I would chalk up a lot of the pop in interest in sadomasochism and heavy bondage among trans women in the 7 months - 2 year period to be about coming to terms with having erectile dysfunction and then losing interest in more vanilla sex. Maybe a bit crass of an explanation but I think it fits with what I've seen.
Interesting question on the community explanation, I wouldn't be surprised if trans men tend to have communities more similar to their pre transition communities. Especially when it comes to dating it seems much more common for trans women to need to seek a new partner pool after transition than trans men since trans women are either dating straight women or gay men before transition, neither of whom tend to be particularly interested in dating women, while the butch/femme spectrum inside lesbianism can more easily accommodate trans masculinity. So maybe that additional insularity can explain some of the additional divergence among trans women.
I think you're onto something with hormones shifting sexual response, though I think it's probably more than ED alone. (It doesn't follow that losing interest in vanilla sex results in gaining interest in kink, and the timeline of the changes isn't an ideal fit.) I'd guess a big part of it is that people who run on estrogen are more likely to have whole-body sexual responses. It makes sense that that'd make pain and restraint more pleasurable, to the trans women for which it's pleasurable. My bet's that we'd see a similar curve for liking massages and holding hands.
(This wouldn't explain the change in interest in CNC, though, and the fact that shifts while the interest in dominance/submission doesn't as much is surprising - your explanation makes more sense there.)
Also, bisexuality is a pretty common thing! And I'd guess up front that trans women pre-transition are more likely to be dating bisexual folks than cis men, since it's more likely that bi folks might be attracted to a gender non-conforming partner. I'm skeptical of the community explanation, both because it's not obvious to me that there's a big difference in dating pool shifts (today; I'd put higher odds on a difference in other moments in history), and because it's not clear to me that dating pool shifts would explain a shift in sexual preferences.
Changing to a whole body response definitely seems like it makes sense, especially when you add in increased desire for things like hand holding and cuddling as other manifestations of that. I like that explanation a bit more than mine, thank you.
Yeah, bisexuality can keep people in the same dating pool (I'm in an st4t marriage that started out as an ~cishet relationship, didn't mean to do a bisexual erasure), but even so plenty of trans women break up when they transition and are then seeking a different population than they were before (in that they're now selecting on people dating [trans] women). Definitely agree that the mechanism on community shifting sexual preferences is a little murky, but insular communities might see people exposed more to BDSM and give opportunities to explore it. I do think today, when trans women are generally seen as much further removed from drag queens than they were say 40 years ago that trans men are much more likely to be in ~lesbian dating scenes than trans women are to be in ~(gay men) dating scenes, like I would be really shocked if that wasn't a substantial difference, but maybe that's a function of not being in gay men's spaces enough to know.
1. Broadly saying "trans people are more ___ than cis people" is a common but very misleading way to distill these types of results. For a more obvious example, it's probably true that "men have [on average] slightly fewer fingers than women." However, while that framing suggests to the imagination a whole population of ~9.95-fingered men standing next to their 10-fingered girlfriends, the numbers actually just capture a vast majority of 10-fingered men plus a small sub-population of dramatic outliers due to violence or workplace accidents.
A more honest form of language would be "The average of values in respondents indicating transwoman identity is slightly higher than the average of values in respondents indicating ciswoman identity," or similar. Likewise, It'd be helpful to see distributions and standard deviations for many of these poll responses both on the cis and the trans side, maybe graphs that parse out trajectories for medians or for 20th vs. 80th percentile, etc.
2. These polls are great fun, but it absolutely contributes to the society-wide decline in information hygiene when you regularly:
- poll an extremely highly selected group of people (on Twitter/ Substack (aware of and following Aella (care enough about BDSM to answer a poll on it))),
- receive oceans of responses enriched with an unknown but likely large quantity of bots, trolls, culture-war-motivated lying, and deliberate multi-responses across alt accounts, and then
- headline your conclusions in ways that fully obscure all those reasons for nuance and epistemic caution, instead presenting your interpretations as broad Truths about group qualities across the general population (which, given the salacious nature of the polls, will go on to be reshared and vaguely internalized _as_ broad Truths by a huge proportion of the audience).
When journalists do this, it's understandable if gross. But as a rationalist-adjacent type, shouldn't you have higher standards for information handling?
Aella's been consistently transparent about the limitations of the data, especially when you take these articles as a series. Reminders about the limitations are always useful, but this is unnecessarily insulting & exaggerated (the reach of the survey is far larger than the group you outline, for example) and I'd say lacks perspective on what level of data quality is typical and practical in social science.
I absolutely don't mean to be insulting. Obviously, all the other kids are also doing this: practices like overgeneralizing results and conflating observations with interpretations are ubiquitous in the the more PR-hungry parts of the social sciences.
However, Aella is also part of a movement specifically centered around ethical commitment to rigorous truth-seeking and epistemic humility. With her visibility, she also has an amazing opportunity to meaningfully improve the situation (or at least, not to further normalize deceptive communication) by making a principled choice to present her own results with scrupulous honesty.
It would be very easy to just type up these summaries using the framing "Online responses indicating trans female identity also indicate a mean of XXX interest in BDSM on a 5-point scale," which is a reasonably accurate way to describe the sort of thing this type of poll actually shows, rather than "trans people really like ______," which is definitely not what it shows. Aella seems like a conscientious person who is genuinely curious about the topics she investigates, not just another culture warrior with a predetermined conclusion in mind; and maintaining clarity and circumspection around imperfect data is absolutely essential to making forward progress in any field. I brought up these critiques not as zingers, but because I honestly think someone of her disposition might be interested and open to making changes.
If there was better sources of information I would agree but the use of data in the academic study of this is worse. everything I've read is literally the stereotype of 20 white 18-25's from the same university. You can pull some data from porn sites but that's got its own problems. Other than that data is non existent. Hopefully one day we get far more systematic data but until then this is an information add so long as it is couched in appropriately uncertain language which this is.
Also "The average of values in respondents indicating transwoman identity is slightly higher than the average of values in respondents indicating ciswoman identity," is one of the most needlessly verbose sentences I've ever read, contains no new information, and doesn't even address the stated problem with distributions. The standard interpretation of X is more than Y is a difference in averages. The standard interpretation of cis and trans is identity, I don't know any circumstance where this would need to be specified. And then you through in a bunch of filler words like "of values" "indication" ect. This casts the manipulative language used in the last sentence as purely concern trolling and not a legitimate criticism.
>poll an extremely highly selected group of people (on Twitter/ Substack (aware of and following Aella (care enough about BDSM to answer a poll on it)))
Aella has frequently explained this in the past[1], but I think it's fair to say that her data is some of the least selected-for data on human sexuality that exists. It's not a specific poll about one topic, it's a general kink quiz that has gone viral enough that the majority of respondents don't even know who she is, her sample size is huge (total N=500k), and it matches paid respondents pretty well.
I did ctrl-f for 'Progesterone" in a discussion of trans women's sexuality and found no results so I think you're leaving out something pretty big here. Trans women are typically prescribed T-blockers and Estrogen at the beginning of transition and then about six months to a year after that are prescribed progesterone. Testosterone blockers (especially Spironolactone) are not just ED inducing but broadly reduce libido and interest in sex, especially at the beginning of transition where standard practice seems to be totally blocking testosterone production and giving only a very small dose of estrogen. Some trans women, myself included, find themselves to be essentially asexual from the point they take t-blockers (especially Spironolactone) until the point they begin taking progesterone.
Progesterone is believed by some in the trans community to increase attraction to men especially when you start taking. I'm not claiming this changes orientation, I know trans lesbians who were annoyed to begin experiencing attraction to men but never changed who they wanted to be in relationships with. I will say as a bisexual person who had sex with men before hormonal transition, progesterone absolutely changed what it felt like in my body to interact with a man I was attracted to even in non-overtly sexual ways.
Progesterone also quite famously 'unlocks' scent based attraction, trans women on prog sometimes discover that certain people's mild body odor smells really good.
As a cis malesub, I find the results for trans men fascinating...
> This confusion also is evidence against my theory that hormones have something to do with the submissive/dominance gap; if hormones themselves are causing changes, then it’s really counterintuitive for this impact to happen more on the extremes of kink. It might in fact work that way, but it’s not what I’d naively expect.
I had thought that maybe cis het malesubs were towards the "feminine" end of some hormonal/brain continuum... something like "Not quite gay enough to be gay, but could a masculine women please take charge of the sex?" (Before somebody leaps on me, remember malesub online discourse has a lot of "forced bi" and sisssification in it.)
However, if I read Aella's graphs right, transmen (tend to) start off as submissive and the male hormones make little difference to that as a baseline, though they maybe become more adventurous about switching. (And as a sidebar, I wonder if some of the tailing off of enthusiasms is just the novelty of experiencing kink wearing off.)
Now, I wonder: if I suddenly started taking testosterone or similar masculinity boosters, would it actually make me *more* submissive, or at least more stoical and maybe more eager to take a harsh beating?
My expectation would be that transwomen become less into the trans community after they transition.
E.g, before transition, talking to the community for advice of various kinds. (It would appear that dealing with government paperwork is a big part of the trans experience, from getting a prescription for hormones to getting a Gender Recognition Certificate).
After transition: more going out as a woman in the wider community, rather than trans-specific venues.
I'm a bit surprised about you writing "especially trans women, are already really far away from cis people’s scores" given that the first figure seems to show that absolute gap between scores is larger for *transmen*. Transwomen, on the other hand, are only slightly more submissive than ciswomen.
I believe the intended comparison in that sentence was with assigned sex at birth in that sentence (i.e. cismen with transwomen and ciswomen with transmen), which both gives correctly different direction and correctly huge absolute value difference.
"Trans women are more submissive than cis women, even before ever taking hormones."
That would make sense, wouldn't it, given that they have made a conscious determination that they feel like a woman--in whatever complex set of emotions and definitions they associate with that feeling--and not only that they feel like a woman but that they want to take action to actualize their identity as such. Submission being traditionally identified as a female trait might be part of that.
I would chalk up a lot of the pop in interest in sadomasochism and heavy bondage among trans women in the 7 months - 2 year period to be about coming to terms with having erectile dysfunction and then losing interest in more vanilla sex. Maybe a bit crass of an explanation but I think it fits with what I've seen.
Interesting question on the community explanation, I wouldn't be surprised if trans men tend to have communities more similar to their pre transition communities. Especially when it comes to dating it seems much more common for trans women to need to seek a new partner pool after transition than trans men since trans women are either dating straight women or gay men before transition, neither of whom tend to be particularly interested in dating women, while the butch/femme spectrum inside lesbianism can more easily accommodate trans masculinity. So maybe that additional insularity can explain some of the additional divergence among trans women.
I think you're onto something with hormones shifting sexual response, though I think it's probably more than ED alone. (It doesn't follow that losing interest in vanilla sex results in gaining interest in kink, and the timeline of the changes isn't an ideal fit.) I'd guess a big part of it is that people who run on estrogen are more likely to have whole-body sexual responses. It makes sense that that'd make pain and restraint more pleasurable, to the trans women for which it's pleasurable. My bet's that we'd see a similar curve for liking massages and holding hands.
(This wouldn't explain the change in interest in CNC, though, and the fact that shifts while the interest in dominance/submission doesn't as much is surprising - your explanation makes more sense there.)
Also, bisexuality is a pretty common thing! And I'd guess up front that trans women pre-transition are more likely to be dating bisexual folks than cis men, since it's more likely that bi folks might be attracted to a gender non-conforming partner. I'm skeptical of the community explanation, both because it's not obvious to me that there's a big difference in dating pool shifts (today; I'd put higher odds on a difference in other moments in history), and because it's not clear to me that dating pool shifts would explain a shift in sexual preferences.
Changing to a whole body response definitely seems like it makes sense, especially when you add in increased desire for things like hand holding and cuddling as other manifestations of that. I like that explanation a bit more than mine, thank you.
Yeah, bisexuality can keep people in the same dating pool (I'm in an st4t marriage that started out as an ~cishet relationship, didn't mean to do a bisexual erasure), but even so plenty of trans women break up when they transition and are then seeking a different population than they were before (in that they're now selecting on people dating [trans] women). Definitely agree that the mechanism on community shifting sexual preferences is a little murky, but insular communities might see people exposed more to BDSM and give opportunities to explore it. I do think today, when trans women are generally seen as much further removed from drag queens than they were say 40 years ago that trans men are much more likely to be in ~lesbian dating scenes than trans women are to be in ~(gay men) dating scenes, like I would be really shocked if that wasn't a substantial difference, but maybe that's a function of not being in gay men's spaces enough to know.
1. Broadly saying "trans people are more ___ than cis people" is a common but very misleading way to distill these types of results. For a more obvious example, it's probably true that "men have [on average] slightly fewer fingers than women." However, while that framing suggests to the imagination a whole population of ~9.95-fingered men standing next to their 10-fingered girlfriends, the numbers actually just capture a vast majority of 10-fingered men plus a small sub-population of dramatic outliers due to violence or workplace accidents.
A more honest form of language would be "The average of values in respondents indicating transwoman identity is slightly higher than the average of values in respondents indicating ciswoman identity," or similar. Likewise, It'd be helpful to see distributions and standard deviations for many of these poll responses both on the cis and the trans side, maybe graphs that parse out trajectories for medians or for 20th vs. 80th percentile, etc.
2. These polls are great fun, but it absolutely contributes to the society-wide decline in information hygiene when you regularly:
- poll an extremely highly selected group of people (on Twitter/ Substack (aware of and following Aella (care enough about BDSM to answer a poll on it))),
- receive oceans of responses enriched with an unknown but likely large quantity of bots, trolls, culture-war-motivated lying, and deliberate multi-responses across alt accounts, and then
- headline your conclusions in ways that fully obscure all those reasons for nuance and epistemic caution, instead presenting your interpretations as broad Truths about group qualities across the general population (which, given the salacious nature of the polls, will go on to be reshared and vaguely internalized _as_ broad Truths by a huge proportion of the audience).
When journalists do this, it's understandable if gross. But as a rationalist-adjacent type, shouldn't you have higher standards for information handling?
Aella's been consistently transparent about the limitations of the data, especially when you take these articles as a series. Reminders about the limitations are always useful, but this is unnecessarily insulting & exaggerated (the reach of the survey is far larger than the group you outline, for example) and I'd say lacks perspective on what level of data quality is typical and practical in social science.
I absolutely don't mean to be insulting. Obviously, all the other kids are also doing this: practices like overgeneralizing results and conflating observations with interpretations are ubiquitous in the the more PR-hungry parts of the social sciences.
However, Aella is also part of a movement specifically centered around ethical commitment to rigorous truth-seeking and epistemic humility. With her visibility, she also has an amazing opportunity to meaningfully improve the situation (or at least, not to further normalize deceptive communication) by making a principled choice to present her own results with scrupulous honesty.
It would be very easy to just type up these summaries using the framing "Online responses indicating trans female identity also indicate a mean of XXX interest in BDSM on a 5-point scale," which is a reasonably accurate way to describe the sort of thing this type of poll actually shows, rather than "trans people really like ______," which is definitely not what it shows. Aella seems like a conscientious person who is genuinely curious about the topics she investigates, not just another culture warrior with a predetermined conclusion in mind; and maintaining clarity and circumspection around imperfect data is absolutely essential to making forward progress in any field. I brought up these critiques not as zingers, but because I honestly think someone of her disposition might be interested and open to making changes.
If there was better sources of information I would agree but the use of data in the academic study of this is worse. everything I've read is literally the stereotype of 20 white 18-25's from the same university. You can pull some data from porn sites but that's got its own problems. Other than that data is non existent. Hopefully one day we get far more systematic data but until then this is an information add so long as it is couched in appropriately uncertain language which this is.
Also "The average of values in respondents indicating transwoman identity is slightly higher than the average of values in respondents indicating ciswoman identity," is one of the most needlessly verbose sentences I've ever read, contains no new information, and doesn't even address the stated problem with distributions. The standard interpretation of X is more than Y is a difference in averages. The standard interpretation of cis and trans is identity, I don't know any circumstance where this would need to be specified. And then you through in a bunch of filler words like "of values" "indication" ect. This casts the manipulative language used in the last sentence as purely concern trolling and not a legitimate criticism.
>poll an extremely highly selected group of people (on Twitter/ Substack (aware of and following Aella (care enough about BDSM to answer a poll on it)))
Aella has frequently explained this in the past[1], but I think it's fair to say that her data is some of the least selected-for data on human sexuality that exists. It's not a specific poll about one topic, it's a general kink quiz that has gone viral enough that the majority of respondents don't even know who she is, her sample size is huge (total N=500k), and it matches paid respondents pretty well.
[1] https://aella.substack.com/p/you-dont-need-a-perfectly-random
Can you survey men who have taken steroids about this? What about men who have taken DHT blockers?
I did ctrl-f for 'Progesterone" in a discussion of trans women's sexuality and found no results so I think you're leaving out something pretty big here. Trans women are typically prescribed T-blockers and Estrogen at the beginning of transition and then about six months to a year after that are prescribed progesterone. Testosterone blockers (especially Spironolactone) are not just ED inducing but broadly reduce libido and interest in sex, especially at the beginning of transition where standard practice seems to be totally blocking testosterone production and giving only a very small dose of estrogen. Some trans women, myself included, find themselves to be essentially asexual from the point they take t-blockers (especially Spironolactone) until the point they begin taking progesterone.
Progesterone is believed by some in the trans community to increase attraction to men especially when you start taking. I'm not claiming this changes orientation, I know trans lesbians who were annoyed to begin experiencing attraction to men but never changed who they wanted to be in relationships with. I will say as a bisexual person who had sex with men before hormonal transition, progesterone absolutely changed what it felt like in my body to interact with a man I was attracted to even in non-overtly sexual ways.
Progesterone also quite famously 'unlocks' scent based attraction, trans women on prog sometimes discover that certain people's mild body odor smells really good.
As a cis malesub, I find the results for trans men fascinating...
> This confusion also is evidence against my theory that hormones have something to do with the submissive/dominance gap; if hormones themselves are causing changes, then it’s really counterintuitive for this impact to happen more on the extremes of kink. It might in fact work that way, but it’s not what I’d naively expect.
I had thought that maybe cis het malesubs were towards the "feminine" end of some hormonal/brain continuum... something like "Not quite gay enough to be gay, but could a masculine women please take charge of the sex?" (Before somebody leaps on me, remember malesub online discourse has a lot of "forced bi" and sisssification in it.)
However, if I read Aella's graphs right, transmen (tend to) start off as submissive and the male hormones make little difference to that as a baseline, though they maybe become more adventurous about switching. (And as a sidebar, I wonder if some of the tailing off of enthusiasms is just the novelty of experiencing kink wearing off.)
Now, I wonder: if I suddenly started taking testosterone or similar masculinity boosters, would it actually make me *more* submissive, or at least more stoical and maybe more eager to take a harsh beating?
i'd like to see what the trend was for straight vs queer more broadly
My expectation would be that transwomen become less into the trans community after they transition.
E.g, before transition, talking to the community for advice of various kinds. (It would appear that dealing with government paperwork is a big part of the trans experience, from getting a prescription for hormones to getting a Gender Recognition Certificate).
After transition: more going out as a woman in the wider community, rather than trans-specific venues.
( Based on knowing a bunch of trans people)
I agree with 1, especially about showing the distributions.
What are your proposed solutions for 2? How *should* we study this topic in a way that avoids selection bias and bots/trolls?
I'm a bit surprised about you writing "especially trans women, are already really far away from cis people’s scores" given that the first figure seems to show that absolute gap between scores is larger for *transmen*. Transwomen, on the other hand, are only slightly more submissive than ciswomen.
I believe the intended comparison in that sentence was with assigned sex at birth in that sentence (i.e. cismen with transwomen and ciswomen with transmen), which both gives correctly different direction and correctly huge absolute value difference.
"Trans women are more submissive than cis women, even before ever taking hormones."
That would make sense, wouldn't it, given that they have made a conscious determination that they feel like a woman--in whatever complex set of emotions and definitions they associate with that feeling--and not only that they feel like a woman but that they want to take action to actualize their identity as such. Submission being traditionally identified as a female trait might be part of that.