Androphilia

Androphilia means sexual attraction to men or masculinity, and androphilic is the adjective. Like its counterpart gynephilia, attraction to women or femininity, it is a term from sexology and behavioural science, and the two were designed to be used together.

The word is older than the pair. Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist, used androphiles in the early twentieth century for one group in his classification of gay men: those most attracted to men between their early twenties and fifty. The modern pairing was proposed and popularised by the psychologist Ron Langevin in the 1980s, as a way to name the kind of partner someone prefers regardless of their own gender identity.

Its usefulness for trans people is the reason it spread. Some sexology research, including work by Ray Blanchard in the 1980s, described trans women attracted to men by the sex they were assigned at birth, with labels such as homosexual transsexual. Other researchers criticised that wording as archaic, confusing, pejorative and heterosexist, and some suggested androphilic as the neutral alternative. The objection was not new: in The Transsexual Phenomenon, in 1966, Harry Benjamin wrote that calling a trans woman who had had surgery a homosexual man was a matter of pedantry rather than common sense.

It is also used in research outside the West, on the grounds that words like homosexual carry Western assumptions. The researchers Paul Vasey and Nancy Bartlett used androphilia and gynephilia in their work on Samoan fa'afafine, and the sociologist Johanna Schmidt observed that they treated it as the more scientific vocabulary. Sam Winter, writing about trans people in Asia, noted that many people there are unfamiliar with words like homosexual and heterosexual, which have no easy translation into their languages.

Community glossaries treat the word as dated. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki calls androphilia outdated, and notes that many nonbinary people prefer words from their own communities for attraction to men, such as toric. It also belongs to the same clinical toolkit as Blanchard's typology of trans women: his 1985 Modified Androphilia-Gynephilia Index adapted earlier scales, and the typology is disputed by many trans people and considered unsupported by scientific evidence by many medical professionals.

Its community counterpart is androsexual, and the two have occasionally been used as synonyms. Both describe attraction without describing the person who feels it. Neither, used properly, is about a particular body: the LGBTQIA+ Wiki notes that androsexual is sometimes misused to exclude trans men, and treats that use as transphobic.

Androphilic is not another word for gay

The two overlap, but they are not the same claim. Gay describes a relationship between the speaker's gender and the gender they are drawn to. Androphilic describes only the second half. A gay man is androphilic, and so is a straight woman, a trans woman attracted to men, and a nonbinary person drawn to men.

Nor is it a diagnosis. The ending -philia is shared with clinical names for disorders, which is why the word can sound like one, but in behavioural science androphilia names a sexual orientation.

Saying it well