How I Cured My Autogynephilia

When allosexuality competes with autosexuality

Ok, so the title of this post is a bit of clickbait. I haven’t actually “cured” my autogynephilia, but over the past few weeks my AGP desires, fantasies, fetishism, and interest in crossdressing and AGP ritual masturbation has significantly abated to the point where I have let my beard and body hair grow out and more or less fully leaned into my masculine self-image.

If you've been living under a rock and don’t know what AGP is, it’s a male’s propensity to be aroused at the thought of himself embodying aspects of womanhood, which can manifest in a variety of ways ranging from weekend transvestism all the way to extreme hatred of the male body (autoandrophobia) which drives men to become transsexuals and get extreme medical interventions such as Sexual Reassignment Surgery.

But according to the research of Dr. Ray Blanchard, who coined the term in the late 1980s, autogynephilia (“love of oneself as a woman”) is the driving force behind why the vast majority of male-to-female transsexuals develop gender dysphoria, which explains why it’s so common for trans women to have a gender exploration phase where they ask the question, “Am I trans or is it just a fetish?”

From a young age, my AGP desires have been primarily focused on wanting to wear women’s clothing via fetishistic crossdressing but when I transitioned and set myself the goal of “passing” as female when I was 28, I rapidly developed a deep dislike of all the parts of my body that made it difficult if not impossible to pass as female. In other words, despite ostensibly a treatment meant to treat gender dysphoria, my gender transition made my dysphoria so much worse precisely because I recalibrated my desires to be set relative to impossible expectations. I call this Rapid Onset Autogynephilic Gender Dysphoria.

Eight years later I detransitioned at age 36. That was one and a half years ago. My whole detransition journey since then has been a process of finding ways of managing my AGP desires and learning to integrate my AGP into my life as a man.

There are three basic strategies for managing AGP: repression, integration, and transition.

In repression, you bury the desires deep and never let them be expressed. Often this involves living a life of secrecy and men will get into relationships with women with this as a deep, dark secret and they end up living a life of internal struggle as they fight to keep the desires at bay. Most self-aware AGPs believe this strategy is doomed to fail as over the years it eventually becomes impossible to fully repress these desires as the anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that they always return in force.

The transition strategy involves adopting a “trans” identity and medicalizing and living under a new social role of “trans woman.” I tried that for eight years and it generated more problems than it solved, particularly in the realm of social anxiety and neuroticism about my inability to pass as a female. I also had serious health problems and I grew to philosophically dislike the idea of being a lifelong medical patient and wanted to be all-natural in how my endocrine system functions.

The integration strategy involves integrating your desire for feminization into your identity as a male. Integration strategies fundamentally involve being open and honest about these feminization desires prior to getting into any kind of relationship. Integrating bits of femininity into your male attire, focusing on being a “metrosexual,” exploring feminization in kink, and occasional crossdressing are all common integration tactics.

Another relevant fact of this story is that I am going through a divorce (which I initiated.) Part of the reason for the divorce was our sexual incompatibility after the detransition, but there are deeper, more personal issues unrelated to AGP or detransition that I will not go into. But anyway, for the past four or five months or so I’ve been living on my own and functionally single and my AGP desires significantly intensified.

I was crossdressing all the time, engaging in kinky solo play related to my AGP, and I became convinced that the only way I would find sexual happiness was if I found a femdom so that I can be fully submissive in the bedroom to satisfy my feminization kink.

Then I met a beautiful woman at an open mic. It’s well-known in the self-aware AGP community that when AGP men first start a new heterosexual relationship that the AGP desires diminish as the man focuses his sexual energy on playing the masculine role in the relationship.

The problem, however, is that these AGP men will hide their AGP nature from their new girlfriends and then get into long-term relationships thinking they can repress their desires forever via a repression strategy because if they tried to integrate (or transition) their normal heterosexual girlfriend or wife would be very much turned off and it’d more or less ruin any sexual or romantic compatibility they had because the vast majority of heterosexual women want masculine men not crossdressers or transsexuals.

Luckily, in my case, the new woman I am dating knows I am a crossdresser, knows about my autogynephilia, knows about my YouTube channel, knows I have a sissy kink, knows I have a submissive side in the bedroom, and the great thing is she is positively interested in this side of myself!

I think it helps that she is bisexual and kinky in her own right. I think the bisexuality is key. In my experience, bisexual women are way more likely than hetero women to be interested in feminine men or to be interested in exploring feminization kinks, pegging, etc.

However, as excited as I am by the idea that I don’t have to hide my AGP side of myself from her and that she is interested in exploring my feminine side, the funny thing is that right now I am barely interested at all in even exploring my feminine side!

Being with a beautiful, feminine women who is attracted to all my masculine qualities has allowed me to discover a masculine, dominant side I had long since buried and wasn’t sure even existed anymore. For a while, after my detransition I thought I would only ever be happy in a relationship where I am the submissive one in the bedroom.

But turns out I am quite happy playing a more dominant role! And not just in the bedroom but I am learning that I actually like being in the masculine role of protector, caregiver, provider, etc. It is affirming to my manhood to be considered the strong stoic one who is competent, successful in my career, and able (in theory) to provide. The development of this competency is I think key for AGPs looking to attract the feminine women they are most attracted to.

I just needed the right woman to unlock that side of myself. It doesn’t feel like play acting. It doesn’t feel forced. Which is interesting because prior to transition I always had “performance issues” with heterosexual women trying to play the masculine role in the bedroom and when I transitioned, I really enjoyed being in relationships where that role was not necessarily expected from me as I was dating queer women where our dynamic was more balanced and I wasn’t expected to play the dominant, masculine role.

I think what bothered me in those pre-transition relationships was the fact that it was expected of me to play that role, and I knew the women I was with at the time had zero interest in exploring my submissive kink or feminization kink.

I think part of the reason why I am able to fully lean into my new masculine role with this woman is because I know in the back of my mind she would be happy to explore my feminine side once my AGP desires inevitably return and I get an itch to crossdress and be submissive again, which I am sure will eventually return once the honeymoon phase of the relationship ends.

The fact that I don’t have to worry about her “finding out” about my AGP side and I don’t have to set the impossible goal of total repression makes it such that I am able to lean into my masculinity.

So, although I don’t quite think it’s possible to “cure” autogynephilia as this is a fundamental part of who I am, an aspect of my sexuality that’s been a part of me since I was a little boy, I do think leaning into one’s heterosexuality is an excellent way for AGPs who are interested in women to manage their autogynephilia.

With that said, I don’t think it’s healthy to conceptualize dating women as a kind of “treatment” for AGP as women should be ends-in-themselves and not merely a means to dealing with your personal sexual hangups. And if you are going to date women with the hopes of suppressing or managing your AGP desires, it absolutely needs to be like first date conversation material because you must assume from the get-go that your AGP desires will inevitably return and you will need to deal with them and integrate them somehow rather than keeping them buried. Women deserve to know what they are getting into prior to dating a man.

Why does dating feminine women work to suppress AGP desires? The concept is simple. AGP is a form of autosexuality. It is heterosexuality turned inwards. You are attracted to femininity, but that attraction gets internalized such that you are also attracted to yourself being feminine and that thought of yourself embodying aspects of womanhood turns you on in some way or another.

However, the key thing is the autosexuality of AGP (self-oriented) competes with the allosexuality (other-oriented) of regular heterosexuality.

The more you lean into the allo, the more the auto is suppressed and vice versa.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that AGPs who fully lean into their AGP cannot be in healthy relationships with other people. They definitely can. But the thing is they need to approach the allosexuality through the lens of the autosexual AGP such that if you are in a relationship, you fundamentally need to get your AGP femininity validated by the partner you are with.

Whereas when you lean into the allosexuality first and foremost, the AGP essentially becomes additive to your heterosexual dynamic rather than core.

But the mistake AGP men make is to think that just because leaning into allosexuality temporarily suppresses the AGP that this situation is permanent because as the steamy magic of New Relationship Energy wears off, the power of the allosexuality to suppress the AGP diminishes, and this is when men start fantasizing about doing way more integration and/or going down the full-blown transition pathway.

But understanding the cyclical nature of AGP and how it waxes and wanes over time depending on the circumstances of life tremendously helps with the management.

My guess is that the vast majority of AGPs who are tempted by the transition pathway are tempted precisely insofar as they feel either sexually unhappy in their current relationship or they are pessimistic about their prospects of ever finding a woman who accepts them as AGP and allows them to integrate.

They are few and far between, but such women definitely do exist. And if you are AGP man struggling with the decision of whether to transition, my recommendation would be to work on building yourself up as a man in the same way other hetero men must in order to find successful relationships. And unless you are an incredibly attractive man, this almost always involves building skills and competency so that you can be a competent provider which is key to success in finding success with feminine women.

I think this is also why so many male-to-female-to-male detransitioners retransition. They fail to build up a confident image of themselves as a successful man and fail to find any viable relationship prospects with women and come to believe that they will have more luck with sex and dating as a trans woman. Which may be true for some AGPs which is why the incel-to-trans pipeline is very much real.

So really this problem AGPs have finding partners is not unique to them and AGPs struggle in the same way as any other man in the modern hetero dating market. You have to differentiate yourself as a man and generally this is by chasing excellence and developing competency and building an attractive life for yourself that women want to be a part of.

In conclusion, I did not “cure” my autogynephilia. But I am happy that I found someone who is affirming my masculine image as a man because getting such affirmation and building a positive conception of masculinity is absolutely key for detransitioned males finding a healthy pathway of integration as a man.