Email by Michael Bailey:

It is great that [tailcalled] is doing work like this. He really understands the conceptual issues and is one of the VERY FEW researchers on these topics. His work is sufficient to get me part of the way there–opening my mind some to ideas I’d dismissed–but not yet sufficient to get me to agree entirely. 

I think the title is far too certain, given the self-report nature of the data relied upon. A better title would have been “Reasons to doubt that meta-attraction can account for all autogynephiles’ interest in men.”

[tailcalled] believes that autogynephilia and androphilia (i.e., sexual attraction to men) can coexist in the same person. He is careful to distinguish real attraction to men from “meta-attraction,” in which an autogynephilic person may eroticize sex with men because it makes this person feel more like a woman. 

The data [tailcalled] finds convincing include some from publications in the 1970s from Buhrich and McConaghy in which a few persons labeled transvestites (or fetishistic transsexuals) by B&M in which [tailcalled] believes there is evidence of bisexual arousal patterns among groups (e.g., heterosexual crossdressers) predicted to have mono sexual patterns. Looking at the article entitled “The Discrete Syndromes of Transvestism and Transsexualism” on page 492 (penile volumetric responses), I am unconvinced. I would need to know more about the “U Scores” they present. Some ways of computing penile arousal will yield intermediate scores when a man is relatively unresponsive. 

The key data though are from a study [tailcalled] conducted in which he recruited “gay” and “bisexual” autogynephiles and found that their self-reported arousal to different kinds of gendered pornography was similar to that from non-AGP gay and bisexual men. Well, interesting, and maybe. I am concerned about self-report issues concerning: (a) the classification of AGP (and subtype, i.e., “gay” and “bisexual”) and (b) arousal to the stimuli. I don’t know enough to know how AGP was assessed, though to be sure it has been much more common to deny AGP than to falsely report AGP. More serious is the arousal issue. Our first bisexuality study (Rieger et al., 2005) found bisexual men showing a clear bisexual pattern of self-reported subjective arousal but not at all a bisexual pattern of genital arousal. Among the two relevant groups we studied in the lab (AGPs and GAMPs), neither showed more evidence for bisexual arousal patterns than straight men did. Yet plenty of them identified as bisexual. Where are all the AGP-identified men with bisexual arousal patterns? We certainly didn’t exclude anyone because of their arousal pattern.

I think a disconfirming case needs to be very well supported–so well supported I wouldn’t even accept Ray Blanchard’s patient as clearly disconfirming, although of course Ray’s opinion opens my mind far more than it would have been. So send candidates to our lab in Evanston. We’ll take a good history and measure their penile arousal.