Ray Blanchard’s Research is Bad. Maybe Retraction Bad?
Christa Peterson has been reexamining the foundational papers on autogynephilia from the 1980s. She believes a formal retraction would be appropriate after all this time.
by Evan Urquhart
Sexologist Ray Blanchard’s theory of autogynephilia, based on research from the 1980s, is the favorite explanation among anti-trans kooks for why trans people (specifically trans women not attracted to men, which is most of them) exist. Though Blanchard’s research has been heavily criticized by others in the field, was never widely accepted, and subsequent studies failed to find support for its key ideas, there’s never been a serious effort to request a formal retraction of his work. Christa Peterson would like that to change.
Retractions of old papers are exceedingly rare, because scientists recognize that progress always builds on the imperfect foundations of the past. However, Peterson says that some of the lesser-known irregularities in Blanchard’s work fall far outside what was considered good research practice even back in the day.
For example, did you know that the measure Blanchard used to determine if a trans woman patient was heterosexual or homosexual scored respondents differently if they liked dancing? Or that his efforts to detect symptoms of physical arousal relied on the extremely weak sexual responses of women undergoing testosterone suppression with HRT? These sorts of methodological problems, which Peterson believes are far outside the norm even for 1980s sexology, are the issues Peterson is focusing on in her attempt to build a case for the formal retraction of Blanchard’s papers after all these years.
What is autogynephilia, anyway? Blanchard believed, and continues to believe, that there are two and only two types of trans women, and both are motivated to transition out of sexual desire. The first type of trans women seek to transition in order to sleep with straight men, while the second type are “autogynephiles,” who Blanchard imagines are straight men whose attraction to women somehow missed its target and resulted in an attraction to the idea of becoming a woman instead.
As for transgender lesbians who say they don’t become aroused at the idea of wearing women’s clothes? Blanchard claims they lie.
The most publicized criticisms of Blanchard’s work, such as those made by the well-known trans writer/former biologist Julia Serano, have focused on critiquing Blanchard’s interpretations of his findings as well as later studies that would seem to undermine Blanchard’s key claims. For example, Serano has explained that subsequent research showed the sexually charged “female embodiment fantasies” that undergird so much of Blanchard’s evidence decrease naturally over time. If these fantasies are at the core of trans women’s sexuality, why would they fall off? If sexual arousal at these fantasies is the motivating factor for transition, why do people who have had these fantasies remain happily transitioned decades after they did so?
Via email, Serano wrote, “People have pointed out the many methodological flaws in Blanchard's original autogynephilia studies since at least the early 2000s. Several peer-reviewed critical reviews of that research and the theory more generally have been published, and numerous independent research groups have since published results that directly contradict autogynephilia theory.”
Enter Christa Peterson. Peterson is a PhD student in philosophy. As part of her research she has been working on an interdisciplinary project on the history of clinical conceptions of transness. She believes some of the problems in Blanchard’s old papers are so fundamental that they should not remain part of the published body of research in the field.
Thus far, Peterson has published four separate commentaries using PubPeer, a site dedicated to enabling post-publication discussion and review of published scientific work, and she has plans for more. “My focus is on whether the findings are reliable as they are reported, not whether the theory is plausible or his interpretation of them is sound but whether what Blanchard reports accurately reflects what he was seeing,” Peterson explains.
Peterson’s commentaries have identified some issues in Blanchard’s work that don’t seem to be widely known. In a commentary on a Blanchard paper titled “Nonhomosexual gender dysphoria” published by Blanchard in the Journal of Sex Research in 1988, she discusses the scale Blanchard used to identify his subject’s sexual orientation, the Modified Androphilia/Gynephilia Inventory. Rather than relying on patients’ own descriptions of who they were attracted to and how strongly, Blanchard used a scale with some strange elements. For example, one item Blanchard’s MAGI scale scored respondents differently based on whether they’ve gone dancing since the age of 17. Another gave different scores based on the respondent’s age.
screenshot from PubPeer
Instead of asking whether Blanchard’s conclusion that trans women can be sorted into two groups based on their sexuality holds up, Peterson’s critique calls into question whether he was measuring respondents’ sexual orientations at all. “A few months ago I was looking to see if anyone else used [Blanchard’s MAGI scale]. It’s unvalidated and never became widely adopted,” Peterson says.
In another of Peterson’s commentaries, on Blanchard’s “Phallometric detection of fetishistic arousal in heterosexual male cross‐dressers,” she discusses Blanchard’s use of phallometrics to discern the hidden sexualities of his patients. Phallometrics seeks to quantify a person’s arousal in the presence of different stimuli by directly measuring how much their penis becomes engorged. However, Peterson believes that Blanchard methods diverge from the accepted phallometric practices of the day in ways that ought to invalidate the findings as he reported them.
screenshot from PubPeer
Retraction is a rare step, only undertaken when a paper has very serious flaws, but she believes the methodological errors in Blanchard’s work are severe enough to meet the criteria for retraction according to guidelines set by COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics most journals are members of, particularly the first, highlighted below.
screenshot from COPE’s website
Even if Peterson’s critiques hold up, it will likely be an uphill battle to convince journals to consider a retraction so long after the publication of the work. But Blanchard’s research continues to be promoted as a justification for treating trans women with fear and disgust, by keyboard warriors and by the right wing press. When bad science continues to be relied on by members of the public who don’t understand its flaws, there may be a case that retraction is the sort of remedy that can signal just how fatal those flaws are as a matter of scientific concern.
This article was updated on August 14 to make it clear earlier in the piece that the theory of autogynephilia concerns trans women, specifically.
The first version of this article incorrectly stated that Christa Peterson is trans. She is not.