Transphobia: An Action Pack (Pt. 4)

An authoritative collection of details on what transgender means, the current medical status, public perception and backlash.

“Thunder… Thunder… ThunderCats! HO!”

Hey, you! Yes, you. Are you normal? You didn’t change gender, or anything? Then you might have heard a lot of barking about those mean-old transes coming for your women and children.

Maybe you’re feeling just a bit intimidated by it all? This topic is loud, it’s confusing and you probably feel like if you ask for more information you’ll get yelled at.

Well, I’m here to help, best beloved.

I’d like to show you how people talk about me and those like me, what it means and where we are now.

Entries

Glossary entries

1. Gender Identity
2. GSM, transgender, trans man, trans woman, cisgender, anti-trans campaigner, biological essentialism, misgendering, deadnaming, dogwhistle
3. Stochastic violence, conversion therapy, trans-away-the-gay, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
4. Autogynephilia (this part!)

The Arguments

1. Arguments 1 (Part 5 overall)
   “What about the minority who are dangerous?”
   “Calm down and stop being hysterical!”
   “I’m just asking questions…”
   “I’m not transphobic I’m just against extremists!”
   “We have concerns but the transes silenced us!”
   Some variation on “men”…
2. Arguments 2 (Part 6 overall)
   Linking together gay/drag/sex/kink/abuse/pædophilia
   Falling back on accusations of perversion
   Using Trans Rights Activists / Lobbyists as a derogatory term
   Appealing to “the gut” or common sense
   Likening trans people to a contagion
3. Arguments 3 (Part 7 overall)
   An appeal to ‘bringing reality’ into the conversation
   - Declaring that sex is ‘baked into every cell in your body’
   - Declaring that ‘you cannot change sex’
   - Declaring that ‘men will always out-compete women’ in sports
   Appealing to protecting women and girls
4. Arguments 4 (Part 8 overall)
   An appeal to “ineffable womanhood”
   An appeal to being generally “silenced” or “cancelled”
   Any line that starts with “Well why can’t I identify as…”
   Appealing to a shared experience that trans women cannot have
5. More soon!

To make it easier, we’ll need to share some terms. Like a little glossary. It’ll make everything a lot easier. You can review or skip these terms as you like. This is the last entry in our glossary before we start looking at the actual arguments used by anti-trans campaigners.

Autogynephilia

Back in the 80s, a doctor did research where he tried to study trans woman, cross dressers and femme gay men. It’s not, on the whole, an awful study — at the time, nobody much studied GSM people.

Blanchard was building off of the work gone before him, especially by Kurt Freund. Kurt got up to some… ahem… interesting studies. Back in the 50s he tried to de-gay patients by exposing them to emetics at the same time as erotic photos of other men, literally hoping it would alter their behaviour so they were sick at the sight of homoeroticism.

Now, to Kurt’s credit, when the study failed (because DUH) he did, in fact, change his mind and campaign for decriminalising homosexuality! He then turned his attention to sexual criminals — pædophiles, rapists — with a view to improving treatment.

Long story short: he studied queer and trans people for a bit, and decided that trans women (…apparently the only kind of trans…) were either feminine as kids and later attracted to men or they were older guys who were attracted to internalised fetishisations of women’s bodies.

Blanchard took these theories and explored them. He started with two boxes, one labelled “femme gays who want to be treated like women” and the other labelled “old guys who get hot from wearing dresses”. He then categorised study participants accordingly.

Now, I do say again, not everything about Blanchard’s work is awful, because he was investigating areas of human behaviour that aren’t normally a hot-ticket topic. His qualitative research into queer and trans people is not without use… but his bullshit two boxes approach is complete twaddle.

In Science, we start with a theory and then attempt to disprove it. If we disprove it, we modify the theory and try again. If we cannot disprove it, we modify our tests and try again. If, after serious effort, we cannot disprove it then we publish it so other people can have a try. That way we end up with pretty solid research that gives us a good model for working with our world and everything in it.

Blanchard did the opposite of that: he started with the results he wanted to find, and worked backwards. He chose his samples according to his own understanding of sexuality, nothing to do with gender. It’s a shame, because his interview-based research turned up some very interesting information and learnings about the psychologies around GSM. But as far as his trans-stuff went, it’s just bad science.

But, best beloved, it gave anti-trans campaigners one of their biggest, most favourite talking points. It underscores, neatly, everything they want to be true about trans people. Blanchard’s study gave us “autogynephilia”, a word that describes a man who gets off dressing like a woman.

Anti-trans campaigners have been dining out on that poor science for a very long time. It’s everything they want: it’s sexual, fetishistic, grubby, invasive and completely invalidates trans women’s identities as real women.

Let’s you and I take a “steel man” approach to this, and look for a way that Blanchard could be right. Let’s say that his scientific method was poor… but maybe, even so, he stumbled onto the truth? That’s possible, isn’t it? Maybe trans women are just men getting their jollies by involving strangers in their elaborate women-face cosplay?

Unfortunately for that line of thinking, there is even more that Blanchard missed out. Not least of all that, in the first place, sometimes people do, indeed, find themselves hot… cisgender women included. It’s not unheard of for human beings to see themselves in the mirror and go “phwoar! I am smokin’!” It doesn’t seem to be a trans-thing, so why are we making it one?

Secondly, Blanchard’s research makes little mention of or account of trans men and non-binary people. For the study purposes, trans = trans women and that’s just not the case.

Thirdly, the research has no control group of cisgender women for comparison.

Fourthly, plenty of us just go about our lives normally: we put women’s clothes on because we are women and we need to go out to the shops for Wotsits or Smarties. We don’t do it because it’s an elaborate sex-game that turns us on; what on earth would it be like to have that much time on one’s hands??

Fifthly, the research makes extensive use of self-reporting and cherry-picking of answers.

Sixthly: the research has a hard time being reproduced, because it’s so subjective, so it’s very hard to draw firm conclusions from it.

Now, there are arguments against my rebuttals here, from anti-trans campaigners and in favour of Blanchard’s work. Here they are:

1. Cisgender women can find themselves hot too: “no they can’t, that’s a totally different thing, I’ve decided! Because hair-splitting hair-splitting…”
2. Minimal trans men/non-binary study: “so what?”
3. No cisgender control group: “No I… isn’t!”
4. Plenty of trans women just exist normally: “you’re still a pervert, it’s just SUBCONSCIOUS!”
5. Ignoring contradictory self-reports: “those self-reports were LIES! They were lying! It’s what trans women do all the time!”
6. It’s not reproducible: “YES IT IS! Look this is kinda, sorta similar…”

Essentially, the anti-trans counter-arguments boil down to trying to redefine and reclassify omissions and errors, or just flat-out disagreeing because it’s quite a subjective, qualitative thing.

Now there are some researchers who still study it. Mostly it’s considered highly subjective and flawed. Some don’t see it that way — indeed, some researchers, such as Anne Lawrence, spend inordinate amounts of their time publishing defences of the usage of sexuality as the basis of “categorising” trans people but… to be honest, I just don’t see the point of the argument. Like why does this matter and why are you dying on this hill? It’s not useful or illuminating in any way.

It is worth noting that Blanchard’s study was of no major importance to anyone outside of researchers until the early 2000’s. Since then, and with the rise in anti-trans sentiment, it’s now a cornerstone of many campaigners’ beliefs.

Despite Wikipedia stating:

Scientific criticisms commonly made against Blanchard’s research include that the typology is unfalsifiable because Blanchard and other supporters regularly dismiss or ignore data that challenges the theory, that it failed to properly control against cisgender women rather than against cisgender men in rating levels of autogynephilia, and that when such studies are performed they show that cisgender women have similar levels of autogynephilic responses to transgender women.

And if that’s not enough, here’s a grab-bag of papers, books and studies you can read that punch holes in the autogynephilia theory. There are plenty more. If you want, you can grab a subscription and read the back-and-forths they all have with Blanchard’s handful of defenders.

1. Serano, Julia. In her book “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,” Julia Serano offers a critique of autogynephilia from the perspective of a trans woman and biologist. Serano argues against the pathologisation of trans women’s experiences and offers an alternative view on gender identity and sexuality.
2. Veale, Jaimie F., et al. A study titled “Prevalence of Transsexualism Among New Zealand Passport Holders” (Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 2008) challenges the prevalence rates and assumptions underlying Blanchard’s typology by examining a wider population sample.
3. Veale, Jamie F. & Serano, J. Their work “Autogynephilia Is a Flawed Framework for Understanding Female Embodiment Fantasies: A Response to Bailey and Hsu (2022)” published in the “Archives of Sexual Behavior” (2022), critiques the biological and psychological assumptions of Blanchard’s theory.
4. Diamond, Milton. In a paper titled “Biased-Interaction Theory of Psychosexual Development: ‘How Does One Know if One is Male or Female?’” (Sex Roles, 2006), Diamond critiques the binary understanding of gender and sexuality, offering a more nuanced view that challenges the basis of Blanchard’s typology.
5. Bauer, Greta R., et al. Their article “Transgender People in Ontario, Canada: Statistics from the Trans PULSE Project to Inform Human Rights Policy” (The Lancet, 2015) provides data on the transgender population that challenges the simplistic categorisations used in Blanchard’s research.
6. Daphna Joel, et al. Research on brain structure, such as “Sex Beyond the Genitalia: The Human Brain Mosaic” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015), although not directly addressing Blanchard’s theory, undermines the binary sex/gender model by demonstrating the complexity of brain sex differences, which could be extrapolated to challenge the underpinnings of Blanchard’s typology.

Or for a snarkier tone, try RationalWiki’s take on the subject.

WOW. That was tiring, wasn’t it? I’m exhausted, and in theory I’m used to this shit. I’ve had it thrown at me enough.

That’s it for the glossary, best beloved. Next up we’ll start on the actual arguments being made. You’ve gotten a taste of them already.

This is part of a multi-part series. New additions will appear when they are ready. All images used were created using DALL-E 3 via OpenAI. Use them if you like, AI sucks and should go in the bin.