When it Comes to Gender Dysphoria in Males, We Have to Talk About Autogynephilia

A Video Essay / What's On My Mind for July 2024

There’s a raging debate, far down the gender rabbit hole, about what’s going on with the boys. Some of the most invested and knowledgeable people in the gender world, despite agreeing that pediatric gender medicine is dangerous, vehemently disagree about how to understand boys who question their gender identity. Some say there’s an entirely new category of ROGD boys whose motivations for transition are similar to the girls: mostly via peer influence or social contagion. And others say that the so-called ROGD boys today fit easily into the older classifications: they are either homosexual or autogynephilic. If you’re already confused, don’t worry. Today we’re going to clarify terms and I’ll help you understand the convoluted and challenging topic of male gender dysphoria, specifically the type we may be seeing in straight boys.

Autogynephilia is a term coined by Canadian psychologist and sexologist, Dr Ray Blanchard in the late 80s, and it has been studied and written about extensively since. Autogynephilia describes what Blanchard saw in many of his MtF transsexual patients: they were aroused by and infatuated with becoming women. Auto: self, Gyn: women, Phil: love. The love of oneself as a woman. Dr. Blanchard had been trying to simplify and clarify the many different categories of transsexualism which existed at the time, and he came to differentiate between two main types of males seeking transition: HSTSs (homosexual transsexuals), and autogynephiles (AGPs). Blanchard (and others since) observed that HSTSs were highly feminine gay males who didn’t necessarily have sex dysphoria, meaning they didn’t necessarily hate their male physical characteristics. They often sought out transition in order to avoid homophobic bullying, secure a male companion, manage internalized homophobia, and/or lead more ‘normal’ lives. They’d present for help during their late teen years or early adulthood in most cases. The AGPs, were unremarkable in terms of gender conformity: they seemed like pretty regular guys. But, in addition to being attracted to women, asexual, or bisexual, they also experienced arousal and erotic feelings when cross-dressing and could fall in love or lust with the idea of becoming women. They might find their male genitalia and masculine physical characteristics distressing, and might have wished to become girls, even from a young age. With the onset of puberty, this desire to become a woman would develop a sexual and erotic component. But they’d often seek to transition only later in life, sometimes after decades of living successfully as a man (whatever that means), many even after being married with children.

Their sexual orientation included another interesting element: they often engaged in what has been termed pseudobisexuality: AGPs often engage in sexual fantasies and relationships with straight men, which allows them to feel more feminine by contrast; more like “real women.” AGP is often accompanied by fantasies of being penetrated, emasculated, “sissified,” or denigrated as women in sexual encounters. For many AGPs, this kind of erotic fantasy is inextricably linked with their fantasy of womanhood, while others are attracted to feminized males and transwomen. Obviously, many biological women may find this entire business to be horribly sexist, perhaps viscerally disgusting. We can understand why many women believe the nature of these fantasies is further proof that AGPs are, indeed, undeniably men. Some feminists conclude that the autogynephilic conception of woman-as-sex-object conclusively proves they are nothing like women and they are certainly not feminine.

On top of this, some MtF trans activists have aggressively demanded access to women-only spaces and insisted on being called women, despite their clearly-male appearance. This seemingly oblivious and bizarre behavior reflects the most egregious forms of narcissism, cluster B personality traits, aggressiveness, and otherwise unacceptable antisocial behavior. But we would be making a grave error to generalize such pathological behavior as being synonymous with AGP, something I’ll address here later.

Dr. Anne Lawrence is an MtF transsexual, psychologist, and self-described autogynephile. Lawrence is a highly controversial figure for many reasons which are not our focus for today, but, she wrote a very important book in 2013 called Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies, full of interviews and first hand accounts of males who experience AGP. And even before Lawrence, or Blanchard, or Dr Mike Bailey–who also wrote on this topic–first hand accounts of gender dysphoric males dating as far back as the early 1900s, are full of remarkably similar sex dysphoria experiences which include familiar themes: eroticism, sexual cross-dressing, romantic feelings, euphoria, genital hatred, and even blissful love-feelings from men who want to become women. Accompanying these, we may also find a kind of obsessive fixation, transition-blinders: once an AGP learns about transition and the possibility of making the fantasy real, it becomes a powerful driver and can take over his mind, his life, and all his choices thereafter.

It’s worth noting that many self-described AGPs have critiqued Blanchards typology for lacking nuance and not fully grasping the romantic aspects of the experience–some claim Blanchard (and Bailey) put too much emphasis on a purely erotic fixation. Furthermore, some AGPs don’t see their bisexuality as “pseudo” at all, as some sexologists have called it.

While many males and transwomen have felt relief in finding a description of their experience, and others have made minor critiques of the typology, many others have vehemently and angrily rejected the AGP category. And I don’t think it’s hard to understand why. AGP is the love that shall not be named. By acknowledging the condition, of being a man with this unusual propensity, much of the fantasy is already damaged, and the torture and anguish of his own maleness is back to disrupt his mind, heart, and spirit. The shame and self-loathing can only be mitigated by “feeling like a woman.” On top of this, the condition itself often emerges in secret and misunderstanding, for both the boy who has it, and the people in his life. And in the interest of emotional self-preservation, remaining in denial, or accessing hormones and surgery, dysphoric males have, for decades, coached each other with more palatable and wholesome narratives: being born in the wrong body, having a female brain in a male body, and so forth. (But I don’t believe any of it has to be this way–more on this later.)

So we now come to dysphoric teenage boys. In my practice, approximately 30% of families who contact me have an adolescent, or young adult, son claiming a transgender identity. How are we to understand this group of boys? Does the Blanchard typology still apply? What if they are shy, innocent, sweet, and seem nothing like the aggressive trans activists that hog much of the public spotlight? Is this group of boys a completely different, third category?

Maybe; but maybe not.

Aaron Terrell is a transman who, like me, is gravely concerned with the industry of gender medicine and the misinformation and lies peddled to teenagers through gender identity dogma and queer trans activism. He’s appeared on Gender: A Wider Lens, he’s a co-host, along with Aaron Kimberly, of the excellent Transparency Podcast, and he’s part of the LGBT Courage Coalition. I also consider Aaron a virtual friend–someone I even had the pleasure of meeting IRL at the Genspect conference in Denver. He and I had a lively exchange on X about precisely this question of gender dysphoric boys. Broadly speaking, Aaron believes the straight gender dysphoric boys we see today may, indeed, simply be AGP. He wrote this piece on his Substack, I responded to Aaron on X. Below, I’ve include excerpts from my responses, slightly modified for this newsletter format, though these thoughts are still disparate, random points, rather than a cohesive essay.

Aaron, there are many points on which we very much agree, and I have added some additional questions and concerns for consideration.

Agreement:

1. AGP males in the past, despite beginning their transitions in middle-age didn’t have middle-age onset AGP. It was just more feasible to ‘come out’ and begin transition after years of struggling with AGP, and middle-age afforded them greater life stability and financial means.

2. Allo (attraction to other) and auto (attraction to self) sexual attraction may exist on a spectrum. Some males may fall somewhere in the middle, meaning they have some attraction to becoming women while also being attracted to other people who are women. So in today’s culture, males who fall on many parts of this spectrum may feel more free to express and pursue their AGP fantasies. Perhaps in the past, males who fall closer to the allo side of the spectrum would simply have pushed the AGP desires aside or learned to manage them without any kind of outward feminine presentation. Males today, however, have no reason to repress AGP fantasies, even if they are minor or simply a little whisper in the background.

3. A boy/young man can be both AGP and sweet, sensitive, ASD, shy, gifted etc. These traits are not mutually exclusive.

4. Either because AGP is highly stigmatized, because it elicits a powerful “icky” visceral reaction, especially from women, or because it’s generally harder to comprehend than other forms of gender distress, parents and therapists alike have incentives to deemphasize the role it plays in the boys’ stories, or sometimes to outright deny its very existence. This is especially true when attempting to highlight boys’ vulnerability as victims of the trans movement. However, these two things can be true at the same time.

5. In some cases of adolescent-onset GD in such boys, forced feminization and sissy-hypno porn didn’t necessarily cause their AGP, GD or trans identity, but simply facilitated a process that might have occurred anyways (be it secretly, or publicly). Such material can, however, transform a little tickle or curiosity in the back of someone’s mind, into an all-out obsession or fixation with transition, especially when coupled with physiological force of puberty and sexual awakening.

6. Boys are not actively identifying as AGP when they “come out as trans.” Instead, those who have AGP–to any degree–may be expressing the desires/fantasies/eroticism without having any conceptual framework for what it is. They've subsumed their understanding of that eroticism and desire into some other trans activist narrative or trope, like born in the wrong body, boy body with a girl brain, etc. What these boys and their families really need is more accurate and comprehensive information to understand their experience, including in cases where only a minor aspect of the gender dysphoria is sexual or erotic in nature.

7. Males who experience any kind of AGP deserve to be given accurate information about this contributing cause of their GD without shame, stigma, insults, or denigration.

Additional Questions and Concerns:

1. Regarding Social Contagion vs Sexual Orientation: Why is it that when girls express an identity, we think they are flighty, brainwashed, and flaky? People claim their identities are totally influenced by social culture and environment and that girls can’t trust their own self-perceptions. But when boys express an identity, people claim it was caused by an immovable and fixed part of who they really are at the very core: a sexual orientation, according to proponents of the AGP explanation for dysphoria in straight boys. Is it really possible that male sexual desire or male sexual identity is completely insular, fixed, and unaffected at all by time, place, culture, and personal experiences? Is it ALL nature and ZERO nurture? Is female sexual identity the ONLY kind of identity that may be malleable, fluid and affected by time, place, culture, and personal experiences? I must concede that broadly as a sex category, girls do tend to be more susceptible to peer contagion and social influences than boys. An important caveat I have to make, is that as a woman myself, I have no idea what it may be like to be male and go through male puberty, with it’s accompanying surge of testosterone. I only know the embodied experience of female sexuality, and only my own, at that. So I’m open to the possibility that, in fact, male sexuality is much more rigid, while the female sexual identity is more malleable and porous to culture and environment. So I’m not willing to die on this hill because, frankly, I don’t know enough.

2. However, I believe that GD, in all its forms and manifestations, is a complex, multifactorial experience that requires us to acknowledge the individual, unique factors which contribute to its development–we must do this on a case-by-case basis. The same is true for AGP-driven GD.

3. What is gained (and what is lost) by saying: “For males, it’s either Gay or AGP. Full Stop. End of Story”? And…. What else may be going on, in addition to AGP? Because the mere presence of AGP tells us very little about the human being in question. How does this AGP experience impact your self-understanding? What else from your story and your past fits into your current situation? What other options do you have for understanding and managing your compulsive erotic feelings? What can you do with the devastation that comes with never truly becoming the person you wish to be? What is the impact of this AGP experience (be it purely erotic, or a more wholesome love/affection) on your own life and your relationships? And for example, even if “the internet didn’t cause your AGP,” could it be helpful to reevaluate your online behaviors and how you relate to your sexual fantasies?

4. Individuals concerned about gender medicine and the belief systems that prop it up, naturally, make close observations of the online forums and web posts that we have access to. We all do it: Reddit, Instagram, YouTube. Trying to understand these online spaces is one way we can study and make sense of Gender Dysphoria in contemporary times. However, this mode of investigation is not the same thing as sitting down, one-on-one, and engaging with another person to slowly, incrementally build a relationship. In therapy, we have to remain curious about many complex, overlapping layers of the person who suffers with GD. If we can remain driven by this curiosity, rather than dogma or pet theories, each new client we meet will tell us a complex and unique story.

5. Nobody, of either sex, develops completely in a vacuum. We are all influenced by a combination of innate and external forces. We can’t really know (for certain) what might have happened for any particular person if they lived in a different context. For that reason, I agree that it’s wrong to rule out AGP completely. And for that same reason, it’s wrong to assume that GD or AGP was inevitable for that individual. Let’s try to adopt some humility here, as it would best serve everyone involved.

I actually shared many additional thoughts on X about pseudobisexuality, but this section has simply become too long. If you have a son who is claiming to be bisexual or gay and you suspect he’s actually straight, you may want to read more about this. The link to my X post can be found below.

https://x.com/SashaLPC/status/1803888849661366716

One last thing I want to mention, and perhaps elaborate on at another time, is that the presence of AGP doesn’t necessitate transition and should not be seen as some sort of horrible affliction. Many individuals with this experience manage it in a variety of ways, and can even embrace their particular (albeit unusual) brand of gender nonconformity. But the first step always includes a clear-headed, reality-based understanding of what’s really going on. I believe men with this sexual orientation need not be ashamed, and should try to remain curious, and self-compassionate. This self-awareness and grounding in the truth will always be more adaptive than either self-flagellation or some mystical gender fantasy.

If you suspect this might be going on for your son, consider scheduling a parent consult so we can explore helpful frameworks and ways to communicate with your child about this.