Gynephilia

Gynephilia means sexual attraction to women or femininity. It is a term from sexology and behavioural science rather than from everyday speech, and its adjective is gynephilic. The spelling gynophilia also turns up. Its counterpart is androphilia, attraction to men or masculinity, and attraction to both is sometimes called ambiphilia.

What the word leaves out is the point. Heterosexual and homosexual describe attraction relative to the speaker's own gender, so they only work once that gender is agreed. Gynephilia names only the people someone is drawn to, which is why researchers have used it for trans, intersex and nonbinary people. Anil Aggrawal, in a 2008 medico-legal glossary, put the problem plainly: trying to decide which of two opposite labels fits a trans woman attracted to women causes confusion and can give offence, so it is better to describe the object of the attraction and leave the person's sex or gender out of it.

The idea is old; the modern word is not. The Greek poet Theocritus used a related word for Zeus's lust for women, and Freud described his patient Dora as gynecophilic. Gynephilia and androphilia as a pair were proposed and popularised by the psychologist Ron Langevin in the 1980s. Some writers close to trans communities argued for them as well: the author Helen Boyd wrote that defining orientation as androphilic or gynephilic would be much more accurate.

Community glossaries, though, treat the word as dated. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki calls gynephilia outdated, and notes that many nonbinary people describe attraction to women with words from their own communities, such as trixic. Its history in trans research does not help. The Gynephilia and Androphilia Scales built by Kurt Freund and Betty Steiner in 1982 were later adapted by Ray Blanchard, whose theory about trans women many trans people dispute, arguing that it unduly sexualises trans women's identities, and which many medical professionals consider unsupported by scientific evidence.

Its closest community relative is gynosexual, and gynesexual has occasionally been used as a direct synonym for it. Both describe attraction without describing the speaker. Neither, used properly, means attraction to a particular body. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki warns that gynesexual is sometimes used in exactly that way to exclude trans women, and treats that use as transphobic.

Gynephilia is an orientation, not a diagnosis

The ending -philia appears in clinical names for disorders, and gynephilia has sat alongside such terms in old classification schemes of sexual interest, so the word gets heard as a diagnosis. In behavioural science it names a sexual orientation. As the psychologist Rachel Ann Heath points out, the Greek simply means love of a woman.

The opposite mistake treats it as a formal word for straight. For a man attracted to women it roughly is. It is just as true of a lesbian, of a trans woman attracted to women, and of a nonbinary person drawn to women, which is the reason the word was proposed in the first place.

Saying it well