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I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.
Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.
But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.
This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.
Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.
(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)
[cw: probably an invasive meme, although not a particularly harmful one. Also, caveat: I don't think Bailey or Blanchard's model is particularly useful as an approach for the typical trans woman, even and in part because there are actual 'cis'-by-conventional-standards autogynophiles.]
There's a variety and range on these matters: actors taking method acting to extremes either falsely (no one cares about Leto) to more serious issues (Bowie didn't seem to handle his stage persona well at all), and multiples (don't ask) can range from wanting integration to actively being appalled by the concept. It's enough of an issue that there's a lot of psychological screening that goes on for serious undercover investigation roles. TvTropes (cw: tvtropes) has a pretty good list of some real-life examples at the bottom of this page, mostly focused on actors.
((Though not everyone seems vulnerable: Norah Vincent's later suicide is probably unrelated to her time living as a man, but even when she liked the social aspects she never really seemed to change self-identity.))
Fictional tulpa or tulpa-likes that take over their creator is a popular target of media, but actual people who've made one and complain about it tend to be more frustrated just that they can't get it to shut up (and arguably some impact on performance in some testing scenarios?) rather than it becoming the new 'real' personality.
((Furries and some non-furries that spend too much time in VR have reported weird results. Some therianthropes claimed to get similar fake-tactile feedback with sufficient meditation in a pre-VR environment, but it's... hard to find good documentation now. And impacts on personality from an avatar are pretty well-documented well outside of VR, although insert necessary caveats about social science research, even if I've been more impressed by Nick Yee than most social scientists.))
Outside of the more out-there therians and actors, though, this can be hard to notice from the outside, and harder still to distinguish from normal personality changes from simply being in these environments. It's weird if you wanted to have your last name legally changed to match your wrestling stage name or fursona, but unless you also get in a shootout with cops or pick a name the courts don't like, it's probably not going to make the news.
And if it's not changing your name or gender (or phenotype), it might even be part of the intent going in! There's a lot of people who go into VR with the intent of getting more used to meatspace interactions, and it's hard to tell the difference between being more social because you've gotten the practice, and being more social because that's what your avatar would do. If gatt the nardodragon likes pranks more than I do, or gry the Hrothgar is just generally cheerful, it might even be hard for me internally to notice if I’m more them one day. Even if I present mannerisms that are solely artifacts of those game's designers or animators, there’s mirror neuron reasons it could happen just as a matter of course rather than some deep identity matters.
So ?
Just because 2/3rds of people who jerk off to autogynephilic pornography don't have any dysphoria or desire to transition and aren't deluded enough to believe they can change sex, or that's remotely a good idea doesn't mean 1/3rd can't be afflicted in such a way.
Maybe they've peculiar personalities. Maybe their personality is fluid enough due to I dunno, borderline PD that they can mess it up through mere fantasy somehow.
Far bigger proportion of people who enjoy such pornography report being gender dysphoric than the general population. There's likely a connection.
There's some potentially interesting discussion on any link, though untangling correlation and causation, and the direction of causation, gets a little awkward. I don't think that question is useful, but that's largely a separate question. I think cis autogynophiles can be very weird (at least by socon or normie understandings of the term), even compared to actual trans women. The problem for Blanchard's typology is that they're weird in different ways than Blanchard or Bailey predicted or described retroactively, in ways that make the whole typology a wrong model.
Blanchard specifically made this typology under the claim that it covered the whole of the field, in a clear division, between autogynophilic 'straight' or 'bisexual's who transition in contexts separate from searches for relationships (and sometimes at cost to existing relationships), and 'gay' ones that transition in part to attract straight men (... sometimes in the context of prostitution) and, importantly, are not autogynophilic:
These are pretty core to the observations: Blanchard's first papers were about collapsing broader categories from previous approaches like Hirch's, to the point where he concluded that any self-reported androphilia among less originally-femmy trans women was largely an artifact of those trans women really being interested in women but having to jump through hoops for hormones/therapy. Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen has a short 'quiz' to identify a specific transperson, and 8 of the 12 questions are about directly about the subject's sexual orientation, with a further two asking if they worked in a classically masculine or feminine career.
Yet you can find a tremendous number of cis and trans fans of a lot of 'sissy' porn verging on 'transification' that you focus on, which is about as sexually oriented toward the thought or images of themselves as women could be, and are also primarily interested themselves-as-women getting railed by men, which do not show the facelessness that Bailey once focused so heavily on. To the point where F/F visuals are actually pretty uncommon. Conversely, Bailey's 'quiz' would identify quite a lot of simple gay crossdressers as 'straight' autogynophiles; to the extent some would not be identified as 'homosexual transvestites' by Blanchard's approach despite being exactly that reflected less their disinterest in or having a vagina, which some small number of gay men can develop as a kink, but because there's not that much demand for hair stylists or prostitutes.
This was, to be fair, perhaps a somewhat reasonable mistake to have made in the early-90s, when there weren't many visible trans people (and the standards for social science were even worse than today's). There are certainly some people that fit into these specific combinations, and there's a variety of reasons that they'd be oversampled in Blanchard's original survey groups. But there's just as many where this entire framework makes no sense. Even in Bailey's era, he encountered the outskirts of this matter (eg, a section in TMWWBQ talks about what Bailey called "men who want to have sex with 'she-males'", and what trans women today call 'chasers', which Bailey tried to squeeze into a format of autogynophilia that seems really hard to match with their overwhelming desire to suck a woman's dick). Blanchard's research crowed about Blanchard-identified autogynophiles who, when asked a hypothetical about getting either complex physical or social transition, exclusively, and half taking the physical transition, and then mumblemumbled' something about the other half.
And nowadays you have a broad portion of gay men fantasizing about an appealing vagina-equipped body, sometimes up to and including getting knocked up (and, uh, other more esoteric and unlikely fantasies)... except they don't want a straight male partner, or to have breasts, (or even necessarily to preferentially bottom), while the 'homosexual transsexual' category for the typology predicts that they'd have been driven by interest in attracting a straight male top. Or those "men who want to have sex with 'she-males'" who were sublimating their true autogynophilia, increasingly don't want to go any further than cross-dress even in fantasy where sprouting a perfect pair(s) of breasts are a simple click away (and otherwise violate the 'quiz' from TMWWBQ). Or femmy-and-early-transitioning gynophiles, or masculine-and-late-transitioning androphiles, or situations like non-op trans-on-trans relationships, or the various androphiles that have crossdressing kinks focused around how lifting up a skirt with a boner is hot, so on and so forth. Even presuming for the sake of this argument that every trans person fits into one of these categories, the categories themselves don't actually describe reality near the level of consistency and clarity that Blanchard or Bailey uses; they're not even especially helpful as fuzzy predictions rather than far-edge stereotypes.
Worse, this undermines its predictive power, not just its categorical approach. TMWWBQ isn't about how people were driven to transness by these interests, but about how these interests were served by transition, which the Blanchard typology believes to be not just the driving force but the central tool for even self-evaluation of progress and quality of life. But this becomes incoherent when the boundaries between categories fall not just to rare outliers, but fairly common cases and interests. The autogynophile interest in putting on a dress and jacking it as core to the entire category's interaction with the fairer sex might well have been true for a handful of people seeing a gender therapy clinic, but more than its faults as a test, its broad failure to handle non-erotic crossplay among 'heterosexuals' is pretty clear. Conversely, TMWWBQ believes that autogynophiles went to transexuality because they had no recourse for their fantasies otherwise, sounds like a joke to anyone who's been on a roleplay forum, MMOs, or the VR communities that have collected a lot of trans women, or even with your predictions that these matters feedback onto themselves. Bailey's description of 'homosexual' transsexuals gets less pushback from mainstream trans activists (and even the nutty Andrea James-style trans activists), but it's just as prone to these faults: Bailey combines demure and effortless femininity from a young age with limited and unsatisfying romantic and sexual relationships in his description of how "fundamentally, all homosexual transsexuals are similar", which might have been a reasonable mistake to draw from a handful of and is so hilariously wrong if you actually go amongst broader communities that it's hard not to laugh.
Well articulated! It's annoying to see trans-skeptics latch onto AGP as a non-mainstream explanation of trans when it doesn't fit most modern trans people. Blanchard's ideas also poorly explains the negative parts of dysphoria - the extreme distress at being perceived or seeming male (although I don't think 'male born in woman's body' by itself explains those either).
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As long as someone's weirdness is contained within highly sanity hazardous 'art' or roleplay which is kept out of the public eye, nobody cares. And I don't think that's actually true - e.g. the stereotype of AGPs who transitioned isn't that they were particularly weird, but that they are conceited jerks, which is probably related to having been able to convince themselves that they should do it.
There's also a reason why people are afraid and avoid trans 'women'. People who are as quick to take offense as any 16th century aristocrat and are one mental health crisis away from a breakdown are somewhat ..more problematic.
I'd not make that claim at all. Why do you say so?
We are going to find out in a few years when it's going to be possible to get something smart to laboriously check the entire content of e.g. fictionmania, or archiveofourown or other porn sites that have a lot of that shit, and tell us what kind of characters there, what's the action, themes. We'll know then.
I agree that it's completely fucked up and quite confusing, as I note from observing some hobbyist researchers trying to make sense out of it all.
However, one thing is certain - broadly speaking, the people involved, judging by their 'artistic' output are nothing like 'a mind trapped in a body of the opposite sex'. Perhaps a few (~10%), but generally absolutely not.
Internet has vastly complicated the picture by letting people have access to complicated sexual fantasies. Simple ones don't do it anymore. These days even housewives have heard about the weird pests strangely interested in menstruation products, etc.
.. and why is the research of low quality ?
Perhaps it is because anyone sane avoids the field and rather does something else. Only a masochist would who look at what has happened to people who didn't appease the nutty activists like Andrea James and decided "I'm going to do solid research on this weird phenomenon and risk getting very online single-minded obsessives angry at me".
Modulo trolls, to an extent, but my point's less about whether people care and how well the model describes reality. I don't think Blanchardian theory needs to explain a guy who fetishizes getting knocked up in the vagina or having their skull literally fucked, for one example (eg Kyrosh for an artist who draws well and isn't gory). But once you explain why he doesn't think himself as -- and isn't even comfortable in -- trans spaces with the phrase "aren't deluded enough", it either needs a big asterisk or it needs an explanation.
Yeah, that's fair. If the claim behind Blanchard's typology was to separate transwomen into Drama Queens and people who picked names starting with "A"... well, it wouldn't be completely without controversy, since drama queens and you'd need an inclusive and, but it'd mirror a lot of complaints inside the community.
Largely because Blanchard's typology is categorical and admits few exceptions, to the point where Bailey takes reporting errors as evidence that all exceptions are reporting error. In this environment, existence proof is enough, and I've got more than a couple cases there. It's hard to think of something more autogynophilic, in either the trans or not-trans sense, as something like XChange... but that it's present at all is something Blanchard and especially Bailey specifically reject as part of the typology.
I'm willing to accept a predilection toward it, and probably a pretty strong one, though even there I think it wouldn't be as strong as Blanchard's original dataset would point, if only for selection reasons. If you want to get into it, I'd further expect trans-focused porn is more sub-focused and more likely to have surgical or blood-oriented aspects than average. But that's retreating pretty far from Blanchard's typology.
It's that totalizing aspect that makes Blanchard's typology such an awkward fit, and it's not just a problem on the autogynophilia side. I'd compare Strype with Accelo for an example of people who'd be very easy to make a predictive analysis from the "discomfort with own body" sense, and give very wrong guesses in more than one direction even assuming Strype is autogynophilic (for the sake of your eyeballs, I'll avoid linking to then-his-now-her excellent gay smut). Accelo's emphasize on a femmy version of themselves getting railed by named and developed characters of both genders but favoring men is not unusual either among cis gay men or clearly and conventionally androphillic trans women.
The archetypes Blanchard's talking about exist, and may well have actually been extremely uncommon in Blanchard's original datasets, given the nature of selection there -- I'm not calling his work any more fraudy than other social science of the time -- but even in his original datasets he was throwing out 10%+ as lizardman constant. There were justifiable reasons to do so at the time, but in the modern era you can get a much deeper and far more direct glimpse at unvarnished fringes of human sexuality and it just doesn't seem to fit nearly as well.
I'm not particularly sold on that model, either, and I'm not even sure it's considered likely or even acceptable to voice inside a lot of the modern trans movement; if you want some deeper evidence against I can give it. But I think you need to do a lot more to prove one theory than to disprove another.
Yeah, that's fair, and I've spoken up against that aspect in the past in trans-friendly environments. The bizarre emphasis on disagreement-as-suicide-baiting doesn't do the movement favors, and the immediate jump to threats does even less.
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How is the ratio in comparison to an equally niche subgroup? Gen pop is not the right comparison here, I don't think.
Also, links please.
In general population, ratio of transgender used to be 1 in 5000 or 1 in 10k before 2010.
The data I remember was was something like half dysphorics, some survey by tailcalled. (more in the later part of this reply)
Even now outside of certain US high schools girl circles where it gets into % range, gender dysphoria is still vanishingly rare.
There are similar conditions, e.g. some other cases where people come to identify with the object of their erotic desires -e.g. amputee fetishists are far more likely to have to want their limbs hacked off, fat fetishists are much more likely to desire being fat than random people.. but I don't know actual ratios in these groups. Probably nobody does.
As to popularity of autogynephilic pornography:
if we consider the amount of content existing on a general pornographic board such as f95zone.to..
on that rather extensive site devoted to content creation and pirating content, there are cca 180 threads classed as 'sissification' (maybe half or more of AGP porn is like that).
Hard to tell how popular AGP stuff is compared to say common favorites such as harem, oral sex etc as searching by tags tops out at 1k results.
Meanwhile, the site has ~5000 threads marked as 'renpy' which is a common 'visual novel' development framework.
So, in the single digit % range at best, probably less popular.
Or, alternatively, you can check another huge general porn archive : https://archiveofourown.org/ and check what's the ratio of tags there. It won't be high.
As to the data it was by tailcalled, and you can probably find something on this website by /u/tailcalled who used to post on /slatestarcodex and motte a bit hangs out there. The site is down atm, it was still up last month. He hangs out at this discord: https://discord.gg/ptqeCQg, where I failed to find links to it.
He posted one time a somewhat large-ish survey with a result that showed that basically, there's not much correlation between strength of autogynephilic desires and gender dysphoria, with many men with strong autogynephilic desires reporting no gender dysphoria. However, in it, something like half of all men with gender dysphoria reported some autogynephilia. So, there's definitely some association, and searches through the discord showed there's debate going on whether it's GD -> AGP or AGP -> GD or some other factor causing both. Complicated business.
Sorry, I've just spent cca 40 minutes tracking it down and can't find it atm. It was definitely from a survey of his. Maybe I'll find something later.
EDIT:
Just checked up on what tailcalled has been up to on reddit and there was this subreddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/sissyology/
With 90k subscribers. (insert the rolling on the floor laughing emoji). It's one of those 'simulation is glitching' things.
Thank you!
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Is there even a difference? A new behaviour is established, gets positive reinforcement, grows.
Yes, few people have the ability to keep their inner life unchanged when they get a lot of reinforcement in a different direction. And describing it like that, I think its easy to see how having that ability would put you at risk for a different kind of insanity.
Google is useless here, mind elaborating?
At the boring level, people do seem to behave differently based on their avatar, specifically, even when not self-selected. Again, caveat social science research (it's a little hilarious in retrospect how much effort went to eliminating priming as a potential confounder) or anecdote, but Nick Yee's research does try to poke at this and some other alternatives. And anecdotally, I have picked up mannerisms or habits of speech I never used, but the game's animators and designers (or even third-party modders) did -- that's not quite the same thing when I wasn't really pretending to be the character so much as controlling them outside of cutscenes, but it seems like that could be close enough.
At the intermediate level, it's very easy for a character to 'get away' from you, either because of ramifications from other characterization or limitations of a format or type. You might try behaviors you'd normally never consider in those same environments, simply because it's the 'right' or 'in-character' thing. (Or maybe the character just always looks kinda goofy.)
Closer to the central claim, though, I think there is some difference between, for example, playing a character that is foo and doing foo, for wide varieties of characteristics. The latter probably is better at encouraging that specific action! But the former makes you think about the broader characteristics and motivations and how all those things would interact. Which, to be fair, is still a new behavior that's established and getting reinforcement. Just a different one.
Ah, sorry. Multiplicity/plurality is a broad category of self-identification. I don't know the topic particularly well enough to go into detail, and there's a lot of taboo words that may reflect either philosophical positions or community battles that aren't particularly obvious to outsiders: the internal phrasing is usually some variant of multiple people in one body. This seems to be one of the more popular descriptions for outsiders that I've been pointed to, though I don't know how well-regarded it is in general, or to what extent everyone covered by this definition would self-identity (eg, most LessWrong tulpamancers don't self-identity as plural).
MineCraft Quilt is a modloader that forked/derived from a different one for a variety of reasons (link is a lot of unnecessary background info), but while most were long-lasting technical problems, a big triggering incident was about as Culture War as it could get, which meant that most of the founding generation for Quilt either had very strong feelings about dependency correction or were very specifically pro-trans.
Add in some evaporative cooling, and you get a very Blue Tribe community. But there's a lot of subcultures in the Blue Tribe, including some things that weren't well-known even among a lot of fairly strongly left-leaning people to start with. One of the matters that was both very visible (in part because of a couple serious code contributors) and didn't readily slot into widerspread community norms was multiplicity/plurality. (And not just in the funny ways like inviting a bunch of debates over the singular 'they'.)
These were not specific to (or even particularly well-known before within) the MineCraft or modded MineCraft community. There's been some livejournal and dreamwidth communities from these people dating back to the late 00s, to my knowledge -- I'd seen them on the edges of the therian/otherkin communities for a while then. Quilt's just one of the first places I've seen where a) it was taken as a rule that it needed to be honored, to the point of having integrated Discord tools to assist, and b) interacted with people that were majority not-plural, plural-curious, or in a weird adjacent community (eg therians, otherkin, people building tulpas).
As I understand it, this would be in effect only while you wear the avatar. I interpreted the sentence I responded to
as being about long-term effects. The short-term effects are interesting, but I dont see how they would lead to the character taking over in the off-time.
I somewhat agree, depending on what you imagine for "just doing foo". If you get told what to do over earbuds, thats less dangerous than "playing a character" normally. I would say this is because in the latter case youre figuring out what to do, and that way of figuring out can be reinforced. I dont think its essential for that figuring out to involve thinking about some character.
And I think this is essentially the same way normal behaviour changes in an environment: You go in with somewhat different mood/disposition each day, and some of them get more positive reinforcement than others.
BTW, I think often doing a specific action is not the best way of encouraging it. Many actions lie at a point within the decision tree that youd never normally get to, and training that last step more wont help.
There's been some research to check for transfer to offline environments (eg here or, while less directly tied to the avatar, 'game transfer phenomena discussions of behaviors and habits do seem close). I think the science tends to be weaker, especially garden of forking paths problems, and they tend to only measure on scales of days rather than months or years, but it does match my experiences.
Now, these are usually small and fairly trivial things, and sometimes not even matters you'd consider character (or, conversely, are Character in the Calvin's Dad sense), so it's fair to say there's still a long way from the sort of mode changes that the OP was motioning around. But I think it's a quantitative rather than qualitative difference.
That's reasonable.
Well yes, if we believe in reinforcement or some other mechanism like that, that can carry the short-term consequences into the long term. But there the proteus effect is not an alternative way that the character can take over long term. All the stuff about the mechanism of it suggests it doesnt have an independent long-term effect.
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That's a name I haven't seen in a long time. It's a shame he pivoted his academic virtual social research into a gaming market research firm. The rest of the Terra Nova writers had less interesting content over the years. I think Castronova has been flogging the same virtual economics concept unchanged for something like 20 years now.
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@gattsuru, please correct me if I’m missing something.
Quilt is a fork of Fabric, one of the main modding tools for Minecraft. It split in part because of drama involving ”plurality,” or multiple personalities in one body. The issue was not so much that concept as it was the moderation response to criticism, but I’m less clear on the specifics.
I think plurality/multiplicity/headmates pushes the boundaries of “new behavior.” Or rather—it is adequately described from the outside as an adopted behavior, but proponents will fight tooth and nail to tell you that’s not the case. That their personalities have distinct values and goals, and must not be treated as an affectation. They may benefit from social accommodations such as xenopronouns or discord bots.
One thing led to another, and Quilt seceded to make their own modloader, with blackjack and redesigned moderation. My understanding is that this involves a lot of workflow and API improvements, too, and is not just a political maneuver. In theory it’s the free (-open-source-software) market in action: if you don’t like the management, head out and make your own improvements.
In practice, critics view it as the continuation of politics by other means. Technical improvements made by Quilt are inseparable from its weirder stances. I have no idea how the cost-benefit works out for the broader Minecraft modding community.
I'd caveat that Quilt mostly split over more conventional trans-specific Culture War. If you want the exact background, here and here (cw: discussion of suicide) are the Quilt-favorable perspectives on the events, though I'll caution that they're a long and very inside-baseball read.
((Also some even more boring problems related to bikeshedding: literally a year of Fluid API attempts.))
The increasing recognition of multiplicity/plurality stuff seems to have been a downstream effect of evaporative cooling and a few of the early Quilt coders (I think gdude? and silver?) being plural or plural-adjacent, and having roles early on that made it easier to bring up or turn into community rules or norms. But afaik the whole thing was little more than a curiosity for Fabric even early into the split.
In the end, both Quilt and Fabric are a bit of a rounding error for total users: the biggest Quilt and Fabric mods gets tiny download counts, and those are often straight clones or ports of their Forge equivalents. There's interesting stuff happening in places, but they're more for the programmer and friends than a general category of users.
There's a not-implausible argument that they've encouraged better behavior from LexManos and Forge -- at the very least, Forge is a lot more willing to work with people now than in the 1.7-1.12 era, especially for ASM/mixins -- but at the same time the increasingly fractured community makes it hard to work or onboard newcomers. I've got hopes that Quilt may try to solve a few dependency problems (mostly resolution, but also a variant of the diamond problem) that wouldn't be possible for Forge to force or practical for Fabric's design team, but it hasn't really done that yet.
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