Response to Jesse Singal in regards to Ray Blanchard and Alice Dreger, and Autogynephillia

Rosa
Rosa
Sep 7, 2018 · 9 min read

[This was originally a series of tweets, the thread became too long so I’m moving it here to Medium]

Singal’s tweets that I’m responding to:

The fact of the matter is, Blanchardism isn’t an innocent scientific theory, but rather a strict dogma. Blanchard says that *ALL* lesbian and bisexual-identified transgender women are, on a fundamental level, heterosexual men who transitioned due to a pyschosexual paraphillic disorder.

For those who deny it, according to Blanchard, they are ALL lying. Including Contrapoints, who has been personally accused of being an Autogynephille by those who believe in Blanchardism. Blanchard has publically stated, through his twitter, that YouTuber Riley J Dennis, along with Caityln Jenner, are both Autogynephiles which he states as a matter of fact.

(“non-homosexual transsexual” is used synonymous by Blanchard with “Autogynephilic transsexual”)

Singal, I’m certain you’re not blind to the dynamics at play here, since you’re pretty well-acquainted with transgender people and generally seem to have a good understanding of us. And I’m pretty sure you understand and agree that Transgender women are women, knowing you’ve pretty much said so a few times on Twitter.

So, to recap, Ray Blanchard is an accomplished doctor in the field of paraphillic disorders, who was selected to work on the DSM’s paraphillic disorder subcommittee, which is a huge deal. In the field of sexology, Blanchard is literally considered to be a *credible source*, and his work is very commonly cited in scientific papers. As far as this field is concerned, Blanchard’s assertions are currently considered to be more or less factual. Do you understand what this means?

In the current situation, somebody could literally say- in a conversation about Riley J Dennis, Contrapoints, Paris Lees, Stef Sanjati, literally any bisexual or lesbian transgender woman-

“This individual is an Autogynephillic Transsexual, as evidence by their sexual orientation which includes gynephillic sexual attraction to females. This means that these individuals chose to transition because they are heterosexual males who were sexually aroused at the idea of being women, and wanted to be able to fulfill these paraphilic fantasies in their everyday life. Some Autogynephillic transsexuals develop pseduo-bisexuality, whereby they aren’t truly attracted to men, but rather at the idea of being penetrated as a woman in sex.”

This would be an EXTREMELY derogatory thing to claim about a trans woman, but someone could literally proclaim that statement to be *factual*, and use Blanchard, who is regarded by many as a well respected and accomplished researcher in this field, AS A CITATION!

In our current situation, you can literally write this in an academic journal and get away with doing so. I’ve actually read gender dysphoria-related scientific studies that cite Blanchard in ways that are similarly deprecating to trans women! Additionally, Blanchard’s twitter can show that he is very opinionated on transgender issues, and has a strong bias against modern trans activism. Because he’s currently regarded as a legitimate source, these musings can be viewed as having academic authority behind them.

I am sure you’re aware that Homosexuality used to be considered a mental disorder in the DSM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_DSM …

And I’m sure you can logically conclude the types of ways gay people could be (and often were) oppressed by having such a diagnosis over their heads

Back then, there WERE (and still are today, usually involved with Evangelicism) gay people who considered themselves to be suffering under a mental illness BECAUSE of their attraction. Gay people who didn’t believe this could easily be disregarded as mentally ill and in denial.

In a pretty direct way, given how society in the 1970s had a strong stigma against homosexuality AND the mentally ill, this was an instance of a widely acclaimed academic source using pseudoscience to cast homosexuals in a subhuman light.

Now imagine if, today, you were to meet a psychologist who STILL believed that homosexuality was a mental illness, and proclaimed that the modern DSM was “too politically correct” and hence doing a disservice to homosexuals who needed conversion treatment instead of acceptance.

Would you disagree with the psychologist? Would you consider the psychologist to be a bigoted homophobe? Would you support Gay people protesting against books written by the psychologist and his colleagues? Or would you support the psychologist as a victim of academic censorship?

I’m fairly certain that you, as a liberal, would do the former and not the latter. So my question is, why the hell are transgender people different? Why do WE deserve to be villanized as anti-free speech academic censors just because we oppose attacks on us masked as science?

To make things clear, the problem with Blanchardism is NOT that it simply observes how some transgender women, before transitioning and while still living as men, sometimes experience sexual arousal related to women’s clothing and thinking of themselves as women. This is actually acknowledged within the transgender community as a legitimate symptom of gender dysphoria that some experience. Julia Serano uses the term “female/feminine embodiment fantasies” to describe these experiences.

No, the problem with Blanchardism is that it is fundamentally designed to be an anti-trans dogma, which states the following as factual:

  • That transgender women can all be split up into two fundamentally different categories, Homosexual Transsexuals, who transition in order to attract heterosexual males, and Autogynephilles who transition out of a paraphillic condition.
  • That ALL lesbian and bisexual transgender women are Autogynephilles, and those who claim not to be are simply lying.
  • That gender dysphoria in such people is CAUSED by the paraphilic desire, and not the other way around (As Serano claims)
  • That no AGPs can indeed be truly considered “lesbians” or “bisexual”, because they are fundamentally heterosexual men with a unique paraphillic condtion
  • The fact that Blanchardism gives legitimacy to practices that semantically organize transgender women as *men*, not as women. Hence using the term “homosexual” to describe straight trans women and vice versa.

All of these things (and potentially a few other inherently anti-trans aspects of the dogma that I may have missed), paired with the fact that Blanchard has revealed himself to have a strong personal vendetta against “transgender activism” as can be seen through his twitter should be lighting up a million red flags to anyone who legitimately supports transgender people, to anyone who sees transgender men as men and transgender women as women.

As an aside, I’d also like to mention that in the couple of instances where I’ve told cisgender friends (Obviously these are friends who are pro-trans, but also have other transgender friends other than myself because we’re all college millennials) about Blanchardism, their understandable reaction is “What the fuck!?”.

When trans women are opposed to Blanchardism, it’s usually because we’re genuinely really fucking afraid of it. Terrified, even. And we’re terrified of it BECAUSE it is super easily co-opted by transphobes to legitimize their efforts to deny us our “resources, dignity, and non-discrimination”, as you write. ESPECIALLY our dignity and non-discrimination. We’re terrified of blanchardism BECAUSE we care about these things so deepy, and the fact that Blanchard’s dogma stands directly opposed to our dignity, and can also be easily used by transphobes to oppose our resources and non-discrimination, is a huge problem for us. We cannot effectively fight for all of these things, while covering all of the bases, without fighting against Blanchard’s dogma. J Michael Bailey’s work on transgender women was a direct attack on our dignity, and his experiences of “academic censorship” described in GMF are the products of vitally needed transgender activism that seeks to protect our “resources, dignity, and non-discrimination”.

There is no dignity in a transgender woman- an individual who is, and who believes herself to be, a woman- to be pseudoscientifically branded in the ways that Blanchard and Bailey brand us.

We’re right to be afraid of Blanchardism because not only is it a perfect dogma for transphobes to adopt, in order to legitimize their views, (much like homophobes used the DSM to legitimize their “Homosexuality is a mental illness” mantra) It’s actually ALREADY BEING USED by transphobes in this manner! The anti-trans subreddit /r/Gender_Critical uses the shorthand “AGP” (Autogynephille) to describe trans women (or “trans-identified men” as they call us) all of the time, it’s one of their main abbreviations.

And here is Magdalen Berns, a semi-popular anti-trans Youtuber, invoking Blanchard’s dogma in order to say dehumanizing things to a trans women, dehumanizing things about trans women:

Magdalen’s outburst isn’t a rare occurance, I’ve seen an increasingly high number of transphobes invoke Blanchard’s typology in order to legitimize their bigotry. It is an extremely common practice. And, once again, what Magdalen Berns said, perhaps in a more clinical and less vulgar manner, could LITERALLY be written in a scientific paper, with Blanchard as a source. How is this not a problem? Why are transgender women treated as dogmatic when they oppose this dogma’s legitimization through any means necessary? And with conservatives in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and other various countries, actively campaigning against transgender rights, the use of Blanchard’s dogma to enforce transphobic bullying, oppression, and attacks on our dignity will only get worse.

“Why the fuck should women have to share a room with men who want to be treated as women because they are sexually turned on at the idea of being women?”

“Why should insurances pay for surgeries in order to fulfill these freak’s sexual fantasies?”

“This person may look like a woman, but he’s a fucking man. He’s a man, and he either has a sexual fetish at the idea of being a woman, or he’s a gay dude trying to get heterosexual men to sleep with him.”

I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve actually heard variants of all of these.

All of these statements could be enforced by citing Blanchard as a source. And when people such as Dreger legitimize Blanchard, they are EXTREMELY COMPLICIT in Blanchard being use as a rhetorical bat to savagely beat trans women with.

And I think Natalie Wynn, myself, and many other people are genuinely concerned that *you*, Singal because of your connection to Dreger, also will start legitimizing Blanchard and thus be complicit in this as well.

But, as one might point out, you’ve constantly stressed your support to trans people and the fact that you were a trans ally. How could we possibly think that someone such as yourself would be complicit in transphobia?

Well, please forgive the fact that the trans community has a tendency to throw out accusations like this. The only reason why we’re so easily suspicious that people might be secretly transphobic is because this is genuinely something that happens to us all the time. In alt-right circles, there is a concept called “hiding your power level”. The idea is that you will lose your audience if you’re overtly racist from the start, but if you pretend to be anti-racist, but start gradually introducing people to water-ed down white-supremacist viewpoints, you might actually succeed in moving them closer to your side.

And, unfortunately, this practice is incredibly common for transphobes as well. So many times people will claim to be “supportive of LGBT rights, including trans rights”, so that they are not immediately brushed off as bigoted when among left-wing audiences. But then, over time, they’re increase the dial on the transphobia, so slowly that you might not even notice it’s happening. Graham Linehan’s twitter is the ultimate testament to this.

And, I mean, you’ve already written the detransition article, which, although not overtly transphobic, definitely has been used to empower unsupportive “Gender Critical” parents into not affirming the identities of their transgender children.

So how long will it be before we get another article in a major magazine from you? I can imagine it now:

Men trapped in Men’s Bodies

Transgender people claim to be ‘born in the wrong body’, but does this hold up to scientific scrutiny? Some researchers, such as Ray Blanchard, disagree, but trans activists are on the offensive against anyone who dares speak out!

by Jesse Singal

Hopefully I haven’t given you any ideas.

Rosa

Written by

Rosa

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