Sexology Report

Here you can find our positions on a variety of questions related to the autogynephilia test. For your convenience, summaries of the positions are listed in a table of contents below:

Autogynephilia tests lack validity for cis women

A common autogynephilic fantasy among men is to transform from a man into a woman. This fantasy is uncommon among cis women, but I think it's silly to use this to infer that cis women are not autogynephilic. After all, the element where one starts out as male is probably not caused by autogynephilia, but rather by the fantasy-haver being male.

Conversely, a common sexual fantasy for women is to have sex with a man, as a woman. While this sexual fantasy is also common among autogynephilic men and highly indicative of autogynephilia in men, I don't buy that this automatically means cis women tend to be autogynephilic either. After all, cis women are already fully female, and being a woman is part of how they would naturally have sex with a man. It's not clear what sexual fantasy would be expected from a non-autogynephilic woman.

This sort of thing puts us in a bit of a pickle. Most possible indicators of autogynephilia would be biased in one way or another by the respondent's sex.

One could argue that pure autosexuality-based measures would be less biased. Things like being into fondling or oogling oneself. Certainly if a woman was masturbating a lot to her reflection in the mirror, I would infer that she is autogynephilic, while if she was not, I would be skeptical.

However, I don't fully buy that this is unbiased. There's lots of stories about trans women having various forms of autogynephilic interest, but a conspicuous lack of such stories when it comes to posttransition autosexuality. It seems like for most autogynephiles, this sort of thing is reduced in attractiveness by living as a woman.

Without any unbiased indicators to go by, we cannot reliably measure autogynephilia in cis women. Tests and studies that attempt to do so are probably invalid. For this reason, I don't endorse taking cis women's scores on my AGP test very seriously.

Autogynephilia seems related to but distinct from gender identity

Many trans women report various forms of autogynephilia-like sexuality, and in fact the concept of "autogynephilia" was originally coined in a gender identity clinic. This, combined with the fact that autogynephilia is rare among cis men, makes it natural to think that autogynephilia is related to male-to-female transsexuality.

That said, some trans women don't seem to exhibit much if any autogynephilia (even by the standards of my test), and some nontransitioning males are very very autogynephilic. Thus we cannot equate autogynephilia with being a trans woman.

To a large extent, nontransitioning autogynephilic males still want to be women, some desperately so. This once again strengthens the connection between autogynephilia and transness.

But even when considering what one wants to be rather than what one pursues, there's still gaps. For instance, macho autogynephiles are less likely to want to be women, often finding the prospect humiliating. Meanwhile non-macho men often feel like they wouldn't mind being women. That is, other traits than autogynephilia seem to influence how you'd feel about being a woman, as a man.

Autogynephilia tests have unclear validity for trans women

Above, I assumed that autogynephilia-like sexuality is causally upstream rather than downstream from gender identity. I have investigated this a bunch, and I think the balance of evidence supports this view.

However, it seems plausible that gender identity could have some influence on autogynephilia-like sexuality, in that if one feels like a woman or deeply wants to be one, one might imagine oneself as one in sexual fantasies. We might not consider that "true autogynephilia", and instead think of it as "feminine embodiment fantasies" (FEFs).

Autogynephilia tests do not distinguish between true AGP and FEFs, and (for reasons similar to the problem of measuring autogynephilia in cis women) it's questionable whether they could.

Either way, unrepresentative sampling makes statistics flawed

This website is probably mainly visited by people who are interested in being tested for autogynephilia, and that is probably disproportionately going to be autogynephiles who are interested in this. This makes it impossible to estimate the distribution of autogynephilia for the general population (or specific demographics within the general population) using data from this website.

It's unclear if this applies equally to all demographics. For instance, maybe trans women are less affected by this bias because they encounter concepts related to autogynephilia anyway through the trans community. Or maybe trans women are more affected, because trans communities suppress concepts related to autogynephilia.

Because different groups may be affected in different, unknown ways, I'm a priori quite skeptical about attempts to compare the statistics of my test across groups. I'll probably do it anyway, but with a big fat disclaimer that the results are not to be trusted.

I do think that this applies less to breakdowns by sexual orientation than to breakdowns by sex or gender identity. As such, my disclaimer would be less big and less fat when it comes to these groups.

Blanchardians promote fraudulent research when convenient to their cause

The most recent (as of the time of writing this document) and clear example of this is Kevin Hsu and James Morandini's recent paper, Cut from the Same Cloth? Comparing the Sexuality of Male Cross-Dressers and Transfeminine Individuals Through the Conceptual Framework of Autogynephilia. This study has been popular among Blanchardians, yet its methodology section obscures the fact that the trans women were primarily recruited from autogynephilic websites.

This tendency of Blanchardians to promote fraud makes Blanchardian research fundamentally non-credible. (I happen to agree with some of their theories anyway because I have independent lines of research sometimes coming to similar results.)

Anti-Blanchardians censor and harass Blanchardians to suppress their views

Famous Blanchardian researchers have faced severe harassment from activists who oppose autogynephilia theory, but even in ordinary trans forums, bringing up autogynephilia is often banned or piled on.

In affected communities, this make people less aware of the evidence for autogynephilia theory. And in the general discourse, this creates an effect where only the most radical and anti-trans voices for autogynephilia theory are heard, as more moderate people stay silent.

A lot of autogynephilia discourse is full of false, negative stereotypes about AGPs

Transphobes search for the most outrageous stories and present these as illustrative of autogynephilia. As a result, autogynephiles end up being portrayed as predators and extreme perverts, when mostly they are just ordinary people.

That said, it's not an accident that autogynephilia theory is associated with anti-trans viewpoints. One alternative to autogynephilia theory is that trans women transition because they are very feminine. Under this alternative, trans women would fit much better as women than if they transition because of autogynephilia.

"Autogynephilia" is an appropriate term for us to use (vs FEFs)

Some argue that "autogynephilia" as a word is too loaded, and that alternative phrases like "female embodiment fantasies" (FEFs) should be used.

Certainly, it's hard to separate "autogynephilia" from the theory that there's a cascade where gynephilia can be "inverted" into AGP, which in turn can affect gender identity. But is FEF theoretically neutral instead? It doesn't seem to me to be. Instead, FEF theory is based on the idea that gender identity affects sexual fantasy.

Since on net I find the evidence for autogynephilia theory to be compelling, I intentionally use the term "autogynephilia" to refer to this form of sexuality.

The test mentions fantasies that are common among autogynephilic men

The autogynephilia test has two sections. The first assesses six sexual fantasies:

These were taken directly from a study of sexual interests common to autogynephilic men. As such, they exemplify well what autogynephilia centers around, and one would expect many autogynephiles (empirically, it seems ~all autogynephiles) to have many of these sexual fantasies.

The second section of the test does not specify any specific autogynephilic fantasies. Instead it asks abstractly over any kind of sexual fantasy with autogynephilic elements, aiming to assess different facets of how intense those sexual fantasies are expressed.

Our test has superior range and breadth compared to Blanchard's test

Ray Blanchard, the researcher who coined the term "autogynephilia", designed multiple tests of autogynephilia. The most famous one, the Core Autogynephilia Scale, asks respondents whether they have ever been aroused by picturing their female anatomy.

I don't like the phrasing of it. The intended audience doesn't have female anatomy; he should have asked whether they had been aroused by imagining if they had female anatomy, or something. However, it seems like respondents understand what is meant well enough for this to give results anyway.

More problematically, the items in his scale are all based on a distinction between never and ever. Thus someone who has been getting off to it every day is considered no more autogynephilic than someone who got off to it only once. This is in contrast to our autogynephilia scale, where the intensity of the symptoms takes center stage.

Another potential issue with the Core Autogynephilia Scale is that it only assesses anatomic autogynephilia, whereas commonly autogynephiles also have a sexual interest in having sex as a woman (often classified as "interpersonal autogynephilia"). Blanchard has separate scales assessing this and other kinds of autogynephilia, but they have not been used in as much research.

Our test is less contaminated than Hsu's test

Kevin Hsu has designed a test called the General Autogynephilia Scale. It improves on Blanchard's scales by adding gradations to the symptom measurement.

However, Kevin Hsu's scale spends a lot of items on rare sexual interests like menstruating/using tampons or urinating seated like a woman. These probably represent the intersection of autogynephilia with other fetishes, rather than pure autogynephilia. Thus the highest scores on Hsu's scale come from having those fetishes.

Also, all of Hsu's items ask about the intensity of arousal to a specific fantasy. Psychometric scales work the best when they assess several different facets of a phenomenon. This focus on "intensity of arousal" makes his scale overly uniform.