Why Are So Many Autogynephiles in Denial?

The truth will set you free.

Caitlyn Jenner, classic AGP timeline

Ever notice that the trans women who exclusively show interest in men typically have different prototypical life stories compared to trans women who spent decades married to straight women and otherwise lived normal lives as masculine straight men with a secretive life of cross-sex fantasy, often coupled with a fascination in transgender pornography?

Gigi Gorgeous, classic HSTS timeline

Once you recognize the pattern, it becomes hard to unsee. AGPs are more likely to transition late in life and a have a lifetime of living as a masculine heterosexual man with stereotyped masculine interests. The non-AGP transsexual is more likely to have shown signs in early childhood of being an effeminate gay boy.

Gabbi Tuft, classic AGP timeline

So, what is AGP? It is the sexual attraction to femininity coupled with a psychological mechanism that takes that attraction to femininity and partially “inverts” it upon yourself such that you are also sexually attracted to the thought of yourself embodying femininity, whether anatomically (female secondary sex traits), physiologically (envy for pregnancy, menstruation, lactation, etc.), behaviorally (being socially and sexually treated “like a women), or having a deep envy and desire to wear the clothing women “get” to wear (often with a special interest in highly sexualized items like stockings or high heels), or some combination of all of these.

In the late 1980s Ray Blanchard was working at a gender clinic in Toronto doing intake on transsexual women seeking sexual reassignment services.

As part of the clinical intake process, he intuitively picked up on the distinctive life pattern distinguishing the AGP-type from the non-AGP type. He called the non-AGP type “homosexual transsexuals,” because as children they present identically as young effeminate gay boys, many of whom do have identity issues and gender confusion until they hit puberty and “desist” in their cross-sex identity and learn to just accept themselves as gay males.

The distinguishing feature of the autogynephilic type, however, was reporting in their life history arousal from crossdressing, a very reliable indicator of AGP.

In the Gender Dysphoria Bible, a popular online resource for trans women, there’s an entire section devoted to the popular question, “Am I trans or is it just a fetish?”

If you search on reddit for the term “euphoria boner” you will find hundreds if not thousands of threads where literally everyone in the comments is all talking about how perfectly normal it is that trans women might confuse their sincere belief they “really are women” with the idea that it might all just be a fetish for feminization (usually fueled by transgender/sissy pornography.)

r/MtF, the biggest online forum for transfeminine males

So, if AGP vs non-AGP is a real pattern, observable by many and widely reported to be true, including many self-aware trans women who do say the “AGP archetype” describes their life well, why are so many in denial? Why has the entire trans community largely decided to paint the theory as deeply transphobic and cancel all attempts at legitimizing the theory, falsely smearing the theory as “pseudoscientific” as well as dismissing Blanchard as being just a “old cis white male” who was an abusive “tranny chaser,” all lies and smears that were part of an extensive cancelation campaign when Dr. Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen came out popularizing the Blanchardian typology between AGP and non-AGP.

Gabbi Tuft (as shown above), for example, while clearly fitting into the AGP archetype, adamantly denies sexuality had anything to do with their reason for transition:

“Just a fetish”: the Biggest Strawman

My hypothesis as to why so many AGPs deny having AGP is because they think the theory of autogynephilia says any AGP who transitions because of AGP is only doing it “just” because of the AGP.

When they reflect on the reasons why they transitioned, their mind spins an autobiographical narrative, which is core to the narrative identity of “trans woman,” and in that narrative it doesn’t “feel” like they only transitioned for sexual reasons, while some might admit it started merely as a sexual kink for feminization and fascination with transsexual bodies.

But the point is that it feels like it’s “more” than just a kink. The common narrative is that the kink was a coping mechanism for dealing with repression in the only “outlet” that was safe to explore in an oppressive “transphobic” society. They say the ultimate cause of the kink itself was the repressed “subconscious sex” aka the “gender identity” of being a woman, which makes them “born in the wrong body” or, at least, born in a body they want to hormonally and surgically alter to better approximate the female form to “align” with their “gender identity".

But it’s crucial to understand that AGP properly considered is just an internal mechanism of auto-sexual attraction that acts as a predisposing factor which can manifest in a wide variety of phenomena.

At the “mild” end of the spectrum, the AGP predisposing factor might manifest as just the occasional paraphilic desire for a crossdressing masturbation session and on the other extreme of the spectrum it could manifest as severe body dysmorphia, desire for penile inversion surgery, and an obsessive belief that your life will be miserable unless you attempt to socially live as a woman.

AGP as a predisposing factor interacts with environmental influences like trauma, childhood experiences, exposure to pornography, transgender culture, seeing that one trans person on Jerry Springer at 12 years old, as well as the personal circumstances of your life in terms of whether you are able to achieve social success as a man or whether, as in some cases, you “fail as a male” and go down the nice guy-to-trans pipeline.

The classic nice guy-to-trans pipeline is you start with the AGP predisposing factor, which might actually be quite mild with no major body dysmorphia, but then you add failure to thrive and successfully date in the social role of man, aka being sexually and emotionally stunted as a man, coupled with internalized misandry and an autobiographical narrative identity that cannot imagine a happy adult life as a male, and attaches to a new autobiographical narrative that the key to happiness is living life as a woman, which often comes from putting women on a pedestal and internalization of the message that straight males are the source of all the world’s troubles and a desire to be a good feminist ally, along with the belief that life as a trans women would bring more social points as a “valid” and marginalized identity.

In reality, every autogynephile who transitions does so for a complex of reasons unique to their life history. But despite the uniqueness and complexity of these reasons, all autogynephilies share the common predisposing factor which is an internalized sexual attraction to feminization which is not shared by the homosexual etiological type, for whom their homosexuality (not internalized attraction to feminization) is the biggest predisposing factor, often couched in terms of a question of social assimilation (how can my life go better as a highly effeminate male who is attracted to men.)

Promoting Self-Awareness

I think more AGPs would be self-aware if there was not a large element of shame and stigma for males to openly admit being aroused by having a paraphilic interest in feminization and transsexual bodies. There is necessarily an element of the taboo when dealing with non-standard sexual interests, which autogynephilia definitely is. Most males do not find feminization deeply erotic and instantly arousing in the way AGPs do.

Many AGPs also are in denial because of some poor quality and highly misleading research by the likes of Charles Moser which purports to show via survey of natal females that they too show a propensity for arousal when wearing lingerie, makeup, shaving, etc.

But if you dig into Moser’s research closely it reveals that the natal females showed the highest scores for autosexual arousal in the context of getting ready for a date with a man they’re looking forward to having sex with.

But as any AGP knows, the intense fascination with feminization and the instant arousal it engenders is quite different in nature than a female simple getting excited about the thought of a date going well. AGP is more internalized and insulated from those real-world contexts, though, of course, AGP fantasy does often include being treated “like a woman” or “like a transsexual” and the fantasy does often result in “meta-attraction” or “pseudo-bisexual” fantasies about being sexually treated “like women,” which usually involves playing out submissive fantasies.

This is why it’s important to be honest about the nature of autogynephilia as originating out of the male mind’s intense sexual attraction to femininity, which is not at all comparable to heterosexual females finding themselves hot, because heterosexual females don’t have an intense paraphilic interest in maleness itself being feminized, which is quintessential to the internalized attraction males feel when wanting to embody the female form. Trying to compare it to normal heterosexual female sexuality is truly apples and oranges if you understand the nature of the phenomenon properly.

Which is not to say females can’t embody autosexuality in some way or another. But the point in those cases would be it’s relatively unusual for females to have such an intense autosexual drive being the dominant arousing factor in their sex lives in the same way autogynephilic males do. And whether autosexuality exists in females is a hotly contested question in sexology right now. The jury is out as to how to best characterize the phenomenon though I think Phil Illy has done a good job of gathering preliminary evidence to argue for the possibility it truly exists in females.

Conclusion

My goal is that autogynephiles can learn to overcome their shame and learn to live in the truth. Once people learn about the typology, it is hard to unlearn because so many examples in the real-world work to confirm the truth of the basic pattern. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. And you see it everywhere. While I believe, for adults, transition can be a last resort coping mechanism for making it possible to integrate these compulsive feelings about feminization into a relatively more functional life, I think it is important to understand the full picture of where these feelings come from in order to fully understand why social assimilation as female comes with a host of difficulties and problems, and all things considered, if you can build a successful and happy autobiographical narrative as a male while coping with these internalized attractions, that is a preferable life option.