Skip to content

“Gynandromorphophilia”: a disputed diagnosis

“Gynandromorphophilia” is a disease created by Ray Blanchard and Peter Collins in 1993. They used it to describe “men with sexual interest in transvestites, transsexuals, and she-males.” Since 1993, the only people who have used the term uncritically are others with harmful opinions about attraction to transgender peopleï»ż.

Background

Gynandromorph

The term gynandromorph has been used academically to describe bilateral intersex traits and sex mosaics in ants, bees, moths, ticks, termites, katydids, butterflies, fruit flies, wasps, mosquitoes, crabs, brine shrimp, chickens, and crustaceans. Gynandromorph has never been used by scientists to describe mammals, let alone primates like humans.

Paraphilia

Clinical descriptions of unusual sexual interests with the suffix –philia date to the middle 19th century. The term paraphilia was coined in 1904 by the Austrian ethnologist Friedrich Salomon Krauss. Krauss used it to describe any sexual behavior that could not result in procreation. In 1930, Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel used the term in a book that was translated to English in 1950. The term was then adopted by scientists like G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who in 1958 described paraphilia as “the tendency to substitute reproductively non-significant sexual goals for a mate of the opposite sex.” It was also promoted by sexologist John Money and others as a replacement for “sexual deviance” used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM‐I (1952) and DSM‐II (1968). “Sexual deviance” was replaced by the term “paraphilia” in 1980.

Harry Benjamin proposed a scale that placed trans people on a spectrum between two types: transsexual and transvestite. In 1989, Blanchard proposed that transgender women could be divided by sexuality into two types: “homosexual transsexuals” or paraphilic “autogynephilic transsexuals.”

“Gynandromorphophilia”

Since Blanchard and Collins proposed the term in 1993, it has not had much acceptance.

Psychologist Dallas Denny and author Jamison Green noted in 1996 that clinicians “have invented needlessly complicated terms” and “stigmatizing jargon” like this for the quite common attraction to transgender people. Tracy Clark-Flory noted in Salon in 2011 that the term remains controversial.

The only people who have used this terminology uncritically since 1993 are other conservatives who promote Blanchard’s work, including:

Sex columnists

Conservative and gender critical behavioral scientists

  • J. Michael Bailey and Bailey’s doctoral students: “Gynandromorphophilia (GAMP) is sexual interest in gynandromorphs (GAMs; colloquially, shemales).”
  • Paul L. Vasey and Doug P. VanderLaan: Evolutionary Developmental Perspectives on male androphilia in humans. in Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology
  • Larry Nuttbrock: Transgender Sex Work and Society
  • Richard Docter and James S Fleming
  • D. Richard Laws and ‎William T. O’Donohue: Sexual Deviance
  • Paul H. Blaney, ‎Robert F. Krueger, ‎and Theodore Millon: Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology

Anti-transgender authors and journalists

  • G. Eugene Pichler: The Transsexual Delusion

Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs), also called Gender-Critical Feminists.

Conservative and gender critical trans people

Transmedicalists

“Autogynephilia” activists

Conservative trans-attracted people

References

These notes are under construction. Apologies for the mess!

Firestein, Beth. Bisexuality: the psychology and politics of an invisible minority. Sage Publications, 1996 ISBN 9780803972735

Psychological Medicine -1(4):1-9 Â· October 2015 with 4,415 Reads DOI: 10.1017/S0033291715002317

K. J. Hsu (a1), A. M. Rosenthal (a1), D. I. Miller (a1) and J. M. Bailey (a1) Who are gynandromorphophilic men? Characterizing men with sexual interest in transgender women 
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291715002317

http://www.juliaserano.com/TSetiology.html

Anne Lawrence

Money and Lamacz (1984) coined the term gynemimetophilia to describe a paraphilic sexual attraction to surgically or hormonally feminized men who had not undergone SRS (often called she-males; Blanchard 1993b). Money (1986 p. 262) later broadened the definition of gynemimetophilia to include paraphilic attraction to feminized men who had undergone SRS (i.e. postoperative MtF transsexuals). A few years later, Blanchard and Collins (1993) coined the closely related term gynandromorphophilia, which they used to describe paraphilic sexual attraction to feminized men who had not undergone SRS – a group that included transvestites as well as she-males, but did not include postoperative MtF transsexuals. Thus, those of us who study and describe paraphilias are presented with the confusing situation of having two very similar terms with overlapping but not identical applicability. To summarize: Men with a paraphilic interest in transvestites are properly called gynandromorphophiles. Men with a paraphilic interest in postoperative MtF transsexuals are properly called gynemimetophiles (Money, 1986). Men with a paraphilic interest in she-males are properly called by either term. 

https://twitter.com/prothoproject/status/1108109546780794881/photo/1

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/01/basic-instincts-gender-butterfly/

Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts

Lisa Downing, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan

Paraphilias Pfallin

A Speculative Consideration of Certain Possible Forms of Sexual Selection in Man

G. E. HutchinsonThe American NaturalistVol. 93, No. 869 (Mar. – Apr., 1959), pp. 81-91