Not so much a question as an apology:

In the past, I've been somewhat detransphobic. Or I don't know that detransphobic is the right word, because I haven't attacked detransitioners per se, but I've been dismissive of your experiences and relevance. I think partly this was due to ignorance, and partly due to being in spaces where detransitioners are sometimes used as a weapon against trans people, but this doesn't excuse what I did.

After hanging around here, and talking with some detransitioners, along with looking at the facts more carefully, I've gradually changed my attitudes. There's still some cases where I disagree with the subreddit consensus, but I try to take the detrans concerns more into account with this disagreement. For instance, I think medical transition during adolescence should be allowed under carefully controlled protocols (I have a lot of specifics in mind, but I'm not going to get into too much detail here; the protocols would take into account that, for instance, many masculine girls experience temporary gender issues during adolescence; and they would include opposition to the idea of "gender identity").

In a survey I've done, some deidentifiers (= identified as trans, planned to transition, but then stopped identifying before they transitioned) reported being mostly non-dysphoric while having been dysphoric during their transition, so it is possible for dysphoria to go away. I haven't seen any systematic study showing that any specific treatment will get rid of dysphoria, though, so I don't have much advice on the how to achieve it.

Most trans women transition because of dysphoria originating in autogynephilia, so being AGP doesn't necessarily make you any different from other MtFs. However, most AGPs don't end up transitioning and probably shouldn't transition, so this observation by itself cannot answer whether transition is right for you.

Isn't curing GD or at least alleviating the symptoms the entire point of transitioning?

IME about half of trans people are ego-syntonic about their gender dysphoria. For them, changing genders is the entire point of transitioning; they don't want to change their desire to do that, any more than they want to change their other ego-syntonic desires (think stuff like desire to care for those one holds dear, desire to stay alive, desire to be a successful person, etc.).

There isn't really any objective way of evaluating which desires "should" be ego-syntonic vs ego-dystonic (closely related to the orthogonality thesis). People come to different conclusions depending on their predispositions.

I don't think there's great evidence that the reasons for transition have much to do with whether one is going to end up regretting. This often seems to assume that there is some sort of "true trans" "male brain in female body" cause of transness that will not lead to regret, as well as other causes that will; however, this sort of thing doesn't seem to be true IMO.

Obviously trans people are going to say they transition due to a magical innate gender identity - because people have a tendency to justify what they do in whatever is considered acceptable around them. But plenty of detrans people used to have the same justification, and they still ended up detransitioning. (At which point they reinterpreted their reasons for transitioning in a different way.)

It's hard to say what exactly predicts detransition. Some studies I've read mentioned a combination of bad outcomes, unrealistic expectations for the outcomes, very poor mental health, and insufficient mental health treatment before transition, if I recall correctly; however, this combo seems more extreme than what a lot of people on this subreddit had, so there might be new factors that are also sufficient which they didn't detect in that study. Still, it's probably a good starting point to make sure you have a realistic understanding of the potential outcomes.

I'm quite aware of Dr. Ray Blanchards studies on transexuallism but have read many criticisms regarding how flawed the research was and how it has never been replicated.

If people tell you it has never been replicated then those people are lying to you. For instance, Nuttbrock found that most gynephilic trans women were AGP, and Hsu found that autogynephilia in men was correlated with an absurdly huge increase in gender dysphoria.

There are many reasons an adolescent might become insistently fixated on a cross-gender identity

One of the tricky things with transition during adolescence is, it's mainly for early-onset gender dysphorics, and most EOGDs manage to learn to live as GNC people without transitioning. I don't think those who don't manage to do this are necessarily much different from those who manage to do it, but might instead simply have different environmental circumstances or similar that affects things. This makes it difficult to make any sort of different treatment of the groups to begin with, because the "many reasons" don't necessarily differ all that much between the transitioners and the nontransitioners.

I don't think any amount of gatekeeping will protect adolescents from themselves as long as the fantasy of changing gender is offered to them as a possibility.

The best policy here would be to start out with attempts to support desistance, rather than to encourage transition. I don't know the best approach for this - I've seen Michael Bailey suggest taking the kids to meet adult GNC people - but this really is a job for the people who're working with the kids to figure out, not my job.

At some point, though, if this approach doesn't work, transition should be allowed on the table. I'm under the impression that this subreddit thinks that this shouldn't happen before 18, or 25, or something like that, and I'm not EOGD or EOGD-spectrum, so there's a limit to how much I can object to that. (At the same time, there's many here - not you, based on your posting history, but many others - who aren't EOGD either.) But I do know EOGD people, including early transitioners, late transitioners, desisters, early transitioners who seem to vaguely regret having transitioned, nontransitioners who are only partially desisted, partial transitioners, and possibly other groups that I'm forgetting, so I feel like I'm at least somewhat informed about the range of outcomes.

I don't want to assert too strongly how EOGD transition would work, but I think ultimately it's not going to be a perfect system. One should go through the limitations of transition, avoid concepts like "gender identity" which give an unrealistic and transition-encouraging self-image (in favor of instead encouraging a self-concept along the lines of "GNC person struggling with gender norms", making it clear that there are other reasons that people transition, and that living as a GNC person because easier over time), and generally discourage any treatments beyond what is necessary (no "surgery makes you a woman" - the homosexual transsexuals I know tell me that it is becoming more practical to live as a trans person without having had surgery).

The protocol is going to need to vary depending on whether one is natal male or natal female (desistance happens faster and easier in the male case). Thus... transition can be tabled for earlier, at the onset of puberty, for males. And this is difficult for me to say in response to you, because I know from your history that you would not have been helped when things are made this lenient. I can only hope that some of the other restrictions, like treating transition as last resort instead of destiny, would help people like you. But ultimately, I don't know that it's possible to help everyone.

I don't know when to table FtM transition. This is further complicated by the fact that all the studies I've been able to dig up found that desistance for natal females matched sexual orientation almost exactly; those attracted to men desisted, while those attracted to women persisted. Can we really accept any protocol whose primary effect is to transition all masculine lesbians who come into contact with it? Gender issues don't seem to fade as much for natal females as it does for natal males (possibly due to women being the target of stronger gender norms?) so at the same time it seems even worse to prevent FtM transition than MtF transition here.

We will say whatever we think we have to say to escape the pain and shame our dysphoria causes when we think we have an easy way out.

And... then there's an ethical neurosis I have, which is probably not going to be very popular here. I think people should be able to opt out of pretty much any policy that restricts what they are allowed to do in order to protect them (even quite young people! though, in that case, it may be a good idea to use prediction markets to see if they are going to regret it, and if they would, it would be acceptable to restrict them), and I would apply it to this system too.

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Autogynephiles seem to be seeking out transition earlier in life today than they did in the past. I know multiple autogynephiles who transitioned early, and since AGP doesn't tend to go away in the way that EOGD tends to, I don't think aiming for desistance is necessarily the right option. This means that late-onset gender dysphoria would be treated differently, and perhaps paradoxically, in a more-transition-encouraging way than early-onset gender dysphoria. However, the concept of gender identity should still be avoided, and they should instead be taught to understand their autogynephilia.

There has recently been a large number of late-onset FtMs transitioning. The nature of this is not very well understood, so reasoning up a policy for those is probably a bad idea when new data is soon going to come in and illuminate them more. It's unlikely enough that I'm going to have any influence on the other forms of treatment, the idea that I could have an influence on the treatment of this group before new, better information comes up is absurd.

It kinda sounds like you're autogynephilic.

If you're attracted to men and you don't want to detransition, it might be a good idea to see if you can focus your sexuality on autoandrophilia instead.

I'm trying to do some research on autogynephilia in AFABs, so I think it would be great if you could join my discord server and give advice. I'd especially be interested in knowing about your pretransition sexuality, as I want to try to study it in cis women, and so far most approaches to this have yielded a lot of false positives.

I'm a textbook detransistioner in every way, but I can't imagine ever doing that.

In a survey I did, I didn't really find a clear connection between autogynephilia and detransition. However, it's unclear that my autogynephilia-in-women measure is anywhere close to accurate (I asked something like "Picture a beautiful woman. How arousing would you find it to imagine being her?"), and the people I asked weren't as transitioned as most people here are, so it might not generalize to detransitioners who had fully transitioned.

However, just because it's not a textbook detrans thing doesn't mean it can't be a detrans thing. There's been a couple of posts about autogynephilic FtMtF detransitioners here IIRC.

Autogynephilia is probably the strongest known correlate of gender dysphoria. One study found that autogynephiles had 1.9-2.9 standard deviations more gender dysphoria than the male baseline. This is an absurdly huge effect size, around the size where it would be usually be considered "too big to be plausible" (but I believe that this is the order of magnitude we're talking about, since I've often found similar effect sizes in my surveys).

I just don't understand why : - I'm not behaving like a sexual predatory social outcast in real life on a day to day basis. Women don't feel threatened by me. I'm liked by most people and seen as soft and undangerous. Most AGPs I read about behave like leather boots queens who prey on their environment and who get erections by entering women's spaces.

Is it possible to be AGP but also be socially adjusted? To the point where you are not seen as a creep by your environment and such?

You need to take into account that there is a lot of bias with who gets labelled as AGP. Most AGPs are well-adjusted, or only ill-adjusted in non-predatory ways, but certain political groups are much less likely to talk about them than they are to talk about the predatory ones.

You might want to join the AGPTS support group linked in the top of /r/Blanchardianism.

Am I an AGP transsexual? Is there something like an androphilic AGP transsexual?

Not only are there androphilic AGP transsexuals, there are two kinds. The first and more commonly talked about kind is one where the androphilia is part of the AGP, but more subtly there appears to be a second kind that has classical androphilia in the same way that non-AGP gay men do.

These are all based on Daphna Joel's line of reasoning, but her requirements for there to be male/female brains are ridiculously strong. A similar argument would imply that there are not male/female faces, because facial characteristics tend not to be "internally consistent" either. Individual facial characteristics have a lot of overlap between the sexes, and so while a face in gestalt is clearly male or female, if you look at individual traits you will find that most people have some that are like the opposite sex.