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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.

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.

... 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.

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.

I'd not make that claim at all. Why do you say so?

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.

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.

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.

.. and why is the research of low quality ?

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.