Okay, I can’t keep silent on this anymore. Scott Alexander is endorsing autogynephilia discourse, and doesn’t even bother to hedge some of the more terrible claims in the stuff he links.
(Such as that late-transitioning trans women’s identity is always and solely centered around their sexuality, and that we are pathological liars for claiming otherwise. Yes, really.)
No, that’s not true and I don’t endorse it at all.
I linked to a study showing that brain scan research suggested there were two different causes of transgender. I think it was a good study.
I doubt either cause of transgender is related to autogynephilia. First, because most trans people I know say they don’t feel like they’re autogynephile, and I don’t know what it means to have a fetish so powerful it controls your life but also be consciously unaware of it.
Second, because this sounds like exactly the sort of Freudian stuff that has always been wrong before (“people are just gay because they’re angry at their mother”, “people are just autistic because their parents weren’t nurturing enough”) as opposed to the kind of biological stuff that has always been right before.
Third, because trans people seem different than cis people in a bunch of interesting ways - for example, late-transitioning trans women seem way more likely to have stereotypically masculine interests like programming. I’ve said before and I will say again that the type of explanation that makes sense is something like partial resistance to sex hormones, so that the body produces more sex hormones to compensate during a critical period and you end up with some parts of the brain getting way too much and other parts getting way too little, which could result in eg an AMAB with some parts of their brain that are very feminine and other parts that are very masculine simultaneously. This is a complete wild guess, but that sounds more plausible than some people having fetishes and not realizing it and also for some reason these fetishes make them better programmers. I would not be surprised if the two different types of transgender are something like the difference between CAH due to 17H deficiency vs. due to 21OH deficiency.
On the other hand, I’m very not in favor of the whole thing where people talk about how autogynephiles are pathological liars and perverts and disgusting and so on. I say this because i’ve met some transwomen who do think they’re autogynephiles (and some people who say they’re autogynephile without being transwomen), and I don’t think they’re any more disgusting or horrible than any other fetish.
I don’t think you’re a pathological liar because you’re a trans woman. But I do worry you’re a pathological liar because you consistently misrepresent my and other people’s opinions in a hostile way.
Can I just? It was a link-dump post of the kind that Scott does all the time. Of course you should expect typically minimal or no hedging for most links in them, because there’s a ton of links and no one has time to write up a several-thousand-word detailed essay on the research behind every single one of these topics. If you’re looking for more lengthy and detailed explorations of transness, I think his post The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories is an incredibly important philosophical and practical examination of why it’s important to respect trans people’s genders. I regularly recommend it to basically anyone who wants to understand more about trans people and who we are. I don’t see any reason to jump down his throat on this.
I get the sense that some of those who’ve read the linked study might be superimposing various other aspects of the discourse around “autogynephilia” onto it. It doesn’t help that Blanchard and others closely tied to him in the field of sexology tend to make all sorts of unsupported and insensitive remarks about how exclusively-androphilic trans women are ‘naturally feminine’ in their behaviors (read: reflect whatever those cultural stereotypes are at this point in time), or 'pass’ even without transitioning ('passing’ doesn’t work as a concept anyway because of how subjective it is), whereas all other trans women possess some 'typically male’ nature and are judged to be 'less attractive’ as well as 'masculine’ in their personality and behaviors.
Those who’ve mostly been exposed to the concept of “autogynephilia” in these contexts might see the study as essentially saying: “yes, this confirms it, there really are distinct brain patterns that divide the 'real’ natural feminine good trans women from the perverts who are actually just men with fetishes.” They probably see it as challenging and dangerous in that way. But there’s also plenty to be found in sexological studies that shows that this most prevalent and stereotyped notion of “autogynephilia” is not entirely or even mostly accurate and can be incredibly misleading in many ways that are directly harmful to trans people in society. There is already a substantial basis upon which to object to aspects of the theory itself as well as many of the ways it’s been used.
The linked review of brain structure research isn’t primarily sexological anyway and doesn’t support those already-unsupported popular stereotypes. It repeatedly states that even exclusively-androphilic trans women have a mix of sex-dimorphic areas of the brain that tend towards being either more typically feminine, more typically masculine, or something in-between. It is a patchwork of many different degrees of 'masculinity’ and 'femininity’ in these areas.
There’s no way to reasonably read this as saying, “yep, that’s right, these trans women are clearly *real* women and the others are really men”. First, you would have to assume all those particular brain areas can be so reliably conceptually connected to our more general notions of who we more widely consider to be a “man” or a “woman” in society (concepts that are already extraordinarily contentious from countless directions), they can be treated as so strongly definitive that they hold - even in part - the power to objectively validate or invalidate a person’s identified gender. And even if you did assume that, you still couldn’t use it to say “this is a man, that is a woman”. The data, misused in this particular way, would imply that even the supposedly-more-legitimate-in-their-womanhood straight trans women are not actually women, but some tertiary gender or a blend. If anyone was trying to use this study to prop up their harmful autogynephilia stereotypes, that’s probably not the sort of thing they would actually want to imply at all.
There is nothing wrong with Scott linking to the study, nor does there necessarily seem to be anything inherently wrong with the study. Stop being rude and uncharitable.
But he also links to this: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/ , which contains lovely passages such as,
Thinking about autogynephilic MTF transsexuals as “male bodied people who love women and (romantically) want to become what they love” offers a more accurate and more richly informative way to understand them.
Sure this is a bit more nuanced than the typical AGP nonsense, but only by degrees. Ultimately it remains gross and offensive.
Scott should do better. It would take one or two sentences to say, “Hey, I don’t endorse all the language here, but some of the numbers are interesting.”
Or else just link to the study and leave the garbage blog posts out of it. The study alone could make his case.