I think there are a number of assertions here that are much too strongly worded. That said, when you see a lecture hall of trans patients at the same time, you can’t escape feeling like there are at least two modes of distribution within both ftm and mtf populations.
The two discrete types model is not The Truth, though. Blanchard and later Lawrence even report patients describing sexual fantasies around being a woman even though the patient is attracted to men. Too strong claims based on too little data from studies that aren’t rigorous enough isn’t the way to go.
My feeling is that, online, only 4chan’s lgbt board has brutal honesty, enabled by the anonymity. And mtfs with AGP would get real empathy by their kind and the kind of frank support without gaslighting that people in that situation need and deserve.
On Reddit fora and discord servers, you see loads of users persuaded of their femininity get hugboxed, the positivity being enforced by strict moderation. Telling someone they would not be seen by the world as a woman as they then presented themselves is a bannable offence in many online trans spaces. This warps their expectations horribly.
That said, some ftms have a very attractive masculine energy in person and it’s easier to feel they are men than not. So passing is absolutely a thing.
The big ick I had was seeing mtfs exhibit ‘coomer mentality’, a very male way of seeing women. How could I see someone as a woman when they were talking about female body parts, my body parts, in a way that stank of coom? We hate being seen by men as a mobile platform for T & A.
It feels like a violation. I got similar vibes when reading about cultures where men don’t have to restrain their sexual impulses.
And that’s why AGP can’t be allowed to exist. It gives too many a disgust reaction. It shatters any illusion of femininity the person might have created. The unbridled male gaze is demeaning, it feels predatory, it devalues women, why can’t men just learn to see the whole person? And when it’s someone talking about breasts in the coomer manner dressing like the male idea of a sex worker, it’s just too much.
>The two discrete types model is not The Truth, though. Blanchard and later Lawrence even report patients describing sexual fantasies around being a woman even though the patient is attracted to men. Too strong claims based on too little data from studies that aren’t rigorous enough isn’t the way to go.
If autogynephilia can overshadow allogynephilia and nullify it, and also lead to a secondary attraction to men (meta-attraction), then it follows that some AGPs will have a sexual preference for men.
It is The Truth that the two types exist. Time will tell if there are more than two types or if some people are hybrids of these two types, but there is enough evidence for the homosexual and autosexual types.
I don’t know if you have relevant clinical experience? I’ve met maybe 200 mtf patients and a similar amount of ftms. Admittedly, this was very superficial. I mean that I wasn’t the treating physician — obviously.
Still…
I can’t deny that just by looks, my brain sees a bifurcation in mtf (what you’d call the feminine HSTS and the coomer AGP groups, judgy bitchiness is my addition) and a trifurcation in ftms.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s The Truth that there are Two Types. The patients coalesce around modes, and, as I said, everyone can see that ftm patients do not fall into two discrete categories. That has already sunk your claim.
Or, we could define trans your way, but 1. what’s the clinical significance? The treatment is the same and 2. it would leave some ftms without a pigeonhole. (If we now want to keep on pigeonholing people)
What’s critically important to realise and keep in mind is that it’s not only the HSTS who is, to cite Bailey, a mosaic of feminine and masculine traits. Every human being has some non-mean amount of every trait. Typologies appeal to us, see the popularity of MBTI, astrology and Blanchards typology as examples :)
There are cishet men with broad hips and cishet women with long straight limbs and narrow hips — look at rugby players and long-distance runners for examples. Lawyer women and male nurses tend to exhibit psychological traits that are coded to the opposite sex.
Human experience and traits we exhibit don’t fall into discrete categories. You’re letting your left-brain thinking sort individuals into categories which enables you to get a handle on things and do stuff, but obscures the individuality of every human.
In the medical sciences, we don’t deal with The Truth, we have evidence and models. And, ‘all models are wrong; some models are useful’. You’ll find the myth of the nearly always passing and womanly HSTS gainsaid by Blanchard and Bailey themselves: according to them, it’s more that ‘the HSTS’ who would be a non-passer gives up when they realise they won’t get the straight guys they want.
And I’ve even met ‘AGPs’ with a few feminine traits! (Internal world usually not being among them. Obscure the usernames and the online discussions don’t read like women talking, at all)
You may not realise it, but the clinicians who embrace the typology do have an anti-trans streak and sometimes private attitudes about patients that in some cases cross over to being unbecoming a physician. (If you have contempt for your patients you need to switch to a different patient population, your patients deserve it, and you’ll feel better about your work)
So people have been right in hiding their fantasies: you don’t usually know for sure that your clinician will greenlight the transition if you don’t feed them an acceptable script.
Don’t be a pickme. Genspecters will always have their disgust override any professional respect for you in the end. You’ll always be, first and foremost, a disgusting perv to them. (Confession: I didn’t have to think long before realising I couldn’t work in trans care)
Transgender research is currently not separating MTFs and FTMs into separate groups by etiology. Until this is done, reliable knowledge pertaining to the proper treatment approach for these distinct groups will not be created. While the medical interventions are similar regardless of etiology (hormones, surgeries), it would be an improvement in treatment if those who would benefit from medical interventions could be more reliably identified.
>Human experience and traits we exhibit don’t fall into discrete categories. You’re letting your left-brain thinking sort individuals into categories which enables you to get a handle on things and do stuff, but obscures the individuality of every human.
If I say that a man is homosexual, I am not denying that he is an individual with his own personality and life story, but am instead saying that he has the trait of same-sex attraction. Most of your response, including this part, is an attempt at deconstruction by the blurring of boundaries. The end point of this way of thinking is that words lack meaning. Classifying people into groups for the purpose of talking about population-level phenomena is important so that patterns are made visible and reality becomes more legible.
>Don’t be a pickme. Genspecters will always have their disgust override any professional respect for you in the end. You’ll always be, first and foremost, a disgusting perv to them.
I am not doing this work because I care that people think highly of me. I'm doing it because autoheterosexuals deserve to know the truth of their condition, and the transsexual subset deserve treatment from clinicians who know more than nothing.
First: I have to admit, I have no idea what it's like to be a man with autogynephilic feelings. So the only intellectually honest thing is to say that you probably know what's going on in the heads of the people presenting a trans woman identity online with very distinctly (icky) male way of looking at women, even if that woman is themselves. Perhaps you really do make up the majority of trans women, and this makes me question my earlier support for trans rights.
Second: the treatments we offer would still be the same: HRT and surgeries on the medical side, permanent hair removal for MTFs, voice and speech training on the less medical side. Knowing about the aetiology doesn't really change much. Perhaps, if we could reliably diagnose with a brain scan, we could, e.g. medically transition androphilic trans girls earlier while letting the other patients mull the transition over.
Third: I read your later post on the biology of sexedness, and I think there is a fertile discussion to be had, but not if you insist on mansplaining instead of having a dialogue and being able to acknowledge points instead of just trying to win.
I used to have views similar to yours and when I was exposed to the variation you see in clinic, I had to adjust my views and re-read DNA translation and sex determination in the light of the Bourdieuan/Foucauldian observations about power and language.
I do not mean to argue for a view of endless number of genders. To me it is a demonstrable sociological fact that for the vast majority of human history, nearly every society had exactly two genders, man and woman. Now, there was always some play in how was was a man or a woman, men had more options, for women, in more than 99% (to be Internet hyperbolic) of cases your options were 'be a mother or die even before you become a mother'.
Hoping to hear you have the intellectual curiosity to at least consider listening to why I moved from your views to 'it's complicated and I don't understand it as well as I think I did'!
>First: I have to admit, I have no idea what it's like to be a man with autogynephilic feelings. So the only intellectually honest thing is to say that you probably know what's going on in the heads of the people presenting a trans woman identity online with very distinctly (icky) male way of looking at women, even if that woman is themselves. Perhaps you really do make up the majority of trans women, and this makes me question my earlier support for trans rights.
I think there are plenty of trans women who don't look at women in the "very distinctly (icky) male way of looking at women", but who are nonetheless of autogynephilic etiology.
>Knowing about the aetiology doesn't really change much. Perhaps, if we could reliably diagnose with a brain scan, we could, e.g. medically transition androphilic trans girls earlier while letting the other patients mull the transition over.
Diagnosing etiology by actually understanding the etiologies and how to spot them is probably more effective than brain scans, at least at the current level of brain scan technology. It's really not hard to pretty immediately guess the etiology of MTFs. And given the base rate is at least 80% AGPs, even if you literally know nothing about a given MTF individual, just guessing they're AGP will get you the right answer more often than not.
>Third: I read your later post on the biology of sexedness, and I think there is a fertile discussion to be had, but not if you insist on mansplaining instead of having a dialogue and being able to acknowledge points instead of just trying to win.
>I used to have views similar to yours and when I was exposed to the variation you see in clinic, I had to adjust my views and re-read DNA translation and sex determination in the light of the Bourdieuan/Foucauldian observations about power and language.
It's okay if we disagree and have different epistemic standards. IDK that it means I'm 'mansplaining' though. I won't adjust my views based on postmodern bullshittery that Foucault and others advocated for. I believe that objective truth exists (the correspondence theory of truth is correct), and this means I can never be on the postmodernists' team nor take them seriously.
You didn't explain how, in your view, we should change the treatment path based on aetiology. I'm thinking people like you probably shouldn't be helped to transition -- fewer bepenised people who want to bonk women in women's toilets and changing rooms and all. But you might differ. So maybe there's something to be won by us not knowing what you guys are like, after all?
It sounds like you believe you have the final and complete revelation and that it is The Truth. Tell me, then, what's the difference between the most 'male-like' female and the most 'female-like' intersex person? In this discourse around being a real woman, women are saddled with all kinds of requirements. I know many women who deny being maternal at all, and lots of conservatives are ready to label them defective just based on that. One thing that comes up is that only females are real women. Where _ever_ you draw the dividing line between female and intersex, you are also denying that some poor lady is a Real Woman. You're taking her womanhood away from her.
If you think defining that dividing line is something where there's no reason at all to consider Bourdieuan and Foucauldian observations about what goes on when the medical establishment defines words, I'd be thrilled to hear ANY reasons beyond your curt assertions that you have superior access to cosmic truths by dint of being a Man and thus obviously superior to me.
"If an autohet person wants to transition but doesn’t even know the name of the sexual orientation underlying their desire to be the other sex before they start taking hormones, how is that informed? How is that consensual?"
This is... not a very convincing argument as written. Knowing every bit of medical trivia there is to know about a condition or its causes isn't generally considered necessary for informed consent.
A patient with a bacterial infection can still give informed consent to antibiotics even if they don't know the name of the bacteria they're infected with.
A patient who's depressed can still give informed consent to antidepressants even if they don't understand the biological causes of their depression or the mechanism by which they work. (Last I checked, no one actually understands those!)
I'd say the core elements of informed consent are knowing what"s about to happen, knowing what the consequences might be, and choosing to go ahead with it. For HRT, that means knowing what hormones are, what effects to expect on what timeline, how permanent those effects are likely to be, and what the risks are. But I don't see why informed consent would require the patient to understand why they find those effects desirable.
I think there are a number of assertions here that are much too strongly worded. That said, when you see a lecture hall of trans patients at the same time, you can’t escape feeling like there are at least two modes of distribution within both ftm and mtf populations.
The two discrete types model is not The Truth, though. Blanchard and later Lawrence even report patients describing sexual fantasies around being a woman even though the patient is attracted to men. Too strong claims based on too little data from studies that aren’t rigorous enough isn’t the way to go.
My feeling is that, online, only 4chan’s lgbt board has brutal honesty, enabled by the anonymity. And mtfs with AGP would get real empathy by their kind and the kind of frank support without gaslighting that people in that situation need and deserve.
On Reddit fora and discord servers, you see loads of users persuaded of their femininity get hugboxed, the positivity being enforced by strict moderation. Telling someone they would not be seen by the world as a woman as they then presented themselves is a bannable offence in many online trans spaces. This warps their expectations horribly.
That said, some ftms have a very attractive masculine energy in person and it’s easier to feel they are men than not. So passing is absolutely a thing.
The big ick I had was seeing mtfs exhibit ‘coomer mentality’, a very male way of seeing women. How could I see someone as a woman when they were talking about female body parts, my body parts, in a way that stank of coom? We hate being seen by men as a mobile platform for T & A.
It feels like a violation. I got similar vibes when reading about cultures where men don’t have to restrain their sexual impulses.
And that’s why AGP can’t be allowed to exist. It gives too many a disgust reaction. It shatters any illusion of femininity the person might have created. The unbridled male gaze is demeaning, it feels predatory, it devalues women, why can’t men just learn to see the whole person? And when it’s someone talking about breasts in the coomer manner dressing like the male idea of a sex worker, it’s just too much.
>The two discrete types model is not The Truth, though. Blanchard and later Lawrence even report patients describing sexual fantasies around being a woman even though the patient is attracted to men. Too strong claims based on too little data from studies that aren’t rigorous enough isn’t the way to go.
If autogynephilia can overshadow allogynephilia and nullify it, and also lead to a secondary attraction to men (meta-attraction), then it follows that some AGPs will have a sexual preference for men.
It is The Truth that the two types exist. Time will tell if there are more than two types or if some people are hybrids of these two types, but there is enough evidence for the homosexual and autosexual types.
I don’t know if you have relevant clinical experience? I’ve met maybe 200 mtf patients and a similar amount of ftms. Admittedly, this was very superficial. I mean that I wasn’t the treating physician — obviously.
Still…
I can’t deny that just by looks, my brain sees a bifurcation in mtf (what you’d call the feminine HSTS and the coomer AGP groups, judgy bitchiness is my addition) and a trifurcation in ftms.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s The Truth that there are Two Types. The patients coalesce around modes, and, as I said, everyone can see that ftm patients do not fall into two discrete categories. That has already sunk your claim.
Or, we could define trans your way, but 1. what’s the clinical significance? The treatment is the same and 2. it would leave some ftms without a pigeonhole. (If we now want to keep on pigeonholing people)
What’s critically important to realise and keep in mind is that it’s not only the HSTS who is, to cite Bailey, a mosaic of feminine and masculine traits. Every human being has some non-mean amount of every trait. Typologies appeal to us, see the popularity of MBTI, astrology and Blanchards typology as examples :)
There are cishet men with broad hips and cishet women with long straight limbs and narrow hips — look at rugby players and long-distance runners for examples. Lawyer women and male nurses tend to exhibit psychological traits that are coded to the opposite sex.
Human experience and traits we exhibit don’t fall into discrete categories. You’re letting your left-brain thinking sort individuals into categories which enables you to get a handle on things and do stuff, but obscures the individuality of every human.
In the medical sciences, we don’t deal with The Truth, we have evidence and models. And, ‘all models are wrong; some models are useful’. You’ll find the myth of the nearly always passing and womanly HSTS gainsaid by Blanchard and Bailey themselves: according to them, it’s more that ‘the HSTS’ who would be a non-passer gives up when they realise they won’t get the straight guys they want.
And I’ve even met ‘AGPs’ with a few feminine traits! (Internal world usually not being among them. Obscure the usernames and the online discussions don’t read like women talking, at all)
You may not realise it, but the clinicians who embrace the typology do have an anti-trans streak and sometimes private attitudes about patients that in some cases cross over to being unbecoming a physician. (If you have contempt for your patients you need to switch to a different patient population, your patients deserve it, and you’ll feel better about your work)
So people have been right in hiding their fantasies: you don’t usually know for sure that your clinician will greenlight the transition if you don’t feed them an acceptable script.
Don’t be a pickme. Genspecters will always have their disgust override any professional respect for you in the end. You’ll always be, first and foremost, a disgusting perv to them. (Confession: I didn’t have to think long before realising I couldn’t work in trans care)
>1. what’s the clinical significance?
Transgender research is currently not separating MTFs and FTMs into separate groups by etiology. Until this is done, reliable knowledge pertaining to the proper treatment approach for these distinct groups will not be created. While the medical interventions are similar regardless of etiology (hormones, surgeries), it would be an improvement in treatment if those who would benefit from medical interventions could be more reliably identified.
>Human experience and traits we exhibit don’t fall into discrete categories. You’re letting your left-brain thinking sort individuals into categories which enables you to get a handle on things and do stuff, but obscures the individuality of every human.
If I say that a man is homosexual, I am not denying that he is an individual with his own personality and life story, but am instead saying that he has the trait of same-sex attraction. Most of your response, including this part, is an attempt at deconstruction by the blurring of boundaries. The end point of this way of thinking is that words lack meaning. Classifying people into groups for the purpose of talking about population-level phenomena is important so that patterns are made visible and reality becomes more legible.
>Don’t be a pickme. Genspecters will always have their disgust override any professional respect for you in the end. You’ll always be, first and foremost, a disgusting perv to them.
I am not doing this work because I care that people think highly of me. I'm doing it because autoheterosexuals deserve to know the truth of their condition, and the transsexual subset deserve treatment from clinicians who know more than nothing.
All right, I've had a thought.
First: I have to admit, I have no idea what it's like to be a man with autogynephilic feelings. So the only intellectually honest thing is to say that you probably know what's going on in the heads of the people presenting a trans woman identity online with very distinctly (icky) male way of looking at women, even if that woman is themselves. Perhaps you really do make up the majority of trans women, and this makes me question my earlier support for trans rights.
Second: the treatments we offer would still be the same: HRT and surgeries on the medical side, permanent hair removal for MTFs, voice and speech training on the less medical side. Knowing about the aetiology doesn't really change much. Perhaps, if we could reliably diagnose with a brain scan, we could, e.g. medically transition androphilic trans girls earlier while letting the other patients mull the transition over.
Third: I read your later post on the biology of sexedness, and I think there is a fertile discussion to be had, but not if you insist on mansplaining instead of having a dialogue and being able to acknowledge points instead of just trying to win.
I used to have views similar to yours and when I was exposed to the variation you see in clinic, I had to adjust my views and re-read DNA translation and sex determination in the light of the Bourdieuan/Foucauldian observations about power and language.
I do not mean to argue for a view of endless number of genders. To me it is a demonstrable sociological fact that for the vast majority of human history, nearly every society had exactly two genders, man and woman. Now, there was always some play in how was was a man or a woman, men had more options, for women, in more than 99% (to be Internet hyperbolic) of cases your options were 'be a mother or die even before you become a mother'.
Hoping to hear you have the intellectual curiosity to at least consider listening to why I moved from your views to 'it's complicated and I don't understand it as well as I think I did'!
>First: I have to admit, I have no idea what it's like to be a man with autogynephilic feelings. So the only intellectually honest thing is to say that you probably know what's going on in the heads of the people presenting a trans woman identity online with very distinctly (icky) male way of looking at women, even if that woman is themselves. Perhaps you really do make up the majority of trans women, and this makes me question my earlier support for trans rights.
I think there are plenty of trans women who don't look at women in the "very distinctly (icky) male way of looking at women", but who are nonetheless of autogynephilic etiology.
>Knowing about the aetiology doesn't really change much. Perhaps, if we could reliably diagnose with a brain scan, we could, e.g. medically transition androphilic trans girls earlier while letting the other patients mull the transition over.
Diagnosing etiology by actually understanding the etiologies and how to spot them is probably more effective than brain scans, at least at the current level of brain scan technology. It's really not hard to pretty immediately guess the etiology of MTFs. And given the base rate is at least 80% AGPs, even if you literally know nothing about a given MTF individual, just guessing they're AGP will get you the right answer more often than not.
>Third: I read your later post on the biology of sexedness, and I think there is a fertile discussion to be had, but not if you insist on mansplaining instead of having a dialogue and being able to acknowledge points instead of just trying to win.
>I used to have views similar to yours and when I was exposed to the variation you see in clinic, I had to adjust my views and re-read DNA translation and sex determination in the light of the Bourdieuan/Foucauldian observations about power and language.
It's okay if we disagree and have different epistemic standards. IDK that it means I'm 'mansplaining' though. I won't adjust my views based on postmodern bullshittery that Foucault and others advocated for. I believe that objective truth exists (the correspondence theory of truth is correct), and this means I can never be on the postmodernists' team nor take them seriously.
You didn't explain how, in your view, we should change the treatment path based on aetiology. I'm thinking people like you probably shouldn't be helped to transition -- fewer bepenised people who want to bonk women in women's toilets and changing rooms and all. But you might differ. So maybe there's something to be won by us not knowing what you guys are like, after all?
It sounds like you believe you have the final and complete revelation and that it is The Truth. Tell me, then, what's the difference between the most 'male-like' female and the most 'female-like' intersex person? In this discourse around being a real woman, women are saddled with all kinds of requirements. I know many women who deny being maternal at all, and lots of conservatives are ready to label them defective just based on that. One thing that comes up is that only females are real women. Where _ever_ you draw the dividing line between female and intersex, you are also denying that some poor lady is a Real Woman. You're taking her womanhood away from her.
If you think defining that dividing line is something where there's no reason at all to consider Bourdieuan and Foucauldian observations about what goes on when the medical establishment defines words, I'd be thrilled to hear ANY reasons beyond your curt assertions that you have superior access to cosmic truths by dint of being a Man and thus obviously superior to me.
I kind of agree with you but I don’t want to!
I’ll come back with an argument
"If an autohet person wants to transition but doesn’t even know the name of the sexual orientation underlying their desire to be the other sex before they start taking hormones, how is that informed? How is that consensual?"
This is... not a very convincing argument as written. Knowing every bit of medical trivia there is to know about a condition or its causes isn't generally considered necessary for informed consent.
A patient with a bacterial infection can still give informed consent to antibiotics even if they don't know the name of the bacteria they're infected with.
A patient who's depressed can still give informed consent to antidepressants even if they don't understand the biological causes of their depression or the mechanism by which they work. (Last I checked, no one actually understands those!)
I'd say the core elements of informed consent are knowing what"s about to happen, knowing what the consequences might be, and choosing to go ahead with it. For HRT, that means knowing what hormones are, what effects to expect on what timeline, how permanent those effects are likely to be, and what the risks are. But I don't see why informed consent would require the patient to understand why they find those effects desirable.