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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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