Sep 9, 2021 04:49 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 9, 2021 06:43 PM by C C.)
"This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence [...] the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Ttheir anger results from “envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them,” he has tweeted. “They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant."
But clearly male authors (below) get targeted, too.
Note that the LGBT-wiki entry about "autogynephilia" is open or more receptive -- different from the RationalWiki one. Ironically, it's the latter that is the angry, politically reactionary one. (Actually not so incongruous, since RW is not as impartial as its title implies -- it has "teacher's pets", it can be paternalistic or opportunistically protective about certain issues and groups.)
The potential co-occurrence with narcissim perhaps clarifies how the vitriol and attack operations from activist leaders can be so intense and menacing -- akin to channeling an inner Trump.
- - - - - -
The truth about autogynephilia
https://quillette.com/2021/09/07/the-tru...ynephilia/
EXCERPT: [...] Bailey knew his book would be criticised by activists who disapproved of Blanchard’s typology. But the level of vitriol shocked him—as it did Blanchard, who felt “survivor’s guilt” at seeing Bailey targeted, and horror at the diatribes that started to be published about Blanchard himself online. “That kind of boiling hatred reminded me of when I was a small kid, brought up in a farming community,” he says. “You would sometimes come across the rotting, stinking corpse of some small dead animal, and it’s like a physical blow.”
Bailey’s university received complaints alleging that he had broken rules governing research on human subjects, slept with one of those subjects and taken payment to write referral letters for people seeking sex-reassignment surgery—sackable offences, if true. An allegation was made to the state regulator that he was practising psychology without a licence. Rumours were circulated that he had abandoned his family, and that he had a drinking problem. His book had been nominated for a “Lammy,” an award for excellence in celebrating or exploring LGBT themes. After protests, the nomination was withdrawn.
Bailey’s family was also targeted. Andrea James, a transwoman working in consumer advocacy in Los Angeles, posted pictures of his children online, with captions saying “there are two types of children in the Bailey household”: those “who have been sodomised by their father [and those] who have not,” and asking whether his young daughter was “a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it.”
“The situation went from disconcerting to disturbing to terrifying,” says Bailey. “I knew that some people didn’t like the ideas I wrote about; I did not know how deranged some people would get or how coordinated they would be. And then, from terrifying, it became humiliating. I was national news, with all kinds of accusations, from lying to my research subjects to having sex with them.”
Blanchard and Lawrence hunkered down and let the storm blow over. Now nominally retired, though still publishing, Blanchard says he is “quite cheerful” about the attacks on him—which continue—though “traumatised by proxy” by those on Bailey. Lawrence is also retired, though she is considering trying to bring her ideas to a wider audience, perhaps by writing explicitly autogynephilic erotica.
But the campaign against Bailey might have succeeded, had it not been for Alice Dreger, a bioethicist and medical historian who moved in some of the same professional circles. The claims were so numerous, and so widely disseminated, that at first she thought they must contain some truth. After meeting Bailey and hearing about the harassment of his family, she decided she had to be sure. In an essay published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2008 she debunked them all, using evidence from emails and more than 100 interviews. The material is enlarged upon in her acclaimed 2015 book, Galileo’s Middle Finger.
Bailey had been targeted for publicising ideas transactivists wanted buried, Dreger concluded. The aim had been to “undermine Bailey’s reputation, undo any positive praise his book received, and make Bailey as personally miserable as possible.”
She showed that three transwomen had orchestrated the campaign: Andrea James; Lynn Conway, a computer scientist; and Deirdre McCloskey, an economist. Strikingly, one had previously acknowledged autogynephilia, and another described what sounded awfully like it in an autobiography.
In an email to Lawrence in 1998, James praised the “Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies” essay, described Blanchard’s observations as “quite valid, even brilliant” and said she recognised autogynephilic tendencies in herself. In McCloskey’s autobiography, Crossing, she writes that her teenage self, Donald, experienced “a rush of sexual pleasure” when dressing in his mother’s underwear, and used to break into neighbours’ houses in search of girls’ clothes. She also specifies his preference for autogynephilic pornography: “There are two kinds of cross-dressing magazines, those that portray the men in dresses with private parts showing and those that portray them hidden. [Donald] could never get aroused by the ones with private parts showing. His fantasy was of complete transformation ...”
But now self-reflection had been flung to the winds. Being transgender was to be understood as a matter of identity, not sexuality; Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence were contradicting a cherished narrative; and everyone had to pick a side.
Partly, this was because of the “Great Awokening”—an expression coined by journalist Matthew Yglesias as shorthand for the American Left’s shift to an identity-driven style of politics. Activists had started to judge people and ideas, not according to the evidence, says Bailey, but according to a very particular notion of social justice. In their way of thinking, gender is a political identity—an innate characteristic that has nothing to do with sexuality. In the past couple of years he has assigned his grad students an article he and Blanchard co-wrote, entitled “Gender Dysphoria is Not One Thing.” The students typically find it upsetting and enraging, he says, since it contradicts cherished ideas.
But referring to autogynephilia for any reason other than to deny its existence provokes even greater rage than other sins against “wokeness.” Blanchard thinks one reason is that it complicates the task of “selling” transsexualism. If a guy decides he’s coming to work as a woman from now on, it’s one thing for him to say: “I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve always been a woman inside,” and quite another to say: “I’ve moved on from just masturbating in women’s clothes to wearing them all the time.”
In Galileo’s Middle Finger, Dreger offers another insight: since autogynephilia involves a fantasy of truly becoming, or already being, a woman, any reference to it can be experienced as an insult. “There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labelled,” she writes. “When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name.”
This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist trans activism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from “envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them,” he has tweeted. “They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.”
Consider the favoured insult of the angry youth wing of trans activism: TERF, which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” The first part does not refer to excluding trans people from jobs, housing or other goods: it simply means denying that identifying as a woman makes you one. “Radical feminism” is feminism understood as a liberation movement to free females from the patriarchy—a man cannot be a radical feminist, only an ally. Only females, therefore, can be TERFs. There is no equivalent insult for males who deny that sex can be changed by self-declaration.
Lawrence adds another piece to the puzzle of trans activist rage. She posits that autogynephilia’s inwardly directed nature, and the frustrations attendant on requiring others to validate your cross-sex identity, mean that the condition co-occurs with narcissistic disorders more often than would occur by chance. And narcissists often respond to minor slights with disproportionate rage. It is not hard to find evidence of “narcissistic personality traits, including a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and lack of empathy” in the attacks on Bailey, she writes in a 2008 paper entitled “Shame and Narcissistic Rage in Autogynephilic Transsexuals.”
Two processes are essential to creating and maintaining a healthy sense of self, says Lawrence: mirroring (being witnessed empathetically by others) and idealising (feeling a commonality with an admirable other). Autogynephilia can disrupt both. The urge to cross-dress is regarded as shameful, meaning it is concealed and the young autogynephile has no one to empathise with him and approve of the “woman inside.” And whom can he identify with or look up to, when older autogynephiles deny what drives them?
Lawrence urges clinicians and researchers to strive for empathy. “Virtually all transsexuals are likely to have been shamed and criticized for their gender variance before transition, and ... are likely to encounter subtle or blatant disrespect, harassment, discrimination, or violence after transition,” she writes. She counsels care in the choice of language: “it might be helpful to begin to describe autogynephilic transsexuals as persons who want to ‘become what they love,’ as an alternative to more stigmatising descriptions.”
Between the studies of effeminate boys and gender-dysphoric men, it had become clear that a male might identify as a woman for more than one reason, and that gender dysphoria and cross-sex identification were related to sexuality in two separate and quite different ways. But the rise of left-wing identity politics and the determination to bury the concept of autogynephilia meant that, as trans people became more common and visible, this complex, nuanced picture of transness was simplified and erased. (MORE - missing details)
But clearly male authors (below) get targeted, too.
Note that the LGBT-wiki entry about "autogynephilia" is open or more receptive -- different from the RationalWiki one. Ironically, it's the latter that is the angry, politically reactionary one. (Actually not so incongruous, since RW is not as impartial as its title implies -- it has "teacher's pets", it can be paternalistic or opportunistically protective about certain issues and groups.)
The potential co-occurrence with narcissim perhaps clarifies how the vitriol and attack operations from activist leaders can be so intense and menacing -- akin to channeling an inner Trump.
- - - - - -
The truth about autogynephilia
https://quillette.com/2021/09/07/the-tru...ynephilia/
EXCERPT: [...] Bailey knew his book would be criticised by activists who disapproved of Blanchard’s typology. But the level of vitriol shocked him—as it did Blanchard, who felt “survivor’s guilt” at seeing Bailey targeted, and horror at the diatribes that started to be published about Blanchard himself online. “That kind of boiling hatred reminded me of when I was a small kid, brought up in a farming community,” he says. “You would sometimes come across the rotting, stinking corpse of some small dead animal, and it’s like a physical blow.”
Bailey’s university received complaints alleging that he had broken rules governing research on human subjects, slept with one of those subjects and taken payment to write referral letters for people seeking sex-reassignment surgery—sackable offences, if true. An allegation was made to the state regulator that he was practising psychology without a licence. Rumours were circulated that he had abandoned his family, and that he had a drinking problem. His book had been nominated for a “Lammy,” an award for excellence in celebrating or exploring LGBT themes. After protests, the nomination was withdrawn.
Bailey’s family was also targeted. Andrea James, a transwoman working in consumer advocacy in Los Angeles, posted pictures of his children online, with captions saying “there are two types of children in the Bailey household”: those “who have been sodomised by their father [and those] who have not,” and asking whether his young daughter was “a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it.”
“The situation went from disconcerting to disturbing to terrifying,” says Bailey. “I knew that some people didn’t like the ideas I wrote about; I did not know how deranged some people would get or how coordinated they would be. And then, from terrifying, it became humiliating. I was national news, with all kinds of accusations, from lying to my research subjects to having sex with them.”
Blanchard and Lawrence hunkered down and let the storm blow over. Now nominally retired, though still publishing, Blanchard says he is “quite cheerful” about the attacks on him—which continue—though “traumatised by proxy” by those on Bailey. Lawrence is also retired, though she is considering trying to bring her ideas to a wider audience, perhaps by writing explicitly autogynephilic erotica.
But the campaign against Bailey might have succeeded, had it not been for Alice Dreger, a bioethicist and medical historian who moved in some of the same professional circles. The claims were so numerous, and so widely disseminated, that at first she thought they must contain some truth. After meeting Bailey and hearing about the harassment of his family, she decided she had to be sure. In an essay published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2008 she debunked them all, using evidence from emails and more than 100 interviews. The material is enlarged upon in her acclaimed 2015 book, Galileo’s Middle Finger.
Bailey had been targeted for publicising ideas transactivists wanted buried, Dreger concluded. The aim had been to “undermine Bailey’s reputation, undo any positive praise his book received, and make Bailey as personally miserable as possible.”
She showed that three transwomen had orchestrated the campaign: Andrea James; Lynn Conway, a computer scientist; and Deirdre McCloskey, an economist. Strikingly, one had previously acknowledged autogynephilia, and another described what sounded awfully like it in an autobiography.
In an email to Lawrence in 1998, James praised the “Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies” essay, described Blanchard’s observations as “quite valid, even brilliant” and said she recognised autogynephilic tendencies in herself. In McCloskey’s autobiography, Crossing, she writes that her teenage self, Donald, experienced “a rush of sexual pleasure” when dressing in his mother’s underwear, and used to break into neighbours’ houses in search of girls’ clothes. She also specifies his preference for autogynephilic pornography: “There are two kinds of cross-dressing magazines, those that portray the men in dresses with private parts showing and those that portray them hidden. [Donald] could never get aroused by the ones with private parts showing. His fantasy was of complete transformation ...”
But now self-reflection had been flung to the winds. Being transgender was to be understood as a matter of identity, not sexuality; Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence were contradicting a cherished narrative; and everyone had to pick a side.
Partly, this was because of the “Great Awokening”—an expression coined by journalist Matthew Yglesias as shorthand for the American Left’s shift to an identity-driven style of politics. Activists had started to judge people and ideas, not according to the evidence, says Bailey, but according to a very particular notion of social justice. In their way of thinking, gender is a political identity—an innate characteristic that has nothing to do with sexuality. In the past couple of years he has assigned his grad students an article he and Blanchard co-wrote, entitled “Gender Dysphoria is Not One Thing.” The students typically find it upsetting and enraging, he says, since it contradicts cherished ideas.
But referring to autogynephilia for any reason other than to deny its existence provokes even greater rage than other sins against “wokeness.” Blanchard thinks one reason is that it complicates the task of “selling” transsexualism. If a guy decides he’s coming to work as a woman from now on, it’s one thing for him to say: “I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve always been a woman inside,” and quite another to say: “I’ve moved on from just masturbating in women’s clothes to wearing them all the time.”
In Galileo’s Middle Finger, Dreger offers another insight: since autogynephilia involves a fantasy of truly becoming, or already being, a woman, any reference to it can be experienced as an insult. “There’s a critical difference between autogynephilia and most other sexual orientations: most other orientations aren’t erotically disrupted simply by being labelled,” she writes. “When you call a typical gay man homosexual, you’re not disturbing his sexual hopes and desires. By contrast, autogynephilia is perhaps best understood as a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name.”
This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist trans activism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from “envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them,” he has tweeted. “They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.”
Consider the favoured insult of the angry youth wing of trans activism: TERF, which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” The first part does not refer to excluding trans people from jobs, housing or other goods: it simply means denying that identifying as a woman makes you one. “Radical feminism” is feminism understood as a liberation movement to free females from the patriarchy—a man cannot be a radical feminist, only an ally. Only females, therefore, can be TERFs. There is no equivalent insult for males who deny that sex can be changed by self-declaration.
Lawrence adds another piece to the puzzle of trans activist rage. She posits that autogynephilia’s inwardly directed nature, and the frustrations attendant on requiring others to validate your cross-sex identity, mean that the condition co-occurs with narcissistic disorders more often than would occur by chance. And narcissists often respond to minor slights with disproportionate rage. It is not hard to find evidence of “narcissistic personality traits, including a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and lack of empathy” in the attacks on Bailey, she writes in a 2008 paper entitled “Shame and Narcissistic Rage in Autogynephilic Transsexuals.”
Two processes are essential to creating and maintaining a healthy sense of self, says Lawrence: mirroring (being witnessed empathetically by others) and idealising (feeling a commonality with an admirable other). Autogynephilia can disrupt both. The urge to cross-dress is regarded as shameful, meaning it is concealed and the young autogynephile has no one to empathise with him and approve of the “woman inside.” And whom can he identify with or look up to, when older autogynephiles deny what drives them?
Lawrence urges clinicians and researchers to strive for empathy. “Virtually all transsexuals are likely to have been shamed and criticized for their gender variance before transition, and ... are likely to encounter subtle or blatant disrespect, harassment, discrimination, or violence after transition,” she writes. She counsels care in the choice of language: “it might be helpful to begin to describe autogynephilic transsexuals as persons who want to ‘become what they love,’ as an alternative to more stigmatising descriptions.”
Between the studies of effeminate boys and gender-dysphoric men, it had become clear that a male might identify as a woman for more than one reason, and that gender dysphoria and cross-sex identification were related to sexuality in two separate and quite different ways. But the rise of left-wing identity politics and the determination to bury the concept of autogynephilia meant that, as trans people became more common and visible, this complex, nuanced picture of transness was simplified and erased. (MORE - missing details)