Blanchard's transsexualism typology

The American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard proposed a psychological typology of gender dysphoria, transsexualism, and fetishistic transvestism in a series of academic papers through the 1980s and 1990s. Building on the work of earlier researchers, including his colleague Kurt Freund, Blanchard categorized trans women into two groups: homosexual transsexuals who are attracted exclusively to men and are feminine in both behavior and appearance; and autogynephilic transsexuals who experience sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body (autogynephilia). Blanchard and his supporters argue that the typology explains differences between the two groups in childhood gender nonconformity, sexual orientation, history of sexual fetishism, and age of transition.

Blanchard's typology has attracted significant controversy, especially following the 2003 publication of J. Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which presented the typology to a general audience. Scientific criticisms commonly made against Blanchard's research include that the typology is unfalsifiable because Blanchard and other supporters regularly dismiss or ignore data that challenges the theory, that it failed to properly control against cisgender women rather than against cisgender men in rating levels of autogynephilia, and that when such studies are performed they show that cisgender women have similar levels of autogynephilic responses to transgender women. The American Psychiatric Association includes with autogynephilia as a specifier to a diagnosis of transvestic disorder in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013); this addition was objected to by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), who argued that there was a lack of scientific consensus on and empirical evidence for the concept of autogynephilia.