My latest Genspect post is a doozy. Let’s talk about “gay trans guys”—formerly known as heterosexual females. Some self-identified “gay trans guys” apply the label“autoandrophilia” to their own experiences, a term that mirrors Ray Blanchard’s concept of “autogynephilia”—love of one’s self as a woman—and, like autogynephilia, is embraced by some trans and detrans community members, while being rejected as pathologizing by others.
“Here’s what this looks like to me: for some adolescent and young adult heterosexual females, trans identification seems to be a response to deep discomfort with heterosexuality and what heterosexual relationships entail and imply.”
May I offer an additional possibility? The human brain did not evolve to consume and process high levels (ie, higher than anything that would be naturally encountered in the real world) of animated, highly stylized, unrealistic sexual content on devices and platforms only recently introduced to humanity and designed to exploit the dopamine system, all during a time of adolescents’ rapid brain changing and development, sexual development, and identity formation. How could this not cause confusion and anxiety in some people, especially young women who may already be prone to anxiety or sexual insecurity due to other personal or societal factors?
"I feel fine until I think about how I act and I feel like I’m way too feminine. I’m codependent, I’m childish, I’m needy, I’m clingy, I’m sensitive,"
That's internalized misogyny, plain and simple, as is this:
"a lot of women struggle being just like other girls. They see other women who are feminine and think “but I’m not like her! I’m different!”
Also, the direct line between fetishization and a trans identity: "I was fetishizing gay men, no turns out I just am a gay man" and "We’d write and trade yaoi/shounen ai fanfiction daily, draw and trade nsfw and fluff images daily, etc. I believe it had a lot to do with my personal gender confusion as a child".
Interesting that porn and romance are compared "It’s so hard to find porn and romance that isn’t completely degrading to women". I actually agree that both are unrealistic and degrading to women. These examples also illustrate the profound impact different types of media representations have on our sense of self and sexuality. This is where the idea "anything sexual is natural and inherent" is problematic. Our sexuality isn't immune to being shaped by our environment.
This article really highlights the way misogyny drives wedges between women ("I'm not like her") and between women and themselves. This is exactly what it's meant to do–divide and conquer. It also makes sense as to why I often hear detransitioners talk about how radical feminism was helpful for them -- it helps many women make sense out of their experiences (especially abuse, being constantly gaslit and demeaned) and helps them direct their ire toward something other than themselves (like demeaning portrayals of women and abusive behavior towards women).
As psychologist, I would say that the role playing is one end of a broad spectrum of identity plays through which people put themselves, particularly when they are young and "searching" for their "true" identity. Exploring the options of one's humanity is normal. The problems, of course, arise when one has a difficult time separating the performance from the reality.
[Note: Currently, my Substack site is broken and doesn't have any articles on it.]
Trans people make it all so difficult when in fact it is all so easy.
To the Reddit poster: If you have a vagina, straight men will see you as a woman. You may see yourself as a man -- and even a homosexual man -- but real homosexual men won't see you that way. Just as your straight boyfriend does, gay men will see you as a woman.
The simple fact is, you ARE a woman.
Now, the person who said that as you get more masculine in appearance, your boyfriend may be turned off, is correct. If he's a real straight man, he really doesn't want a man with a vagina. He may want a masculine woman, but as soon as your appearance above the crotch is convincingly male, he may start to get turned off.
Now, as a gay man, I can tell you that no gay man will want you no matter how male you look from the crotch up. That's because gay men want real penises and testicles, not fakes. So you will have to be satisfied with straight men who are willing to accommodate your masculine traits.
If you continue to transition, you may be able to find a man who wants a partner with a male appearance, but such a man might want to fuck you from behind, which you will most likely find uncomfortable because you don't have a prostate gland to be stimulated.
If you are smart, you will keep your vagina and go back to being a tom-boy type woman, and be glad that your boyfriend is straight.
Eliza, thanks for raising these issues. I have often tried to figure out just what kinds of sex trans people expect to be able to have. The trans configuration which is probably the most successful in that regard, is trans women who have had bottom surgery. Such a trans woman may be able to find a straight man who doesn't care if the vagina is real as long as he can put his penis in it. If he doesn't enjoy cunnilingus, all the better. My understanding, however, is that a lot of trans women have to keep stretching their fake vaginas to make sure they don't scar up and close.
The narcissism involved here is mind boggling. How do these people who spend so much time revolving around their genitals and appearance hold down a job and feed themselves? I can imagine their brains shriveling from focusing on this drivel.
These self-involved individuals and their self-importance strike me in a certain false note, as a trans widow, that is, the ex-wife of a man who left me alone with our infant and toddler while he "explored" his PhD psychologist sanctioned "true life test," pretending he was more in danger than I. He liked that "French Resistance" secrecy and wrote all about it in the 3 journals I discovered, which gave me concerns about whether the AIDS virus can travel through breastmilk, and if was I endangering our baby by the most natural act in the world; breastfeeding your baby. No, I tested negative, thank heavens. Now that I'm in communication with a couple dozen trans widows like myself, who are more likely to be worrying about money than anything else, I want to write an expose of the famous Blanchard and his stunning lack of consideration for women over the decades. To be clear, the Swedish study (Dheine, 2011) found that the 10-20 years later suicide rate of women post "masculinizing" surgeries was 40 TIMES the rate of the control group. When the study was published, they collapsed the male and female suicide rate together, so it was a mere 19 times higher, a decade post surgery. The Dr. Stephen B. Levine testimony is linked here:
So much anxiety! So much confusion! I keep thinking of Louise Perry's The Case against the Sexual Revolution. When I was a child in the late 1960s, my parents were very young--my father left us and joined a cult in which promiscuity was the rule until it turned into a polygynous one in which a group of American women each bore a child of the guru. Anyway, one of them had been in grad school with my father, who had an affair with her, she had a breakdown, and she later accused a cult member of sexually assaulting her child (and was then cast out).
My longwinded point: in moments of upheaval, when libertinism and hedonism are valued as ideologically superior, when being "normal" (or monogamous or hetero or whatever) is to be avoided, you'll see these victims of the times. Young women, especially, trying to be cool, trying to have sex the way the groupthink says they should. These women feel desperately confused about normal feelings, trying so hard to fit into some ideological box (freedom! trans!), but they can't find peace.
From your article on Genspect: "When men are feminine it’s seen as a statement, and comes from a place of power..." I think this is an amazing insight from the woman who posted it. So many TRAs are adopting (allegedly) feminine traits as a choice because it gives them power over others. Many young women seem to be trying to circle around to their femaleness by discarding it and then adopting it back. I don't know if this is what is known as "biotrans" (it's very difficult to keep up with a lot of the terminology), but I start to see something coming out of the impenetrable fog of "gender identity". These young women simply don't have the ability to assert themselves, so they are borrowing a persona from which to springboard their own selves.
In essence, I'm not saying anything new here - it is just that a window into the mechanism of life-as-performance has just opened up to me!
There is no better demonstration of stereotypically masculine psychosexuality than a man's explanation of why he thinks he's a woman. And it seems the reverse is true as well.
I revisited this after discovering one of my favourite fanfiction authors - a wonderful writer, who when I discovered her, described herself as a bisexual woman in love with her wife - now declares in her bio on one site that she is an "out gay trans man". Her wife has become her "husband", which suggests we have a lesbian couple now claiming to be gay men. It made me want to cry. Her previous bio was charming, slightly snarky, describing her love for animals and her work in her community as well as the fandom. Now, her "gay trans man" persona rants bitterly about terrible, evil terves. I've never met this woman; I've never interacted with her apart from leaving appreciative comments about her work every now and then. I sincerely hope she and her wife are content with their decision, and of course I have no idea whether the happy, positive young woman who seemed to accept herself as she was that came across in the original bio truly reflected reality. But I had a weird feeling of grief, as if a friend had joined a nihilistic cult.
I'm a bisexual female and admit I enjoy slash fic; I have always gravitated towards reading about gay romances, m/m and f/f - I found depictions of het romances left me cold and had moments in my teens (mercifully pre-internet, God knows where I would have ended up had I been born 30 years later) where I wondered what it would be like to be a gay boy. I now think part of it was the abusive or sinister tropes in pop culture that accompany "romantic" interactions between men and women in film or literature (creepy "to me you are perfect" guy in Love Actually, for instance). Romanticised depictions of same-sex relationships seem to have an element of equal power that many young women don't feel they have in het relationships - I certainly felt that way. When I was 13 and developed my first crush on a boy, I was terrified and ashamed of wanting him in the way that I did. Also, while I never thought I was anything other than female, I did not want to be A Woman because A Woman attracted frightening attention from men. Then I fell in love (unrequited) with another girl at the age of 18, and that was just as scary although for slightly different reasons. I'm not asexual but I've never had a proper relationship of any length; part of it was that I don't believe anyone could fall in love with me (not looking for reassurance; I think we all know the "someone for everyone" idea is not realistic, and I'm generally fine with the way my life has gone) but the other part was that the vulnerability involved in any sexual interaction scared me.
I still think that fanfic is a good creative outlet for many people wanting to develop their writing skills, but - as with anything, such as gaming communities, alternative "wellness" groups, etc- overconsumption and obsession to escape an unsatisfying real life can create more problems than it solves. I'm sure a similar pattern occurs with young people radicalised into other forms of extreme belief. They are searching for a perfect world in which they fit - a world which does not exist, and no matter how hard they try, they will never achieve the perfect embodiment of the self because no one can. We are all flawed human beings, sometimes life really sucks, but being able to develop gratitude for the good things you have, and contentment or acceptance with your body and the way your life has turned out, I think is crucial to be able to navigate the world as it is. To this day, I still spend way too much time in my head; I work in an area involving constant exposure to traumatic material and deeply distressed people, so the urge to escape is powerful. Because of my obsessive tendencies, I try to limit the amount of fic I consume as a writer or reader - to the point of often spending months not reading any - and don't focus solely on one fandom, just as I need to set limits on my consumption of political media or, yes, even radfem and GC content and have to be careful about even discussing any form of weight loss regimen because of my history of EDs. At the risk of sounding like that "have you tried yoga" arsehole we often encounter on social media, I have to say rediscovering yoga thanks to a couple of fantastic teachers who ran online classes during lockdown, as well as a women-only dance school which I joined a few years ago, has been invaluable in getting me out of my head. So much body dysmorphia stuff I think stems from a disconnection between the mind and body - the idea of having souls separate from the body has a lot to answer for.
I hope the above makes some sense! I can only speak from my own experience of the world, but I imagine other young women (I no longer qualify as "young" but I was one once!) might experience things similarly.
I wonder: girls and young women, "demisexuals" for the most part for whom emotional attachment is a key factor in sexual attraction, consume lots of stuff that shows that kind of emotional romantic attachment, and is thus erotic for them, but the characters are young gay men. Do these girls and young women then confuse the identity with the romance? IOW, since they will not find much emotional attachment in heterosexual or mainstream porn but they can find it in this gay male erotica, do they then think they must be or need to be gay men in order to enjoy such emotional attachment in sex? Without adult experiences, and basing their beliefs solely on the media they consume and the online community they find, perhaps they decide that being a heterosexual woman will condemn them to a life of emotionally disconnected hook ups (as per Louise Perry's argument)? And so transing to be an effeminate gay man is the best route toward the romance they seek?
All those excerpts from Reddit are prime examples of what Wesley Yang diagnoses as "the terminal boredom at the End of History". These listless preteens had so little to do, so little engagement with the flesh and blood business of living, that they read themselves into a Hobbesian community of mentally ill savages making ideological war upon each other. And now they're mentally ill adults inflicting their mental illnesses upon their real life partners and friends.
Many young girls of my generation are quite disgusted with femininity/womanhood. I tried to look masculine during my adolescence to break away from stereotypes. Including changing my behavior, walking posture…
But I find masculinity and femininity to be polar opposites of the same set of stereotypes.They are actually two sides of the same coin.
Until I found a neutral lifestyle that I was freed from the sex dilemma.
Oh, my ! Do these people have time to think about the important things in this world , like wars, refugees starving, climate change? Pollution, species extinction, political instability, economic disparities?
Or is the most important thing in their lives whether their boyfriend knows that they’re faking it ..that they’re actually a woman? Jeez ! Stop
“Here’s what this looks like to me: for some adolescent and young adult heterosexual females, trans identification seems to be a response to deep discomfort with heterosexuality and what heterosexual relationships entail and imply.”
May I offer an additional possibility? The human brain did not evolve to consume and process high levels (ie, higher than anything that would be naturally encountered in the real world) of animated, highly stylized, unrealistic sexual content on devices and platforms only recently introduced to humanity and designed to exploit the dopamine system, all during a time of adolescents’ rapid brain changing and development, sexual development, and identity formation. How could this not cause confusion and anxiety in some people, especially young women who may already be prone to anxiety or sexual insecurity due to other personal or societal factors?
"I feel fine until I think about how I act and I feel like I’m way too feminine. I’m codependent, I’m childish, I’m needy, I’m clingy, I’m sensitive,"
That's internalized misogyny, plain and simple, as is this:
"a lot of women struggle being just like other girls. They see other women who are feminine and think “but I’m not like her! I’m different!”
Also, the direct line between fetishization and a trans identity: "I was fetishizing gay men, no turns out I just am a gay man" and "We’d write and trade yaoi/shounen ai fanfiction daily, draw and trade nsfw and fluff images daily, etc. I believe it had a lot to do with my personal gender confusion as a child".
Interesting that porn and romance are compared "It’s so hard to find porn and romance that isn’t completely degrading to women". I actually agree that both are unrealistic and degrading to women. These examples also illustrate the profound impact different types of media representations have on our sense of self and sexuality. This is where the idea "anything sexual is natural and inherent" is problematic. Our sexuality isn't immune to being shaped by our environment.
This article really highlights the way misogyny drives wedges between women ("I'm not like her") and between women and themselves. This is exactly what it's meant to do–divide and conquer. It also makes sense as to why I often hear detransitioners talk about how radical feminism was helpful for them -- it helps many women make sense out of their experiences (especially abuse, being constantly gaslit and demeaned) and helps them direct their ire toward something other than themselves (like demeaning portrayals of women and abusive behavior towards women).
As psychologist, I would say that the role playing is one end of a broad spectrum of identity plays through which people put themselves, particularly when they are young and "searching" for their "true" identity. Exploring the options of one's humanity is normal. The problems, of course, arise when one has a difficult time separating the performance from the reality.
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/hallucinating-your-inner-trans-reptile
... And the problems are exacerbated when one expects other people to accept one's own confusion as reality.
Thank you for a very interesting and thought-provoking essay!
[Note: Currently, my Substack site is broken and doesn't have any articles on it.]
Trans people make it all so difficult when in fact it is all so easy.
To the Reddit poster: If you have a vagina, straight men will see you as a woman. You may see yourself as a man -- and even a homosexual man -- but real homosexual men won't see you that way. Just as your straight boyfriend does, gay men will see you as a woman.
The simple fact is, you ARE a woman.
Now, the person who said that as you get more masculine in appearance, your boyfriend may be turned off, is correct. If he's a real straight man, he really doesn't want a man with a vagina. He may want a masculine woman, but as soon as your appearance above the crotch is convincingly male, he may start to get turned off.
Now, as a gay man, I can tell you that no gay man will want you no matter how male you look from the crotch up. That's because gay men want real penises and testicles, not fakes. So you will have to be satisfied with straight men who are willing to accommodate your masculine traits.
If you continue to transition, you may be able to find a man who wants a partner with a male appearance, but such a man might want to fuck you from behind, which you will most likely find uncomfortable because you don't have a prostate gland to be stimulated.
If you are smart, you will keep your vagina and go back to being a tom-boy type woman, and be glad that your boyfriend is straight.
Eliza, thanks for raising these issues. I have often tried to figure out just what kinds of sex trans people expect to be able to have. The trans configuration which is probably the most successful in that regard, is trans women who have had bottom surgery. Such a trans woman may be able to find a straight man who doesn't care if the vagina is real as long as he can put his penis in it. If he doesn't enjoy cunnilingus, all the better. My understanding, however, is that a lot of trans women have to keep stretching their fake vaginas to make sure they don't scar up and close.
Being trans isn't easy, that's for sure.
The narcissism involved here is mind boggling. How do these people who spend so much time revolving around their genitals and appearance hold down a job and feed themselves? I can imagine their brains shriveling from focusing on this drivel.
These self-involved individuals and their self-importance strike me in a certain false note, as a trans widow, that is, the ex-wife of a man who left me alone with our infant and toddler while he "explored" his PhD psychologist sanctioned "true life test," pretending he was more in danger than I. He liked that "French Resistance" secrecy and wrote all about it in the 3 journals I discovered, which gave me concerns about whether the AIDS virus can travel through breastmilk, and if was I endangering our baby by the most natural act in the world; breastfeeding your baby. No, I tested negative, thank heavens. Now that I'm in communication with a couple dozen trans widows like myself, who are more likely to be worrying about money than anything else, I want to write an expose of the famous Blanchard and his stunning lack of consideration for women over the decades. To be clear, the Swedish study (Dheine, 2011) found that the 10-20 years later suicide rate of women post "masculinizing" surgeries was 40 TIMES the rate of the control group. When the study was published, they collapsed the male and female suicide rate together, so it was a mere 19 times higher, a decade post surgery. The Dr. Stephen B. Levine testimony is linked here:
https://wordpress.com/post/uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com/5385
So much anxiety! So much confusion! I keep thinking of Louise Perry's The Case against the Sexual Revolution. When I was a child in the late 1960s, my parents were very young--my father left us and joined a cult in which promiscuity was the rule until it turned into a polygynous one in which a group of American women each bore a child of the guru. Anyway, one of them had been in grad school with my father, who had an affair with her, she had a breakdown, and she later accused a cult member of sexually assaulting her child (and was then cast out).
My longwinded point: in moments of upheaval, when libertinism and hedonism are valued as ideologically superior, when being "normal" (or monogamous or hetero or whatever) is to be avoided, you'll see these victims of the times. Young women, especially, trying to be cool, trying to have sex the way the groupthink says they should. These women feel desperately confused about normal feelings, trying so hard to fit into some ideological box (freedom! trans!), but they can't find peace.
From your article on Genspect: "When men are feminine it’s seen as a statement, and comes from a place of power..." I think this is an amazing insight from the woman who posted it. So many TRAs are adopting (allegedly) feminine traits as a choice because it gives them power over others. Many young women seem to be trying to circle around to their femaleness by discarding it and then adopting it back. I don't know if this is what is known as "biotrans" (it's very difficult to keep up with a lot of the terminology), but I start to see something coming out of the impenetrable fog of "gender identity". These young women simply don't have the ability to assert themselves, so they are borrowing a persona from which to springboard their own selves.
In essence, I'm not saying anything new here - it is just that a window into the mechanism of life-as-performance has just opened up to me!
There is no better demonstration of stereotypically masculine psychosexuality than a man's explanation of why he thinks he's a woman. And it seems the reverse is true as well.
It just seems sad and pathetic.
I revisited this after discovering one of my favourite fanfiction authors - a wonderful writer, who when I discovered her, described herself as a bisexual woman in love with her wife - now declares in her bio on one site that she is an "out gay trans man". Her wife has become her "husband", which suggests we have a lesbian couple now claiming to be gay men. It made me want to cry. Her previous bio was charming, slightly snarky, describing her love for animals and her work in her community as well as the fandom. Now, her "gay trans man" persona rants bitterly about terrible, evil terves. I've never met this woman; I've never interacted with her apart from leaving appreciative comments about her work every now and then. I sincerely hope she and her wife are content with their decision, and of course I have no idea whether the happy, positive young woman who seemed to accept herself as she was that came across in the original bio truly reflected reality. But I had a weird feeling of grief, as if a friend had joined a nihilistic cult.
I'm a bisexual female and admit I enjoy slash fic; I have always gravitated towards reading about gay romances, m/m and f/f - I found depictions of het romances left me cold and had moments in my teens (mercifully pre-internet, God knows where I would have ended up had I been born 30 years later) where I wondered what it would be like to be a gay boy. I now think part of it was the abusive or sinister tropes in pop culture that accompany "romantic" interactions between men and women in film or literature (creepy "to me you are perfect" guy in Love Actually, for instance). Romanticised depictions of same-sex relationships seem to have an element of equal power that many young women don't feel they have in het relationships - I certainly felt that way. When I was 13 and developed my first crush on a boy, I was terrified and ashamed of wanting him in the way that I did. Also, while I never thought I was anything other than female, I did not want to be A Woman because A Woman attracted frightening attention from men. Then I fell in love (unrequited) with another girl at the age of 18, and that was just as scary although for slightly different reasons. I'm not asexual but I've never had a proper relationship of any length; part of it was that I don't believe anyone could fall in love with me (not looking for reassurance; I think we all know the "someone for everyone" idea is not realistic, and I'm generally fine with the way my life has gone) but the other part was that the vulnerability involved in any sexual interaction scared me.
I still think that fanfic is a good creative outlet for many people wanting to develop their writing skills, but - as with anything, such as gaming communities, alternative "wellness" groups, etc- overconsumption and obsession to escape an unsatisfying real life can create more problems than it solves. I'm sure a similar pattern occurs with young people radicalised into other forms of extreme belief. They are searching for a perfect world in which they fit - a world which does not exist, and no matter how hard they try, they will never achieve the perfect embodiment of the self because no one can. We are all flawed human beings, sometimes life really sucks, but being able to develop gratitude for the good things you have, and contentment or acceptance with your body and the way your life has turned out, I think is crucial to be able to navigate the world as it is. To this day, I still spend way too much time in my head; I work in an area involving constant exposure to traumatic material and deeply distressed people, so the urge to escape is powerful. Because of my obsessive tendencies, I try to limit the amount of fic I consume as a writer or reader - to the point of often spending months not reading any - and don't focus solely on one fandom, just as I need to set limits on my consumption of political media or, yes, even radfem and GC content and have to be careful about even discussing any form of weight loss regimen because of my history of EDs. At the risk of sounding like that "have you tried yoga" arsehole we often encounter on social media, I have to say rediscovering yoga thanks to a couple of fantastic teachers who ran online classes during lockdown, as well as a women-only dance school which I joined a few years ago, has been invaluable in getting me out of my head. So much body dysmorphia stuff I think stems from a disconnection between the mind and body - the idea of having souls separate from the body has a lot to answer for.
I hope the above makes some sense! I can only speak from my own experience of the world, but I imagine other young women (I no longer qualify as "young" but I was one once!) might experience things similarly.
I wonder: girls and young women, "demisexuals" for the most part for whom emotional attachment is a key factor in sexual attraction, consume lots of stuff that shows that kind of emotional romantic attachment, and is thus erotic for them, but the characters are young gay men. Do these girls and young women then confuse the identity with the romance? IOW, since they will not find much emotional attachment in heterosexual or mainstream porn but they can find it in this gay male erotica, do they then think they must be or need to be gay men in order to enjoy such emotional attachment in sex? Without adult experiences, and basing their beliefs solely on the media they consume and the online community they find, perhaps they decide that being a heterosexual woman will condemn them to a life of emotionally disconnected hook ups (as per Louise Perry's argument)? And so transing to be an effeminate gay man is the best route toward the romance they seek?
All those excerpts from Reddit are prime examples of what Wesley Yang diagnoses as "the terminal boredom at the End of History". These listless preteens had so little to do, so little engagement with the flesh and blood business of living, that they read themselves into a Hobbesian community of mentally ill savages making ideological war upon each other. And now they're mentally ill adults inflicting their mental illnesses upon their real life partners and friends.
Utter tragedy.
Many young girls of my generation are quite disgusted with femininity/womanhood. I tried to look masculine during my adolescence to break away from stereotypes. Including changing my behavior, walking posture…
But I find masculinity and femininity to be polar opposites of the same set of stereotypes.They are actually two sides of the same coin.
Until I found a neutral lifestyle that I was freed from the sex dilemma.
Oh, my ! Do these people have time to think about the important things in this world , like wars, refugees starving, climate change? Pollution, species extinction, political instability, economic disparities?
Or is the most important thing in their lives whether their boyfriend knows that they’re faking it ..that they’re actually a woman? Jeez ! Stop
Contemplating your navel!