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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.
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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