EDIT (three days after posting): Big thanks to whoever donated the awards and coins! But, um, I hope you didn't give any real money to Reddit after they bannedr/gendercritical*...*
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Hi. Aussie autogynephilic male here. GC's favourite kind of person!
Just feeling the need to vent, and maybe help some people make sense of all this trans craziness.
I don't have any grotesque stories of my time as a TIM, because I never quite made it that far (thankfully), but maybe I can help people understand what it's like to have autogynephilia--at least in a mild form.
It's frustrating to see so little discussion of AGP in public discourse, even by people like JK Rowling. To my mind, it's the key, heart, core and crux of the problem with the trans movement today.
Then again, I might just be projecting. We AGPs are nothing if not self-absorbed. ;)
Disclaimers
I'm posting this here because doing so on the GC sister sub would be the height of ironic hypocrisy. "Oh hi ladies, please tell me how awesome I am for courageously talking about AGP, validate me please..."
More seriously, I should note that I'm not actually gender-critical. In fact, learning about AGP and the Blanchard MTF typology made it impossible for me to be gender-critical any longer. That pesky stuff about instinctive HSTS childhood feminine behaviour...
However, I amcritical of current trans ideology and worried about the things we males are getting away with. And there aren't many other places on the net to talk about it.
I'll try to talk GC style while I'm here, using terms like TIM, but under protest. In some cases it can be actively dangerous--especially when talking about the other kind of MTF transsexual (HSTS) who are vulnerable to being 'outed' as male. However, I do agree that 'TIM' and 'he' are useful terms for helping people to see AGPs like me clearly as the men we are, rather than valiantly trying to believe we're somehow 'really' women just because we say so.
Since this is a GC sub, I hope everyone here knows what AGP is, but for the benefit of random internet wanderers:
Autogynephilia is the erotic desire to become a woman. Sometimes it's described as a paraphilia (fetish), sometimes as an inward-directed sexual orientation, and sometimes as an 'erotic target location error' or 'identity inversion'--basically a glitch or bug in your sex drive that makes you want to becomethe object of your desire.
I strongly recommend looking it up, along with the Blanchard MTF typology. Pretty much everything wrong with trans activism these days makes sense once you know about it.
The short version is that there are two--and only two--kinds of MTF transsexual.
One is 'homosexual transsexual' or HSTS: basically the cousins of very feminine gay men--the extreme end of the rainbow. (If you want a dodgy shorthand stereotype, think The Crying Game, or Cindy from Ally McBealif anyone remembers that episode. Blaire White on YouTube is probably HSTS, as is Georgie Stone for the Aussies reading this. Also probably HSTS: Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, Kay Brown, Jazz Jennings, Bailey Jay, and maybe Rhyannon Styles.)
The other is 'autogynephilic transsexual'or AGP: heterosexual males with an erotic desire to be women. AGP can twist our sexuality into pretzels until we seem to be bisexual, asexual, attracted only to men or 'trans lesbians'. Apart from that, we seem like ordinary blokes--because we areordinary blokes. We have trouble passing as women and often shock everyone when we come out as trans.
AGP often, but not always, includes cross-dressing to get off. (The term 'autogynephile' also covers other varieties of this fantasy, like heterosexual transvestites.) Some autogynephiles are more turned on by the idea of having the female body, others by behaving in a stereotypically feminine way, others by having female body functions (like menstruating), and still others by wearing feminine clothes. Most of us probably have a little of everything.
In much of the world, the HSTS type is the most common (think Thai ladyboys). However, in the West, the autogynephilic type is the majority among dysphoria cases.
It's worth keeping in mind that some AGPs will distort their life histories and try to pretend they're HSTS. This can stuff up the data even in academic studies. So just because a TIM passes well, appears only attracted to men (nowadays) and claims to have been super-feminine in childhood doesn't necessarily mean they're genuinely HSTS. [EDIT: Those with more expertise than me will probably get a weary chuckle out of some of the comments on this post...]
It's also likely, although I'm not certain, that AGP comes in mild, moderate and extreme/disordered intensities, just like other paraphilias. Some autogynephiles develop gender dysphoria that requires treatment, but many of us don't. For instance, I don't have dysphoria--I'm not distressed that I'm 'trapped in a male body'--but I would very much like to become a woman. For, uh, reasons.
Two good free PDF books on the subject (albeit a few years old now) are Bailey's The Man who would be Queen and Anne Lawrence's Men Trapped in Men's Bodies.
With all that out of the way ... here's how it went for me
AGP is famously difficult for people to get a handle on--even for we AGPs ourselves. It's also routinely denied, distorted and hushed up by the trans community.
I didn't even know I had it until age 35, even though I thought I was well-informed about sexuality. One of my parents taught sex ed, fer Chrissakes. I read Kinsey biographies for fun. And even I'd never heard of it.
If you met me you wouldn't think I was anything but a bookish, shy, nerdy guy. A bit weird, sure, but in no way naturally feminine or 'gay'.
For as far back as I can remember, I've had a mild but persistent longing to be a woman. It goes right back into childhood, but--importantly--it was a secret fantasy thrill. I wasn't the kind of 'sissy boy' who stresses his parents out because he's always wearing dresses and playing with dolls. (That's sometimes an early sign of the other kind of MTF transsexual, HSTS.) But I wasthe guy who would always plays as a female character in video games, and preferred books and movies with female leads, and got all invested in lesbian shows. (For the record, Cat/Frankie 4 life.) It even included dreams--the profoundly spiritual kind where you see yourself with a female body in the mirror and wake up from going, 'OMG, the universe just sent me a Message about my True Inner Subconscious Feminine Gender Soul Identity! Which was incidentally kind of hot.'
Unlike many AGPs, I wasn't particularly into erotic cross-dressing. I'm more what you'd call an 'anatomic' autogynephile--it's the female body I fantasise about having.
I don't think it's a coincidence that I feel the same way about real women. I'm not one of those guys who thinks a woman in lingerie is hotter than a fully nude one. The point of clothes is to take them off, dammit!
Because of this, I never twigged to the fact that my fantasies had any connection to transvestic fetishism, which I thought was just about the clothes, or to transsexualism (which was, after all, supposed to be about gender identity rather than sexuality). On the other hand, the lack of cross-dressing helped me dodge the intense feelings of shame that many AGPs suffer. But even so, I've used a wig now and then, and I didfind that an excuse to cross-dress (e.g. a fancy dress party) kinda did it for me. This isn't unusual for AGPs--we often have a physical response to cross-dressing even if we thinkwe're not into it.
I'm just old enough to have grown up without the internet having too much influence on my teen years, which may have been a blessing. But I alternated between thinking I had some kind of utterly obscure fetish that nobody else on the planet shared, and thinking that I must be unusually empathetic and sensitive to women because I spent so much time trying to see life from their point of view. (Um...)
At one point I asked my doctor for a karyotype test to see if I had some kind of hidden intersex condition that would explain my strange 'affinity' for women. I don't. This kind of thing isn't unusual among AGPs either.
You might think the sexual nature of a paraphilia would be obvious, and sure, if it were something like 'I want to become a dragon' then it would be. But when it comes to AGP, a lot of us genuinely have trouble figuring out what our feelings mean. 'I'm attracted to women, but I also wish I was a woman and have dreams where I'm a woman... but why? I know intersex and trans people exist, and trans people say it's all about gender identity--so maybe I was born with a female brain?' You end up going in circles trying to puzzle it out. It was hard enough for me, with all my sex-ed knowledge. I can only imagine the maze of confusion and shame other people must go through, trying to work it all out from the weirder corners of the internet.
Until you ask the trans community for advice. And gee willikers, what sensible, evidence-based, scientifically sound advice they give. /sarcasm
Around my 35th birthday I 'cracked my egg' and started secretly identifying as trans. Fortunately I didn't get as far as actually trying to transition. Poking around transgender forums taught me a whole lot about HRT and so on, but nothing about the true nature of my feelings... or why people were trans in the first place. There seemed to be a lot of contradictions. Why were some kids obviously gender nonconforming from an early age, while other people didn't crack their eggs till they were 50? But the general consensus seemed to be, 'If you think you're trans, you probably are!'
Never saw a single reference to Blanchard, the typology or AGP. Not one.
Months later, I was on some unrelated internet surfage when I finally stumbled into GC and discovered the concept of autogynephilia. Talk about a peak trans. I went from sea level to Mt Everest in a single night of horrified Googling.
Analogy time:
Imagine if you were gay, but raised in some remote village where the very concept of males being sexually attracted to other males never even occurred to anyone. There isn't even a word in your language for 'gay'. Or even a way to say 'I am a guy with the hots for other guys'. The very concept is literally unthinkable in your culture.
Then, in your mid-thirties, after years and years of bewilderment at your strange feelings, you stumble onto the fact that 'homosexuality' exists and has been studied for decades, and that millions of other men like you exist. Except... some gay men had conspired to hush up the sexual aspects and insisted that it was all about chaste brotherly companionship. In fact, they destroyed the reputations of anyone who tried to explain what homosexuality was really about.
And, by the way, the gay rights movement is busily renovating the language, rejigging all the laws of sport and prisons and changing rooms, encouraging drastic and unnecessary medical procedures on children, attacking anyone who raises the meekest concern, and demanding that all straight men have sex with them... but that's all totally reasonable, right?
/analogy done
If it's true that we AGPs are prone to narcissistic rage, then guess what, trans rights movement, you've set off my volcano and I'm not happy, Jan. The rainbow warriors didn't get where they are today by being dishonest.
To be clear: I'm not ashamed of having AGP. Any more than a gay man or lesbian should be ashamed of being homosexual. In fact, I'm overjoyed to finally understand myself. Seriously. Like 'yell it from the rooftops' joy. In my view, calling us sicko perverts is counterproductive... although we're giving women plenty of justification these days. That sort of disgust, and the deep shame many AGPs feel, is one of the reasons AGP was hushed up and denied in the first place, because the dysphorics among us couldn't get treatment if we admitted to it. It's contributed to the mess we're in now.
But I am deeply alarmed and concerned by what autogynephilic men like me are doing. Denying and concealing a particular kind of sexuality is dangerous. I'm a man, much as I might wish I wasn't, and I know full well the kind of shenanigans we males try to get away with when nobody's looking.
Especially what we're doing to lesbians. Every time I think about it I want to punch holes in the wall (in a ladylike way, of course). I can't help being a perv, but I can damn well make sure I'm not a creep.
Lies and silence
The fundamental problem with autogynephilia--the thing that makes it such a hated idea among many TIMs--is that it means, with cold and merciless scientific precision, that I'm a male with a paraphilia. Which is exactly what the autogynephilic fantasy wants to deny. It's a snake that eats its own tail.
If I have AGP, I want to believe I'm a woman. I don't want to accept that I have AGP. Because that would mean I'm just a man with a glitchy sex drive.
So AGPs like me end up telling ourselves comforting fictions. For instance:
'AGP doesn't exist.'
So... the hundreds of case histories collected by researchers are all false? And all that feminisation porn out there is made by and consumed by who, exactly?
'AGPs are fetishistic men, but real trans women are totally different. Gender identity has nothing to do with sexuality.'
But... hang on... wouldn't a man with especially intense desire to become a woman take hormones and get surgery? Wouldn't they try to become... a transwoman?
'AGPs are a tiny minority among transwomen.'
Say the people whose own autobiographies read like textbook AGP case histories.
'Women feel sexy about themselves too, so my erotic fantasies of being female are in fact proof that I have a ladybrain!'
Wait, I thought AGP was rare or didn't exist? Now you're saying it's common and proves your female gender identity? Make up your minds.
Besides... you're telling me women get off on ironing or being pregnant or having their periods, just like the fantasies of some AGP males, do they? And they love to just stand naked in the middle of a room and do nothing, because existing while being female is a helluva turn on? And they get wet just by putting on undies in the morning? Yep, that sure sounds like female sexuality. Not male or fetishistic at all.
Incidentally, why do males get embarrassed by their own hard-ons when they cross-dress? Could it be because they're experiencing a male sexual reaction and they don't like it because they want to believe they're female?
'There is no evidence that there are two types of MTF transsexuals. The Blanchard typology has been debunked / discredited / proven false.'
Funny thing, I've spent the last eighteen months trying to find these allegedly definitive disproofs and come up empty. Apart from one or two feeble attempts like the Serano and Moser papers everyone raves about.
On the other hand, the academic work that finds evidence for two types--whether or not they accept AGP--goes back a hundred years and just keeps piling up. Every time I turn around I find another paper. Hirschfeld, Freund, Buhrich and McConaghy (AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE OI OI OI sorry), Blanchard, Lawrence, Nuttbrock, that Netherlands team I can never remember the name of, Zahvlin...
Now since I know I'm AGP myself, you could fairly accuse me of confirmation bias. But then you'd have to also admit bias on the part of all those many, many trans activists who really, really don't want AGP to be real. Somehow I think their bias might outweigh mine.
Oh, and even some activists who insist AGP isn't a thing, like ContraPoints, grudgingly admit there do seem to be two 'clusters' of transsexuals.
... Wait, no, what am I saying? There can't possibly be two types. Because if there are two types, then it's obvious why the HSTS type goes trans... 'cos if you're incredibly feminine and gay, living as a woman kinda makes sense. Hey, maybe they're even born with incompletely masculinised brains or something, I dunno. But... it's weird the othertype goes trans. The guys like me. We seem like typical straight blokes. Wouldn't we be better off as typical straight blokes? There must be some kind of inner motivation. Oh, how interesting, guess what, these guys all seem to have one thing in common: fetishistic arousal to the idea of becoming a woman. Which leads us to...
... AGP. Oops.
And that's why we mustn't talk about the two types, folks. Loose lips sink ships.
'Um... trans women are women, so shut up, you TERF.'
By Jove, your well-reasoned argument is irrefutable. I am agog.
So what's the big deal?
Whenever I try to raise my concerns about all this with friends and family, their universal response is 'What's the big deal?'
Examples (from my left-leaning circle):
A cousin who said he 'supported me on my journey' should I declare myself trans, but warned he and his wife might never speak to me again if I went public about AGP, because it could hurt transwomen. (Um... what about, oh, I don't know, the other 99% of the population?) He also dismisses concerns about TIMs hassling lesbians as a fringe minority.
A fiftysomething lesbian who finds the whole discussion strange, boring and irrelevant (!!!)
A female psychologist and sex researcher who has ranted to me about entitled male sexual behaviour... yet doesn't find AGP convincing, doesn't see why it should matter in any case, and (when confronted with evidence of TIMs harassing lesbians for sex) insists that they must be men with some other kind of lesbian-fetish, rather than AGP. Because... well, I think the chain of reasoning goes something like, 'autogynephilic transwomen are transwomen, and we all know transwomen are women, so they'd never act like that.'
A friend who, when I cautiously suggested that 'some men' might pretend to be trans in order to get into women's spaces, shrugged it off as so rare and unlikely as not to be worth worrying about. We definitelyshouldn't demonise a whole marginalised, oppressed and vulnerable group out of paranoia over something like that. (Ooh, I'm secretly part of a marginalised, oppressed and vulnerable group, am I? Sweet as.) Besides, gender-neutral changing rooms are becoming the norm, aren't they? (Um... are they? Well, she works in the creative arts...) I asked her how she'd respond if I announced I were trans on the spot. She seemed happy to start using female pronouns immediately. This is the same woman who has dropped hints about having suffered traumatic abuse at male hands when younger--possibly sexual--and is usually sharply critical of male privilege. To be fair, though, I didn't actually get to the point of mentioning AGP. I wanted to lead into it by talking about homosexuality first, but it turned out she thought at least 25% of men are gay, which derailed the conversation a little. Again, creative arts...
As far as I can tell, most people I talk to are working from a well-trained mental assumption that 'trans women are women' in the brain or soul somehow. Fair enough; I used to assume that too. They start from that position and then work backwards. AGP is an interesting origin story, but nothing more.
The real implications--that AGP means we're all fundamentally heterosexual males, and that women should be just as wary of us as they are of every other heterosexual male--seem to fly over their heads. Even though I'm standing there going, "Hello? I have AGP and I'm telling you not to extend a free pass to guys like me. Hello? Can you hear me? Is this thing on? Hello?"
Nah... the moment a man says he's a woman, he must have been one all along, welcome, how brave, here's your get-out-of-male-free card. I wonder when Trump will hit on that little trick.
Possibly part of the issue is that I'm Australian. We tend to trail a few years behind the bigger English-speaking countries on most social trends. Trans rights issues don't yet seem to have reached the boiling point of total legal lunacy that they have in the US and UK, so it's not on most people's radar. When you talk about a 'transgender woman' here, I think most people still picture the old-school MTF transsexual who's had surgery, been on hormones for years, might be a bit eccentric but basically keeps themselves to themselves and just gets on with their life. We haven't had a high-profile figure comparable to Bruce Jenner, as far as I know. It's hard to tell for sure what's going on here, though, because online chatter from the US and UK tends to drown us out. Only our right-wing media discusses it, which drives me round the bend.
My personal nightmare (which has already come true)
I suspect (as do many others) that the vast majority of TIMs these days are autogynephilic males who probably don't even have dysphoria, but are just enjoying the sweet sweet bliss of plugging into the Transgender Orgasmatron Matrix and imagining we're women, while society bends over backwards to stroke our pleasure centres. I was ready to do it. I like to think I'm a fairly smart guy, but the siren call of trans activism very nearly got me. I owe GC a huge debt for throwing cold water on my face.
All this increasingly deranged language? 'Assigned male at birth', 'sex is a social construct', 'women and ciswomen' instead of transwomen and women, 'clit' instead of 'penis', on and on and on... It's not just political correctness gone mad. It's not just thought policing and Orwellian newspeak. It's kink. It's fantasy. We've all plugged ourselves into the Matrix while convincing ourselves that we woke up.
And right now the world seems happy to cater to it, because the world hasn't cottoned on to what it's really all about. The barriers have lowered so far that even mild cases like me, who would previously have never seriously considered adopting a trans identity, are clamouring to get through the gate.
I know many women see this whole thing as an orchestrated plot to destroy feminism and put females back in their boxes. You might be right. (That Everyday Feminism site disturbs me.) But my gut feeling at the moment is that it's something more selfish and unconscious. Something typically male, in other words. I don't think a lot of us even notice the damage we're doing as we rampage around in the china shop.
My hot take: We're not delusional, exactly. We're not convincedwe're women, like the guy who's convinced he's Jesus. If we were, we wouldn't get so angry when people refuse to play along; we'd just nod and smile and forgive them. We just really, really, really want to believewe're women. Because it feels so exquisite. We're trying our damndest to stay asleep, but deep down we know it's all a dream. And you just keep on trying to shake us awake with your painful reminders that we aren't women and never can be, that our heart's desire is impossible. We just want you to shut up, you TERFs, so we can stay in bed and live the dream. Oh, whoops, did we smash women's rights in the process? Oh dear, what a shame, but hey, omlettes, as long as we get our kicks.
(Anecdotally, quite a few AGPs do know what's going on and are just as upset as me. But there's a certain coterie of activists who come after any sex researcher or TIM who admits to having AGP and tries to ruin their lives, along with the lives of everyone they know. J Michael Bailey was #1 on their hit list and they've been patrolling us ever since. That was disconcerting to learn. I mean, jeez, paedophiles are hated by pretty much everyone except other paedophiles... but out AGPs are hated by other AGPs. It's a weird world we live in.)
Scary thought: It's hard to get accurate figures, but I've seen estimates (Lawrence 2011) that 3% of males may be autogynephilic to some degree. Now, that includes men whose AGP makes them 'bisexual' or 'asexual' or only attracted to men, and mild cases who are happy to just stick to cross-dressing without identifying as trans.
However, when you realise that lesbians only make up about 1-2% of the female population...
... in other words, the potential pool of AGP males outnumbers lesbians...
... and that a heterosexual male with AGP is quite likely to consider himself a 'trans lesbian' because he still wants sex with women...
... and that males tend to get their way at the expense of females...
... and that paraphilias often come in clusters, i.e. if you're AGP you may well also be into kink/BDSM or any number of other strange things ...
... and that pretty much anyone can identify as trans these days and be instantly believed and have their every whim catered to, without needing a diagnosis for dysphoria ...
... and that most people have no idea there are two distinct types, so that (for example) everyone holds up Georgie Stone as a figurehead for trans rights even though she's almost certainly HSTS rather than AGP...
... and that everybody knows being trans is all about gender identity and being 'trapped in the wrong body from birth', and has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality, how dare you even suggest it, you transphobe...
... hello Cthulhu.
Most days I feel like that guy shouting at passing cars from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
Another analogy: Keeping paedophiles from preying on children is hard enough. Imagine how hard it would be if hardly anyone knew paedophilia existed... and anyone who tried to talk about it was fired from child protection agencies or banned from teaching.
I'm not writing all this to wring sympathy from anyone. I'm just trying to say that the denial of autogynephilia doesn't just hurt women and children (and team LGB, and...) It also hurts AGPs ourselves, by misleading us, turning our feelings inside out, and pandering to our selfish desires instead of teaching us restraint. Because if we're women, we must be safe and trustworthy, right?
I came thisclose to throwing my righteous weight behind trans activism, attacking TERFs and hurting the people I love and adore most of all--women--while totally convinced I was a good guy. Or rather girl.
Phew. Okay. Rant over. Happy to answer questions if anyone has them.
Love,
Jackie Fucking Lane
See you in Washington D.C. on March 8th for International Women’s Day. Women around the world are being redefined.
