"But 93 Percent Of Cis Women Experience Autogynephilia, Too!"

"But 93 percent of cis women experience autogynephilia, too!"

People comment this under almost every one of my posts. So let's look at the study this is drawn from.

What is autogynephilia? Autogynephilia is a term, coined by the sex researcher Ray Blanchard, describing a male's propensity to be aroused by the thought of himself as a woman. This includes being aroused by

wearing typically female clothing,

doing something typically regarded as feminine,

having bodily functions specific to women, such as periods or pregnancy and

having the fantasy of a typical female body or its parts, such as breasts and a vagina.

Blanchard developed the term when assessing biological men who wanted sex reassignment surgery and found that a sizeable portion of his clients who identified as transgender women had one or more of the above mentioned fetishes. This was especially true for the patients that had previously identified as heterosexual men and now identified as "trans lesbians".

How did Blanchard tell if someone has autogynephilia?

Blanchard developed a questionnaire, where he questioned his biologically male patients the following:

Have you ever become sexually aroused while picturing yourself have a nude female body or with certain features of the nude female form?

Which of these statements are true?

You became sexually aroused while picturing your nude female breasts.

You became sexually aroused while picturing your nude female buttocks.

You became sexually aroused while picturing your nude female legs.

You became sexually aroused while picturing your nude female genitals.

You became sexually aroused while picturing your female face.

3. Which of the following pictures of yourself has been most strongly associated with sexual arousal?

As a nude women

As a woman dressed only in underwear, sleepwear, or foundation garments (for example, a corset)

As a fully clothed woman

Have never become sexually aroused while picturing yourself as a woman

Have never pictured yourself as a woman

... and similiar questions. If you want the full list, you can find it here.

It is important to understand that Blanchard did not ask whether the arousal comes with another person, i.e. being aroused by having sex with your partner and just happening to be a woman. He specifically asked whether the sole thought of having female breasts, genitals or performing stereotypically feminine tasks such as cleaning or cooking is arousing to a biological male.

Do some biological males who want to transition to the female sex actually have autogynephilia?

In the study we are going to look at, another study is brought up. Here half of the respondents, who are biological males, have experienced autogynephilic arousal "hundreds of times or more". Only 14 percent of the respondents reported never having had experienced autogynephilic arousal.

What does the trans community say to these findings?

Many trans people, especially trans women, do not agree with the results of Blanchard's research. While some outright say that autogynephilic arousal does never happen, others claim that cisgender women get aroused as well at the sole thought of having a vagina or breasts, wearing feminine clothing or having periods. To strengthen this hypothesis, the famous "93 percent"-study was developed in 2009 by sex researcher Charles Moser. So let's look into it.

How did Charles Moser conduct the study?

Charles Moser developed a questionnaire he gave to cisgender women. In his own words, the questionnaire he developed was "analogous" to Blanchard's autogynephilia-scale. It contains the following questions:

The difference in the questionnaire Blanchard applied to his biologically male patients and the one Charles Moser applied to the biological females he questioned is apparent: Whilst Blanchard mostly speaks of the patients being aroused by the mere thought of wearing lingerie, Moser asks whether one is aroused by wearing lingerie in anticipation to a sexual encounter. Both questionnaires are not in any way comparable, and it is honestly not clear to me why Moser would not just ask all of Blanchard's questions to the biological females, and why he would feel the need to change the questions. Who knows.

Whom did Charles Moser ask for his study?

Yes, you read correctly. 29 participants, all from the same workplace. As somebody who has a degree in statistical sociology, I can honestly say that this study is not even worth the paper it is printed on. To even suggest that this could in any way, shape or form represent the average female population is laughable. When I read the number of participants, I actually asked myself whether I should read any further.

What did Charles Moser find?

The responses to the questionnaire are the following:

Now, one finds that the only three questions to which more than two respondents answered that they felt this type of arousal "frequently" are those that include other people or that happen in anticipation of sex with another person. The types of arousal that happen when a woman is all by herself, just thinking about her "femaleness", are very rare. This is not comparable to the 49 percent of biologically male respondents in the previous study that reported experiencing autogynephilic fantasies "hundreds of times or more".

"But autogynephilia goes away after hormone treatment or sex reassignment surgery! This proves that it really isn't a fetish!"

Moser brings up a study where after sex-reassignment surgery only three percent have had autogynephilic fantasies "hundreds of times or more". This, however, does not in any way, shape or form suggest that autogynephilic fantasies completely go away, just because their number is not in the hundreds anymore. Also, it is reasonable to expect the sex drive of a person to go down after they take medication that represses their sex hormones. This does still not prove that a fetish is not and never has been present. Then, people get used to fetishes. If a person has a fetish for wearing a dog collar, and starts wearing a dog collar everywhere he goes, it is reasonable to assume that after a few days, he will not be as aroused by the sole thought of wearing a dog collar anymore. This, however does not mean that the motivation for wearing a dog collar is suddenly not a fetish anymore or proof of the fact that it never has been a fetish. Also, 44 percent of respondents reported on still experiencing autogynephilic fantasies after sex reassignment surgery, just not "hundreds of times or more". This, as Moser admits, could be explained by the simple fact that respondents just hadn't had the time to indulge hundreds of times in their fantasies.

"But it literally harms nobody! Everyone can have any fantasies they want!"

Yes, everyone can have any fantasies they want. But when these fantasies include other people, especially marginalized groups, one has to tread with caution. A man who masturbates for years to porn starring asian women can be influenced to treat asian women as sex objects. The same thing can happen with a man who only watches porn starring lesbians, who afterwards feels entitled to the attention of a lesbian. But with autogynephilic men, it oftentimes does not stop there. Because their fantasy is not just to have sex with a woman, but to possess a female body, the fulfillment of the fantasy is to become female. And with modern medicine and affirming doctors, this happens more often than not (as shown above). Let me give you an example: Imagine an able-bodied person fetishizing the thought of being disabled. They masturbate hundreds of times to the thought of being disabled and watch hours of porn starring disabled actors. Then, one day, they start to identify as disabled. And when you asked them how they got that idea, they told you "After years of masturbating to imagining myself to the thought of being a disabled person and watching porn of people with disability, I came to identify myself as disabled and you should include me in your disability activism." If that scenario is appalling to you, but the scenario of an autogynephilic transwoman is not, I want to ask you why. As a disabled woman I feel the same discomfort when imagining both of these scenarios.

"But I am a trans woman and I never have had those fantasies!"

One thing I disagree with Blanchard on is that in his opinion, every single transgender woman who is not exclusively attracted to men is an autogynephile. According to his research, most autogynephiles have been heterosexual men and now identified as "trans lesbians", but surely there is also an amount of transgender women, attracted to men or not, who do not experience autogynephilic arousal. And of course not every trans woman is guilty by association. The thing that worries me more is the prevalence of openly autogynephilic behaviour I see in trans spaces, and how it is almost never called out.

"Why can't we just be nice to people with autogynephilia? They deserve compassion too!" "Be nice!" is what is drilled into every little girl's head from the moment they get put into a little pink blanket as a newborn at the hospital. "Be nice!" is what every Disney movie teaches us, is what every Lego Friends playset forces into our heads, is what every representation of women in the media tells us to do. "Being nice" won't help. "Being nice" is what got us here in the first place.

Other marginalized groups, such as gay men, have made it clear from the beginning that they do not tolerate members of another group who fetishize them in their spaces. I think it's time we did the same as well.

yessssss.... I've been following the debates on TRA vs Radfem for the past decade, online. and I've been noticing that sometimes women will just extrapolate what they believe that something means, what its origin is, and why it is the way it is.

Some pieces of culture may have a very different origin than you initially are imagining. Even if they are later used to differing ends.

Not everything will fit neatly into a simplistic framework of "patriarchy" (everything bad done by men solely to hurt women), because in the real world, women are freely agentive people. We can choose to hurt ourselves or other people just for the heck of it. Some TRA rhetoric is made "for the benefit and comfort of FtMs", NOT JUST FOR MTFs.

The patriarchy is a fiction that some people want to pull into reality, but it is not "reality".... if that makes sense. I mean that it is a memetic piece of culture, but it is not necessary to life. People live without it all the time, we only slip into this fantasy world. but I find a lot of comfort in remembering that it is literally NOT REAL. There are matriarchal cultures, egalitarian cultures, anarchist cultures. Animals have all kinds of social structures. Wake up, please.

you are not immune from propaganda and brain rot just because you're not on tiktok and you reblog essay posts from radfems on tumblr. the sociopolitical consequences might not be the same on a global scale but there is no difference between someone who just parrots what trans activists say online and someone who just parrots what radical feminists say online. you need to read actual books and articles and make up your own mind

for women, pattern recognition and gut feelings is survival instinct. recognizing that someone is behaving in some way like a predator you’ve known (etc) literally keeps you alive and healthy. that’s actually even the biological “point” of being triggered when you have ptsd – your body is giving you an intense signal to get the fuck away from something that has hurt you before. obviously, with ptsd its maladaptive, and the trigger itself doesn’t have to mean anything real or patterned if it was based on a very specific situation. but the most basic form of this is pure self protection. the nagging feeling that asks you to move across the street when a large figure is walking a little too close behind you. jumping out of your skin when you hear a raised and angry male voice nearby. a little pit of despair forming when you see rhetoric that seems eerily similar to the frameworks your rapist used to justify himself, deflect blame, or communicate his reasoning for violence against you. your body tensing and freezing when you start to feel guilty or pressured into sex. your heart beating a little faster when… your face getting red if…  an unheatlhy response to this is to move through the world in fear (and GUILT for feeling fear) constantly with no way of making sense of it, individualizing violence, ignoring the way individual experiences of violence intersect with one another forming webs. a healthy response is retaining the ability to make connections and make meaning of the conditions under which women live – talking to other women and noticing which experiences you share. really actively allowing yourself to see what keeps happening. its healing to know you’re not alone. its self defense to believe yourself. listening to your body’s signals as best you can – and yeah, i know that trauma can often make that really hard, make your body feel distant and immaterial. but it really is still there, waiting for you. when i see someone urging women (using really convincing language) to repress their ability to recognize patterns and listen to our bodies and express our realities, i think, in what way would this person benefit from us repressing trust in our own perceptions? why am i being asked to take theirs on as my own? an open ended question without a black and white answer. but sometimes, a feeling is enough.

holy shit, I've known several of the second guy personally. the most annoying, blind motherfuckers who think "identity" matters more than "real behaviour" (not only in terms of gender, but in general.)

they say "oh I don't want to be this type of asshole who objectifies women anymore so I'm just going to say I'm not; and if you point out when I am, I'll throw a hissy fit and pretend like it's your problem and not mine. I don't identify as the problem, anymore. I framed it in my own language, how dare you come up with your own personal understanding for yourself?!?!?!?!?! "

they're just running from their own shadows.

it's bigger than gender, because there are reasonable men who do not act like this. I have personally met some biological women with the same crazy bullshit complex, and some of them were pretending to be male. but behind all this gender horseshit is the psychological mechanics of it. I would suggest learning about that.

"an object they associate with sex" I think the "object" you are talking about are women?

you couldn't make this shit up 😭 it has three hundred likes as well. do they even hear themselves?

r/actuallesbians is what happens if you let straight men into spaces for same-sex attracted women. It is a giant social experiment that has failed, and the only reason a homosexual woman should visit that subreddit is to laugh at delusional men

This is a organizational sabotage tactic that the CIA outlines in this handy book:

I'd recommend reading the full booklet. It was written in 1944, from the perspective of the Allies sabotaging the Axis powers. The tactical awareness may come in handy for you, someday.

why do they always do this? what exactly do they hope to prove by derailing the conversation into what a human being is, and what an adult is? what do they hope to prove by pretending they don’t know what a female is, while simultaneously knowing what a “cis” woman is?

I’m genuinely failing to see what this accomplishes. they all use this same strategy and it never actually ends up proving anything once we go down these threads.

Is it simply just a red herring? an attempt to sidetrack the conversation so they don’t actually have to address your points?

so @sailor-moon-rage asked me for details with regard to my comment that white nationalists are masquerading as leftists to radicalize men in communist, anarchist, and other radical left spaces on social media. this post is me providing further detail.

i suspect my claim was surprising for many folks who assume that, if you identify as a marxist or anarchist, you'd be resistant to alt-right ideologies. in a traditional sense, that would have been true; typically young men would have been radicalized through learning about marxism at college and/or by working with a union, and/or by joining another progressive activist group. these are real-world experiences, though, and as social media and polarization further isolate people from one another, young, politically-minded men and women are learning about politics and social movements exclusively via the internet. that means they have no lived experience, or little lived experience, that would expose them to their ideologies in the real world. they're not talking about their politics in person with other people, exploring nuance and differences and being tempered, they're not organizing--they're posting. and algorithms push people to consume more extreme content in order to maintain their interest (and keep them on the site longer, for advertisers.)

this matters because, in online leftist spaces, the way men talk about their grievances with the government is virtually indistinguishable from the way alt-right men talk. again, this might surprise people, because there's a common misconception now that the alt-right is synonymous with conservatism; it is not. nazis are generally not watching fox news and sporting blue lives matter pins--they hate the police, they hate the government, and they believe in total political sovereignty and independence. the SPLC list of related extremist ideologies is useful for illustrating the scope of these beliefs, which does include general anti-government ideology. most of these groups want to start a revolution that hastens the demise of government, which they see as irredeemably corrupt and bad for the people. 

sound familiar? (cut for length!)

this isn't new. i grew up, as an impoverished black girl in the south, in a predominately white area filled with these types of men. they're deeply committed to domestic terrorism and violence against the state, which they see as righteous. and if you visit any anarchist or communist's page, you'll see them posting/reblogging/retweeting nearly identical rhetoric every day--our enemies must die violently, we must arm ourselves, the revolution begins now. seriously, go to any leftist's blog, like that balaclava moron i was fighting with, and you'll see them reblogging these very posts from open nazis with names like 'pnzr'. partially, this is their shared aesthetic--they love their slavic warcore or whatever the fuck you want to call it lmao--but they also share many ideological beliefs about the nature of politics. 

so, there are superficial similarities. but how does a nazi convince a committed marxist that their goals aren’t so different in the end? by finding an “in”. as i described in my post yesterday, this "in", on most modern social media sites, is a seemingly shared hatred of women. the dirtbag left movement, popularized by podcasts like the red scare and el chapo’s traphouse, and by influencers like that absolute piece of shit rapist hassan and the former incel and anti-feminist contrapoints, problematized feminism as a distraction from “real” political goals. it goes like this: feminists are fat, whiny cunts. why are we letting them emasculate our movement? we need guns, we don’t need nannyscolds. all real leftist women understand where their loyalties should lie. this is a classic appeal to the “cool girl”, and it works—young women, especially, are anxious to be seen as cool and intelligent and desirable by men, so they begin to define themselves wholly in opposition to patriarchy-critical feminist beliefs (usually just termed “radical feminism” which is catch-all for the left, like “zionism” or “globalism”): i’m not like other girls, i love porn. i have an onlyfans, the only acceptable form of capitalism (i guess??) i hate other women. i’m just one of the guys. if you disagree, you’re an ugly terf swerf pig cunt who needs to be decapitated. so the left, like the right, becomes an echo chamber where dissent is violently shut down in certain areas--feminism, yes, but also moderation in any measure. you think violence isn't the answer? bootlicker.

remember, the goal of white nationalism is an ethnostate. they are terrified about a “crisis” of white population demographics; they constantly fret over the decline of western civilization due to “miscegenation” and “immigration”, etc. they don’t actually see a violent leftist white man as their enemy; he’s just misguided. white nationalism and related beliefs are inherently evangelical: that is, they want converts. they talk openly about this on discord servers and chan sites and even openly on twitter, where they discuss tactics to bring these men into the fold, to awaken them. hell, i've talked with many nazis on here to learn more about their beliefs; i'm upfront that i'm a black woman, and they calmly explain to me what their goals are. they evangelize.

so, a united front against “radical” feminism is the easiest way in for them to convert more white people, and from there, once they’ve normalized extreme violent language against "enemy" women, they can more easily begin to problematize other tenets of the left. the trust has been earned. the government should be violently overthrown, right? and what’s in place of it? an anarchist utopia where the people make their own laws, right? and maybe where people who want to be with their own kind, who want to start big families should be left alone, right? patriarchy is intoxicating—marx himself was an abusive patriarch. and most white people are deeply suspicious of non-white people (this is a tenet on the left, after all, that white people are all racist 😬), so obviously for the safety of non-white people, we should encourage separatism, to some extent, right? that's what nazis tell me--the races just aren't meant to mix, and it's best for everyone. it's not a hard sell for white leftists. i mean, they historically love black seperatism—they supported the black panthers, right? (by the way, i am a black feminist and i put black women first. the original panthers were a leftist organization where misogyny was a core value to the extent that black women had to break away and form their own groups, because some of the most powerful men in the panthers were avowed rapists and abusers.) so this isn’t a hard sell for black and brown men, either, because machismo and patriarchy are strong values in every culture; just look at andrew tate and kanye, two of the most prominent alt-right figures—they’re black. and look at hassan, a MENA man, and so deeply committed to misogyny in the name of “marxism”.

in the end, there is no real difference between the goals of these guys. they want “freedom”, they want the independence to rule their little domain as they see fit, and they want to murder their political enemies. i am very active in irl political circles, especially my union, and it is full of these violent, borderline-psychopathic leftist men who don’t care about social justice whatsoever (“restorative justice” is only for rapists, ig), but they do care deeply about violence and subjugating their enemies. i’m not saying all leftist men are like this—i also know incredible male allies who are deeply committed to real justice and care. what I am saying is that young men, especially those who really only ever post online about their politics, are susceptible to extremist ideologies writ large. they can accept, coexist, and even cooperate with alt-right men when their goals and beliefs align, and sometimes they even have a “come to Jesus” moment and see that, perhaps, for them, the alt-right has the answers they’re looking for. we have a name for this: the alt-right pipeline. and it sucks water from many wells. stay vigilant and take the advice of our radical sisters and sistas from the 1970s—never trust a man just because he says he’s a marxist. 

if you have something to add, please do feel free to reblog with commentary, or even just to boost if you found it useful!

edit: reading list!

daniel lombroso (author of white noise and many articles), who embedded with the modern alt-right movement on the internet. i also recommend the work of the following academics who write about white nationalism as a movement and how it lures "normal" (apolitical) and sometimes even leftist radicals into its sphere of influence:

thomas frank (author of what's the matter with kansas? which is the definitive work that traces the roots of leftist radicalism to modern extreme right movements in america)

george lipsitz (author of the possessive investment in whiteness)

dan carter (author of the politics of rage)

theda skocpol (author of the phenomenal states and social revolutions who later wrote about the tea party movement)

rick perlstein (author of nixonland, one of the best history monographs ever written imo, was my go-to in grad school)