Transgendered or Autogynephilia? What's the probability?

what is the suicide (attempted/successful) rate of people desiring gender reassignment surgery?

What do you think?

The people I know who have accepted themselves as transgender and made a variety of changes have been happier, settled with themselves, than they ever had been previously. I get that this is anecdotal.

Hey, maybe it's society's often rabid condemnation that promotes suicidal thinking.

But autogynephilia is still a known condition. And, perhaps not a good reason for surgery.

. . . that's a decision for an individual and their team of health care professionals, not speculation by a former psych major

There is a similarly long history of “autogynephilia” being described as a “male”-specific phenomenon and a paraphilia—these notions are interrelated, as (according to psychiatric dogma) paraphilias are extremely rare or nonexistent in women.[1] However, recent studies have shown that many cisgender women (up to 93%) have experienced “erotic arousal to the thought or image of oneself as a woman.” Therefore, we should no longer use a term that is so closely associated with paraphilias and “erotic anomalies” (as Blanchard calls them) to describe what appears to be a relatively common (and non-pathological) form of sexual thought or fantasy experienced by many female/feminine-identified people.

Blanchard’s model makes two etiological claims. The first is that cross-gender arousal arises from a “misdirected heterosexual impulse”; this claim was shown to be highly suspect in the previous section. The second claim—that cross-gender arousal causes gender dysphoria and a desire to transition to female in nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals—is based solely on Blanchard’s correlations and his anecdotal theory of “erotic target location errors.” No hard evidence has been forwarded to establish or support this proposed causal relationship. In fact, in the original papers in which Blanchard first developed and tested his theory of autogynephilia (Blanchard, 1989a, 1989b, 1991, 1992), there is no exploration or even discussion of the possibility that cross-gender arousal may be an effect of gender dysphoria (rather than its cause) or that both traits might simply correlate in nonandrophilic MtF individuals for some other reason. This oversight is surprising, given that Blanchard’s own research provides several lines of evidence to indicate that the causal relationship he proposes does not hold true. [1]

In regard to timing of suicide attempts and gender transition, some surveys and clinical studies have found that transgender people are at an elevated risk for suicide attempt during gender transition, while rates of suicide attempts decrease after gender transition (Whittle et al., 2007; DeCuypere et al., 2006; Transgender Equality Network Ireland, 2012). [2]