Ray Blanchard

As portrayed by Terrence Mann in the 2015 documentary Sense8

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“”I think that a transsexual should be considered as whatever their biological sex is plus the fact that they are transsexuals. That’s how you would do research on them.

—Ray Blanchard, 2013

Ray "Whispers" Blanchard (1945–) is an American-Canadian sexologist and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, Canada. who researches pedophilia, sexual orientation and gender identity.

He is best known today for his work on the fraternal birth order effect in gay men, but also more controversially, his "typology of transsexualism," in which he divides male-to-female transgender people into the categories of homosexual (attracted to men exclusively) and autogynephile (attracted to the concept of themselves as a woman), first described in 1989.

Much like a Hollywood villain, Blanchard's shadow has loomed large over the transgender community for decades. He was, until 2003 and the backlash to J. Michael Bailey, an honest-to-God member of what later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization that publishes the standards of care for transgender healthcare, and helped write both the DSM-IV and DSM-V, overseeing the insertion of his "autogynephilia" theory into the United States' premier manual of mental health diagnoses.

Relationship with the LGBT community

Until recent years, Blanchard himself was not what one would generally describe as a "transphobe," perhaps a gatekeeper or transmedicalist extraordinaire, but not openly antagonistic to the trans community in his words (though arguably in his deeds). He stated in 2004: "If people are desperately unhappy right now and there is nothing else to do besides sex reassignment, then I think this is the best we can do and what we should do. Cosmetic surgery can help people lead much happier and productive lives. … We are not trying to encourage people to have sex reassignment surgery. On the contrary, we encourage people to try to make an adjustment to their biological gender."

Yet what has been truly insidious about his influence is how his theories have provided the proverbial fuel to the furnace of anti-transgender hate of both the religious and trans-exclusionary feminist variety, who have turned them into the ideal scientific veneer for fear-mongering and concern trolling. He has recently found a great deal of common ground with the TERF machine, participating in mob harassment of figures like Zinnia Jones and endorsing the gender critical-championed concept of "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" on TERF websites like 4thWaveNow. He has also given credence to the extremely serious theory of anime (Japanese cartoons) turning people trans, a fact for which he has been roundly mocked. Some of his other statements don't lend themselves to anti-trans moral panic, however, in what might be viewed as stopped clock moments: in example, he attests that there is "no notable overlap between trans and pedo[phile] populations", based on his experience clinically interfacing with both.

Blanchard claims that anti-trans conversion therapy should instead be called "sex-acceptance therapy"; he also unsuccessfully opposed attempts to ban conversion therapy in Ontario, claiming there "was little-to-no conversion therapy of gays and lesbians happening in Ontario in 2015 or now. Therefore I think the bill was a Trojan horse primarily intended to prevent therapists from helping gender-dysphoric children accept their anatomic sex." In a letter to the Toronto Star, he claims that gender identity "is demonstrably mutable, at least in children" and therefore this practice should not be banned. The figures he is likely drawing this conclusion from are anything but solid and uncontroversial, to say the least — many of the studied patients were likely not gender dysphoric in the first place, and the researchers put forward often-bizarre definitions of desistance (in some of the papers, simply dropping out of study participation counted as "desisting" from a transgender identity, and this applied to large chunks of the subjects).

It is difficult to get past the impression that Blanchard sees sexual minorities first and foremost not as human beings, but as test subjects. He has not won many friends in the community by saying, for example, "I think that a transsexual should be considered as whatever their biological sex is plus the fact that they are transsexuals. That’s how you would do research on them." His insistence that all non-heterosexual sexual activity is "abnormal" has not helped either, though Blanchard would contend that he simply refuses to be "politically correct."

Autogynephilia

See the main article on this topic: Autogynephilia

Blanchard believes, as he has steadfastly held since the 1980s, that male-to-female transgender people can be separated into two distinct groups based on sexual orientation: "homosexual" and "autogynephile." The latter is supposedly both a sexual orientation unto itself, constituting a "misdirected" heterosexual attraction to the idea of oneself as a woman, and also the impetus to transition for all trans women not exclusively attracted to men. This theory has never enjoyed widespread acceptance in the scientific community, but has received extensive publicity thanks to figures like J. Michael Bailey and his controversial 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen, and self-appointed poster child of the theory, sexologist Anne Lawrence.

Blanchard made an attempt to include "autoandrophilia," the female-to-male equivalent of autogynephilia, in the DSM, but later said, "I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism… I don’t think the phenomenon even exists."

Gynandromorphophilia

In 1993, Blanchard co-authored a paper that coined the phrase "gynandromorphophilia". This term, as defined by Blanchard and co-author Peter I. Collins, conflates attraction to male crossdressers and attraction to transgender women. The 1993 paper refers to men with attraction to "cross-dressers, transvestites, transsexuals, or she-males". To be fair, this is likely as a result of the fact that many of the men under observation did not themselves make such a distinction, although, they were specifically observed via pornography, hook-up and prostitution advertisements, which could have introduced some selection bias (and it was also the early 1990s, so transgender awareness was not exactly at its peak). In any case, it shouldn't preclude that people attracted to transgender women but not male crossdressers (and vice versa) do exist.

See also

• J. Michael Bailey
• Steve Sailer, connected to Bailey and Blanchard via Sailer's "Human Biodiversity Institute"