A 2009 study by Charles Moser, titled Autogynephilia in women, found that 93% of women could be classified as autogynephilic (or 23% of women using a more rigorous definition of AGP). To find AGP in women, Moser used a questionnaire with items that were used to classify AGPs in other studies, and asked women to respond. The following is a list of the questions used and the results:
These results have led some to believe that AGP is 'normal female sexuality' - that women are usually AGP themselves, and that AGP in men represents a full or partial female sexuality. According to this line of reasoning, AGP men have some type of intersex condition that caused them to have a sexuality that is normally found in women.
Contrary to these types of claims, data collected on a multitude of sexual interests suggests that the idea of AGP as 'normal female sexuality' is incorrect. My earlier blog posts describe a phenomenon where paraphilic interests often have self-directed and other-directed pairs. Examples of this are: aroused by the idea of being a vampire and aroused by vampires, or being aroused by someone wearing latex and aroused by the idea of wearing latex. I call this self/other paraphilic pairings.
AGP (in men) is a self-focused paraphilic interest with an 'other' pairing. That 'other' is transgender women. AGP that is ascribed to women by people like Moser does not typically include a sexual attraction to transgender women. This is a major difference between AGP in men and supposed AGP in women. As far as I can tell, what Moser describes as AGP in women has no paraphilic pairing because it is not paraphilic.
The following graphs show the rates of arousal towards the idea of having sex with a woman and having sex with a transgender woman with a penis:
Cis women are not commonly aroused by the idea of having sex with a transgender woman, while transgender women are. This demonstrates a major difference between the sexual interests of cis women and AGPs (who are much more likely to be transgender women than non-AGP men). It also supports the self/other paraphilic pairing model. Transgender women are often AGP, and AGP pairs with attraction to transgender women. According to PornHub, searches for transgender porn make up about 2% of all searches in the United States on their website. Most of the men searching for transgender porn are likely AGP, based on the strength of AGP predicting arousal towards transgender women.
AGP is likely not caused by an erotic target location error (ETLE) either. AGP is, by definition, an ETLE. It is an arousal that focuses of the self rather than another person. In the case of women, this is normal, as women appear to be aroused by the idea of sex acts that include both themselves and a partner. This phenomenon of women being aroused by sex acts, while men being aroused by sex actors is what Moser picked up on and erroneously thought of as AGP in women. It's normal for women to have some arousal towards themselves, as they make of one of the partners in a sex act. Men, however, tend to focus their sexual interest much more on their partner. Men are aroused by sex acts as well, but they focus on the partner who they are having sex with, while women are aroused by themselves and their partner and tandem. (See the following study for more detail on the differences between male and female sexuality: https://www.scribd.com/doc/275396603/chivers-seto-blanchard-2007).
Defining AGP as an ETLE makes sense, but the idea that AGP is caused by an ETLE based on an attraction to women is likely false. AGP caused by an ETLE does not take into account attraction to transgender women, nor does AGP as 'normal female sexuality.'
AGP is not 'normal female sexuality' since women are not normally aroused by transgender women. AGP is also not likely caused by an ETLE, because that model also cannot account for the attraction towards transgender women. The actual cause of AGP remains unknown. My humble guess is that AGP and many other paraphilic interests are memes that incorporate aspects of regular sexuality like attraction to female bodies. By some mechanism (perhaps trauma), a paraphilic interest becomes ingrained in someone, and this becomes a lifelong sexual interest.
Transgender women and men who are interested in transitioning should understand that it's not very common for others to be attracted to transgender women. Because they themselves are attracted to transgender women as much as they are attracted to women, they might believe others who are attracted to women have the same sort of sexual feelings towards transgender women as they do. Holding this erroneous belief could case significant hardship, as they wonder why most people who are attracted to women do not find them attractive. They might believe it's caused by 'transphobia,' while in reality, most people are not attracted to them simply because they do not have a paraphilic interest in transgender women.
I have an alternate hypothesis. It could be that trans women are attracted to trans women because they have put in the ideological work (n.b. I use ideological with a neutral valence) to shift their perceptions of trans women to the "women" box. This would differ from the general population, who have generally not done so. I would anticipate the same affect for trans men, so to test this, you might wish to do a similar survey for male-attracted trans men measuring attraction to men vs. trans men. Another idea would be to measure how the respondents view trans women overall: whether they lump them into woman, man, or other. You will probably need to somehow separate out ideological commitments that transgender women should be generally treated as women from gut classification.
ReplyDeleteA point against this theory is that the trans men 5-value decreases. I can't read off the chart how much of a decrease that is. I do note, however, that the attraction becomes mixed, rather than mostly 0. I think that this could be consistent with the theory above: trans men, who have also done the gender-recategorization work, view trans women as more like women cisgender people, but to a lesser degree than trans women who better internalise the notion. This story is confounded by some 0's moving to mixed too. I think that there's separate gender-presentation and genitalia attraction, so maybe those that move up are more attracted to genitalia than presentation. In any case, only more data can tell if this story is correct.
Also, you have not sourced/provided the data in your graphs. Are they from one of the studies you link to, or somewhere else?