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Causality: Is it sexual deviance, compensation, or just a fantasy? Blanchard believes that autogynephilic sexual fantasies cause gender dysphoria, but his evidence is only with correlations (technically the categorical equivalent). Alternately, the reverse causal direction could be true: gender dysphoria could cause cross-gender fantasies for compensation. Finally, a third possible factor may be the causal mechanism.
This is page 9 of 13. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
One thing social scientists always need to be careful about is the difference between a correlation and causality. For example, let's say we find out that African Americans perform worse on IQ tests than Caucasian Americans. Does this means being black causes stupidity? Of course not. There are many other possibilities. For example, institutionalized racism may have left African Americans far more likely to live in poverty and poverty is not so helpful when taking IQ tests.
Blanchard believes that some male-bodied persons have sexual fantasies about being a woman and these fantasies cause gender dysphoria. Here too, there are many other possible causal relationships. For example, maybe some male-bodied people cope with gender dysphoria by having sexual fantasies about being a women? Another possibility is that there is some third factor causing the difference between the groups of transsexuals. In the next section I note why age is a particularly likely third factor. Though there are some ways to experimentally tease apart the causal relationships (e.g. priming studies), there still is no evidence for Blanchard's predicted causal relationship.
This is page 9 of 13. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
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