgender women, some segments of the radical feminist community endorse this diagnostic category in their own writing as well. … The most outspoken critiques of the theory of autogynephilia ahve emerged from self-identified transfeminist academics (e.g. Julia Serano and Talia Mae Bettcher), who have highlighted not only the lack of empirical support for these theories but also the underlying biases and assumption revealed in the very foundations of the theory itself.”
I highlighted three phrases as they demonstrate a rhetorical trick, repeat a lie three times and people will tend to believe it. Yes, I bolded the text because these are bald faced lies. The material claims that there is no empirical evidence for autogynephilia in transwomen. But we have numerous studies that put the lie to these statements, some of which were conducted by transwomen ourselves. To make this assertion is academic misconduct of the worst sort.
Because I know that most readers will only read this one page, I feel I need to point out that we have such empirical evidence in abundance, both prior and subsequent to Blanchard coining the term “autogynephilia” to replace the earlier terms “fetishistic femmiphilia” and “fetishistic transvestism”. Science depends upon repeatability, and these results regarding sexual orientation and autogynephilia have been replicated by Buhrich (1978), Freund (1982), Blanchard (1985, 1987, 1988, 1989), Doorn (1994), Smith (2005), Lawrence (2005), Veale (2008), and Nuttbrock (2009), in separate studies spanning four decades, collectively involving over a thousand transsexuals to date. In fact, this is one of the most repeated and reconfirmed scientific finding regarding transsexuality. The largest study, Nuttbrock et al. found that fully 82% of gynephilic transwomen acknowledge being autogynephilic, specifically, being sexually aroused by wearing women’s clothing. I have essays on this blog that extensively survey and discuss these papers and their abundant empirical evidence supporting the “assertion” that many transwomen are autogynephilic. Let me say this again in another way, we have empirical study after study after study that shows that the vast majority of gynephilic (attracted to women) transwomen fully admit to being autogynephilic. How much more plain empirical evidence do we need, proof using phallometry to measure the amount of sexual arousal? We have that too!
The section also includes misleading statements regarding the nature of autogynephilia, trying to confuse the issue with non-autogynephilic sexuality. With deceptive cleverness this writer has substituted the usual “women are autogynephilic too” meme by referencing men instead. But here too, we see that they use the classic rhetorical trick of confusing the map for the territory. Here, they suggest that non-transmen, both homosexual and heterosexual, experience autoandrophilia. But in fact, this deliberately conflates, or rather confuses, pride or even vanity in one’s masculinity with sexual arousal to one’s own maleness. This can only be done because the casual reader doesn’t know the exact nature of autogynephilia and autoandrophilia. These men are not getting turned on by simply being men. They are not being turned on by simply wearing men’s clothing, although autogynephiles do exactly that. (As I pointed out, the vast majority fully admit to sexual arousal to wearing women’s clothing.)
So, we’ve caught them out in a outright lie, in misleading statements meant to confuse the issue, but what about lies of omission? Oh yes, this they have done as well, in that they totally fail to include any mention of transsexual and transgender scientists and writers who support the two type taxonomy and the role that autogynephilia plays in the etiology of one of the types. Where in all of this encyclopedia is Dr. Anne Lawrence?
Actually, they do reference her. But in safety, only mentioning her letter regarding the need for better transgender medical care. But where are her papers, book chapters, and even a book discussing the nature and role of autogynephilia in transwomen’s lives? How can they simply make such an important transwoman’s work on the subject disappear and call this work “encyclopedic”?
(This is especially ironic in that Lawrence has written material, currently in press, entitled, “Gender dysphoria: Overview; Gender dysphoria: Diagnosis; Gender dysphoria: Treatment; Sex reassignment surgery. In A. Wenzel (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of abnormal and clinical psychology)
There is one other lie of omission… where in this “encyclopedia” is the voice of the exclusively androphilic and known to be non-autogynephilic transwomen? By printing this disinformation the editors of this work have given voice to only one of the two types of transsexual, and only the minority that are in denial of their autogynephilic nature at that, completely silencing the other. For an academic work that purports to give voice to the LGBTQ communities, this is a very serious cultural and political offense.
Finally, not content with outright lies, misleading comments, and lies of omission, they top it off with calumny, “underlying biases and assumption revealed in the very foundations of the theory itself.” That is to say, that this supposed academic work tops it off with character assassination of those of us, scientists and transsexual activists, who recognize the abundant (and socially obvious) empirical evidence for the theory, by implying that we are “transphobic” and “biased”.
I cannot condemn this work in any greater terms, knowing how deeply distorting it is of an area in which I have some knowledge. It leads me to distrust any areas where I may not have the in-depth knowledge to recognize any other lies it may contain.
I have to wonder, is deep disgust, how many transfolk are going to read this material in despair. As M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake, an autogynephilic and gender dysphoric (but not yet transitioned) individual wrote in reference to his own experience,
“A brief note on why all this matters. Independently of whether the two-type taxonomy is in fact taxonic, there are obvious political incentives to dismiss the explanatory value of autogynephilia, because it could be construed as invalidating trans women. I get that.
But here’s the thing: you can’t mislead the general public without thereby also misleading the next generation of trans-spectrum people. So when a mildly gender-dysphoric boy spends ten years assuming that his gender problems can’t possibly be in the same taxon as actual trans women, because the autogynephilia tag seems to fit him perfectly and everyone seems to think that the “Blanchard-Bailey theory of autogynephilia” is “clearly untrue”, he might feel a little bit betrayed when it turns out that it’s not clearly untrue and that the transgender community at large has been systematically lying to him, or, worse, is so systematically delusional that they might as well have been lying.”
For more information:
READ MY WHOLE BLOG !!!
List of publications by Anne A. Lawrence, M.D.
References:
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-lgbtq-studies/book244331%20
Two clinically discrete syndromes of transsexualism. Buhrich N, McConaghy N. British Journal of Psychiatry. 1978 Jul;133:73-6. Abstract online
Two types of cross-gender identity. Freund K, Steiner BW, Chan S. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 1982 Feb;11(1):49-63. Abstract online
Typology of male-to-female transsexualism. Blanchard, Ray. Archives of Sexual Behavior. Vol 14(3) Jun 1985, 247-261. Abstract online
Heterosexual and homosexual gender dysphoria. Blanchard, Ray; Clemmensen, Leonard H; Steiner, Betty W. Archives of Sexual Behavior. Vol 16(2) Apr 1987, 139-152. Abstract online
Nonhomosexual gender dysphoria. Blanchard, Ray. Journal of Sex Research. Vol 24 1988, 188-193. Abstract online
The concept of autogynephilia and the typology of male gender dysphoria. Blanchard, Ray. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. Vol 177(10) Oct 1989, 616-623. Abstract online
Nonmonotonic relation of autogynephilia and heterosexual attraction. Blanchard R. J Abnorm Psychol. 1992 May;101(2):271-6. Abstract online
Varieties of autogynephilia and their relationship to gender dysphoria. Blanchard R. Arch Sex Behav. 1993 Jun;22(3):241-51. Abstract online
C. D. Doorn, J. Poortinga and A. M. Verschoor, “Cross-gender identity in transvestites and male transsexuals” http://www.springerlink.com/content/u63p723776v57m11/
Transsexual subtypes : Clinical and theoretical significance Smith Yolanda L. S.; Van Goozen Stephanie H. M.; Kuiper A. J.; Cohen-Kettenis Peggy T.; Psychiatry research (Psychiatry res.) 2005, vol. 137, no3, pp. 151-160 Abstract online
Anne A. Lawrence, “Sexuality Before and After Male-to-Female Sex Reassignment Surgery” 2005 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-005-1793-y
Jaimie F. Veale, Dave E. Clarke and Terri C. Lomax, “Sexuality of Male-to-Female Transsexuals” http://www.springerlink.com/content/bp2235t8261q23u3/
A Further Assessment of Blanchard’s Typology of Homosexual versus Non-Homosexual or Autogynephilic Gender Dysphoria, Nuttbrock, et al. Archives of Sexual Behavior
http://www.springerlink.com/content/b48tkl425217331j/
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Getting Lost in the Crowd
Or, How the Big Tent Transgender Movement Distorts Science and Holds Back Civil Rights for Transsexuals
In the early ’90s, Beth Elliott, using her nom de plume Mustang Sally, wrote an essay entitled, “The Incredible Shrinking Identity” in which she decried the social effects of subsuming transsexual people into the larger umbrella of “transgender”, which with each passing year seemed to be growing at its margins to include more and more people who just a few years before, would never have been considered to be in the same grouping. Of course, she was mostly talking about cross-dressers, autogynephilic men, who as we know, are in fact in the same etiological taxon as autogynephilic MTF transsexuals. In the ’90s, it was possible to ignore this complaint as being specious on the social level, given already rampant socially unwanted and scientifically unwarranted lumping of autogynephilic and exclusively androphilic MTF transwomen.
But what started as merely political embarrassement (for AGP transwomen) has now become a serious scientific and civil rights issue as the term “transgender” has now been stretched to the point where it has little meaning as to actual sexual, social, or gendered behavior. It is no longer enough for scientists to differentiate between autogynephilic/late onset vs. androphilic/early onset MTF transwomen… nor even between autoandrophilic vs. androphilic FtM transmen… now we must differentiate between an ever growing host of self-defined “other” gender categories and underlying behaviors, identities that are lumped under “transgender” to the point of making the term meaningless to sexologists and social scientists alike.
Flashback, 1980: Hanging out in the L.A. transsexual community, as it gained a political self awareness, was a teenager; let’s call her “Lee”. Lee would tell anyone who asked that she was “transsexual”… yet caused great confusion to all who met her. She was natal female, short even for a woman, pleasantly plump, and decidedly feminine in both appearance and manner. She was in no sense gender atypical. And during the time that I knew her, over 18 months, she never made any attempt to present as a man, nor even as butch. She was always on the femmy side of androgenous to the point of being decidedly “cute” as she hung out, mostly with younger MTF transwomen whom she seemed to admire. Had she been hanging out in this same manner in the gay male scene, they would have likely labeled her a “Fag Hag”. The transsexual community, while leery of non-trans males who would have acted this way, affectionately accepted Lee’s non-threatening presence, while secretly rolling their eyes when she declared that she was “FtM”.
Thinking back on Lee, I’m fairly certain that she never transitioned and I’m willing to place fairly high odds that she married and had kids, probably now has grandchildren, none of which have any idea that she once hung out in the trans-scene. At the time, we had no label for her. Today, on the internet, the FtM transsexual community does have a label that would have applied, “tucute”, as in “Too Cute” to be trans. If you visit the FtM pages on Tumbler, you are sure to run into a few… and will also note that they in turn, grumble about the negative feedback they get from “Truscum” (androphilic FtM) for not accepting that they too are just as “trans”, even if they are in no sense gender atypical or gender dysphoric.
Recent Events: A couple years ago, via her facebook page, a very socially liberal, rather prominent (and wealthy) venture capitalist in my professional circle proudly announced that her teenaged child was “transgender”. I’ve been living “mostly stealth” in that most of my professional contacts do not know of my medical history (yes, I “pass”). But in a move to be supportive and perhaps even help her with the emotional issues that almost always come with a child’s transition I came out to her. BAD MOVE! Nope, upon learning more about her child, it became very clear that her daughter had always been very gender typical as a girl, was not the least bit gender dysphoric, and had no intention of legally, socially, nor medically transitioning. No, she just wanted to be recognized as “transgender” and have everyone around her use gender neutral pronouns (cause she is so special, she deserves it).
There is another name for this behavior, “TransTrender”, as in it is now “trendy” to be transgender. Back in my college years, hanging around Stanford University, I would often hear complaints from actual gynephilic women, real lesbians, about the phenomena of primarily androphilic women taking social positions as “Political Lesbians” and “Lesbians Until Graduation”. The “transgender” community now has the same phenomena. It seems to have become “cool” in some comfortably well off, very socially liberal teenaged and young adult circles to be associated with the LGB and now T community, as though being associated with a marginalized group made up for their obvious social privilege.
One could well imagine the growing resentment felt by those of us who have experienced familial rejection, social disapprobation, economic deprivation, and psychic pain from a lifetime of gender atypicality and dysphoria towards those who misappropriate an identity from the protective cocoon of indulgent family, liberal universities, and the anonymity of the internet.
If these issues had stayed on the pages of tumbler and facebook, it wouldn’t be a problem for science or those seeking better civil rights for transitioning transfolk. But it hasn’t.
Consider a recent paper published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence in which the authors very laudably explore the issues of safety and bathroom access for “transgender” youth. Ah… you are probably anticipating some of the problems that this might entail and you would be right. But let’s explore each of them carefully.
The authors cite the now popular William’s estimate of 0.7% of the population in the US as “transgendered”. The problem with that study is the number who identify as “transgendered” because William’s did not apply any operational definition beyond asking if they were “transgendered”. Yet we know that only 0.03% of the U.S. population has actually socially transitioned, according to US Census study that cross-correlated with name/sex status changes to Social Security cards (arguably the absolute best estimate we will ever get to the number of individuals who actually transitioned). This means that less than 5% of those who identify as “transgender” ever transition. Thus, by definition, more than 95% of those who identify as “transgender” never transition, that in fact, they aren’t all that gender dysphoric. So who are they? Well, given that 80 to 90% of MTF transsexuals are autogynephilic and that 4.6% of men in the general population are autogynephilic, while only 0.5% of women are autoandrophilic, we can surmise that the vast bulk of those who identify as “transgender” adults are autogynephilic males, otherwise gender typical heterosexual men who cross-dress in the privacy of their homes and perhaps occasionally have a “girls’ night out” with other cross-dressers.
We know that autogynephilic males are gender typical growing up. They are also gynephilic. These are, save for their secret cross-dressing and sexual fantasies of being or becoming female, typical, average, run of the mill straight men. Thus, autogynephilic males who have not transitioned are not socially visible. Further, we know that the median and average ages of transition for autogynephilic transsexuals (the moment that they become socially visible) is 35 and 40 respectively. In fact, in the Nuttbrook study, which surveyed 571 transgender women, only one gynephilic (and presumably autogynephilic) individual had begun transition before age 20 and of those who had begun transition before age 20, only 7% said that they were bisexual (of which a number of them are likely to be autogynephilic, as we know from other studies).
Now, compare that to the number of early onset / androphilic transwomen who transition before age 20… that number is half. HALF. Further, we know from study after study that such transwomen are very notably gender atypical, as well as gender dysphoric. THESE are the kids who will be the most socially visible as youth, NOT autogynephilic “transgender”. On the FtM side, the Autoandrophilic population similarly transition later as adults, not teens. It will be the rare, very rare (remember, only 0.03% of the total US population transition) exclusively gynephilic, gender dysphoric kids that will be socially visible as youth, not the TuCutes and the TransTrenders. These are the kids who are socially and personally vulnerable as youth, not the vastly larger number of individuals who will identify as “transgender”.
How badly off are the numbers? In the Wernick study they found 86 individuals who self-identified as transgendered out of 935 students. Seriously, 9%? NINE &^%$#@ percent?!? That’s more than ten times the number of adults who self-identify and three hundred times the number who actually transition. That’s on the same order as are found to be gay or lesbian. Are all of the LGB kids claiming to be “transgendered”??? Or is this representative of all of the secretly cross-dressing and cross-dreaming boys plus the TuCutes and the TransTrenders, all balled into one? Because, if the schools were statistically representative of the population as a whole, with only a thousand or so students, we could only expect a one in three chance of finding an actual transsexual among them, most likely an autogynephile who will transition as an adult and only one in fifteen chance of finding a transkid.
The design of this study was flawed from inception, as the numbers surveyed were never enough to find any statistically valid number of transkids, while using self report of being “transgendered” without a valid operational definition lead only to a measure of the trendiness of the label in the teenaged population.
So we see, that truly gender atypical and gender dysphoric individuals will be a very small percentage of youth who will self-identify as “transgender”. These are the kids who social scientists and policy makers should be concerned with, not those who have yet to transition or never will. These are the kids who, while finding more and more visibility in the press as they transition, are the ones who are getting lost in the crowd in social science studies and policy making because of the failure to apply appropriate operational definitions.
(Addendum 5/5/2017: To reinforce my point that one needs to have an operational definition of “transgender”, we can see in another recent study (Sumia 2017) using the GIDYQ-A that only 1.3% of teenagers had any “potentially clinically significant gender dysphoria”. Interestingly of the natal female teens, only 0.5% compared to 2.2% of the natal males had indicated such potential dysphoria. Note that this is indeed potential, not clinically significant distress. These numbers tally better with the hypothesis that most of these boys are autogynephilic and will likely live as secret cross-dressers.)
Further Reading:
Essay on US Census Estimate of Post-Transition Population
Essay on the Ratio of Gynephilic vs. Androphilic MTF Transsexuals
Essay on the Nature of Autogynephilia
References:
Wernick, et Al, “Gender Identity Disparities in Bathroom Safety and Wellbeing in High School Students”, Journal of Youth and Adolescence
DOI: 10.1007/s10964-017-0652-1
Sumia et Al, “Current and recalled childhood gender identity in community youth in comparison to referred adolescents seeking sex reassignment”, Journal of Adolescence
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140197117300155
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Here Be Dragons
There has been a long tradition within the transsexual and transgender communities of trying to argue away the key role that autogynephilia plays in the development of late onset gender dysphoria. Some simply deny it’s existence. But this has lately fallen out of favor in the more realistic segments of the late transitioning MTF community in recognition of how obviously prevalent it is. Though not new, it has become au currant to insist that it is either a normal part of female sexuality or that it is a natural consequence, an after effect, of gender dysphoria. Both efforts confuse the map for the territory. Both efforts ignore the logical consequences of their assertions and how they fail to match the evidence, the data collected over the years, concerning the phenomena.
First, there is the wonderfully creative, if fallacious, redefinition of autogynephilia, the softening of the language, more than simple euphemism, of calling it “female embodiment fantasies”. How delightfully it allows one to then state that, of course, women naturally see themselves as female embodied as they have sexual fantasies. See, women are autogynephilic too. Or, as some twist it around, “Blanchard is defining normal female sexuality as a paraphilia!”
But this is confusing the map for the territory. The phenomena being described are not the same, though they are deliberately described using the same words. Women are not sexually aroused by, nor become romantically enamored with, their femaleness (nor the thought of, contemplation of, their femaleness or femininity). But that is what autogynephilia is… sexual arousal and/or romantic attachment to the contemplation of becoming or being female in and of itself. Where women only incidentally see themselves as female, because they are female, in their erotic imaginings, the autogynephilic individual is specifically and deliberately seeing themselves as female/feminine as that is a key element to which they sexually and romantically respond.
Just because someone labels a portion of a map, “Here be dragons” doesn’t mean there are.
If autogynephilia were an effect of gender dysphoria and a female gender identity, we would predict several consequences from that effect to show up in the data. We would expect that those who were the most gender dysphoric from an early age, those who are the most naturally feminine from an early age, those who transition the soonest, to report the most autogynephilia.
But this is not the case. Early onset / early transitioners have the lowest reported autogynephilia. We can see this in study after study. In Lawrence (2005), those who self reported being exclusively androphilic only 18% reported experiencing “hundreds” of autogynephilic episodes of erotic cross-dressing compared to 52-58% of non-androphilic, which division also showed correlations with age of transition and self-reported childhood gender atypicality. In Nuttbrock (2009), those who had begun Hormone Replacement Therapy as teenagers only 14% reported having any autogynephilic arousal to cross-dressing compared to 82% of the gynephilic subjects (of whom only one had started HRT as a teen).
Just because someone labels a portion of a map, “Here be dragons” doesn’t mean there are.
Further, if it is an effect of gender dysphoria and of a female gender identity, we would expect that only those who experience gender dysphoria and claim a female gender identity, to experience autogynephilia. But this too is not the case. Post-transition people (both MTF and FTM total) only make up one in four thousand people, yet studies have shown that 4.6% of men, that’s nearly five out of a hundred, experience autogynephilic arousal to cross-dressing. That is to say, significantly less than one out of one hundred males who are autogynephilic develop gender dysphoria and a female gender identity.
Just because someone labels a portion of a map, “Here be dragons” doesn’t mean there are.
Can we please stop with the erroneous rationalizations? It’s time to recognize not only the Two Types… but the underlying autogynephilic etiology of one of them.
Further Reading:
Essay on Statistical Reality of the Two Type Taxonomy using Lawrence 2005 study
Essay on Autogynephilia in the general population
Essay on Census of Post-transition transgender population
Essay Showing Autogynephilic Causation of Late Transitioning MTF Transsexuality
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Mars and Venus in Conjunction…
In my last post, we looked at the idea that though the brain is comprised of many areas that individually are only mildly sexually dimorphic the pattern of which adds up to a very sexually dimorphic brain mosaic. It reminded me of an earlier study in which they found that personality traits were also only mildly sexually dimorphic when examined individually, but the overall personality, the matrix of traits, was also very sexually dimorphic. That is to say, that men and women, on average, do have different personalities, but no one trait is all that different.
Given that brains and minds are intimately linked, that minds are the function of brains, the fact that both brain mosaic and personality are both individually only mildly sexually dimorphic, but collectively very dimorphic should not surprise us.
The idea that men and women have different personalities has been widely accepted for millenia, but recently has been seriously questioned by feminists and some social scientists and psychologists, most notably Prof. Janet S. Hyde. But even she, in propounding the “Gender Similarity Hypothesis” did find obviously sexually dimorphic behaviors in humans, as Guidice, et Al remarked,
“Specifically, Hyde found consistently “large” (d between .66 and .99) or “very large” (d≥1.00) sex differences in only some motor behaviors and some aspects of sexuality; “moderate” differences (d between .35 and .65) in aggression”
“…some aspects of sexuality…” Yeah! Duh! As in sexual orientation, the single largest sexually dimorphic difference between men and women, also motor behaviors that are highly correlated with sexual orientation. Finally, aggression; yes, men are more aggressive than women by nature. But what of the more subtle areas of personality?
In this study, the authors chose to use a very well established personality inventory, the 16PF which underlie the more well known Big Five factor personality inventory.
First, we need to discuss the matter of looking at individual aspects of personality as single variables then averaging this difference between the sexes as the authors pointed out,
“The problem with this approach is that it fails to provide an accurate estimate of overall sex differences; in fact, average effect sizes grossly underestimate the true extent to which the sexes differ. When two groups differ on more than one variable, many comparatively small differences may add up to a large overall effect; in addition, the pattern of correlations between variables can substantially affect the end result. As a simple illustrative example, consider two fictional towns, Lowtown and Hightown. The distance between the two towns can be measured on three (orthogonal) dimensions: longitude, latitude, and altitude. Hightown is 3,000 feet higher than Lowtown, and they are located 3 miles apart in the north-south direction and 3 miles apart in the east-west direction. What is the overall distance between Hightown and Lowtown? The average of the three measures is 2.2 miles, but it is easy to see that this is the wrong answer. The actual distance is the Euclidean distance, i.e., 4.3 miles – almost twice the “average” value. The same reasoning applies to between-group differences in multidimensional constructs such as personality. When groups differ along many variables at once, the overall between-group difference is not accurately represented by the average of univariate effect sizes; in order to properly aggregate differences across variables while keeping correlation patterns into account, it is necessary to compute a multivariate effect size. The Mahalanobis distance D is the natural metric for such comparisons. Mahalanobis’ D is the multivariate generalization of Cohen’s d, and has the same substantive meaning. Specifically, D represents the standardized difference between two groups along the discriminant axis; for example, D = 1.00 means that the two group centroids are one standard deviation apart on the discriminant axis.”
Using Mahalonobis’ D allows us to see the real difference in personalities of men and women taking into account the global pattern of personality traits, rather than one at a time. From this the authors found,
“We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES, the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). These are extremely large differences by psychological standards. The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology.”
‘Gee willikers Mr. Wilson’… that 10% overlap sounds awfully familiar – Oh yeah, that’s similar to that found for the global pattern of the sexually dimorphic mosaic of the brain. And just as I suggested that this might represent the effect of the non-heterosexual population, I again hypothesize that we might see a larger effect size if all known LGBT folk were excluded from the study subjects. If so, that would further support my hypothesis that humans don’t have sexually dimorphic brains so much as having androphilic vs. gynephilic ones.
Further Reading:
Essay on Sexually Dimorphic Brain Mosaic
Essay on Sexually Dimorphic Motor Behaviors
Reference:
Guidice, et Al, “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences In Personality”
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029265
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Pink and Blue…
Or, Yes, We Now CAN Tell The Sex of a Person By Imaging Their Brain
Before recent developments in neuroimaging, I would have said that there was no way that we could determine the sex / gender of a person looking only at their brain. In fact, I DID say exactly that. But now, I don’t believe that that is an accurate statement, at least not wholely accurate, because a recent paper/letter has shown that with increased resolution and computer power we can determine the sex of a person that a particular brain resides in just from an analysis of the 3D image of their brains to 93% accuracy. The mere fact that this can be done shows that the human brain is in fact highly sexually dimorphic, because if we were to simply guess, we would only be right 50% of the time.
The number, 93%, sounded suspiciously familiar to me. That’s about the number of people who are not LGBT in the population. Given that we also know that LGB people are likely to have sexually dimorphic features that as a population, are shifted towards that of the opposite sex, I’m proposing an hypothesis and a prediction. If this analysis were redone excluding all known LGBT people, that the mathematical regression would result in greater predictive strength. It would not reach 100% because there would still be those who due to social desirability bias would fail to disclose their sexual orientation and thus still be included in the heterosexual study group. Increasing the accuracy in that instance will add evidence to a quip that I have made before, that humans don’t have male and female brains so much as androphilic and gynephilic brains.
There’s an important point that is missed by people with discussing the issue of whether the human brain is sexually dimorphic or not; The size and shape of any specific feature of the brain is to an extent only a very crude estimate of the number of neurons and the connection density of that region. It does not tell us the functional differences, if any, that that difference represents. As Cordelia Fine has pointed out, these differences, though they clearly exist, does not tell us what, if any, the differences may be in men’s and women’s minds. Only additional research will help us determine these.
But still, anyone who still says that it is not possible to determine the sex of a human brain hasn’t been keeping up with the science.
(Addendum 3/4/2017: I did a bit of calculation and found much to my amazement, that to “guess” the sex of the brain to 93% accuracy means that the effect size (Cohen’s d) would, if it were a single dimorphic feature, be a whopping 3.0 !!!! That’s an over the top value. Thus, as we get better imaging tools to see the fine details, we are learning that the human brain, in terms of multivariate statistics of multiple measurements at all points of the brain, is in fact extremely sexually dimorphic. The problem is that no one area is all that dimorphic, but in aggregate, they are quite dimorphic. That is to say, if one area is slightly dimorphic, giving a small statistical clue as to the sex of the individual, and a second area is also slightly dimorphic, giving a small clue as the sex of the individual, the two can be used together to give a medium sized clue to increase the accuracy… and with many many areas, each additively pointing towards one sex or the other, the accuracy gets quite good.)
Further Reading:
Book Review: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
Reference:
Chekrouda, et al., “Patterns in the human brain mosaic discriminate
males from females” http://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1968.full.pdf
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