Everyone Has Autogynephilia

Survey results

At the time of writing this, sample is 414,000 people, with 13,392 transmen and 5,008 transwomen.

(interestingly, the sex ratio of respondents matches perfectly for trans and cis people; 72.8% of my total responders were biological females, and 72.8% of trans responders were biological females. Whatever social/internet/interest dynamics cause people to respond to my survey, it seems to be selected for by biological sex regardless of if they’re trans or cis identifying!)

The popular term is autogynephilia, but I asked about autoandrophilia too, and as far as I can tell there’s no term that refers to both the female and male versions of this. Autophilia is the obvious choice, but it already means ‘arousal from yourself,’ which isn’t quite right.

Still, I don’t have a better term, so autophilia it is. If there’s a better term out there let me know!

Thanks to some feedback from tailcalled, I ended up with four autophilic questions - two for sexual-specific fantasies, and the other for non-sexual fantasies.

The exact wording respondents got was this:

‘Agreement scale’ were the options people had to answer, and were a 7-scale spectrum from “totally disagree” (-3) to “totally agree” (3).

I am aware my examples for the ‘existing in nonsexual situations’ questions are a bit stereotypical, but I wasn’t sure how to differentiate between the two without it. I intended the questions to get more at the social role of things, and social roles are basically differentiated by stereotype.

Here’s the average results:

The same data, but all together now:

So - are trans women sexually aroused by imagining themselves in sexual situations as women? Yes! But so are cis women, and cis men, and enbies, basically everybody except trans men.

Trans women do seem to be the most into it, though I’m not sure how to interpret this in the context of trans women being more into everything. Trans sexuality seems to be broader and more intense, in general. If you adjusted for this, my guess is that trans women autogynephilia would be more comparable to cis women autogynephilia.

Really, trans women’s lack of arousal from the thought of masturbating as a male seems to be much more a predictor of their transness. It’s the greatest gap between cis and trans women scores; cis women are much more autoandrophilic than trans women are. The close runner up in gap size is ‘existing as male’, which cis women again are much more interested in than trans women.

When it comes to existing as a female and masturbating as a female, cis and trans women’s preferences lie the closest, with only a .53 and .45 gap, respectively.

I was surprised to find how much people liked the thought of masturbating as a female.

If you’re a cis dude and don’t like the thought of masturbating as a women, you’re the weird one

Transmen’s autoandrophilia is more of an outlier than transwomen’s autogynephilia, though not by much; most people still liked the thought of masturbating as a male. The biggest gap was thought of masturbating as a female; transmen generally do not like this, whereas cis men are much more interested, with a 1.3 gap in score.

Averaging all autophilia scores within each group, enby (amabs) scored the highest and trans women the lowest:

1. Enby (amab): 0.05

2. Cis females: -0.14

3. Enby (afab): -0.16

4. Transmen -0.26

5. Cis males: -0.32

6. Transwomen: -0.55

Averaging autogynephilia scores (both masturbating and existing as female) within each group:

1. Transwomen: 0.51

2. Enby (amab): 0.16

3. Female (cis): 0.02

4. Enby (afab): -0.34

5. Male (cis): -0.35

6. Transmen: -1.41

And the same for autoandrophilia scores:

1. Transmen: 0.9

2. Enby (afab): 0.02

3. Enby (amab): -0.07

4. Male (cis): -0.29

5. Female (cis): -0.30

6. Transwomen: -1.60

By region

I asked people where they lived, and selected the biggest bins for inclusion in these graphs. The smallest bin here is ‘Asia’, with 9,679 respondents.

For total ranking (number for each is the average of the male and female averages separately, so shouldn’t be influenced by differing % of male/female responses):

Ethnicity

Smallest ethnicity bin included was “black (other)”, at 8,460 respondents.

Correlations

In my survey I also asked about a ton of other stuff, such as Big 5 traits, childhood abuse, religiousness, mental illnesses, porn habits, and of course a few hundred questions on sexual interest preferences. What did autophilia correlate with?

Masturbating as a female

Arousal from the thought of masturbating as a female was correlated with:

1. arousal from the thought of masturbating as a male in both females (r=0.25) and males (r=0.16).

2. Interest in cunnilingus in females (r=0.23) and males (r=0.31)

3. Arousal from the thought of existing nonsexually as a female, in females (r=0.22) and males (r=0.37)

4. Interest in fingering vaginas (in females at r=0.18 and males at r=0.28)

In females there’s a lot more slight correlations with female-specific sex stuff, like squirting, facesitting, vaginal dildos, vibrators, etc. It’s almost shockingly vanilla - usually in my data the weird stuff tends to correlate with each other, which makes me think this particular preference overlaps with particularly normative sexuality for women.

Males show the same correlations, but with a mixed-in addition of stuff like strapons (r=0.22), futa (r=0.23), genderplay (r=0.22), gender transformations (r=0.2), crossdressing and pegging (r=0.19).

Masturbating as a male

What correlated with interest in masturbating as as a male?

1. Existing as a male, in both females (r=0.38) and males (r=0.40)

2. Blowjobs, in females (r=0.27) and males (r=0.19)

3. Interest in masturbating as a female (in females r=0.25 and males r=0.16)

4. Handjobs (females r=0.23 and males r=0.18)

For females, interest in masturbating as a male was correlated with interest in worshipping male body parts (r=0.21), genderplay (r=0.22), futa (r=0.19), pegging (r=0.2), higher frequency of porn use (r=0.19), anal sex (r=0.17), crossdressing and creampies (r=0.17).

In males it was again, pretty similar, though without the genderplay stuff. In males it correlated to circle jerks (r=0.2), anal fingering and ass-to-mouth (r=0.17). Interestingly it also correlated to attraction to masculinity, at r=0.22.

Existing as a female

Females who liked the thought of existing as a female had interesting correlations with basically nothing that I haven’t already covered - the strongest correlation was interest in age progression at r=0.12.

Males interested in existing as a female had many more correlations, very dominantly genderplay (r=0.22) focused - acting like the opposite sex for sexual fulfillment (r=0.21), crossdressing (r=0.2), futa (r=0.2), gender transformations (r=0.19), bodyswapping (r=0.17).

Existing as a male

Females who liked the thought of existing as a male still didn’t really have interesting correlations with much; they were more likely to select a greater total number of things that were arousing to them, but for specific interests besides masturbating as males (r=0.38), the strongest correlations were interest in blowjobs (r=0.13).

Similar results for males! Not a ton of strong correlations, though there’s a weak smattering of interest in masculinity (r=0.21) and masculine body parts, like arms, jawline, and hands (r=~0.12).

One notable thing here is that wanting to masturbate as a female or male feels roughly equivalent - correlated with interest in femininity/female sexuality vs masculinity/male sexuality, and a corresponding genderplay interest if your own sex mismatches the fantasy.

But this doesn’t seem to hold true with arousal from the thought of existing as a female vs male; existing as a female seems to be very genderplay-fetish oriented for males in a way that doesn’t hold true in the reverse for females.

To summarize

The data seems much more nuanced than any side of the debate I’ve heard. Some people claim that transgenderism isn’t a sexual thing at all; I think this is likely blatantly untrue. Lots of transgender people report feeling sexual satisfaction from masturbating or existing as their preferred gender.

But also people’s claim that cis people don’t experience this is also untrue! Cis people have a shockingly high amount of cross-sex-identifying sexual fantasies, to the degree that I wouldn’t consider it to be a particularly significant differentiator between cis and trans people. The best differentiator between trans and cis people is looking what they don’t like; trans people are much more opposed to non-gender-affirming fantasies than cis people are.

It seems to me that gender itself seems to be sort of inextricably linked to sexuality; it’s sexually flavored for a lot, even the majority, of people, both cis and trans.

There’s probably a lot more to say about the data here, but I’ll save the social analysis for future blog posts.