Not with a Woman, but as a Woman
Could trans people actually experience a unique sexual orientation?
“Before, I always avoided photos and always thought I looked gross. Now, I’m finally able to smile when I see myself in the mirror.”
This is the trans glow-up of a person who, for once, can actually care about her appearance. The man in the photo had dead eyes. Unkempt hair. He cannot bring himself to smile, either. But the woman’s eyes are bright. Her hair is done. This is the face of an auto-gynephile - perhaps the most misused word in trans history.
Auto-gynephile. This word strikes terror into the eyes of any trans woman. According to the mainstream trans community, auto-gynephilia is a “debunked transphobic theory.” “Transmedicalists” are quick to emphasize their “neurological sex,” distancing themselves from “AGP fetishists.” Trans-exclusionary radfems cite auto-gynephilia theory as proof that trans identity is just a misogynistic caricature of womanhood. The one thing that everyone agrees on is that auto-gynephilia means nothing good.
Only a select few, perhaps the most notably Anne Lawrence, have attempted to defend and even own auto-gynephilia theory. Yet, even Lawrence’s defense remains unconvincing. To many, the idea that dysphoria arises from a sexual place seems ludicrous and offensive. Yet, we believe that to date, nobody has written down a strong articulation of the two-type typology. We hope that trans people of the impression that auto-gynephile means something gross will finally be able to see themselves in auto-heterosexual.
Portraits
Portrait A:
Growing up, you thought a “trans person” meant the little boy who played with dolls and hung out with girls. You don’t remember much signs from your own childhood.
However, when you reach puberty, your face and body start to seem foreign. Your body hair grows in, and you feel subtle disgust seeing yourself in the mirror. You disassociate and have little memories of your teenage years. You eventually attempt to come out to your family as trans. However, you are disbelieved, because you weren’t feminine in childhood.
Portrait B:
You had a typical boyish childhood. You gravitated to trains and action figures, not dolls and family roleplay. You can’t say that you were particularly feminine. However, while most boys turned to sports and normative masculinity, you turn inwards, occupying yourself with nerd interests. While most boys date girls and most girls date boys, you don’t date anyone.
In young adulthood, you attempt to date women, unsuccessfully. You have difficulty in intimacy because you need your partner to see you as a woman. You seek out a clinician, but he gatekeeps you due to your lack of childhood femininity.
From Transvestism to Transsexualism
Magnus Hirschfeld was first to distinguish cross-dressing, which he termed transvestism, as a distinct phenomenon from homosexuality (1948, p.167). Hirschfeld catalogued that transvestites could be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or automonosexual [lacking attraction towards others] (1948, p.167). However, Hirschfeld (1910/1991) felt dissatisfied with the word “transvestism” because it focused on the clothing and not the feeling within: “One disadvantage of the term is that it describes only the external side, while the internal is limitless.”
Sexologist Havelock Ellis, for his part, invented the alternative terms “sexo-aesthetic inversion” and “Eonism,” after the Chevalière d'Éon. Ellis (1928) suggested, “Psychologically speaking, it seems to me that we must regard sexo-aesthetic inversion as really a modification of normal hetero-sexuality.”
In Weimar Germany’s fragile liberal atmosphere, transvestites could live full-time in the opposite sex role. Hirschfeld handed out “transvestite certificates,” medical diagnosis protecting them from police harassment. His Institut für Sexualwissenschaft pioneered medical transition, helping transvestites take on the appearance of the opposite sex - the first transsexuals. In a sense, “transvestite” in Hirschfeld’s time was the original umbrella term for what we today understand as the entire transgender spectrum from part-time cross-dressers to full transitioners.
While Hirschfeld accepted transgender people of any sexual orientation, post-war sexologists would institute far stricter definitions of transsexual. According to Robert Stoller, transsexual women were feminine since childhood and homosexual relative to birth sex (1968). Multiple sexologists, grouping transitioners into cohorts by life history, arrived at a feminine, homosexual cluster and a cross-dressing, heterosexual cluster. An early two-type typology came from John Money, who divided transsexuals into “homosexual” and “transvestitic” types (Money & Gaskin, 1970-1971). Person and Ovesey, disagreeing with Stoller, argued that “primary” transsexuals were asexual (1974a), while “secondary” transsexuals progressed “under stress” from either effeminate homosexuality or heterosexual transvestism, also noting that transvestites were occasionally bisexual but had a low interpersonal sexuality (1974b). In time, “primary” and “secondary” terminology would instead come to distinguish between the homosexual and transvestic clusters.
During this period, clinicians often preferred feminine homosexuals and gatekept “transvestic” heterosexuals from transition. Patients would deliberately prepare “classical transsexual” narratives or subconsciously distort their memories. Realizing that both homosexual and transvestic types benefit from transition, Norman Fisk (1974) would shift the goal from determining who was a true transsexual to helping the patient by consolidating both conditions under “gender dysphoria syndrome.”
However, an institutional bias for “primary” transsexuals would construct the popular image of the “classical transsexual” woman, feminine since childhood. This popular image would prevent many future trans people from recognizing their own dysphoria. Sexologists did not separate simple observation of multiple types of transitioner, of which sexual orientation was often the distinguishing factor, from value judgements of who was “true transsexual.” This historical context underlies the seemingly banal (but wrong) mantra, “sexual orientation is separate from gender identity.” This historical context is also crucial to understanding the trans community’s hostility to Blanchard and auto-gynephilia theory.
Articulating Auto-Heterosexuality
Consider the following three passages:
Some trans women, for example, identified as gay men pre-transition out of a desire to have a partner that treats them like women during sex, but find themselves to actually be lesbians once that demand is lifted. Others may attempt to live as gay men, but find that the role doesn’t fulfill them because they know their partners see them as men.
In my opinion, bisexual gender dysphorics’ erotic interest in males is qualitatively different from that experienced by homosexual gender dysphorics. In their fantasies of sexual interaction with men, bisexual gender dysphorics are primarily aroused by what is, for them, the symbolic meaning of such acts, namely the thought that they themselves are women. This type of “bisexual” orientation need not reflect an equal erotic attraction to the male and female physiques and would perhaps be better characterized as pseudobisexuality.
Homosexual gender dysphorics maintain their interest in other men is actually heterosexual, because “inside” they are really women. They also prefer partners who are heterosexual—or claim to be so—and who concur with the transsexual’s self-evaluation that he is “really” a woman.
The first passage comes from “Sexual Dysphoria” in the Gender Dysphoria Bible. The second and third come from Ray Blanchard. Some trans women date men to feel like women, only to reveal an underlying gynephilia (sexual orientation towards women). This is the distinction between the pseudo-androphilic meta-attraction of an auto-gynephile (AGP) and the androphilia (sexual orientation towards men) of a homosexual transsexual (HSTS).
A common misconception today is that the two-type typology is “Blanchard’s typology.” Blanchard only built on the many observations of sexologists before him, and the “homosexual transsexual” was a well-established phenomenon. Blanchard’s contribution was to propose a sexual orientation with provocative explanatory power for the origin of nonhomosexual gender dysphoria: flipped heterosexuality.
While many transitioners fit into either the “homosexual” and “transvestic” types, some transitioners resembled the “transvestic” type more closely than the “homosexual” type, yet did not cross-dress. Harry Benjamin (1966) already knew that his “high-intensity” transsexuals either desired to date men as women, “if young,” or had children “using fantasies,” if married. For Blanchard, the missing piece was Philip.
While many patients kept their erotic thoughts private, Philip was unusually forthcoming. Philip found no fulfillment in cross-dressing, but since puberty, fantasized of embodying a woman. Philip attempted dating women, but could not have sex; in his only long-term relationship, he stopped having sex after a few months. Philip was not attracted to men as a man, but rather envisioned heterosexual sex from the woman’s perspective. The man was a faceless abstraction; the focus was on being the woman (1991). Where previous sexologists had only seen the cross-dressing, Blanchard saw a sexual orientation in which one sought to bring to life the vision of oneself as a woman: auto-gynephilia.
Blanchard (1991) returned to the observations of Havelock Ellis decades ago, proposing that auto-gynephilia was a variation of heterosexuality. Anne Lawrence (2007) emphasizes that auto-heterosexuality is not just an erotic phenomenon, but contains deeply emotional romantic elements, just as conventional heterosexuality does. Cross-dreaming can plausibly be a type of romantic fantasy.
Lawrence (2012, Ch. 7) collected narratives from self-identified auto-gynephilic transsexuals noting that their feelings resembled heterosexual attraction. She also quotes Nancy Hunt (1978), “I seethed with envy… I wanted to become possess them even as I wanted to become them,” and Zander (2003), “I used to call this my ‘have her and be her’ fantasy.” The contemporary trans cultural meme of “gender envy” is consistent with these experiences. By the parsimony principle, if it feels like heterosexuality, it’s probably heterosexuality.
Subconscious Sexuality
However, even the portrayal of the trans experience as an autoromantic orientation is unlikely to resonate with the most dysphoric trans people who do identify with the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative. After all, you transition so that you may be comfortable in your body, not to enter a romantic relationship with yourself. The answer is that sexuality permeates one’s consciousness much more deeply than people realize.
A preference for the feminine over the masculine or vice versa, for example, comes from sexuality. In turn, desiring to “feel feminine” by wearing women’s jeans derives from autosexuality. Even the aesthetic appreciation of a statue is filtered through sexuality. (One trick is to imagine switching your sexuality. If gynephilic, imagine you were androphilic instead. Might you view Michelangelo’s David differently?)
Sexuality is not just libido. Sexuality is not even romance. Sexuality is constantly at work. When a straight man walks down the street and sees two women, it only takes a split second for him to tell, as if by instinct, which he finds more beautiful. He does not necessarily have to be aroused to have this thought. He just knows. When a straight man sees another man, he simply knows that he’s not attracted to men. Furthermore, people instantaneously gender others not by checking gonads or chromosomes, but nose, jawline, height, and body frame, all of which exist on a spectrum from masculine to feminine, and correspondingly associated with attractiveness for that gender.
The missing half of auto-gynephilia theory is auto-androphobia. Most people do not process their own body as a partnering target. However, for a subset of auto-heterosexuals, the same instantaneous “attractiveness check” applied to other people will also be performed against themselves. Therefore, for an auto-gynephile, masculine features will look “grotesque” or “wrong,” while feminine features look “right.” The revulsion of bottom dysphoria is equivalent to forcing a straight man to have sex with a man.
There is no cross-sex “brain-body map.” A “female brain-body map” putatively purports to explain why a natal male should look down and feel revulsion at the sight of a phallus, as this is an anatomic difference between males and females. However, transsexuals can be dysphoric about all sex differences, from overt anatomic differences such as genitals, to muscle mass to body hair to subtle details such as facial contours. There is no reason for men and women to develop a sexually-dimorphic neurological “face map,” yet nevertheless MtF transsexuals will look in the mirror at masculine facial features, such as a square chin, a strong jawline, or a pronounced browridge, and feel dysphoric. The heterosexual attractiveness check is what creates the effect of “expecting” to see a female body, but instead seeing a male body, leading to sex dysphoria, or auto-androphobia.
Some interpret this experience as evidence that everyone has a “gender identity” or “subconscious sex,” which goes unnoticed in most people but trans people have mismatched. Instead, we contend that everyone has a subconscious sexuality, and trans people have a subconscious autosexuality. Subconscious sexuality allows us to make sense of trans experiences such as:
Yeah. To be fair, I was never particularly attractive throughout my life. But that’s how most average looking males will feel.
The odd thing however is. Once I realized I was trans. And when I would look at the mirror through the perspective of wanting to feminize my face/ appearance, I feel much more at peace with how I look.
So that probably explains it.
and:
Once male puberty started taking its hold, I started hating my appearance, and I attributed it to holding myself to female beauty standards. It wasn't until my early 20s when I made the connection that I had dysphoria.
and even (from a panicked dysphoric individual who asks if “AGP” has been debunked, and later transitions):
Why do heterosexual people find the idea of the opposite sex attractive as a date but wouldn't want to look like that personally?
This might seem like a troll but it's not.
A dude I go to the gym religiously to get a buff body, and yet the buff look they see in the mirror would be repellent in date.
I girl might spend a long time on beautiful hair and nail selection, but if their date showed up with something similar it would be most likely repellent.
How does this work how is there two different sets of standards how can you be attracted to someone but if they were in the mirror it would be horrible?
Dysphoric auto-heterosexuals tend to be apathetic about their appearance because they cannot see the beauty in their birth sex. This is the meaning of “I’m finally able to smile when I see myself in the mirror.”
Masc Lesbian Guinea Pigs
A notion spread around the trans community, downstream from the belief in a “male brain” and “female brain,” is the concept of “reverse dysphoria.” John Money’s infamous David Reimer experiment is frequently cited as evidence that cisgender people, when transitioned, experience the same mind-body mismatch as transgender people. If Reimer experienced reverse dysphoria, it was reverse HSTS dysphoria.
In a 1958 experiment on intersexuality, researchers Phoenix, Goy, Gerall, and Young injected testosterone into the wombs of pregnant guinea pig mothers to masculinize their female offspring. As hypothesized, the female offspring exposed to testosterone developed penis-like clitorises. In addition, the prenatally treated guinea pigs, even those without enlarged clitorises, did not take the female sexual position of lordosis, but instead took the male position and mounted their untreated female siblings. This result led to the groundbreaking organizational-activational hypothesis of sexual behavior.
Because of this hypothesis, Milton Diamond disputed Money’s theory on gender roles (Colapinto, Ch. 3). While Money reported his “John/Joan” experiment as a success, Diamond would discover that David Reimer had detransitioned to a man. Although Reimer’s mother reared him as “Brenda” at Money’s instruction, Reimer behaved masculine from an early age, down to how he sat. Interestingly, Money (1965) already thought that prenatal hormones influenced sexual behavior.
Although we like to regard sexual orientation as nature (gay people are “born this way”) but gendered behavior as nurture (boys and girls are socialized into different gender roles), they belong to the same phenomenon. Consider the following gendered behavior: Most men love women and most women love men. From this perspective, homosexuality is cross-gender behavior. The 19th century theory of homosexuality as “sexual inversion,” though seemingly passe, is not too far off from the neurohormonal theory of sexual orientation, which implicates homosexuality with an atypical sexual differentiation of the brain.
However, there is no “male brain” or “female brain.” Instead, androphilia probably correlates with certain traits (say, maternalism) while gynephilia correlates with certain traits (say, aggression). Then, society ascribes the “feminine” gender role to androphilic-typical traits and the “masculine” gender role to gynephilic-typical traits. Gendered behavior is really sexual behavior, which we call sexual orientation. “Homosexual transsexualism” really means cross-gender transsexualism, and refers to the extremely rare childhood case where an extremely feminine boy persistently insists he is a girl and does not desist during puberty. Auto-heterosexuals “come out” as trans; childhood androphilic transsexuals are marked as “girlish” by others.
Is the two-type typology invalidating? The typology challenges “feminine essence theory,” the folk wisdom that trans women and cisgender women have a common female mind, such as a “brain sex” or “gender identity.” “Reverse dysphoria” is simply the effort that trans auto-heterosexuals put into gendered mannerisms to pass. (Straight and lesbian women will also differ in mannerisms.) In the end, nobody has a “feminine essence;” cisgender women do not have a “feminine essence.” Trans people become men or women by transitioning.
Not with a Woman, but as a Woman
Blanchard never intended for auto-gynephilia to be a pejorative. In a time when one mere act of cross-dressing could disqualify someone from transition, Blanchard’s work helped expand access for “secondary” transsexuals. “HSTS” and “AGP” were meant to be descriptive, value-neutral terms to replace hierarchical pairs such as “primary” and “secondary” or “true” and “pseudo,” establishing both types on equal footing.
Blanchard (1993) likened transition for an “autogynephile” to marriage for a heterosexual. In sexology discourse, androphilia is the normal sexual orientation of heterosexual females and homosexual males and gynephilia is the normal sexual orientation of heterosexual males and homosexual females. Allosexuality is sexual attraction to others and autosexuality is sexual orientation towards oneself. So, allo-gynephiles wish to live with a woman and auto-gynephiles wish to live as a woman.
Blanchard (2005) wrote,
My colleagues and I at the Clarke Institute were accustomed—again, under the influence of Kurt Freund—to referring to the erotic preference for adult women as gynephilia rather than heterosexuality, because the former denotes both the gender and the age of an individual’s preferred partners, whereas the latter denotes only the gender. It was thus a small step for me to prefix gynephilia with auto to produce autogynephilia.
Blanchard worked within the setting of sexology, steeped in clinical language like this. More than anything else, however, perhaps Freund’s preference of gynephilia over heterosexuality, inherited by Blanchard, would set the tone of all subsequent discourse.
Everyone knows what heterosexuality is. Laypeople don’t know what androphilia and gynephilia are. Several prominent trans academics attempted to censor Blanchard. Transphobes lifted the word “auto-gynephilia,” without engaging with Blanchard’s work or the sexological work that preceded it, to attack the trans community. From there came the strawman of the typology, invoking cultural anxieties about trans people: “Gay men who transition to sleep with straight men, or straight men with a fetish.” The trans community itself then internalized this strawman as a meme. Once “AGP” became an insult, the well was poisoned.
Ultimately, the trans community’s attack on Blanchard was the explosion of pent-up anger against decades of pathologization by sexologists. Meanwhile, Blanchard identified a phenomenon, reversed heterosexuality, but as a sexologist communicated it in the most awful-sounding way. However, auto-heterosexuality does not belong to Blanchard any more than it belongs to Hirschfeld or Havelock Ellis.
Queer Heterosexuality
Despite its present rejection of auto-heterosexuality theory, trans subculture interestingly already treats being trans somewhat like a sexual orientation, with the trappings such as pride flags. While the abstraction of “gender identity” can be difficult for people to comprehend, articulating LGBT as lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and reversed heterosexuals makes intuitive sense.
As increase in trans awareness has led to a decline of the manufactured “classical transsexual” narrative and rise of “egg crack” narratives, the controversial “egg prime directive” dictates not to suggest that another person may be trans - as being trans can be scary. Auto-heterosexuality solves this dilemma by separating the underlying sexual orientation from the action of transition. “Trans” is not an intrinsic identity, but the natural division between transitioning and non-transitioning auto-heterosexuals.
A 20th century trans joke goes, “What is the difference between a transvestite and transsexual? Five years.” Where have the heterosexual cross-dressers gone today? Mistakenly including “femboys” in an article on “effeminate gay bottoms,” Richard Vytniorgu (2022) writes,
These are not simply gay males who enjoy bottoming: they are self-identified effeminate androphilic males who exclusively seek to be penetrated by dominant, masculine men and in such a union, to adopt a stereotypical—even exaggerated—role traditionally associated in Europe and North America with women.
Contrast this with Blanchard (1989):
For these persons, the male sexual partner serves the same function as women’s apparel or make-up, namely, to aid and intensify the fantasy of being a woman.
Femboys are not androphilic, but auto-gynephilic - straight males who desire to be feminine for heterosexual reasons, putting on a straight male’s affect of what is feminine and attractive, different from the effeminacy of a gay bottom or the theatrical cross-dressing of gay culture. Submission to masculine men is a performance of pseudo-androphilic meta-attraction, the attraction to the dynamic between the feminine self and the masculine partner. The bottom role, like the thigh-highs and skirt, is part of the femboy costume. A century ago Hirschfeld identified cross-dressing as a separate phenomenon from homosexuality, yet even today academics continue to confuse them.
More suggestively, Wikipedia links femboys to its article on “queer heterosexuality.” Like Ellis and Blanchard, the femboy Wikipedia article correctly intuits that femboys display a variant of heterosexuality - where heterosexual norms reflect back onto a person’s own gender expression. Auto-heterosexuality has usefulness as neutral, descriptive term for a phenomenon currently being identified incorrectly as “effeminate gay bottoms” or insufficiently as “queer heterosexuality.” The two-type typology may be generalized to distinguish homosexuality from auto-heterosexuality, and extended to gay bottoms and femboys. What is the difference between a femboy and a trans woman? Twink death. (Although “twink” is gay slang, the femboy motivation is not gay, but straight!)
Therefore, there is no intrinsic essence of “trans.” Dysphoric auto-heterosexual transsexuals have a strong heterosexual disgust response against their own body, leading to a strong drive to pass and assimilate. Other auto-heterosexuals enjoy occasional cross-dressing and do not experience dysphoria. However, the “gender identity” narrative interprets mild dysphoria as a reason to transition, even if doing so leads to self-destructive behaviors. (Transitioning, or realizing one is “trans,” should never increase dysphoria!!)
If a belief in “gender identity” leads people to make decisions against their best interest, then “gender identity” is a bad abstraction. Instead of suggesting that someone is an “egg,” suggesting that they may be “auto-heterosexual” lets them know that they may derive pleasure from embodying traits of the opposite sex, and may even experience unrecognized dysphoria - but lets them deal with the revelation on their own terms.
Ultimately, auto-heterosexuality gives a name to another type of cross-gender expression (such as femboy-ism) that people may intuitively grasp, but are hitherto unable to articulate. Therefore, auto-heterosexuality, not dissimilar to the “transgender umbrella,” encompasses femboys, transsexuals, and many others in between. However, auto-heterosexuality discards the abstraction of “gender identity” and reveals a sexual orientation.
The Most Common Sexual Orientation of All
In “Whatever Happened to the Transgender Tipping Point?”, Samantha Allen surveys backsliding public sentiment towards transgender people. Cultural visibility alone has not translated into concrete protections, and in some cases, has made transgender people more vulnerable to culture war. Now a decade after the “transgender tipping point,” Allen’s inferences have only become all the more urgent.
Allen wonders whether trans advocacy can copy the model of gay activism, or whether it must forge its own path. Gay activism, Allen argues, succeeded by appealing to love, an experience that heterosexuals could empathize with. Same-sex marriage won when it shifted its message from the abstract notion of rights to the personal notion of love because “almost everyone knows what it’s like to love someone.”
Meanwhile, Allen points out, trans people must deal with issues of others’ choosing: bathroom debates, job discrimination, and violence. In the years since, adult HRT access and legal ID change have come under threat. None of these topics are as inspiring as love. The challenge is that unlike gay people, trans people require sympathy for a plight that others cannot understand.
Transgender allies… have to do more than just extrapolate their own experiences of love onto another group.
They have to ponder what it might be like to have an experience that is empirically valid but completely foreign to their own embodied understanding of the world.
The classical transsexual narrative of “trapped in the wrong body” is superficially plausible, but other people can’t truly comprehend what it means. However, what if underneath the rare trans experience was actually the most common sexual orientation of all?
If a straight man can understand that he loves women and cannot be forced to be with a man, he can understand why a gay man cannot be forced to marry a woman. Perhaps he can try to understand a trans person too. Behind gender dysphoria is the plight of heterosexuals trapped in same-sex marriage with their own body, even with their own genitals - trapped in the wrong body.
Not only does “love” allow people to empathize with trans plight, it allows people to empathize with trans aspirations too. Phil Illy (2023) writes, “The idea of autoheterosexuality allows heterosexuals to understand—as best they can—that some people have the same sort of strong feelings about being the other gender that they have toward the other gender.” While most men dream of meeting their queen and most women dream of meeting their dashing knight, auto-heterosexual males dream of being the queen and auto-heterosexual females dream of being the knight. While most heterosexuals live with a man or woman, some just live as a man or woman.
The Love that Speaks Many Names
Therefore, auto-heterosexuality, far from being either a debunked transphobic theory or a cudgel against “fake” trans people, accurately and usefully describes a broad continuum from cissexual femboys to transsexuals “trapped in the wrong body.” We must correct strawmans of the two-type typology, spread by transphobes. In reality, the rare homosexual transsexuals are “childhood” transsexuals with persistent, observable cross-gender behavior, while the more common trans auto-heterosexuals develop dysphoria puberty-onset or later. The typology lets others know that dysphoric individuals who never showed early childhood “signs” are “really trans,” and their plight is real.
Onlooker John McLaughlin remarks,
One plausible explanation of why same-sex marriage eventually gained overwhelming public approval is that the basic concepts the movement relied upon—male, female and homosexuality—have existed since time immemorial…. Trans activism, on the other hand, seems to invoke so many new or contrived concepts…
Hiding itself in history with gestures and codes, homosexuality is the love that dare not speak its name. Where do most trans people come from? While “gender identity” introduces confusing new concepts, the actual answer, supported by science going a century back, is much simpler: flipped heterosexuality. Trans is a sexual orientation. Auto-heterosexuality grounds being trans in familiar and stabilizing ideas: man, woman, and heterosexuality. Existing across history is the love that speaks many names, from Eonism to auto-heterosexuality.
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