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It has been suggested that Philogyny be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since August 2010.

Androphilia is sexual attraction to men, and its counterpart gynephilia is attraction to women.

The term androsexuality was originally used to describe the age aspect of sexual orientation of male homosexuals. The terms androphilia and gynephilia were also used to distinguish love of adult humans from pederasty and pedophilia. These describe types of chronosexuality and within that, androsexuality and gynesexuality collectively refer to two variable forms of teleiosexuality.

Later the words androphilia and gynephilia (gynaekophilia) were appropriated to describe sexual orientation independently of one's sex, particularly in discussing the orientation of transsexual people (regardless of which age-range of attraction), as well as for general studies of sexual attraction.

Androphilia

It is believed that the term originated from Hirschfeld's systematics of homosexual men. Magnus Hirschfeld, writing in the early twentieth century, offered a threefold age classification system for homosexual men:

• Ephebophiles, "who are attracted to youths from puberty to the early 20s". The term is now used to describe both heterosexual and homosexual attraction to the age range.
• Androphiles, which he used as men who prefer men from their second to fifth decade. The term is now mostly used correctly; to describe any who have love for men.
• Gerontophiles, who prefer older men. The term is now used correctly; as a sexually neutral preference for old people.

The term androphilia was used in describing societies where pederasty was the norm, but where attraction between adult men was frowned upon.

A book by Jack Malebranche uses the term androphilia in its title: Androphilia, A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (ISBN 0-9764035-8-7). The author uses the term to emphasize masculinity in both the object and the subject of male homosexual desire and to reject the sexual nonconformity that he sees in some segments of the homosexual identity.

Gynephilia

Gynephilia is philologically inconsequent, as it takes the nominative form in place of the root, and would have as its counterpart anerphilia (From Greek anēr, "men," + -philia), not androphilia ; while gynophilia is formed in violation of Greek word formation rules, cf. gynaecology/gynecology (From Greek gynaiko-, "woman," + logos)

The term gynophilia is misused in some psychotherapy to mean "attraction to adult women", in contrast with pedophilia, with the aim of therapy usually being to replace pedophilic desires with teleiosexual ones.

The age zone of gynephilic interests is defined likewise as in case of androphilia.

Use for transsexual people

The terms gynephilia and androphilia are occasionally used when referring to the sexual orientation of transsexual people, since the terms homosexual and heterosexual can be unclear. In describing a human's sexual orientation as homosexual or heterosexual, one is not only saying a thing about the sex that human desires, but also about their own sex — specifically, that their sex is the same as, or different from, that of those they desire. Difficulty in making these judgements can be seen, for example, in debates about whether gynephilic transsexual men are homosexual. Androphilia and gynephilia are often preferred, because rather than focusing on the sex of the subject, they only describe that of the object of their attraction. This has led to less emphasis on the age-based restriction that those terms were originally misused for. The third common term that describes sexual orientation, bisexuality, makes no claim about the subject's sexual identity.

This use is problematic for transsexual people because it denies their experiences as their actual sex, but also implies that they are really of the sex they were originally. It is barely controversial that transsexual people define themselves as homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual as appropriate, and will reject any terminology that is applied to them but not also to cisgender people. Debates about whether gynesexual transsexual men are homosexual, for example, do not typically include those men's perspectives.

It is however more commonly and less controversially used amongst genderqueer people who fall outside the gender binary and so are usually considered transgender if not always transsexual. For them conventional terms like heterosexuality and homosexuality don't apply so easily and so describing the gender you're attracted to independent of your own is often useful especially when talking about monosexual sexualities.

See also

• Autoandrophilia
• Autogynephilia

Footnotes

1. http://lgbthealth.org.uk/sites/default/files/Needs%20Assessment%20Sept%2007%20_Updated%20Dec%2007_.PDF
2. http://starways.net/beth/4not2.html
3. http://www.black-rose.com/articles-liz/genderlang.html
4. For example: "Fa’afafine are a heterogeneous group of androphilic men, some of whom are unremarkably masculine, but most of whom behave in a feminine manner in adulthood.", Bartlett, Nancy H. and Vasey, Paul L. (2006), A Retrospective Study of Childhood Gender-Atypical Behavior in Samoan Fa’afafine, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Springer Netherlands, ISSN 0004-0002 (Print) 1573-2800 (Online), Volume 35, Number 6, December 2006, Pages 659-666

Reference

• Dynes, Wayne "Androphilia." Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. Dynes, Wayne R. (ed.), Garland Publishing, 1990; p. 58.

• Articles to be merged from August 2010
• Sexual orientation