Pseudoscience

If I did a study to see if drinking coffee lead to a life of crime and I studied only prisoners who drank coffee and then said that it was true you would be laugh at. But suppose you studied only trans people from a gay bar and said that all trans people are autogynephilic, you would become famous.

The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism author J. Michael Bailey is at it again, this time he is analyzing Caitlyn Jenner, in two articles on Pathoes, “What Kind of Woman is Caitlyn Jenner? Part One of a Q&A on Autogynephilia with Michael Bailey” and part two.

In his book Bailey states that the book is not based on research but only observations but then the book is used by others as research. His research was not peer-reviewed nor did he go before any Institute Review Board (IRB).* His subjects were recruited by word of mouth or it is otherwise known as “the snowball method, there was no control group, but from this “research” came the theory of Autogynephilia.

If you are not familiar with it, it is basically trans women being aroused of the image of themselves as a woman and he developed a series of questions that he asked the trans women from his “research”. As I said there was no control group, there was no validation of his instrument (the survey). So he asked these trans women that he meet at a gay bar to take this survey, and low and behold they said that they did get aroused of the image of themselves as a woman. Q.E.D. all trans women are aroused of the image of themselves as a woman.

Then came along Charles Moser who asked himself what would the results be if he asked women if they are aroused of the image of themselves as a woman. Guess what he found when he asked women at the hospital where he worked?

A questionnaire which included the ASW was distributed to a sample of 51 professional women employed at an urban hospital, 29 completed questionnaires were returned for analysis.  By the common definition of ever having erotic arousal to the thought or image of oneself as a woman, 93% of the respondents would be classified as autogynephilic.  Using a more rigorous definition of “frequent” arousal to multiple items, 28% would be classified as autogynephilic.  The implications of these findings are discussed concerning the sexuality of women and the meaning of autogynephilia for MTFs.

Wow! Imagine that, women are aroused of the image of themselves as a woman! I would bet that if you asked men if they aroused of the image of themselves as a man they would say yes. I think it is part of human nature to think of ourselves as sexy beautiful not as short dumpy overweight man or woman, therefore if a trans woman fantasies as a woman are they not expressing their true gender?

Julia M. Serano in the article The Case Against Autogynephilia¹ in the International Journal of Transgenderism said,

Two of these papers provide evidence that there are two classes of transsexuals—androphilic [Androphilic to describe people who are exclusively attracted to men, and gynephilic to describe people exclusively attracted to women.] and nonandrophilic (Blanchard, 1985; Blanchard, 1988). In the third, he developed the Core Autogynephilia and Autogynephilic Interpersonal Fantasy scales (which measure various aspects of cross-gender arousal) and showed that the nonandrophilic group scored significantly higher on these tests than the androphilic group (Blanchard, 1989b). The experiments found in these three papers were conducted in the 1980s on the same, or largely overlapping, populations (i.e., clients at the Clarke Institute). Wyndzen (2003) has pointed out numerous shortcomings of this work; these, in part, include (a) that Blanchard’s subtypes were not empirically derived but rather stemmed from his initial grouping of individuals based on their sexual orientation, thus, “begging the question” that transsexuals fall into subtypes based on their sexual orientation; (b) that he did not include nontranssexual female control groups; (c) that Blanchard relied exclusively on clinical samples that may not accurately reflect the greater nonclinical transgender population (c.f., Hooker, 1957); and (d) that his results had not been replicated. Indeed, Blanchard himself described his results as “provisional” and stated that “the present findings, therefore, need replication” (Blanchard, 1989b, p. 620).

The paper goes on to state,

While early explorations of feminine clothing and thoughts of female embodiment may be highly arousing (perhaps related to the sexual symbolism associated with femaleness and femininity in our culture), this sexual charge wanes for many MtF cross-dressers and pretransition transsexuals as they begin to interact socially in the feminine role, to develop a conscious female identity, and/or to view their transgender inclinations as authentic and nothing to be ashamed of (Doorn et al., 1994; Serano, 2007).
[…]
It is farmore parsimonious to suggest that cross-gender arousal is an effect of, or merely correlates with, MtF transgenderism (especially in its earliest stages) rather than being its cause.

The third and perhaps most damaging finding for the presumption of causality is that many nonandrophilic MtF individuals report that they experienced an awareness of wanting to be female long before they ever experienced crossgender arousal.
[…]
Together, these findings indicate that cross-gender arousal does not cause transsexualism or cross-gender expression in the majority of nonandrophilic MtF individuals.

But their theory of Autogynephilia almost made it into the DSM even though it is based on pseudoscience.

*All human subject research projects must go before a board to see if their research will not harm anyone. I had to go before an IRB when we were studying the trans community about AIDS/HIV a few years ago.

1. Julia M. Serano (2010) The Case Against Autogynephilia, International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:3,176-187, DOI: 10.1080/15532739.2010.514223