Nearly a year after her win in the NCAA Division 1 500 yard freestyle (and fifth place finish in the 200), Lia Thomas is being hunted by the right wing press for sport. Her fellow fifth-place finisher, Riley Gaines, has accused her of indecency for changing in the only available locker room at the March 2022 meet, and transphobic extremists are now digging for any information they can use to portray her sexuality as unsavory and elicit their readers’ disgust. They’ve found little, but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to make something out of the possibility Thomas may have liked a few memes.
A right wing sports podcaster associated with the Daily Wire, Jake Crain, accused Thomas of liking some memes about autogynephilia on a secret Instagram account. Thomas is also accused of being in a relationship with another trans woman who likes and posts memes. None of the memes they believe Thomas liked on a private alt account are particularly shocking, explicit, or bad, they’re just jokey references to the idea of trans women finding themselves or other trans women attractive. Some of them use crudely drawn depictions of boners to get that rough idea across. If you’re predisposed to be afraid of or disgusted by trans women (in other words, if you’re a transphobe) then it’s fodder to fuel that fear or disgust, but there’s nothing anyone who wasn’t a hateful bigot would be worried about.
Some on the right, including our old friends at the Washington Examiner, are also using the opportunity to breathe new life into the pseudoscientific theory of autogynephilia, or AGP. Therefore it seems useful to talk about AGP in more depth. The discussion that follows will largely be drawing on work by Zinnia Jones, a trans woman who has written some excellent critical analysis of AGP.
Autogynephilia is an old school psychological theory. It dates back to a time before psychology had any truck with data or research, and instead just kinda made stuff up based on vibes. The theory holds that there are two types of trans woman. One type is solely attracted to men, and AGP theorists think that means they’re really just extremely gay men, men who are so gay they want to live as straight women and have relationships with straight men. Proponents of AGP generally feel this type of trans woman is basically okay, as long as they’re conventionally attractive enough and don’t make any waves. However, the theory goes, there is a second group of trans woman, a bad kind, who are attracted to women, and they are disgusting and wrong. The “autogynephilia” part comes in because, the theory goes, these trans women (and never the other kind) experience arousal when they imagine themselves to be women. This experience of arousal is believed to be the only reason this type of trans woman seeks to transition, and the reason they should not be allowed to do so. Many proponents insinuate that these trans women are predatory, and all tend to treat their existence and their sexuality in a dehumanizing way that relies on disgust.
Critics of AGP don’t claim trans women never experience arousal when they imagine themselves to be women, but they suggest that this is a normal, healthy part of some trans people’s sexuality, and can happen whether they’re gay, straight, or bi. They point out that many cisgender women also experience arousal at the idea of their own female body, and at relating sexually as a woman in a woman’s body. This is called “experiencing arousal.” Further, they say that having sexual thoughts about being the opposite sex doesn’t mean such thoughts are the primary reason trans people seek to transition, and that the evidence shows trans women who have such thoughts experience gender dysphoria like other trans people and their outcomes are improved by transition, like other trans people’s are.
AGP isn’t a proper scientific theory at all. If it were a proper scientific theory, there would be two observable, distinct groups of trans women, with little or no overlap. That is simply not the case, and proponents’ own research proves that. In truth, AGP is little more than a formalized way for weird jerks to talk about how disgusted they are by trans women. It makes no testable predictions, and offers no meaningful insights into trans people’s motivations or lives.
Lia Thomas may or may not have liked some memes referencing AGP, and she may or may not have experienced sexual feelings like those described by transphobic creeps as autogynephilic. It’s really no one’s business but hers and her partner’s. It’s been almost a year since Thomas beat all the other women in one high profile swim race, and was beaten by cis women in the other races she swam. She has a right to like memes, to be in a lesbian relationship with another trans woman, and to have a private sexual life that harms no one. Nothing about Thomas is disgusting, but the right wing bigotry she faces certainly is.
You have a very skewed understanding of the qualification of autogynephilia and are misinterpreting the supposedly ‘diverse’ graph you pulled.
The actual definition of AGP is easily verifiable through appendix A of Blanchard’s 1989 paper (here’s a free post of it if you don’t have access to pubmed or springer: https://www.genderpsychology.org/autogynephilia/male_gender_dysphoria/autogynephilic_fetishism.html) and very clearly excludes cis women by its very definition. The main ‘study’ (I don’t remember the name, but it’s what those critics are referring to in "many cisgender women also experience arousal at the idea of their own female body") that is pointed to by apologists falls apart on this very point, as its questionnaire bore no resemblance to Blanchard’s questionnaire as linked, and there is a published letter to the editor detailing this if you don’t want to verify it yourself and/or want to hear it coming from the mouth of someone in the field.
The next misstep is in the graph. Blanchard only claims that HSTS are non-AGP, and that ‘transbian’, bisexual, AND asexual MtFs all experience AGP. He points out in 1989b that the clinical analysis does show some outliers (as shown in said graph), but that the overwhelming majority of non-HSTS transsexuals still do, and that those outliers are easily attributable to a handful of samples not being completely truthful. So your graph there actually supports the typology. This isn’t some crazy fringe theory: it has since been backed up extensively by neurology, genetics, and endocrinology, and the typology itself is still very widespread as a means of narrowing down sample pools to only those transsexuals who were born this way. There is a huge difference between early-onset MtFs (HSTS) and late-onset MtFs (non-HSTS). It isn’t 100% perfect, but it’s obviously accurate enough if it’s good enough for genuine medical research in the 2020s.
Besides, like you said, critics of the typology say that being sexually aroused by crossdressing and fantasizing about oneself as a female are "totally normal reactions," which is patently absurd. ‘Euphoria’ is not a real thing: it’s a fetish. If it were normal, all of us would experience it, even those of us who are completely male-attracted, but as someone who falls into that category, I can tell you I have never once experienced this mystical event. I have never once had to forego leaving the house because I had a constant erection over feminine garments, I have never once been overwhelmed by the need to go home and jerk off on account of being aroused by being in public crossdressing, etc.—these are all things which are regular points of discussion amongst the members of r/MtF, for example, which is one of the most AGP-centered subreddits that isn’t explicitly about it like r/AskAGP.
These are not normal behaviors and, frankly, as a passing intersex and transex woman who has been sexually assaulted and harassed in public bathrooms and locker rooms since middle school, I for one do not want to share such spaces with non-passing transvestites who are constantly in a state of sexual excitement because of their presentation and make a habit of meme-ing and advertising their fetishistic attraction to other cis and trans women. The fact that we can’t address the fact that there are extremely problematic people passing themselves off as "trans women" in society is going to be death of ALL of us.