Beyond Repression: A Christian Approach to Autogynephilia

Obsessing Over Repression’s Downsides Dooms Us to Fail

r/AskAGP is an active Reddit community for people who describe themselves as “self-aware autogynephiles.” Autogynephilia (AGP) is a sexual paraphilia defined as a male’s propensity to be aroused at the thought or image of themselves as a woman. This phenomenon has both an explicitly erotic dimension as well as an emotional-idealization dimension, but fundamentally, it depends on the disordered internalization of regular male heterosexual attraction to femininity.

In this community, a frequent topic of discussion is how to manage AGP best. Community consensus has aligned on three broad strategies:

• Repression: no crossdressing, no AGP-themed porn, no transition, no feminization, no finding a “kinky outlet” in the bedroom, no AGP-themed masturbation sessions

• Integration: maintaining one’s social identity as a man but “integrating” feminization in your life either through explicit kink outlets (“keeping it in the bedroom”) or through more subtle types of transvestism (e.g., removing body hair, wearing androgynous women’s clothing, etc.). Integration also involves the classic “weekend warrior” transvestite who dresses up to the nines once in a blue moon, often climaxing in an orgasm which then leads to “post-nut clarity” and usually a binge/purge cycle from guilt and shame

• Transition: medicalizing with cross-sex hormones, surgeries, feminization procedures, taking on a female name and pronouns, and executing a radical transformation in one’s entire social identity to be that of a “trans woman.”

A common refrain in the self-aware AGP community and among professional (and amateur) sexologists who study AGP is that integration and/or transition are the psychologically healthiest approaches and that the repression strategy is not only doomed to failure but leads inevitably to psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, OCD, self-hatred, etc.

The idea is based on a classic Freudian psychodynamic model of the libido, where the more mental energy you put into repressing the AGP desires, the more internal psychological pressure builds up until it eventually spills out into your life in a terrible way, forcing you to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms until the dam breaks and you relent to either integrate or full blown transition.

Reframing Repression

In this post, I want to posit that from the perspective of Catholic sexual ethics, this entire framing is misleading, and because the problem of “managing AGP” is not appropriately framed within a larger spiritual context, it leads to the common perception that repression is doomed to failure.

In other words, if you feel compelled by your conscience to repress your AGP, even framing it in terms of “repression” is going to make your goal of never feeding your paraphilia psychologically difficult, if not impossible.

The reason is that the framing of “repression” focuses entirely on the negative dimension of refraining from feeding your paraphilia. When you posit in your head the prospect of “lifelong repression,” it’s no wonder that repression always fails because you’re imagining only a lifetime of psychological misery with nothing “positive” to replace your paraphilic desire in a healthy way that truly satisfies you and truly brings inner peace.

The Normative Sexual Blueprint

The problem comes from the decision framework for deciding between the various management strategies.

Secular liberal ethics frames the question as: which pathway will maximize my own happiness?

The way that Christian ethics frames the question is different: which pathway will be most pleasing to God?

And how do we know which pathway is pleasing to God? Because we can discover through reason via the Natural Law the Normative Ideal of sexuality, and also God has revealed to us via Divine Revelation the normative sexual Blueprint in the Creation story.

So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27)

When the Pharisees attempted to trip up Jesus over the question of divorce, Jesus pointed back to this Divine Eternal Blueprint for sexual ethics by combining Gen 1:27 with Gen 2:24:

⁴ “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ ⁵ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? ⁶ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matt 19:4-6)

When asked to lay out a Normative Ideal for sexual communion, Jesus refers back to the pre-Fall Eternal Blueprint wherein the Normative Ideal for sexuality is, to put it crudely, a penis and a vagina coming together in a loving, unitive way with an openness towards the possibility for procreation.

Natural Law confirms this Divine Revelation of God’s Eternal Blueprint for sexuality through reason. We can ascertain that the lungs are designed for breathing, and the heart is designed to pump blood. But what is the penis and vagina intended for? Clearly, they were perfectly designed to come together unitively with an openness towards procreation.

From the perspective of Catholic teaching, grounded in Scripture, Tradition, and Natural Law, anything that falls short of that normative ideal is dis-ordered where order refers to the Telos or Blueprint of the External Law that God imprinted onto humanity through his Creation of us in His image as male and female united into one flesh through the Sacrament of lifelong marriage.

But Adam and Eve did not remain in perfect accordance with God’s Blueprint forever. They made a free choice to disobey God and thus usher sin into the world wherein human nature lost the perfections of Grace pre-Fall and instead fell into dis-order.

Pre-fall, Adam and Eve had sexual desire for each other, and it was good. There is nothing inherently wrong with sexual desire per se when it is appropriately oriented according to God’s Blueprint.

But, now, post-Fall, it is possible for humans to have sexual desires that are inherently dis-ordered. The best example is pedophilia. Experts believe this might have an innate basis, which instantly destroys the logic that simply by virtue of being “born that way,” one can conclude that one's desires are correctly ordered.

Indeed, in the post-Fall world, it is possible to be born with desires that are inherently dis-ordered relative to the Normative Blueprint, such as the desire to masturbate, the desire for lust, adultery, porn consumption, fornication outside of marriage, and mostly controversially, same-sex attraction.

Autogynephilia is another case of a dis-ordered sexual desire that might have some degree of innateness. However, a desire that is innate does not entail that it’s inherently appropriately ordered. Psychopathy is largely innate, but we wouldn’t say because a psychopath was “born that way,” that his desire to torture kittens is, therefore, good. We must analyze the “orderedness” of desire relative to the Normative Blueprint given to us in Scripture, Tradition, and Natural Law.

The Dis-order of Autogynephilia

You might ask why AGP misses the mark from the normative ideal. It is fundamentally self-referential, and all sexual desire flows first and foremost through that self-referential lens instead of what the original Divine Blueprint wants it to be: wholly self-giving and self-sacrificial as an outpouring of self into the other through love.

This is not to say that AGPs are incapable of loving others. However, the integration and transition pathways affirm that in order to satisfy the AGP desire, the self-referential feminization must first be satisfied. Then, and only then, will the AGP desire allow itself to be redirected outwards towards others.

AGP, therefore, intrinsically fails to live up to the Normative Blueprint in the same way masturbation does: it grounds its internal satisfaction in self-love rather than self-sacrificial love, putting the cart before the horse.

Fruits of the Spirit

Returning to the question of repression as a management strategy, the reason why it fails is that it only focuses on the negatives of not getting your subjective desires satisfied instead of the positives of living in accordance with God’s Normative Ideal, His Perfect Will for how we ought to live in a Christ-like way so that we may partake in the Sacraments and achieve communion with God Incarnate, bringing heaven to earth and co-operating with God’s Grace so that we may strive to become saints.

And when we are partaking in the Sacraments, communing with God, and sharing in God’s Nature by literally ingesting the Eternal Bread of Life that Jesus gave to us as a New Covenant in the Eucharist, we can reap the spiritual benefits of the Holy Spirit that come from genuine repentance of sin. When we turn away from the enslavement of dis-ordered desire and focus on living a Christ-like life in accordance with the External Blueprint, we can have a clear conscience. And when our conscience is clear, the Holy Spirit, through Christ and in Christ, can dwell inside of us, allowing us to partake, in a limited degree, in His Divine Nature, which brings the fruits of spirit.

As St. Paul summarizes this well in his letter to the Galatians:

The Works of the Flesh

¹⁶ Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. ¹⁷ For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. ¹⁸ But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. ¹⁹ Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, ²⁰ idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, ²¹ envy,^[e] drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

The Fruit of the Spirit

²² By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. ²⁴ And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. ²⁵ If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. ²⁶ Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.

Conclusion

So instead of framing AGP management in terms of “repression,” we ought to focus on the fact that when we live in accordance with Scripture, Tradition, and the Natural Law embedded into our conscience, which reflects the External Law, then we reap the spiritual fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control, a mode of human flourishing that is external and far surpasses the earthly pleasures of hedonism, sexual pleasure, “gender euphoria,” self-satisfaction, and the high of feeding one’s paraphilia.

This is not a life of psychological torture. It is a life of abundant, transcendent positivity. As St. Paul says in Colossians,

² Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, ³ for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴ When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

……….

+++++++++++++++++++++0………………………………………………..

+++++++++++++++++++++++0