Let’s talk about the rates of autoandrophilia I’ve observed among FtMs. I’ve had a few different approaches for assessing this, so it’s probably worth going through things in detail. Arguably, the most direct was asking about it directly:

Rates of transmasc autoandrophilia in the Transmasculine Sexuality Survey.

For counting this properly, I exclude the third question, since it could conceivably by interpreted as assessing gynephilia, rather than autoandrophilia. Doing this, the total autoandrophilia rate in the survey was 74% (n=31). However, one problem with this survey is that I shared it to a nonbinary subreddit, and so it is possible that some NBs responded too, which might make the data hard to interpret. If I exclude those who didn’t pick “male” as one of their gender responses (I allowed multiple, including “nonbinary”, “genderfluid” and “questioning”), I get a rate of 71% (n=14), essentially the same.

It may be informative to also consider the frequency of autoandrophilic fantasies from this group. I won’t include this when counting the rates, though.

Transmasc pre-identification AAP fantasy rates according to Transmasculine Sexuality Survey.

Another survey with a very straightforward methodology was in my Survey of Traits You Are Attracted to or Would Like to Have. Unlike the previous survey, this was targeted at reddit in general, not just transmascs, and so it may have a better accuracy distribution-wise. In this survey, I also asked rather directly whether they found being male hot:

Autoandrophilia in transmasc participants of Survey of Traits You’re Attracted to or Would Like to Have.

Again, the rate of affirmative answers was 74% (n=27). If we exclude the nonbinary participants, the rate increases to 89% (n=9). One nice thing about this survey is that I also asked about “sexual fantasies about being the opposite sex”, so this gives us a way of assessing whether these yield the same sorts of results. The problem is that some trans men will interpret “sexual fantasies about being the opposite sex” as referring to sexual fantasies about being female, so it’s important to figure out how big this problem is.

For the record, the equivalent MtF numbers are 95% (n=19) and 90% (n=10).

In this survey, arousal to fantasies about being the opposite sex wasn’t very strongly associated with autoandrophilia (r~0.28). In fact, it was more closely associated with the autogynephilia measure (r~0.39), despite the fact that the concept of autogynephilic transmascs is… weird. I found that 70% of the ones who got positive scores on the AAP scale also got positive scores on the scale assessing A*P by asking about “opposite sex”, but 43% of those who got zero scores on the AAP scale still got positive scores on the A*P scale. Not great.

Another survey with a slightly less direct approach was my Can you look at some porn For Science? survey, which was about exactly what it says in the title. Before presenting the erotic material, I asked a number of questions about paraphilias, including “Picturing myself as the opposite sex, or with certain physical features of the opposite sex” and “Picturing an attractive man and imagining *being* him”. The latter seemed to work for assessing autoandrophilia in women; assuming the former question assesses AAP perfectly (dubious), the latter had r~0.72 correlation with AAP, 15% false positive rate, and 21% false negative rate.

Amount of autoandrophilia in the transmascs in the porn survey.

68% of transmascs (n=22) and 75% of FtMs (n=8) reported AAP according to this measure. This survey also allows us to revisit the approach of asking about “opposite sex”. It had a correlation of r~0.5, and the rate of positive answers to this among those who had given positive answers to the other AAP question was 80%. Meanwhile, the rate of negative answers to this among those who had given negative answers to the other AAP question was 14%. This is a far higher validity than was observed in the other survey. On the other hand, the equivalent numbers when comparing with the AGP question are 0.37, 91% and 29%, which is still a pretty strong connection, so asking about “opposite sex” probably isn’t great.

The MtF rates of autogynephilia here were 76% (n=33) and 82% (n=23).

So far, this suggests an AAP rate of 68% to 74% (weighted average: 72%, n=80) for transmascs in general and 71% to 89% (weighted average: 77%, n=31) for FtMs. Of course, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt; for example, there may be some misreporting, where some AAPs report not experiencing AAP. In addition, there is a troubling problem that needs to be taken into account, and which I will address in my next post.