Autogynephilia discourse is so absurdly bad on all sides

I think it's important to highlight because Blanchardians position themselves as careful honest truthseekers. But yes, you are right.

Michael Bailey is the most prominent and well-respect figure in this debate:

• He is friends with Ray Blanchard, inventor of the term "autogynephilia",
• He wrote a book on homosexuality and transness titled "The Man Who Would Be Queen", with a substantial part of the book being about autogynephilia,
• He is one of the biggest advocates for autogynephilia theory, perhaps seconded by Kay Brown, Rod Fleming, Steve Sailer, or some radical feminists I don't know about; but also certainly the most respectable figure among the autogynephilia advocates,
• He runs SEXNET, an intellectual dark web mailing list for research into sexuality,
• He is arguably the main academic researcher in the topic of autogynephilia.

Kevin Hsu used to be his grad student. I think the badness of autogynephilia discourse in this case is due to Bailey, since e.g. it was only him on the response paper, so let's not bring Kevin Hsu into it. I only mentioned him because he was on the author list for the paper.

Also it should be said that e.g. Ray Blanchard isn't necessarily better; for instance, he endorsed the Bailey study that I complained about in the OP.

I think it's best to get new, better data: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oHn8yvzn5uGvPYmsb/i-think-michael-bailey-s-dismissal-of-my-autogynephilia?commentId=Xq96prSNjwBYQoMaM [LW(p) · GW(p)]

I guess I just took it for granted, given Zack's post and my own experiences with the anti-autogynephilia-theory side, that autogynephilia discourse is also bad on the opposite side. But yes you are right that I didn't do much to justify this, and others might disagree.

I strongly dislike this paragraph since it seems to me to optimize for heat over light. If I were strongly convinced that the Blanchardian camp were up to no good, then I wouldn't be as put off by dismissing the entirety of their work from a single case of malfeasance. However, I don't think you come close to demonstrating that in the preceding post, so when you try to convince me that I should be exhausted with them (and imply that I should therefore ignore them), I'm peeved.

In the paper, they claim to be responding to people such as Charles Moser and Scott Alexander, and as I said Charles Moser and Scott Alexander are talking about AGP in trans women. Furthermore, elsewhere on social media they claim that their paper is a rebuttal of these papers they are responding to.

From what I can tell, they're merely saying that the AGP group and the female group are indeed rather different from eachother in terms of how much AGP they have. My main criticism is something like "well no shit", but I don't really see how you can take that and then say that they're up to no good. Are they using this specific claim elsewhere to do something that isn't actually supported by this paper? That would be the problem, not what they're up to here.

It seems to me that this is basically a semantic debate about what it means to "have AGP". If you take AGP to mean something like "a fetish that you regularly masturbate to", then I don't think it's terribly surprising that females typically don't "have AGP". Now, you might wanna push back on that definition of AGP. Sure, go for it. You might claim that the actual rate of females with AGP is high enough that it has significant overlap with the trans women with AGP (Sure, go for it). Your post here, however, seems to go a step much further and assume that I'm convinced that they're pretty egregiously wrong here and then leverage that presumed-convinced-ness into thinking they're all a bunch of grifters. I don't like that, and I trust you less because of it.

I don't understand why you consider my description in the post dishonest when it seems to me that it is basically the same as how you describe it:

Michael Bailey (the effective leader of autogynephilia theory) recruited samples of highly active members of online erotic AGP communities, and found that these samples are on average much more AGP than cis women, and therefore conclude that AGP in cis women is dubious.

As I described in the post, I think it's dishonest because of the greater context of the debate.

Yep, the idea autogynephilia explains transgender identities can be shown to be false by referring a single piece of direct evidence: it isn't difficult to find aro-ace trans people. That right there shows autogynephilia isn't a universal explanation. It may apply to some cases, maybe, but transgender identities definitely go way beyond that.

Feels like an example of bad discourse that you dismiss it on the basis of ace trans women without responding to what Blanchardians have to say about ace trans women.

Besides, but also mainly, we have evidence for physiological causes:

• Frigerio, Alberto, Lucia Ballerini, and Maria Valdés Hernández. “Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation: A Systematic Review of the Human Neuroimaging Literature.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 50, no. 8 (November 2021): 3329–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02005-9.

And it takes lots of handwaving, or deliberately ignoring the data, to stick with the autogynephilic hypothesis as the most general explanation.

Idk, I find the neurological research kind of unreadable and sketchy. Like small sample sizes and unclear theories. I would enjoy if someone could lay it out in a more comprehensible manner.

That right there shows autogynephilia isn't a universal explanation.

Do any prominent pro-AGP people claim it is? Even when I see them described by their opponents, the claim is that there are two clusters of trans women and AGP people are one of them, so aroace trans women could belong to the other cluster without contradicting that theory.