How Catholicism Solved My Autogynephilia Problem

A detransitioner shares his journey to the Catholic faith

I am reluctant to write this post because I know it will be taken by some to reveal that I am a “bigot.” Others will take it to reveal that I have gone off the deep end and gone from “one extreme cult to another.” Others will frame it in terms of autogynephilic binge/purge cycles and claim that I am merely in the middle of a purge cycle, and that I will inevitably change my mind in the future when the psychological pressure of repression becomes too much to bear.

But I need to get my conscience clear. I need to get right with God. My desire to not be an intellectual hypocrite demands it. My deep desire for moral and intellectual certainty demands it. My desire for intellectual coherence within my total metaphysical worldview demands nothing less.

Let’s start at the beginning: I have autogynephilia. Typically, it is defined as a male’s propensity to be aroused at the thought or image of themselves embodying aspects of womanhood. It is a paraphilia or fetish, an atypical sexual disposition. In my particular case, my AGP has always primarily been focused on transvestism but there are also elements that cause arousal at the thought of having breasts, being sexually submissive, not having body hair, and other sterotypical signals of femaleness.

I’ve been dealing with this for decades. It first manifested in childhood as a fetishistic fixation on nylons, stockings, etc., as is quite common among AGPs.

In 2015, when I was 28 years old, this paraphilia took over my life and drove me to identify as a trans woman so that I could have a socially acceptable excuse for living out my crossdressing kink 24/7. In order to make this socially viable, I realized that I would have to put effort into attempting to pass as a female in order to avoid people giving me weird stares and to have any semblance of a normal life. So I began getting laser hair removal on my beard and started hormone replacement therapy so that I could pass better. This was not driven by an underling prediposition to hate my male body. I only started hating my male body after I made the conscious decision to try to pass as female in order to assimilate my kink into society better.

Long story short, in the summer of 2023 I had a sudden epiphany that natural is better and that I did not want to be dependent on external endogenous hormone supplementation and be reliant on the pharmaco-medical industry in order to be physically healthy for the rest of my life. All things considered, the more one’s body has normative integrity without dependence on the medical industry, the more healthy you are. I realized that I wanted to prioritize my physical health above all. It is worth mentioning that estrogen supplementation in combination with a history of smoking was partially responsible for giving me a pulmonary embolism and pancreatitis from highly elevated triglycerides, something that almost killed me.

After medically detransitioning, my social detransition soon followed and I reverted to my natural male sexual identity and began living socially as a man again. This social detransition was motivated by the extreme neuroticism caused by attempting (and ultimately failing) to pass myself off as female and the social anxiety this brought up. I hated always being self-conscious of the fact that everyone could tell I was trans. This made me feel weird. Like a freak. An anomaly. It made me uncomfortable around straight men and uncomfortable around women and gave me great anxiety when using female spaces, even after 8 years of doing so.

When I had first transitioned, the fetishistic aspect of my AGP went away because I had completely habituated myself to the novelty of the stimuli by essentially indulging in my fetish 24/7. I became desensitized. It became normalized. And the testosterone blockers greatly reduced my sexual libido as well, which is an strong driver of the fetishistic dimension of AGP.

When I detransitioned, my testosterone came flooding back and therefore so did the fetishistic element of my AGP, which at the extreme end manifests in what’s called “sissy kink.”

At first, I attempted to repress any indulgence in AGP and not crossdress or engage in the sissy kink. It lasted a couple months, but eventually I became tempted to indulge once again in fetishistic crossdressing. I justified it to myself because I was “keeping it in the bedroom,” which has always been the advice of gender critical activists. They say, “keep kink in the bedroom but don’t expose it to the public.” I will expose the problems with that advice later on.

Pretty early in my detransition, I felt the call of Christianity and began exploring becoming an evangelical, which is my spiritual background. I was raised strongly Protestant in the tradition of fundamenalist evangelical youth earth Creationist southern Baptist born-again Christianity. I strongly rejected this religion in high school and became a hardcore atheist and physicalist/materialist/nihilist in my twenties. In my early thirties, however, I had an awakening of sorts and I turned to “spirituality” and became interested in Western esotericism and New Age spiritual paganism, becoming interested in things like occultism, Tarot cards, theosophy, positive mind metaphysics, etc.

But anyway, during my detransition I reconverted briefly back to the evangelicalism of my youth, in a desperate search for moral clarity about how to manage my AGP and live a proper life as a man. This also coincided with other ideological shifts from “unwokening,” going from left-of-center to right-of-center politically.

My desire for intellectual coherence demanded that I take seriously the idea that the Bible is the literal inspired Word of God, which demanded that I take seriously the idea that the Bible is correct on morally controversial areas like whether homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.

At the time I was living with my soon-to-be-ex-wife, who is bisexual and a longtime gay rights activist. Naturally, my flirtation with Biblical fundamentalism caused tremendous conflict in the marriage precisely on this topic of homosexuality. I did not want to believe that acting on homosexual desire was intrinsically disordered but my investigation into scholarly debates on the topic from pro-gay Christians suggested to me that conservative Christianity had the argumentative upper-hand compared to progressive Christianity.

But this caused so much internal cognitive dissonance. After all, I had been a good liberal for my entire life, believing that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with two consenting adults of the same sex loving each other and having sex. From the perspective of secular ethical frameworks like consequentialism that focused on subjective mental states like happiness, I could see nothing intrinsically wrong about such behavior.

Eventually the cognitive dissonance with my liberal axioms became too great and I gave up the fundamentalism and just became a “progressive” or “liberal” Christian.

On this faith journey, I had been looking for the right local church to attend. In reaction to my childhood, I had an allergic reaction to typical evangelical worship services and preaching styles. Something in me was drawn to the aesthetics of high liturgy and groundedness in ancient tradition and so was drawn to the Catholic Church. But I could not intellectually assent to their dogmatic teaching on intrinsic wrongness of homosexual acts. So I chose the next best thing, which was the Episcopal church, which is considered by most to be “Catholic lite” in their liturgical style, which was deeply appealing.

The problem was the Episcopal Church is hyper woke on issues like “anti-racism” and LGBTQ+ radical gender ideology. This became a problem with pretty much every liberal or progressive Church I found: I agreed with them on their progressive stance on homosexuality but profoundly disagreed with their position on transgender ideology. There was no progressive church that said homosexual acts were not intrinsically disordered that did not also buy into super woke radical gender ideology.

This caused great cognitive dissonance because at this time I had already been quite active on my YouTube channel critiquing radical gender ideology. I could not square the circle. It seemed with progressivism, I would have to compromise in some way: put up with gender ideology in order to find a church that I agreed with on the topic of homosexuality. Not to mention, progressive Christians just didn’t really seem to take the ontological reality of God that seriously. They mostly seemed interested in being social justice warriors.

Eventually, this intellectual incoherence led to me simply become disinterested in taking Christianity seriously and I lapsed and just became interested in other things. It became just another one of my many ideological phases in life, of which I have gone through many (my critics think this is my biggest personality flaw, and I can’t say they are necessarily wrong; my lifelong pursuit of truth has led to a kind of ideological flightiness or restlessness over the years.)

At the time, my engagement with amateur sexologists and self-aware autogynephiles had led me to develop an approach to managing my autogynephilia called “integration,” which means incorporating bits of transvestism into my life as a socially identified male.

The received wisdom in the self-aware AGP community was that fully repressing AGP desires was a recipe for psychological disaster. They will say it’s impossible to fully repress forever and the attempt to fully repress it leads to “binge/purge” cycles of shame and guilt which are quite common among AGPs. A constant reference is made to the case of “John 50.”

Anne Vitale, a therapist specializing in gender dysphoria, wrote about this individual in her 2001 paper "Implications of Being Gender Dysphoric: A Developmental Review" (published in Gender and Psychoanalysis.)

“John 50” refers to a trans woman who repressed his gender identity for decades before finally transitioning. In Vitale’s study, "John" (a pseudonym) is described as a 50-year-old who had lived as a man, suppressing his sense of being female since childhood. He married, had kids, and built a career—classic markers of a "successful" life by societal standards—but internally, he wrestled with intense gender dysphoria. Vitale notes that John tried everything to bury these feelings: hyper-masculine hobbies, workaholism, even religious devotion. By age 50, though, the strain became unbearable—dysphoria worsened, depression set in, and he hit a breaking point. He eventually sought therapy, started hormone treatment, and transitioned socially, finding relief and a happier life afterward.

In transgender contexts, "John, 50" has morphed into a kind of archetype, especially in communities like 4chan’s /lgbt/ or Reddit’s trans spaces. It’s shorthand for someone who delays transition for decades, often out of fear, denial, or societal pressure, only to "crack" later when repression fails. The story resonates because it highlights a common narrative: gender dysphoria doesn’t just vanish with time or effort—it can fester, sometimes exploding late in life after years of coping mechanisms collapse.

So the recieved wisdom was that I needed a “healthy outlet” for my AGP. And I had convinced myself that so long as I kept it in the privacy of the bedroom, there was nothing unhealthy about occasionally indulging in this kink or engaging in transvestism, because this was an outlet to prevent me from retransitioning.

For reasons I will not fully go into, I made the decision last summer to divorce my wife, who I had met when I was still trans identified. Some of these reasons had to do with the detransition, but most of the reasons predated my decision to detransition and were intrinsic to problems in the relationship from the very beginning.

At this point, I started casually dating and began to realize how difficult AGP was going to be in terms of dating as a heterosexual man. Most straight women do not want to date, for good reason, fetishistic crossdressers who enjoy being submissive in the bedroom. They want a masculine man. But I thought if I found a bisexual kinky woman I would be able to integrate my AGP into my sexual life in a way that was healthy. Soon enough I met such a woman and we began dating.

Despite her purported acceptance of my sissy kink, I couldn’t help but find it incredibly psychologically incongruent to balance being a masculine man in some contexts while trying to “integrate” this submissive side of myself. Which is why I think a lot of AGPs feel like they must “pick a side.” Either embrace being a masculine, dominant man or embrace being a submissive bottom. It is hard to be truly “switchy” and go back and forth while maintaining the woman’s attraction to you without her eventually getting “the ick.”

All this time I was engaging in my sissy kink at home in the privacy of my bedroom. This caused incongruence because the more I engaged in the sissy kink the less sexual energy I had to give to my girlfriend.

One day recently I was engaged in a ritualistic sissy kink masturbation session while getting high on cannabis, a substance I have been addicted to for 20 years. Indeed, my cannabis addiction and my sissy kink addiction went hand in hand, as they were both part of my highly hedonistic pursuit of maximizing self-pleasure.

Normally, I experience feelings of shame and guilt after I reach orgasm, but in this instance I experienced a sudden shock to the conscience of shame and guilt before I even reached climax. I immediately stopped and vowed to quit both addictions for good. I couldn’t escape from the fact that my AGP-induced sissy kink was taking on the exact same dopamine-fueled addictive qualities as my cannabis addiction. They both involved habituation to stimulus, building tolerance, and the need for greater and greater stimulation in order to chase the initial euphoric high.

This is called paraphilic escalation and is a well-documented phenomenon: dabbling in a little AGP only makes you want to dabble more and more, until eventually it is taking over your life and you are fantasizing about how to live the lifestyle 24/7, which almost always leads to looking for a socially acceptable excuse to do so, which in our modern culture is adopting a transgender identity of being a “trans woman.”

All of a sudden, I felt a sudden inner pull to get serious about my spiritual life and reconnect with Christianity. But I faced the exact same dilemma before in regards to finding a progressive church that aligned with my views on homosexuality. I really wanted to go to the local Catholic cathedral because it was easily aesthetically superior to anything a Protestant church had to offer.

And then it hit me. My original problem with the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality was that it made a distinction between being gay (having gay desires) vs acting on those desires. The Church’s position was that it was only acting on the desires which is intrinsically disordered. The expectation for gays then was a life of lifelong sexual chastity: having sexual desire but never acting on them.

For many gays, this seems psychologically impossible. Why would God give you a sexuality if He did not want you to act on it? The thought of lifelong celibacy is not pleasant for many gay people, and seems not only tortuous but impossible to stick to for any reasonable period of time. And yet that is the insanely high demand of the Catholic Church’s strict dogmatic teaching on sexual ethics.

Gay people will not like this analogy, but we expect the same thing of pedophiles: they cannot help but having these sexual desires, God made them that way, but morally we expect pedophiles to exercise the self-control of never ever acting on them for their entire life, no matter how psychologically difficult that is.

Most gay people will recoil from this analogy because they will say, “Well, that’s a total disanalogy because acting on pedophilia is morally wrong because children cannot consent but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong about two consenting same sex adults being in a loving committed relationship.”

But there is a strict logic to the Catholic Church’s position on sexual ethics: any sexual act that is not in alignment with the higher-order purpose of sex is intrinsically disordered. And according to Catholic dogma, grounded in Scripture, tradition, and natural law theology, the proper higher-order purpose of sex is procreation within the bounds of committed marriage.

Thus, even masturbation is considered a grave sin because its higher order purpose is not reproduction but the pursuit of hedonistic sexual pleasure for its own sake.

To most modern liberal people, this prohibition against masturbation seems insane. The modern liberal intuition is that so long as you aren’t hurting anyone, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with pursuing hedonistic sexual pleasure outside the higher-order purpose of reproduction. They will say you can consent to yourself. That it’s harmless. And normal. And healthy. And seen in the animal kingdom.

Because almost all normal heterosexual men find this prohibition against masturbation impossible to live up to, most would simply disagree with the Church’s moral position and consider it “non-essential” to be in good standing with the Church.

So the issue isn’t really that the Catholic teaching is singling out homosexuals for being particularly sinful. Many heterosexual Catholics living in modern liberal culture see no intrinsic problem with masturbation or premarital sex or remarriage after divorce.

The Catholic Church sets an almost impossibly high ethical standard for sexuality. Both homosexuals and heterosexuals find it near psychologically impossible to live up to those standards. And because of that psychological difficulty, they justify to themselves their private, personal disagreement with the Church teaching on the subject, or at least learn to compartmentalize that dissonance and just accept being slightly out of step with Catholic dogma.

But that didn’t sit right with me intellectually. According to official Church dogma, in order to validly receive the Eucharist you must be in good standing and to be in good standing means actually repenting from these “impossible to maintain” sexual norms like avoiding masturbation or sex outside of marriage (or remarriage after divorce, which the Church is also absolute on.) To be in good standing also requires assenting to the moral teaching that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.

But when I had my moral wakeup call about the wrongness of my AGP kink, I connected the dots to homosexuality and realized that the Catholic Church is setting a supposedly “psychologically impossible” ethical standard for myself as as a heterosexual man.

The Church asks AGPs to be lifelong “AGP celibates.” To never indulge in AGP. Because of the John 50 archetype, I can definitely see why most AGPs think it’s impossible to go their whole live as “AGP celibates.” And I could see why it’d be easy to take that near impossibility and turn it into an argument for why AGP is perfectly normative and good and healthy. But I know for a fact it’s not. It’s pathological. Which is not to say AGPs don’t deserve love and respect as human persons worthy of intrinsic dignity.

Similarly, might homosexuality be non-perfectly normative? Might it not be a human normative ideal? Surely as just a basic empirical fact many gay people can find love and happiness acting on their desires. But as an empirical fact many AGPs can also find love and happiness transitioning and living out their sexuality. But that does not entail that AGP is not pathological relative to the normative ideal of the higher-order purpose of sex being procreation within the bounds of sacramental marriage.

The realization that my burden of being a lifelong “AGP celibate” was analogous to the demand for gays to be lifelong “gay celibates,” or heterosexual men being lifelong “masturbation celibates,” or lifelong “porn celibates” made it possible for me to finally assent to the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality, which cleared the intellectual pathway for full assent to Catholic dogma.

According to the logic of the Catholic Church:

• Homosexuality = intrinsically disordered

• AGP = intrinsically disordered

• Masturbation = intrinsically disordered

• Pornography = intrinsically disordered

• Premarital sex = intrinsically disordered

• Remarriage after divorce = intrinsically disordered

But the common objection from sexual liberals is always the same:

• Acting on AGP isn’t “hurting anyone”

• Acting on homosexuality isn’t “hurting anyone.”

• Masturbating isn’t “hurting anyone.”

• “Ethically produced” porn isn’t “hurting anyone”

• Premarital sex isn’t “hurting anyone.”

But in all these cases, the reason why it’s “intrinsically disordered” is because they’re not oriented towards the higher-order ideal of what sex is for, which is reproduction.

Which is also why masturbation and porn and premarital sex are also sinful in the eyes of Catholic teaching: they are oriented towards purely self-referential hedonistic pleasure rather than a higher-order purpose that goes beyond pure hedonistic pleasure. The problem is worshipping at the foot of desire and placing allegiance to one’s own desire above the standards of God’s normative ideals for what sex is designed for.

But most men probably masturbate and believe themselves to be “good Christians.” They think it’s “normal.” They think it’s “impossible” to not act on. And they might be right. It might be near impossible for the normal man to be psychologically capable of resisting the temptation to watch porn and masturbate, particularly in a culture where these things are overwhelmingly seen as normal and therefore innocuous and easy to justify to yourself as “no big deal.” But that doesn’t mean it’s ultimately meaningful or purposeful relative to God’s normative ideal even if it’s “no big deal.”

I think the big issue is that historically homosexuality has been treated as a “super duper major sin” and has been singled out in the congregational flock compared to other sins routinely committed by heterosexuals that never get commented upon in the Culture War. Why is the Culture War so focused on gays, and not, say, masturbation or premarital sex or remarriage after divorce? In the eyes of God, all these are equally off the mark from the normative ideal. In the eyes of the Church, acting on gay desire is no different from porn or masturbation or gluttony or getting angry and all the other “minor things” that are “normal” and “difficult to avoid” in our modern culture.

Also, it seems to most men that one can live a happy and normal life while masturbating and watching porn even if it’s not “ideal.”

Similarly, there’s no doubt homosexuals can lead happy and normal lives even if it’s not “ideal” according to the incredibly high-standard of the Catholic norm of procreative sex within the bounds of marriage.

And as soon as I allowed myself intellectually to assent to the truth of the Catholic teaching on sexual ethics, the rest of Catholic orthodoxy was easy to swallow, as I had already been convinced by Christian apologetics and arguments for God’s existence and the historical reality of Christ’s resurrection for quite some time. It was only a matter of finding which branch of Christianity was right.

And even though I was raised Protestant, in every apologetical debate I’ve seen between Catholics and Protestants, the Catholics always seem to have the better arguments. Not to mention their obvious superiority of matters of aesthetics, beauty, and liturgy, all of which are deeply important to me.

I realize that becoming a conservative “tradcath” is going to put me at odds with a lot of my liberal gay friends because now I am officially a “homophobic bigot” because I assent to the truth of the Catholic teaching that acting on gay desire is intrinsically disordered.

But I am also a “masturbation bigot,” “premarital sex bigot,” “porn bigot,” and “AGP bigot.”

Crucially, however, Jesus said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1). I have zero desire to judge anyone or chastise anyone or preach to anyone for finding it psychologically impossible to follow the Catholic teaching on being a lifelong gay celibate.

I prefer to focus on God’s mercy and love and not his legalistic judgment of sin. For gays acting on their gay desire is no more sinful than heterosexuals masturbating, watching porn, having premartial sex, or getting remarried after divorce, behaviors which are ALL normalized in our culture as perfectly healthy, perfectly innocuous, and posing no intrinsic moral problem whatsoever. So in assenting to the truth of the Catholic sexual ethic, I have no reason to focus on preaching to the gays on why they should repent and be celibates. I am far more interested in preaching to my fellow heterosexual men about the problems with masturbation, porn, premarital sex, and remarriage.

There is a good chance that I will not be able to perfectly resist my own AGP desires for the rest of my life, falling prey to the typical binge/purge cycles common among AGPs. And I have to be humble enough to admit that given my past ideological flightiness, that all this could just be some phase and I am just coping and that repression will inevitably fail and I will just eventually become another John 50.

But today, in this moment, I must follow my conscience, which is the voice of God, who has written the moral law on my heart. Even if it leads me to being countercultural. Even if my liberal gay friends now think I am a terrible homophobic bigot. My desire for intellectual coherence and to avoid hypocrisy demands nothing less. This desire for coherence and consistency led me to tell my girlfriend that I no longer wanted to have sex outside of marriage. Understandably, she did not want to continue the relationship.

It makes zero sense to me to think that God truly exists while being a wishy-washy intellectual hypocrite. If God truly does exist, then we must take seriously the possibility that he set really high standards for normative behavior. But that does not entail being an overly moralistic and legalistic preachy person judging everyone all the time.

I have no interest in that. We are ALL broken, gay or straight alike. It is hard to live up to God’s norms for righteous living for anyone, gay or straight. Only God knows what’s in your heart.

My theological instincts tell me to focus on God’s love, mercy, and forgiveness, and not his legalistic judgment. Which is not to say I do not believe in the reality of God’s judgment, or that God has not actually set a normative ideal that we are obligated to follow. It’s all a matter of emphasis. Love is not merely an ethical principle but the foundational reality of God’s nature and the lens through which all Christian doctrine must be understood