In order to get more info on what autoandrophilia usually looks like, I went through all my surveys to find autoandrophilic women who had said that they would be interested in doing a follow-up survey. This gave me a list of 44 women to send the surveys to. Of these, 14 have responded to my survey thus far, giving me the data on this page. Here is a summary of what I’ve found:

The autoandrophilia experienced by the participants seems to take many forms. This include imagining being a submissive man, imagining being a gay man, imagining having a penis and using this in various dominant ways, and imagining being a man in an orgy. I’m sure there are many other ways it could present, considering how few responses I’ve gotten. It also seems unclear whether all of these constitute the same paraphilia, as the women seem to find different aspects of them appealing. This may be an interesting research direction for the future.

The participants were generally pretty happy about being women. To explain this difference from AAP trans men, I think we merely have to look at the amount of AAP. Here’s the results from the women in the survey:

Contrast this with what I have previously found for AAP trans men in another survey:

The fact that they are happy with being women means that they probably don’t have any strong bias towards presenting themselves as being very masculine, being “trutrans”, or similar things that we might worry about when examining groups like AAP trans men.

The autoandrophilia often started early on, with 8 of the 13 respondents being autoandrophilic from the beginning of their sexuality. For example, one respondent wrote “I remember from a very young age (under 10) imagining i had a penis and being turned on by that. I don’t feel like i want to be a man, but in my fantasies, I usually am.”; another wrote “After touching my first hard penis, I wanted to know what it felt like to have one. So I’d read fanfiction to try to imagine it myself.”. This early onset seems similar to the patterns we see in autogynephilic men, which is evidence that autoandrophilia constitutes a genuine paraphilia.

Some of the respondents reported a later onset of AAP, but they did not seem to remember anything notable about this onset. The AAP did not seem to be caused by social contagion or obsession with sex change, since the onset was very early. Only one participant related to social contagion as an explanation, and the main thing she wrote as an argument for that was “I do have a lot of trans and or non binary friends”.

Despite the fact that the autoandrophilia seemed like a genuine paraphilia, it was common for the participants to know transgender and/or nonbinary people, with them on average knowing 4.1 such people. Compare this with Littman’s findings that trans men tend to have about 3.5 friends come out at as trans at a similar time as them. Littman attributes this to social contagion, but the fact that this sample of AAP women knows 4.1 trans/NB people despite not being affected by social contagion shows that it is likely instead caused by AAPs clustering together in similar social groups. (Perhaps because of shared interests?)

The participants reported a variety of sexual orientations, with the most common being bisexual. However, even those who reported monosexual orientations generally reported some degree of flexibility.

Some of the women tried to repress their AAP, but it didn’t seem to work. However, this doesn’t mean much due to survivorship bias; we wouldn’t have heard about it if it did work. I found one of the responses about AAP repression interesting, though: “I watched pornography without any men or realistic phallus. If these things appeared in my fantasies I would replace them. I began to feel that men were disgusting and I idolised women.”. This woman was also the only person in the sample who identified as a lesbian, and her response makes me wonder if the lesbian identity for some AAPs is caused by attempts to repress the AAP? This seems like an interesting research direction for the future. Her feelings that men were disgusting also sound like a mirror image of misogyny that stereotypically appears among some men who try to repress their AGP (though it is worth noting that I found no statistical evidence of such misogyny in other surveys, so it may be a myth).

There didn’t seem to be any consistent patterns in the causes that the participants proposed for their autoandrophilia.

Most didn’t have strong opinions on the idea of it being an erotic target identity inversion. The ones who disagreed with it as an explanation mainly seemed to do so because of their lesbian orientation.

It was common but not universal to feel that a desire for control was a contributing reason for the AAP; however, some participants had a more submissive variant that they didn’t feel could be explained this way. I think it would be interesting to examine the differences and similarities between dominant and submissive AAP further. They did not seem to have especially negative feelings about being around men, but I don’t have a baseline to compare with, so I don’t know for sure. Those who did have bad experiences with men generally didn’t feel that these were the cause of the AAP, despite feeling that the AAP was related to a desire for control; one participant even wrote the opposite: “I would not link my experience to my autoandrophilia. If anything, that experience made me more feminine (non-androphelic)”.

It wasn’t uncommon for the participants to have instances of childhood autoandrophilia or gender nonconformity. For example, one participant wrote “I used to ask my older brother and dad why I didn’t have a penis. One time my brother got so annoyed he told me my penis was ugly so the doctors chopped it off at birth. I was a young kid but still cried extra heavily about it” (she seems to feel better now); another wrote “I would dress as a boy and pretend that I was someone else. Some nameless boy part of the male groups. I dreamed of participating in their male exclusive activities (roughhousing, sleepovers, talking about girls)”. This seems similar to the anecdotes of autogynephiles who have AGP childhood experiences.

The participants reported varying degrees of gender nonconformity. It’s unclear how it compares to the baseline, though in my surveys I haven’t found much of an effect of AAP on GNC, so there might not be much here either.

Most participants hadn’t ever acted on their AAP in a sexual situation. Some participants had a lot of other paraphilias than AAP; others didn’t. There didn’t seem to be any clear themes in what people liked.

There’s a lot of interesting things in the survey that I haven’t covered yet, but going into more detail will have to wait for another time.