Spent some time in last days background worrying over claims some person made over Blanchardian autogynephilia, the idea that (some fraction of) MtF women actually are motivated to transition because they feel attraction (in some variants of the idea, also more general romantic) to their own potential or actualized female selves. Like every other trans woman probably, I’m periodically overanalyzing and second-guessing my own motivations, which is hard because of how hard dissecting our responses over time is. I need to make sure that I don’t treat that worry like those that have confined me in the past; it too is dysphoria-fuelled (more directly than my political angst) and the maladaptive temptation is to make sure I remember concerns and counterarguments until Godot arrives and I have time to fully let the second think in against the first.

This I really should not do. I know it, typing it down makes it better. If I’m wrong, so be it, it still is a question I will have to answer at any given moment, not one I can let confine me. I need so deeply to be done with lists and withdrawing to process them. It’s even OK to be wrong, if I’ll eventually find I am. Instead I should continue experimenting as I do – testing whether the special challenges of a trans life are not too severe for me (not so far, should project and escalate), and testing whether moving further brings new depths of experience, better calm and productivity (it might well, now mostly curious on what hormones will be like).

That all said, when contemplating people’s different accounts, including how some cis people describe being happy or unhappy with their gendered bodies, and for how various trans people describe their dysphorias about being very strongly about the way others see their bodies as those of the wrong sex (an account that I have a harder time articulating, because on the face of it, it seems harder to defend as important, which is an illusory distinction), then I came to a thought that surprised me. The evidence may be compatible with a scenario where some large fraction of trans and cis men and women all feel a strongly emotionally charged need to come across to others as the sex they identify as. This enters into eating disorders and similar issues, and it would enter into bodily gender dysphoria also. So far hardly controversial. I also know that some of these states (e.g. anorexias) probably have independent neural risk factors (including ones involving sex hormone levels), as there is animal model research implying it. And of course, most importantly, the gendered body ideal is culturally constructed and globally and historically volatile. Actual, direct peer pressure will be an important determinant, and offer potential points of intervention.

But might it still be that there is some human instinct (that is learned preferentially in some but not all people) to want to appear to others like those one has associated with the sex one belongs to? That is, part of what it means to have a male gender identity would be to actually want to be perceived as male by others. Which would translate into wanting to fall within the ranges of body and expression of those others one has come to see as males, and vice versa female? The point I want to make is, if this is in part instinctual, then a sizeable fraction of cis and trans people both will experience discomfort – dysphoria, more correctly – over perceived failure to match that range, and euphoria over coming to securely fall within it. It is directly analogous to the instincts of primitive animals to perform displays of sexual dimorphism for the purpose of competition for mates, which would also be why these instincts would have been retained in humans, even as their actual content and details are moved into a memetic rather than genetic substrate.

While the contents of those body ideals will be culturally constructed, they will also reflect features which are hormonally driven sexual dimorphisms having become encoded into the perceived range. Of course, being transgender would make in more cases for someone falling far outside the range, risking considerably more severe bodily dysphoria. There may not be so much novelty to this thought, except that it challenges the view that bodily dissatisfaction in either trans or cis people is solely something learned through toxic culture, lack of body positive role models, or peer pressure. These things interplay with what is there, certainly, but this model lets us explain how it is possible that someone may feel a strong need (i.e. unhappiness unless acted upon) to embody body expectations they were never taught applied to them, explaining a lot of accounts of people experiencing a need to crossdress to feel happy with no need for an auto-X-o-philic component. It also helps highlight how the desire (in the sense of, happier along, unhappier without) for bodily transition can matter without being some sort of kink or choice or habit one stumbled upon.

The truth is always complex, and modeling other people tells me nothing about myself. But I’m curious on this idea of an instinctual component to how we may want to be genderedly [is this a word? am I using it right? E*: you’re a native speaker, what say you?] perceived. This would land us in about three or four components to biological underpinnings of gender identity, each of which would be affected by prenatal hormones:

– Sex-classifying others as in-group or out-group relative to self (“should I go in this row or that row on the group picture?”)
– Instinct to appear correctly gendered (mating display instinct as laid out in this post)
– Proprioceptive map (have yet to explore this though but a knowledgeable person speaks of it a lot)
– Somewhat separate but using the same neural systems in another way: sexual orientation (“is this other person sexy?”)

Predictions from this theory would be that feelings of gendered body dysphoria in cis people (that is, cis women feeling like they look insufficiently like other women, cis men feeling they look insufficiently like other men) would be similar in tone to trans people’s body dysphorias, and that hormonal factors could affect its scope, e.g. it might be more common at certain periods in the menstrual cycle, or as a side effect of some hormonal contraceptives, or it too may be differentially occurring under conditions where prenatal hormones are perturbed.