I wrote this in a chatroom in response to a person criticizing the questions I proposed for Aella’s and Scott’s surveys. I thought it would be worth for me to publish here so my position on the validity of those questions is clearer. This of course doesn’t cover my entire position, but I thought that explaining something is better than explaining nothing.
My core concern about measuring autogynephilia (AGP) across groups is that I don’t think the symptoms are at all measurement invariant (MI) with respect to group membership.
For cis men, different symptoms of autogynephilia such as sexual fantasies about autosexuality as a woman, straight sex as a woman, lesbian sex as a woman, transforming into a woman, and various other things go hand in hand. They have similar distributions and a reasonably uniform set of correlations.
However, if you go to cis women, I think some things like sexual fantasies about having sex with a man as a woman are going to become much more common than other things like sexual fantasies about being a man and turning into a woman.
I don’t think either of these indicators would be MI for AGP across the sexes. [To add: Sex with a man as a woman seems like it is just “normal female sexuality”, and so would be biased to overestimating AGP in cis women. Sexual fantasies about being a man and turning into a woman seem like it is generated not just by AGP sexuality but by the fact that AGP men are male and so could only be sexual as women if they turned into women.]
Or a related difficulty. Autogynephilic men often fantasize about masturbating as a woman (without any partners). I don’t think women commonly fantasize about that, but I do think they commonly engage in that, and it seems like if they can just engage in it, there’s no point in fantasizing about it. [To add: creating a downwards bias.] Though I don’t think they engage in it for the same reasons that cis men fantasize about it. [To add: creating an upwards bias.]
Basically, I think that thing where cis women are female but cis men are male creates MI-violating distortions about most of the symptoms one would use, so I have to make up some really weird symptoms in order for me to believe that they might even have a chance of being MI.
But of course if I make up really weird symptoms then that lowers the probability that they will be correctly comprehended and increases the probability they will be misunderstood, potentially even in different ways depending on the group.
Zooming out from what I wrote in the chat: The point that symptoms of autogynephilia are not MI across sex seems accepted as obvious by everyone in the debate, though not everyone emphasizes the same MI violations, so it is unclear whether everyone believes in the same MI violations. I tend to believe in many MI violations causing both upwards and downwards biases, making it hard for me to know how to untangle things and come up with an unbiased estimate.
I think the only way we can know of the existence of autogynephilia is through its symptoms, so I think the MI violations makes it basically impossible to compare autogynephilia levels between cis men and cis women. My research into AGP in cis women has either been based on ideas for how to bypass this problem, or based on responding to people making claims about specific kinds of AGP symptoms.
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