Eli5 please explain what autogynephilia is and what criticism it receives?
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autogynephilia is when you are sexually attracted to your own body, specifically when thinking about it as the other gender. It happens with heterossexual men and a lot of the early trans sexual research in the 60s and 70s was centered around this phenom, doctors were trying to find the “women within” inside the men who tried to change sex, a term made in the 1930 by a researcher looking into the travestied community.
As the research into the trans community progressed scientists noticed how more and more of the people trying to change sex didn’t fit into this concept, with a lot of men and women that had little to no sexual attraction when thinking about their own body turning into another gender, so the field expanded and mostly stopped dealing with trans sexuals as having autogynephilia.
Today there is kind of a taboo about it, you hardly see the term in papers, at least in my experience, with part of the most erudite anti-trans movement using the phenom to discredit any trans person as sexual freaks, but even in the early days the scientists noticed a lot of people wanting to change sex that had nothing to do with it. The fact that a lot of trans research are centered around children now also explain how the term has fallen out of fashion given how inherently sexual it is.
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