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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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