Interrogating Authority Transfer Relationships from a Consent Lens

Authority Transfer Relationships (ATRs) represents an important and careful articulation of scholarship on power, intimacy, and notably consent.In conceptualizing ATRs as consensual relationships in which one partner voluntarily transfers decision-making authority to another partner, the authors seek to distinguish these arrangements from coercive dominance and from historically entrenched hierarchies such as patriarchy.Their framework articulates ATR participants' self-understandings and is attentive to essential ATR features, that one could argue should be relevant to all egalitarian relationship types but at times potentially neglected, such as explicit negotiation, role intentionality, and ongoing consent.As a consent researcher, however, ATRs raise foundational questions about what consent means when inequality is not incidental but constitutive of the relationship itself.In this Commentary, I consider ATRs as a relational form and critically examine the extent that consent can operate unproblematically in these contexts.Consistent with Casey and Sagarin (2025), I argue that ATRs can indeed be consensual under narrow and demanding conditions.And extending their call for more research, I believe it would be fruitful for researchers to more sufficiently theorize and examine structural constraints such as gendered socialization, asymmetric exit costs, and the potential requirement for those involved in ATRs to be genuinely "good" or altruistic and whether they lead to the successful execution of consent in these relationships.