The Autogynephilia Project

Thomas Hubbard (Wikipedia) was previously a classicist at the University of Texas-Austin who wrote/edited several important books on sex in ancient Greece and Rome, until some students took his discussions of ancient man-boy sexuality as a defence of modern pederasty and vandalised his house. This led to his retirement. He is now President and Executive Director of the William A Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies.

William A Percy (Wikipedia) is best known for The Age of Marriage in Ancient Rome (2003) and was a co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990). The articles in the Encyclopedia on ‘Transvestism (Cross-dressing)’ and ‘Transsexualism’ were pretty bad generally, totally ignoring writings by trans persons, and also admiring the pioneering transphobe Janice Raymond - but they were written by the other two co-editors, not by Percy. See my “More on Wayne Dynes”. I did meet Percy in person. He asked me various questions re trans matters, but showed no conscious interest in autogynephilia as such - although he did offer to sponsor me to go to Fantasia Fair (which I declined).

Percy, before his death in 2022, maintained an extensive web site williamapercy.com but the Foundation set up in his name has allowed it to die.

The Foundation web page lists 14 projects, almost all related to male homosexuality. The odd one out is The Autogynephilia Project.

Let us start with the image on the Autogynephila Project page:

This is a 1841 painting of a cis woman admiring herself in a mirror by the Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg.

Now the point of Autogynephilia is that it is a diagnosis of a type of boy or man who is sexually aroused by the idea of himself as female. Autoandrophilia is a girl or woman who likewise is sexually aroused by the idea of herself as male. One of the criticisms of the idea of Autogynephilia is that if there is actually such a thing, its most common occurrence is in post-pubertal teenage cis girls who are delighted by the changes in their maturing bodies. Some cis women continue to be autogynephilic well into maturity, as some cis men do continue to be autoandrophilic. If so, autogynephilia is a normal variation, not a mental illness. It occurs in mature trans women to the extent that transition is a sort of second puberty.

Very little research has been done on cis female autogynephilia, and thus there is no baseline against which to measure trans female autogynephilia.

However the Blanchard-Bailey-Zucker clique do not go with this interpretation.

The picture is definitely not an image of an autogynephilic trans girl.

So why this image? Does it imply that Hubbard etc do not understand what autogynephilia is supposed to be? Or is it a sly subversion of their own project?

What is Autogynephilia (AGP)?

Prior to 1910 the words ‘transvestite’ and ‘tranvestism’ had been used without specific reference to sexual arousal or orientation. The Paris police had been issuing permissions de travestissement since 1800 mainly to female-born persons living and/or working as male without reference to sexuality. In 1910 Magnus Hirschfeld published his Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb,(Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress) and two years later a pictorial supplement, Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Erotic crossdressing).

The inclusion of “erotischen Verkleidungstrieb” in the title misled later writers although we may note that many of the actual case studies in the former book do not report anything sexual as such. Due to criticisms that he had conflated homosexuality and transvestism in earlier writings, Hirschfeld had overcompensated, and for the 17 case studies that comprise Part 1, he systematically excluded androphilic transvestites. Eight years later in his Sexualpathologie he reversed this and reported that about 35 per cent of transvestites are heterosexual and an equal percentage homosexual, while about 15 per cent are bisexual. The remaining 15 per cent are mostly what he called automonosexual, but also include a small proportion of asexuals. Hirschfeld also arranged police permissions, translating the French permissions de travestissement as Transvestitenscheinen, and, as in Paris, the document was with reference to work, not to sexuality.

Various psychiatrists, notably Emil Gutheil and Wilhelm Stekel, mainly working as Freudian psychoanalysts, picked up on the erotic slant, and analysed their trans patients as needing to be cured. (Stekel apparently coined the term ‘paraphilia’.)

Kurt Freund, in Toronto in the 1980s was a pioneer in the application of penile plethysmography. This tool claimed to measure penile arousal when a ‘man’ was shown various pictures of adults and children or listened to descriptions of such. The results of this research were such that Freund was never able to identify anyone as bisexual, and so, rather than see this as a defect in his methodology, he claimed that there are no bisexuals. Despite this deficiency, he used penile plethysmography, to divide trans women into two groups whom he designated as ‘homosexual’ and ‘non-homosexual’. For both types, the term ‘homosexual’ for heterosexual trans women denies that we are women.

Ray Blanchard, who replaced Freund at Toronto’s Clarke Institute (now CAMH=Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) coined the term ‘autogynephilia’ for the ‘non-homosexual’ group. In his “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia” he defines it as “a male’s propensity to be erotically aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman”. Blanchard was criticised for dismissing exceptions to his model as either misreportings or even lies.

Other approaches

Of course the word “autogynephilia” is simply “love of oneself as a woman” using Greek roots. Apparently most of the cross-dressers and gynephilic trans women who do use the term “autogynephilic” for themselves use it in this sense without the baggage of fetish or erotic arousal. Indeed an actual erotic arousal while out shopping or on public transport is very likely to be problematic.

Anne Vitale proposed a 3-type division: G1 the high intensity trans person who often starts to transition in childhood; G2 persons who spend some years as a lesbian or gay man before transition; G3 persons who conform to society’s gender expectations, often marry and have children - they typically suffer increasingly painful and chronic gender dysphoria and live secretive lives. G1 and G2 transition without trauma, requiring medical assistance only for hormone prescriptions and gender surgery. G3 need help dealing with what she calls Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD) which seems to be similar to AGP but offers a healthier solution.

There is a cultural problem in that AGPs seem to be found only in North America and Europe. Rod Fleming claims to identify AGPs in the Philippines and wrote about his affair with Samantha whom he presents as AGP. He sees Filipino AGPs as not androphilic, but like androphilic trans women they transition before maturity although after puberty. In which case they do not go through the fetishistic (GEDAD) phase - and therefore do not meet Blanchard's definition.

Charlotte Goiar proposed the concept of Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) as opposed to autogynephiles. To many, HBS and Blanchard’s Homosexual Transsexual (HSTS) appear to be almost the same, but HBS and Blanchardianism are two solitudes not talking to each other.

Jack Molay took what is useful in the concept of autogynephila and came up with Crossdreamer - ‘transvalued’ as he says. “The act of dreaming about being one’s target sex or getting aroused by the idea of being one’s target sex. Crossdreamer is a subcategory under the wider umbrella term ‘transgender’ … Crossdreamers may be assigned male or female at birth. Their sexual orientation varies. There is no clear and distinct boundary between crossdreamers and other transgender people.” Crossdreamer is not a synonym for autogynephilia in that it does not require erotic arousal.

The anti-trans people, TERFs, Trump’s Maga people, and various religious groups, are delighted by the concept of Autogynephilia. They see all transsexuality as inauthentic, and a mental condition to be cured. Blanchardism feeds their prejudices and they see even HSTS as autogynephilic. “Autogynephilia” has become a strong insult term applied without discrimination.

Meanwhile out in the trenches of living as AGP, Rosey Bloomflower, a self described autogynephilic wrote comments on my encyclopedia two years ago: “Interestingly, the majority of the soi-disant autogynephiles in my generation (bear in mind I am quite young, going on 20 right now) seem to be exclusively attracted to other trans women. I have a boyfriend at the moment, but sometimes a relationship with a non-op trans woman does seem appealing. I am not attracted to genetic females or anyone with a vagina even if surgically constructed”. This is way beyond Blanchard. “It is my belief that the majority of "AGP" trans women are primarily attracted to other trans women, and only force themselves to sexually interact with cis women out of heteronormativity and internalized homophobia. You can see many cases where they divorce their cis wives if they had one, and partner with another trans woman after transitioning.”

I commented in reply: “Two trans women attracted to each other is a type of homosexuality. 'homo' = 'same' not 'male'. If they also self-id as AGP then they are homosexual AGPs, but Blanchard's definition of AGP (bi, hetero and asexual) is that AGPs are non-homosexual. So here we have an interesting contradiction of terms. Blanchard is a closeted gay man who has made comments outside his theoretical works that are even more anti-trans. His whole schema is a cisplaining using insulting terms/exonyms derived from the dubious concept of 'fetishism', and he has even refused to restate it in more polite terms.”

Recently, psychologist James Morandini has proposed that as many as 1 in 3 bisexual men may be autogynephilic. So much for Freund’s erasure of bisexuality.

Conclusion

Of course the problem with any Typology is human beings are idiosyncratic, they are human. Some appear to fit into one of the boxes of the Typology; others are re-interpreted until they appear to fit; others read the Typology as an instruction manual; and many just do not fit in any way at all. See my The Game of Typology. Blanchard proposed only two types of trans woman; Vitale proposed three; Harry Benjamin proposed six (and, as has been noted, he erased gay transvestites and gynephilic ‘true transsexuals’ ); in my expansion of Benjamin’s scale I propose nine. One could easily come up with many more - especially when indigenous and Asian variations are considered.

Hubbard writes: “The Percy Foundation is funding further study of this marginalized identity by an international team of prominent sexual scientists, led by Prof. J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern, and including Blanchard, Ken Zucker … and the evolutionary psychologist Paul Vasey, as well as several others.”

This team can hardly be objective in that Bailey, Blanchard and Zucker have built careers by assuming that AGP is a real thing. For them to find that AGP is a valid diagnosis is like a defence lawyer also being the judge and jury.

Hubbard shows no discomfort at the misuse of the word “homosexual” for heterosexual trans women, as if we were still in the 1980s. It is long past the time when Blanchardians should have proposed a less contentious terminology. Alice Novic proposed the terms Love-to-be-femme and Act-femme. Phil Illy has proposed AutoHeterosexual. Neither of these have been accepted. The only alternate term that has gained traction is Cross Dreamer with its significant revision of what AGP is.

It may not be a real thing, but in the last 40 years, different writers have taken different approaches to the conceptual nexus that encompasses AGP, GEDAD and cross dreaming. There is no indication that The Androphilia Project will absorb any of that, or even discuss the absence of AGP in Africa and Asia, or in previous centuries. The sociology or social psychology of identity formation is not even mentioned.

The Androphilia Project needs a rethink, and should be done by other more neutral people, not those who invented the concept and built their careers on taking it as fact.

• Magnus Hirschfeld. Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb, mit umfangreichem kasuistischem und historischem Material. Verlag Alfred Pulvermacher, 1910.

• Magnus Hirschfeld & Max Tilke. Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb: Die Transvestiten. Verlag von Alfred Pulvermacher & Co., 1912.

• Magnus Hirschfeld. Sexualpathologie. Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende. 1918. Volume II: Sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Das Mannlicher Weib und der Weiblicher Mann. (5 Sections: Hermaproditismus, Androgynie, Transvestitismus, Homosexualität, Metatropismus).

• Wilhelm Stekel. Der Fetischismus, vol. 7, Störungen des Trieb- und Affektlebens. Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1923. Translated by S Parker: Sexual Aberrations: The Phenomena of Fetishism in Relation to Sex. John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd, 1930.

• Kurt Freund, Betty Steiner & Samuel Chan. “Two types of cross-gender identity”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 1982.

• Kurt Freund. “Cross-Gender Identity on a Broader Context”. Chp 9 in Betty Steiner. Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management. Plenum Press, 1985.

• Ray Blanchard, J G Racansky & Betty Steiner. “Phallometric Detection of Fetishistic Arousal in Heterosexual Male Cross-Dressers”. The Journal of Sex Research, 22, 4, November 1986.

• Ray Blanchard. “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia”. Feb 2004. Previously online at www.autogynephilia.org/origins.htm.

• Anne M. Vitale. Gendered Self: Further Commentary on the Transsexual Phenomenon. Flyfisher Press/Lulu, 2010.

• Jack Molay. A Creative Crossdreamer Vocabulary: Reflections on Transgender. Amazon Digital & Blurb, 2015.

• Charlotte Goiar. The Original Harry Benjamin Syndrome Book. Self published, 2021.

• Phil Illy. AutoHeterosexual: Attracted to being the other sex. Houndstooth, 2023.

• “The Autogynephilia Project”. William A Percy Foundation for Social and Historical Studies. Online.

• Andrea James. “Thomas K. Hubbard vs. transgender people”. Transgender Map, November 3, 2025. Online.

• James Morandini. “One in Three Bisexual Men May Be Autogynephilic. Understanding Their Experience Matters”. QueerMajority, November 18, 2025. Online.

Rod Fleming (1956 - ) writer, photographer, lover of trans women

Rod Fleming, raised in Scotland, cis, attended Edinburgh School of Art in the 1980s – where he first met some trans women – and became a journalist and photographer. He married a woman; they had four children. He also wrote fiction and non-fiction.

Fleming’s mother died in 2005 and he and his wife separated in 2009. He took a year off, did a masters degree at Dundee University, and lived in Paris.

In 2012, he went to the Philippines on a standard 3-week visa in response to Crissy, a trans woman whom he had met online. “She surprised me. She was tall, not lightly built, not really graceful, but quite beautiful in her face. She had been taking hormones for years and this had softened her skin and smoothed her features; but she did not really look like a girl. She was striking rather than pretty.” (see Palawan; Transsexualism: A position statement)

He encountered the Canadian K Burkowski, on the Facebook site for the World Pantheist Movement where they were both liking the same comments. They never met in person but collaborated in a book on religion which was published as Why Men Made God, 2015, in which among other aspects they consider trans priestesses and two-spirit cultures, drawing in particular on the writings of Amara Das Wilhelm, author of Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex.

Also in 2015 Fleming published a novel The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train which is about a divorced journalist in Paris who becomes involved with a Brazilian trans prostitute, leading to a scandal that almost brings down the French government. Fleming noted: 

“My ideas about gender in particular were formed by the research and writing of The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train. Although it is a breathlessly-paced romantic adventure, it required me to dig deep into the natures of gender and sexuality, something I had never done before.” 

His major influence at this time was Kulick’s book, Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Also, using a Portuguese translator, he did telephone interviews with Brazilian trans women, both in France and in Brazil.

Becoming more and more conscious that some trans women were somewhat different from how he imagined them, that is as “small, lightly built, cute, pretty, incredibly feminine and extremely retiring”, Fleming discovered Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would be Queen. 

“The first time I read it I was discouraged. I could respond to much of the book but there was something about it that pushed me away and at the time I could not really figure out what that might be”. (see “Transsexualism: A Position Statement”)

He blogged against Bailey. As Kay Brown put it: “Flemming started out his blogging career dissing Blanchard until I (yes me) convinced him of the reality of the Two Type Taxonomy. He later called me ‘friend’ when someone else mentioned me. He also invited me to write for his blog on the topic. I declined.”

He continued to meet Filipino trans women, and had a revelation. 

“The penny dropped. Western observers, and even Dr Winter, had failed to see it: there were two types of transsexualism in SE Asia. There was one type that was clearly defined and who, within their group, were all remarkably similar, and another type that was totally disparate in every way. They were tall, they were short, they were somewhat feminine, they were very masculine; many did not seem to date men at all whereas others did; some even had girlfriends. Most surprising was the latter’s attitude towards sex. Remember, none of the girls I met were active prostitutes. They were just being themselves. The small pretty ones were forward in their desire to get into bed with me; the others…well, they wanted to date me, but they were cool about sex. It just didn’t seem to be very important to them. … In SE Asia, non-homosexual transsexuals, or AGPs, tend to transition in their teens after puberty, whereas HSTS will have been displaying Gender Non-Conformity (GNC) before puberty. Thus the groups conform to the APA’s fudged and misleading classification of ‘early’ and ‘late’ onset. This is valid in the case of HSTS but many people, wrongly, assume that ‘late’ means middle age, as was typical of Blanchard’s AGP sample. But the APA is clear: ‘late’, here, means ‘at puberty or later’ while ‘early’ means ‘before puberty’.” (Most of the above taken from Fleming’s Transsexualism: A Position Statement).

In October 2015 Fleming responded on Quora to the question 'Is transgenderism natural?' by giving the usual citations of the worldwide occurrences of trans women. He then continued:

“The other type of MtF transgender, Blanchard's autogynephile, is much more problematic. It does not occur in many parts of the world at all. ('Zero percent' in Singapore, for example and similarly in a large study done in Thailand by Sam Winter; it is, as far as I can see, unknown in the Philippines to the point that transwomen there have difficulty grasping the concept.) AGP appears to be concentrated in the West, particularly the Anglo-Saxon West and especially the UK and the USA. Although there is evidence of AGP in persons of colour in these areas, it is predominantly experienced by white, middle-class individuals. Given these factors, it seems likely that AGP is not an innate part of human variation but instead a culturally-induced condition.”

This has since been removed from Quora.

As Fleming put it: 

“I looked at Bailey’s major source, Blanchard, and there found reasoned and well- constructed scientific papers that dealt with the matter in very detached terms, relying on statistics.” Aware of the controversial nature of this position, he endorsed it. He dismissed Andrea James and Lynn Conway as ‘histrionic agitators’. (Transsexualism: A Position Statement”)

In May 2016 he gave a positive review of Bailey’s book on his blog, and he and Kay Brown exchanged compliments.

Over the next two years Fleming posted several accounts of his position, and repeated that the second type trans women in the Philippines are different from Western Autogynephiles, but still referred to them using that term.

In October 2017, Key Brown commented – that is to say corrected – on “Transgender, transsexual and transvestite”. Fleming responded: 

“What you are actually doing is saying that you don’t like my findings because they challenge your own, and instead of going to Asia and finding out for yourself how things are, you’d rather I just shut up. I have no intention of so doing. You are patronising and demeaning towards me in an attempt to suggest that you — a person who has done precisely no field research in Asia– are more qualified than I am to discuss that which I have been studying. I don’t think so.”

Also that month Fleming published “Not Men: bekis in the Philippines” explaining Filipino gender roles using the concept “not-men” taken from Kulick’s studies in Brazil: 

“Traditional Filipino society is divided into two social groups: men, and everyone else. Borrowing from Kulick, I call the latter ‘not men’. This group is formed of women, children, female and gender non-conforming adolescents, and older ‘not men’ including gay males and transsexuals. Kulick goes as far as to define gender in Brazil as ‘men’ and ‘not men’ and, again, I agree with him. Gender conforming adolescent males form a ‘proto-men’ group, where they learn the social skills needed to join the ‘men’ group. Typically these include playing basketball, football and similar sports (but not volleyball); learning how to chase girls; learning how to talk about girls as sexual objects; often, learning to smoke and crucially, learning to drink. As they grow into adulthood, boys like this will be accepted into the ‘men’ group. So the ‘proto-men’ group is an extension of the ‘men’ group, not distinct from it. Any gender non-conforming (GNC) boy, teenage or adult male is automatically placed in the ‘not men’ group. The reasons for this are complex but devolve to showing ‘unmasculine’ character traits. These include things like being somewhat nervous; being a pretty boy; having crushes on men and boys, liking to dance; liking flowers; liking to wear feminine clothes; the desire to be a woman and feeling ‘like a woman inside’.”

Later that month when Fleming published “Autogynephilia: Sex as a woman”, Brown commented: 

“I have met a few Asian AGPs… and they are EXACTLY the same as Western AGPs… and while there are fewer of them as a percentage, as has been shown in study after study, it is NOT correlated with tolerance, as the data clearly shows that the cultural property that is key is that of individuality vs. collectivism (at the family level), as shown by two separate studies (and thus we have replication, the hallmark of good science. This essay is disturbing and wrong… in that it fails to note that at least 50% of HSTS make strong statements of experiencing extreme gender dysphoria at BEFORE puberty. And Yes, like gay men, they were extremely feminine BEFORE puberty, but remained so after age 10 or so, the age when gay men start to defemininize. Thus, their gender issues are not directly mediated by a desire to have sex with men… which is a secondary issue related to their core issue that gender and sexual orientation are indeed correlated.”

Fleming quoted some Asian AGPs that he had met, and replied: 

“Can you explain to these statements, both from Asian transwomen, in terms other than those I have outlined? In fact, the rewards discussed in Blanchard, leaving aside cross-dressed masturbation, are very much alike for both types of MtF TS/TG, as I detailed. The fact is that the Asian model is current throughout most of the world, with only certain parts of the West, notably the Anglo-Saxon and particularly USican ones, being different. Do I detect a sense of white cultural entitlement? That would be disappointing. … AS to ‘defeminisation’ of gay men, I am interested to see how you explain this in a social milieu where young TS/TG of both types are taking hormones from the age of 13 or 14. This is replicated in Latin America, where, as in Asia, contraceptive pills are available, over the counter, very cheaply, without prescription. The fact is that if an MtF trans person wishes to feminise, or not to masculinise, in any of these territories, they can, and do, achieve this very cheaply using birth control pills. … This supports the suggestion that AGPs in the West are remaining hidden for far longer. What do you think could cause that, other than social intolerance? And further, how do you account for the fact that, as social intolerance reduces, we are seeing a rapid increase in young TS/TG? Are you saying they are ALL HSTS? If you are, you just torpedoed your argument about gay men ‘defeminising’.”

Fleming then added an extra comment: 

“When I first responded to this comment by Kay Brown, I assumed that Brown was HSTS. This is an impression that Brown has spared no effort to cultivate. But it is not supported by observation. This is Brown’s self-penned bio page. It is quite clear from the pictures contained in it that Brown is most unlikely to be HSTS. It is common for AGPs to try to colonise HSTS identity, but this example shocks me, I must admit. This likely explains Brown’s clear rage response.”

In 2016 Fleming had met transpinay Samantha Villasencio, “one of the most beautiful girls I’d ever met” and they became lovers. He stayed with her after she was diagnosed as HIV+, and until her death in October 2023.

In February 2022, Fleming revived his speculation re his former mentor and posted “Kay Brown: an example of appropriation?”. He cited her activist record as a Blanchardian, and her self-identification as HSTS. The latter he rejects: 

“However even cursory examination of her body morphology and career indicates that this diagnosis would be unlikely”. 

Brown of course rejected this, but on the grounds

“but I really was 'early onset' as my mother confirmed to Dr. Norman Fisk at Stanford in early '75, when at 17”.

--------------------------------

My reading here is that Fleming is approaching an important question, but I suspect that many of you, as I am, are put off by the Blanchardian language. Let us rephrase it. If gender identity and sexual orientation are both biologically determined, then the proportion of trans women who are androphilic or gynephilic should be roughly equal in quite different cultures. However this is not the case. The majority of trans women in northern Euro-America are gynephilic and late transitioners, while in South East Asia 95%+ are assumed to be androphilic, and almost all have transitioned by the mid 20s. So why this difference? Fleming’s answer is that a second type of trans women is indeed there, but was not noticed by Winter et al. So the question becomes why did Winter not see them? It would be very useful if either Filipino or Western academics or both specifically addressed the question.

Brown was of course missing the point. Fleming had identified ‘early onset’ AGPs as common in the Philippines, but not recognised in North America/Europe. Brown says that she had transitioned by age 17, and therefore could not be compared to Fleming’s second type even though they generally transitioned as teenagers, that is at the same age or younger than she did.

In my article, “What is Autogynephilia?”, I criticized Blanchardism for conflating independent variables. An AGP is taken to be: 1) A late transitioner 2) Gynephilic, usually a husband and father 3) Well employed. The stereotype is to work with computers. This is opposed to HSTS which is a conflation of 1) An early transitioner 2) Androphilic 3) Living on the margins of society without a regular job. Many are assumed to be prostitutes, performers or working in gay bars. Kay Brown, tech entrepreneur, engineer and patent holder, would be by her own account HSTS 1 and 2, but AGP 3. Not that this is in any way a criticism of any person; it is a criticism of the Blanchard Binary. See also Andrea James’ profile of Candice Brown Elliot aka Kay Brown.

Fleming is adding body morphology to the three independent variables. He more than once uses the phrase “small, lightly built, cute, pretty, incredibly feminine and extremely retiring”. This is a set of criteria that only a few cis women attain. Why should trans women be measured by this any more than cis woman are? Likewise Fleming claims that Brown is obviously autoandrophilic in that she does not meet his specifications in appearance. Does he regard most cis woman as also failing to meet these criteria? There are plenty of cis woman, like Brown in their 60’s, who look kind of similar to her.

If body morphology is taken as a criterion, we open the door to the concepts of HSTS trapped in the body of an AGP, and AGP trapped in the body of an HSTS.

Actually, where is the ‘autogynephilia’? Blanchard’s definition is: “a man's paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman". Fleming does not even discuss such paraphilic arousal in his second type who generally transition after puberty, but as teenagers. The paraphilic tendency that is supposed to be a defining aspect of Autogynephilia is presumably a result of not having transitioned earlier. The gynephilic early transitioners who are becoming more common in North America and Europe as more loving parents are accepting seem not to be autogynephilic either. Anne Vitale, for her G3 type patient – the equivalent of autogynephilic – regards the pathology as Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD): that it is this deprivation, not a person’s gender identity, that she seeks to treat. And she regards G3 patients as mature, probably middle-aged or older. Like other trans persons, they did have female yearnings from childhood, but did not transition earlier. Fleming’s second type do transition earlier.

“The fact is that the Asian model is current throughout most of the world, with only certain parts of the West, notably the Anglo-Saxon and particularly USican ones, being different. Do I detect a sense of white cultural entitlement?” I am with Fleming on this point. It was inadvisable for Brown to pontificate on the situation in the Philippines to someone actually living there. It is a problem that gay and trans history is Euro/US centric. It would be good to have a world history that takes the east and south Asian (and the American two-spirit) tradition as the norm, and explain why Europe was different. Between the 4^th century and the appearance of the mollies in the early 18^th century you can almost count known trans persons in Europe on your fingers. Christian oppression was a major factor, although it is the case that Filipino transpinay and Brazilian travestis are living in strongly Catholic societies.

One of the objections to the term ‘autogynephilia” is that it has become a simple insult term, particularly as used by TERFs etc who are delighted to have a semi-academic term that implies that trans women have a mental illness. It is therefore ironic that when Fleming was irritated by Brown, ‘autogynephiliac’ was the term that he flung at her. This is further ironic in that Brown who shared an apartment with Joy Shaffer whom she described as “ best friend, point of stability, and sister”, later described her as ‘autogynephilic”.

Andrea James reads Fleming thus: “Some trans-attracted people who engage in “autogynephilia” activism wish to distance their own attractions from trans women they consider “autogynephiles.” In some cases, it is because they see “AGP” trans women as a threat to their “heterosexual” identity. They often brag about how “heterosexual” they are and how the “homosexual transsexual” people they desire are extremely feminine and only interested in masculine “heterosexual” partners like them. Trans-attracted people who use the terms “homosexual transsexual” or “HSTS” are among the most obsessed with “autogynephilia” and creator Ray Blanchard’s taxonomy of “HSTS” and “AGP,” because it’s so important to their own sexual identities.” This is of course armchair psycho-analysis, but it is a hypothesis that needs more work.

Comparing lovers of seropositive trans women: Rod Fleming did stay and comfort his Samantha to the end, unlike Lou Reed who broke off with his Rachel and left her to die in poverty and loneliness.

By Rod Fleming:

• “Palawan, Philippines, 2012”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2013-06-28. Online.

• The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train. Rare Rose Press, 2015.

• with K. Burkowski. Why Men Made God: Redefining the Sacred. Redefining the Sacred, PlashMill Press, 2015.

• “Explaining transsexualism”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2016-7-14. Online.

• “The Man Who Would be Queen”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2016-5-17. Online. (positive review)

• “Transgender, transsexual and transvestite”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-1-10. Online.

• “Autogynephilic and HomoSexual MtF in Asia”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-10-16. Online.

• “Not Men: bekis in the Philippines”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-10-22. Online.

• “Transsexualism: A Position Statement”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2017-10-29. Online.

• “Autogynephilia: Sex as a woman”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2018-9-19. Online.

• “The Warm Pink Jelly Express Train transsexual lives”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2018-9-26. Online.

• “Kay Brown: an example of appropriation?”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2022-2-14. Online.

• “Sam and Rod: How it all began”. Rod Fleming’s World, 2023-10-21. Online.

WordPress     Rod Fleming’s World      Amazon Author Page

By Others:

• Don Kulick. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

• Don Kulick. The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. American Anthropologist, 99, 3, Sep 1997.

• Sam Winter. “Thai transgenders in focus: demographics, transitions and identities”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 9, 1, 2006: 15-27.

• Sam Winter, Sass Rogando & Mark King. “Transgendered Women of the Philippines”. International Journal of Transgenderism, 10, 2, 2007: 79-90.

• Zagria. “What is Autogynephilia?”. GVWW, 22 March 2011. Online.

• Zagria. “Joy Shaffer (1955-) doctor”. GVWW, 19 January 2016. Online.

• Zagria. “Anne Vitale (1938 - ) gender therapist”. GVWW, 12 May 2016. Online.

• Siobhan O’leary. “A misogynist by any other name would smell just as putrid”. Medium, Nov 15, 2017. Online.

• Andrea James. “Rod Fleming vs. transgender people” Transgender Map, Online.

• Andrea James. “Candice Brown Elliott / ‘sillyolme’ and transgender people”. Transgender Map, Online.

Homosexual autogynephilics?

In November 2012 I wrote an article "The ebb and flow of social constructions" mainly re the two currents of HBS and AGP.   There has been no activity there for ten years.   

However recently Dakota Dawn has been posting some interesting - not to say provocative - comments.  I repeat them here in that they raise interesting points that may otherwise not be noticed at all.

"I would say that, in my experience, these kinds of sentiments are taking hold once again among young trans people. I know both HBSers and self-identified HSTS and AGP who are my age. This comes with many online fights and flame wars, namely between those who identify as autogynephiles and those who identify as lesbians. Interestingly, the majority of the soi-disant autogynephiles in my generation (bear in mind I am quite young, going on 20 right now) seem to be exclusively attracted to other trans women. I have a boyfriend at the moment, but sometimes a relationship with a non-op trans woman does seem appealing. I am not attracted to genetic females or anyone with a vagina even if surgically constructed. I'm early in transition and still primarily present as a feminine male so I often simply say I'm a gay boy."

"100% while I do believe that autogynephilic arousal is a real phenomenon, I have experienced it, I starkly oppose Blanchard's idea that its related to attraction to female bodies. I'm not attracted to cisgender women at all. Even within Blanchard's schema, its stated that the majority of autogynephiles are gynandromorphophilic (and thus the majority of them prefer trans woman/trans woman relationships). This is decidedly not heterosexuality even if you view them as men.

I feel that Blanchard's strict two-type schema erases my personal experience, as it claims that all transsexual women who aren't hyper-feminine are gynephilic, and thus that I'm only "pseudo-androphilic". I begun as a nerdy gay boy, I was teased for being not masculine enough but it wasn't because I played with barbies it was because I played with telescopes. I also became aware of my transsexuality during adolescence, not early childhood as all the androphiles supposedly do. I was 13 when I realized I was a girl trapped in a boy's body. But I'm not gynephilic. I'd be open to a relationship with a non-operative trans woman but not with a cisgender woman or anyone who possesses a vulva really. Ergo I do not identify as gynephilic.

It is my belief that the majority of "AGP" trans women are primarily attracted to other trans women, and only force themselves to sexually interact with cis women out of heteronormativity and internalized homophobia. You can see many cases where they divorce their cis wives if they had one and partner with another trans woman after transitioning, [various examples are named].

Then there's those who were heterosexually married prior to their transition, but are androphilic afterwards. Examples include Lynn Conway, Canary Conn, Tamara Rees Stevenson, Nancy Hunt Bowman, Danielle Bunten Berry. I tend to assume they were closeted gays the whole time as men, but Blanchard would put them in the "pseudo-androphilic" category."

I - being very sensitive to word usage - replied:

"Two trans women attracted to each other is a type of homosexuality. 'homo' = 'same' not 'male'. If they also self-id as AGP then they are homosexual AGPs, but Blanchard's definition of AGP (bi, hetero and asexual) is that AGPs are non-homosexual. So here we have an interesting contradiction of terms. Blanchard is apparently a closeted gay man who has made comments outside his theoretical works that are even more anti-trans. His whole schema is a cisplaining using insulting terms/exonyms derived from the dubious concept of 'fetishism', and he has even refused to restate it in more polite terms.

Your homosexual AGPs are deconstructing his schema, and that is good in itself.

It is also good that gynephilic (not 'autogynephilic') trans women coming of age and feeling accepted as such do not feel obliged to marry a cis woman and have children to prove something as many in my generation did. It was usually quite unfair to the cis woman who found herself in such a situation.

... 

"Take the "gyne" out of the word. "gyne' means 'woman'. Come up with better jargon."

Word games can so easily become sterile, but this suggestion is provocative.   What do you think? 

This and that

When I go to Amazon.books and type in 'transgender' the top item shown is this year's most hyped transphobic screed: A Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

-----------

On page 100 of Kay Brown's new book, named after her blog as On the Science of Changing Sex, she mentions that "Meyer at Hopkins" labelled a group of transkids as 'Eonists'.  She then adds, in brackets: "Ironically, he used the term 'Eonist' which was named after a famous historically significant cross-dresser, who by his history, is easily recognizably autogynephilic".   

Now this is not a surprising claim from Brown who after all declared Christine Jorgensen to be autogynephilic.

Some of the problems in applying a 21st-century concept like 'autogynephilia' to the 18th century:

1. A lack of early-transitioners to compare to.   Quite likely there were many early-transitioners in India and South-East Asia - although this remains undocumented.   In Christian Europe where sex and gender expression had been so repressed, it is almost impossible to name any at all.  
2. The major development of gay/trans expression at that period was the molly houses.  There is no mention that d'Eon was ever seen at one.  However given his high diplomatic rank, he would be very constrained in what he might do.
3. Nor is there any evidence of female lovers.   It is true that the more sensational elaborations of d'Eon's life added such titillations as the claim that d'Eon was the father of George IV, but the more reliable books reject such claims.
4. Vern Bullough makes the claim – that surprisingly has been ignored in the debate about social construction - that “there is no evidence in Western culture of what might be called a heterosexual transvestite consciousness before the twentieth century”, and probably not before Magnus Hirschfield modified the term 'transvestite' in 1910.   Those such as Brown who conflate heterosexual transvestity and autogynephilia are notable in not having even discussed this.
5. Brown seems to regard autogynephilia as sort of an essentialism, that is a resultant from DNA modified by epigenetics.  If so why are there not loads of such persons in the 18th century?  Is modern pollution the required epigenetic? The best known transvestites in 18th century London are George Selwyn, who loved to attend public executions in drag, and Horace Walpole who dressed as an old woman for masquerade balls. Neither ever married and historians discuss whether Walpole was gay.   So how do they fit into the 21st century social construction of  HSTS/AGP?

"his history" .   Brown denies female pronouns to Charlotte d'Eon, as does Gary Kates, her otherwise best biographer, and remarkably so does Patrick Califia.

D'Eon's name was of course taken by the English Princian group, the Beaumont Society.   Personally I could never see her as one of their members.

The word 'chevalier' was used by Susanna Valenti for her Chevalier D’Eon Resort and by Virginia Prince for Chevalier Publications.   I always found it odd that they stuck with the male form of the word, and insist on using the transient title over 200 years later.   The female form is 'chevalière'.      D'Eon is hardly the only chevaler/chevalière.  So are Marie-Pierre Pruvot (Bambi) and Amanda Lear.  Why is it that those who always say Chevalier d'Eon do not say Chevalière Pruvot and Chevalière Lear?  Here is the Wikipedia list of Chevaliers (which does not include Charlotte d'Eon).   And of course the EN.Wikipedia entry is for "Chevalier D'Eon" not "Charlotte d'Eon de Beamont".  The FR.Wikipedia entry is for "Charles d'Éon de Beaumont" - yet another Wikpedia entry for a trans person under the pre-transition name.

----------

My site is being subjected to a strange inflation.   Not the most recent posting, but the first link in the most recent posting gets an extra 6,000 or so visits per day.   Hence at the moment Jan Morris part 3 is so effected because I linked to it in 2020's obituaries.   This did not happen to any of the other links in the same posting.

Blogspot's statistics tell me that the source is the site World of TG which does mention the obituaries but not Jan Morris.   This should change as soon as I post this.  Will George Selwyn now be surged?  

Administrators at World of TG: why are you doing this?  It really messes up my statistics.

+++ added a day later.   I was quite right.   George Selwyn has surged to the very top!!

------

Funny things that cis academics do.   In the new book Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender History , 2020, there is chapter by Annette Timm of the University of Calgary.  

On p147 we find "These primitive forms of hormonal treatment struck Benjamin as a new panacea for aging, and he became the most well-known American exponent of the benefits of getting 'Steinached,' eventually performing as many as 500 of these operations." 57

What is in endnote 57   ?: 

'57. Anonymous, “Harry Benjamin: Part 2 Rejuvenation,” A Gender Variance Who’s Who (blog) 5 Oct 2012, accessed 26 June 2019, https://zagria.blogspot.com/2012/10/harry-benjamin-part-2-rejuvenation_5.html. Even though the author of this blog remains anonymous, I have found the information it provides extremely helpful and impeccably researched.  This is one of the few pieces of information I was not able to  find elsewhere.'

a) The 500 count is not my research at all. It is found in Ethel Person's The Sexual Century.  Person was the only writer to do a biography of Harry Benjamin based on interviews with the subject.  It is an essential source for anybody writing about Benjamin, and is not in Timm's bibliography.

b) Timm otherwise ignores what I have to say.   For example, why no mention of Carla von Crist who actually was transatlantic - appearing in both New York and Berlin? Nor does she use my detailed close reading of Benjamin's The Transgender Phenomenon.

c) So in what way is it "extremely helpful"?

d) Anonymous?!!   This encyclopedia (much much more than a blog) has an author name.

e) The book is by 4 authors.  If any of them are trans they are keeping it quiet, and therefore we assume that they are all cis.  Despite that they title the book: Others of My Kind.

f) Like, I think, most trans persons I live semi-stealth.  Some know my past, most do not, and I do not insist on telling them.  Therefore I use a pen name - as do many cis persons for all kinds of reasons.  While Timm is making a career writing about us, she does not seem to understand such everyday aspects of being trans.   

The erasure of Autogynephilia

I have previously written about Autogynephilia, and developed a chronology of its major events and persons up to 2010. 

The Autogynephilia syndrome and meme was a major brouhaha in the early 2000s, especially after Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen was published in 2003. While many dismissed the concept as pseudo-science, it came to dominate discussions of typology of trans women to the extent that alternate discussions of such typologies were drowned out. While there is an intuitive difference between early transitioners and those who first became husbands and fathers before transitioning, the model as laid out by Freund, then Blanchard and then Bailey aligns each type with a sexual orientation (a mistake earlier made by Harry Benjamin), erases late transition androphiles and early transition gynephiles, insists on referring to heterosexual trans women as ‘homosexual’ and defines the gynephilic late transitioners as ‘fetishistic’ (again a mistake made by Harry Benjamin). The Clarke Institute (later CAMH) in Toronto is especially identified with the syndrome as Freund and Blanchard had top positions there. And, like it or not, the history of trans in North America in this century cannot be told without reference to the debate over Autogynephilia.

However there are writers, both trans and cis, who leave out what we would expect here, even though many of them quietly put Bailey’s book in their bibliography or further reading while saying nothing about it in the text.

This article discusses writings that nevertheless:

1. distinguish two types of trans women, such that the reader would expect a discussion of how this is similar to or different from the concept of Autogynephilia – but this is not discussed;
2. discuss the Clarke Instritute/CAMH, particularly the GIC, but say not a single word about Blanchard or Autogynephilia;
3. retell the histories of US/Canadian trans persons and politics in the 21^st century but say not a single word about Blanchard or Autogynephilia.

The writings in question are indented to the Right.

The basic events of the Autogynephilia debate are here (not indented) to give a context.

1985. 

Betty W. Steiner (ed) Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, Management. The first book from the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto. The full model HSTS-Autogynephilia is explained by Kurt Freund, although at this stage without the word ‘autogynephilia’.

1989

Ray Blanchard. “The concept of autogynephilia and the typology of male gender dysphoria”. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 177, 616-623. 

1990

Ray Blanchard & Betty W. Steiner (eds.). Clinical management of gender identity disorders in children and adults. A followup to the 1985 book.

1994

Betty Steiner and her husband die from fumes from car running in their garage. 

Ray Blanchard on the gender dysphoria sub-working group for the DSM-IV, 1994.

1995

Kurt Freund retires, and Ray Blanchard becomes Head of Clinical Sexology Services at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. 

Viviane Namaste wrote a report “Access Denied” funded by Health Canada to do needs assessment for trans persons in Toronto. Of her sample of 33, 19 were enrolled at the Clarke GIC. The trans academic also visited the Clarke and spoke to some of the staff. There is no mention of Blanchard, Autogynephila or the 1985 book.

1996

Kurt Freund, suffering from lung cancer, takes his own life.

1998

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is formed from a merger of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the Addiction Research Foundation and the Queen Street Mental Health Centre.

2000

Ray Blanchard. “Autogynephilia and the Taxonomy of Gender Identity Disorders in Biological Males”. International Academy of Sex Research. Paris 2000. 

Viviane K. Namaste. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Again, neither Blanchard nor autogynephilia mentioned in discussion of CAMH GIC.

2002

The CAMH GIC awarded a Presidential Citation from Div 44 of the American Psychological Association. Ray Blanchard accepted the award on behalf of CAMH.

2003

Michael Bailey. The Man Who Would Be Queen: the science of gender-bending and transsexualism. The popularization of Blanchard’s ideas.

Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), the professional organization for service providers criticizes the Bailey book.

Ray Blanchard resigns from HBIGDA, calling its criticism ‘appalling’.

Andrea James and Lynn Conway set up web pages to alert trans women about Bailey’s book.

Anjelica Kieltyka complains about how she was misrepresented in Bailey’s book.

Willow Arune and others start Autogynephilia Yahoo group.

Deirdre McCloskey. "Queer Science: A data-bending psychologist confirms what he already knew about gays and transsexuals". Reasononline. November. https://reason.com/2003/11/01/queer-science-2/

2004

Joan Roughgarden writes open letter to the National Academy. "I wonder if many psychologists fully grasp the image some of their colleagues are projecting---psychology as a discipline without standards, nourishing a clique of dumbly insensitive bigots. These psychologists don’t seek to help people, but to dominate them by controlling the definition of normalcy. Their bogus categories and made-up diseases are intended to subordinate, not to describe."

Lambda Literary Foundation nominated Bailey’s book as a finalist in the transgender category.

Christine Burns initiates an online petition which gathers thousands of signatures in just a few days, and the nomination is withdrawn

Jim Marks, Executive Director of Lambda Literary Foundation resigns.

J Michael Bailey steps down as Chair of Psychology at Northwestern.

Kiira Triea sets up transkids.us with Jennifer Ross for Homosexual-Transsexual women (Blanchard's term for heterosexual trans women). Bailey immediately links to the site.

Ray Blanchard. “Origins of the Concept of Autogynephilia”. Feb. Archive.

Ray Blanchard quoted: “A man without a penis has certain disadvantages in this world, and this is in reality what you're creating”. Jane Armstrong. “The Body within, the body without”. The Globe and Mail, 12 June 2004, p. F1. 

2005

Ray Blanchard. “Early History of the Concept of Autogynephilia. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 34.

Alice/Richard Novic. “The Two Types of Transwomen”.

https://www.aliceingenderland.com/twotypesoftranswomen. "In my eye, we MTFs come in two varieties: started-out-straight and started-out-gay.”

2006

Melanie Anne Philips apologized to customers of her voice instruction in that she now realizes that for many it cannot work: “out of all those who have sex reassignment surgery, only a very few have female minds. All the rest, no matter how feminine they have become, have male minds – they don't just think like men, then think as men”.

Philips has two children, and is gynephilic. She definitely avoids any mention of Autogynephilia.

2008

Susan Stryker. Transgender History. The trans academic makes no mention at all of the Blanchard binary and the upsets that it has caused among transsexuals. However Bailey’s book on the topic is quietly found in the book’s further reading section.

2010

Anne Vitale. Gendered Self: Further Commentary on the Transsexual Phenomenon. Trans therapist Anne Vital proposes a typology of three types with Gender Deprivation Anxiety Disorder (GEDAD) of whom the third approximates Blanchard’s Autogynephiles. She treats this deprivation, not a person’s gender identity. Many readers regard her typology as a humane improvement on Blanchard’s. The citation notes to her book include both Blanchard and Zucker, and the reading list on her website includes the Clarke Institute’s 1990 book, Clinical Management of Gender Identity Disorder in Children and Adults. However there is no mention of Blanchard in the text, and thus neither acceptance nor rejection of the inevitable notion that her 3 categories are a rewrite of Blanchard’s.

2012

Darryl Hill. Trans Toronto: An Oral History. Hill does have a short summary of autogynephilia, but refers to Blanchard only once in passing and then by his surname only; only his late 2005 paper is listed and Bailey is not mentioned at all.

2014

Dana/Thomas E. Bevan. The Psychobiology of Transsexualism and Transgenderism: A New View Based on Scientific Evidence. Bevan, late transition, two wives, two daughters, writes: “it is clear that the concept of Autogynephilia is not well defined and cannot be easily operationalized. For this reason alone, it does not constitute a scientific theory”. However she writes as if Autogynephilia is being considered as a, or even the, cause of transsexuality rather than as a second type of transsexuality with a different etiology. She does not mention Michael Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. She does mention – actually she cites – Bailey with reference to twins, sexual orientation, and sibling order. But she totally ignores his book on Autogynephilia.

Will Rowe “Auditioning for Care” in Dan Irving & Rupert Raj (eds). Trans Activism in Canada: A Reader. This is the major discussion in the book of Toronto’s CAMH, the ground zero of autogynephilia. He writes of the "incredibly transphobic history of CAMH's GIC". He interviewed four trans men about their current experiences with the CAMH GIC. For an earlier period, the 1990s, he relies on Namaste's writings only. Namaste, as per her usual approach, never told us whether she was actually a patient at CAMH, although, as she lived in Ottawa and then Toronto while she transitioned, she quite likely was. No other trans women or other earlier patients are cited or discussed. It is particularly odd in Rowe's account that there is no mention of autogynephilia, and no mention of Blanchard.

2020

Barry Reay. Trans America: A Counter-History. Reay cites the title of Steiner’s 1985 book as an early usage of the term “Gender Dysphoria”, but says nothing at all about its contents. There is no mention at all of Autogynephilia, nor its proponents, nor of those who rallied against it. While this recent book continues until almost now, it also erases HBS and Cross-Dreaming.

Note also that the EN.Wikipedia article on CAMH says nothing at all about Steiner, Freund, Blanchard or Autogynephilia.

Rejoinder to Kay Brown 2: the gynephilics

See also A Rejoinder to Kay Brown's What is a Transsexual?

Kay’s description of typical gynephilic transsexuals is:

“The prototypical autogynephilic transsexual was accepted as a boy as a child.  She was often a “loner”, finding her hobbies and reading to be more rewarding, but still willing and ready to participate in rough & tumble play.  She often envied girls and observed them more often than most masculine boys.  As she entered puberty, she began erotic cross-dressing in private, often masturbating while dressed, usually with lingerie.  She found this shameful and hid her cross-dressing as best she could.  She entertained thoughts of living as a woman, often in very idealized situations.  As a young adult, she dated women, often finding it necessary to imagine that she was female to “perform”.  She typically hid this fact from her dates.  She fell in love and found that the previously growing desire to live as a woman abated for a while.  She married and had children.  Her need to cross-dress and use autogynephilic ideation grew, as the first blush of their romance matured into committed love.  She agonized about it obsessively, trying alternatively to push it out of her thoughts and trying to appease it by cross-dressing.  At one point, perhaps in her early 30s, or in her late 50s, a set-back or other significant personal change brought all of these feelings to the fore… and she made the fateful decision that she could no longer ignore her sexuality.  After having tried to ignore the cognitive dissonance between her successful social identity as a man, husband, and father, and her obligatory autogynephilic image of being female, concluded that the female image is her “true” image.  She then made steps to begin counseling with a gender therapist, obtained prescription for feminizing hormones, and then began the painful steps to living full time as a “transsexual”, since she didn’t pass very well and had too many social connections who know of her previous status as a man to be truly stealth.  She had SRS within a short time of nominally living as a woman, as she was impatient, feeling like she had waited long enough in her previous life as a man.  Her wife may or may not have demanded a divorce.”

Just as the previous type had to be ‘homosexual transsexual’ rather than just ‘androphilic’, this type must be ‘autogynephilic’ rather than just ‘gynephilic’.  I find it very difficult to accept that an entire category of people should be defined by the details of how they masturbate.  In addition to the common sense rejection of the notion, as a historian I also know that I rarely have information of how people masturbate.

What I do have though is mention that people marry and have children.  Thus I can identify gynephilic persons who later progress to being women.   There are many of these, more than gay transsexuals.  As more people are heterosexual and not gay, it is not a surprise that more trans women previously had a wife than previously had a husband.  Some examples of transsexuals known to be gynephilic before transition:  Jan Morris, Rennee Richards, Katherine Cummings, Gloria Hemingway, Jane Fae, Nancy Hunt, Rachel Webb, Susan Huxford, Judy Cousins; a surprisingly large number of the better known HBS women: Rose White, Cathryn Platine, Jennifer Usher, Tabatha Basco; and the soi-disant or professional autogynephiles: Anne Lawrence, Willow Arune, Maxine Petersen.

Are these women autogynephilic as opposed to gynephilic, now or pre-surgery? I certainly would not say that, and I really don’t think that Blanchard or Brown would come out and say it either, although their theoretical position implies that they should be willing to say that.  But if they are not willing to say that, what does it mean to say that late transitioners are autogynephilic?

Aspersions have been cast against a few of the women, the term ‘autogynephile’ has become an insult term, especially from the HBS women whom others suspect of trying to divert attention from themselves, but where something has been said about a person it is rarely other than hearsay, and as such not admissible as evidence.

It is common sense that cis men and cis women vary in the degree that they are aroused by being the man or the women that they are.  This is particularly intense in teenagers after puberty.  If we are to have concepts such as autogynephilia and autoandrophilia then the concepts should be applied to cis persons as well.  There has been a small amount of investigation of cis autogynephilia in recent years, but the Blanchardians are still in the situation of applying the term to trans women without any idea of how the phenomenon manifests in cis women.  Brown poo-poos a study done by Charles Moser who used a semi-Blanchardian approach to the question.

Brown and Blanchard reject the idea that there is such a thing as cis autogynephilia, because if there were, trans autogynephilia would also be normal.

Brown and Blanchard take the abnormality of trans autogynephilia even further.  They regard it as a subtype of Erotic Target Location Error (ETLE).  The other two types that they identify are autopedophilia and the desire to be an amputee.  It is of course heterosexist to assume that the correct erotic target for a person born male is an woman of similar age.  It is sexist to insist that there is any correct erotic target.  Nature is full of variations and gynephilic transsexuality is as natural as homosexuality.

Their heterosexism also comes out when Brown criticizes the “obvious lack of naturally feminine behavior” in gynephilic trans women – she writes as if the feminist critique of the social construction of artificial femininity had never happened.

In summary, the concept is not at all useful to anybody writing biographical and history essays.

See also:  A Blanchard-Binary Timeline

          What is Autogynephilia?

Virginia Prince: Part V - Transgenderist dowager

Part 1 – Youth and First marriage
Bibliography
Part II – Second Marriage
Part III – Femmiphilic activist
Part IV – Full-time Living
Part V – Transgenderist dowager
Jargon terms and general comments

In 1985 Virginia and Christine Jorgensen appeared in Lee Grant's documentary, What Sex Am I?    Dorothy Marie Shepherd, Arnold's first wife, died the same year.

This was also the year that the Clarke Institute in Toronto published Gender Dysphoria which laid out the dichotomy between heterosexual autogynephilics and 'homosexual transsexuals'. While this corresponded to Prince's insistence that homosexuals and femmiphics were, to use her term, "separate breeds of cat" there is no record that I have found of either Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard of the Clarke on one side or Virginia Prince on the other discussing how femmiphilia and autogynephilia are different or similar, although later writers see them as two aspects of the same thing.

Frederick Whitam published his Male Homosexuality in Four Societies in 1986. He argues that homosexuality and transvestic homosexuality are as natural as heterosexuality and occur in all societies, and homosexuals in general tend to patterns of early cross-gender behavior. He sees heterosexual transvestites as a different category and protests their appropriation of the word 'transvestite'. "Some heterosexual transvestites, not wanting to be identified as being homosexual, have insisted that they are the 'true transvestites' and take a demeaning attitude towards drag queens and female impersonators". (p80) We now had three solitudes that should have been talking to each other, but did not.

IFGE (International Foundation for Gender Education) was founded by Merrisa Sherrill Lynn in 1987, initially as an outgrowth from Boston's Tiffany Club. Although proclaimed as a group for both transsexuals and transvestites, they built in a heterosexual transvestite bias by creating a Virginia Prince Award, and, apparently with no sense of irony, actually awarded the first one to Virginia Prince. The next two went to Merrisa Sherrill Lynn and Ariadne Kane.

Richard F. Docter published his Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior in 1988. He gathered data from 110 male transvestites. He found that even after excluding those who were exclusively gay, 28% of the rest had some sexual experience with men. He purports a 5-part typology for heterosexual transvestites: fetishism, fetishistic transvestism, marginal transvestism, transgenderism and secondary transsexualism. He conceives these as stages which an individual can progress through. He has a 4-part typology for homosexual transvestites: primary transsexualism, secondary transsexualism, "so-called drag queens" and female impersonators. This is not a progression in the same sense. He treats Prince as one source among many and does not indicate that he knows her personally. Certainly he does not stick to her usage of the term 'transgender', although he credits Prince with coining it in her Understanding Cross Dressing, 1977 (but without giving a page reference and Google Books Search is unable to find it). He notes that his ‘transgenderism’ category corresponds to Benjamin's Type IV, Nonsurgical Transsexual. According to the diagram on p25, it is an heterosexual variation as in Prince, but Docter discusses only one example, a then 22-year-old Everett/Angela who is androphilic, sexually active and will probably shortly have transsexual surgery. (p21-5)

Robert Stoller died in a traffic accident in 1991. His wife returned the tapes and transcription of their 29 years of sessions to Virginia, who later passed them on to Docter for his biography.

By 1992, Yvonne Cook-Riley (who was awarded the Virginia Prince Award in 1995) was lobbying for the use of ‘transgender’ within IFGE, and would later, with willful ignorance, claim that she and Prince had created the ‘transgender community’.

In 1993 Vern and Bonnie Bullough returned to Los Angeles after his retirement. Vern again taught at Northridge as an adjunct professor until 2003. Their new book, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender, while totally ignoring Reed Erickson and April Ashley, reducing Lou Sullivan to an erotic cross dresser, and refusing to give Jacqueline Dufresnoy's female name, builds up the importance of Prince. They claim that Prince was the only transvestite organizer of note from 1952 to the 1980s. They do see through Prince's claims: "Prince's quest for respectability led her to exclude cross dressers who were homosexuals, sadomaschists, women, prostitutes, or even partial cross dressers. Because the psychiatrists accepted Prince's definition of transvestism and incorporated it into the DSM-III-R, behavioral scientists, including the authors, blindly followed the accepted definition by studying club members as if they were the universe of cross dressers." (p302) They follow with a summary of Frederick Whitam's work in the third world, but do not name any European or North American gay transvestites. The organizing work by Sylvia Rivera in New York or of Rachel Pollack or later Yvonne Sinclair in London is certainly not mentioned, and, as I have mentioned before, there is a recurring pattern in Bullough's work of not mentioning either transvestites or transsexuals who have a male lover or spouse. The Bulloughs, despite knowing Prince personally, do not claim the she coined 'transgender', or even associate her with the word at all. They do use the word when referring to Ariadne Kane. The Bulloughs note "Originally, we planned to publish Virginia/Charles's original name, but she regards this part of her past a closed book she would rather not reopen." (308n5)

The internet forum, alt.transgendered, was launched 1992, did not even mention Prince until 1995 when Kimberleigh Richards, editor of Cross-Talk, entered to promote Prince as a pioneer of ‘transgendered’, but with almost no success.

Prince sold most of the remaining copies of Transvestia and the copyright on her major books to Sandy Thomas, an old colleague. There are now available along with Thomas' transvestite fantasy titles from Lulu.com.

By 1996, the claims by Cook-Riley and Richards that Prince had coined ‘transgender’ were becoming widely known, and were repeated without citation in Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: “But the word transgender is increasingly being used in a more specific way as well. The term transgenderist was first introduced into the English language by trans warrior Virginia Prince. Virginia told me, ‘I coined the noun transgenderist in 1987 or ’88. There had to be some name for people like myself who trans the gender barrier’ (p x) “. This is her only appearance in the book: Feinberg does not care to demonstrate Prince as a ‘trans warrior’. This seems to be the major source from which people claim that Prince coined the word. However there is no record of Prince using the word in 1987/8. This led to mainstream, albeit uncritical, acceptance of the claim.¹

The same year, Prince published “Gender Fundamentalists” in Richards’ Cross-Talk, where she rejected the inclusions that IFGE and Feinberg had been putting out in her name and reasserted her separatism and her transgenderphobia. "It is strange but true that the ones who are most vocal, most in print and most publicly active are the transsexuals. Their main point of attack is Tri-Ess because of the policy (which in their anointed wisdom they like to term "exclusionary") of selecting heterosexuals only, which conflicts with what they proclaim to be the only right way for a group to be ... open to all comers." Prince is complaining that transsexuals are trying to include her and her group in an umbrella.

Bonnie Bullough died, just before the publication of Gender Blending edited by herself, Vern and James Elias. The tome is inclusivist except for the contributions by Prince and Kimberleigh Richards. In "Seventy Years in the Trenches of the Gender Wars" Prince actually claims: "As a matter of fact, I coined the words 'transgenderism' and 'transgenderist' as nouns describing people like myself who have breasts and live full time as woman, but who have no intention of having genital surgery". However she does not say where, and she objects to the inclusivist usage of ‘transgender’. She plays with the idea of adopting  ‘transposeur’, although she never returned to this term. She is also emphatic that she is a "congenital heterosexual" (perhaps having forgotten her claim to be a woman). She re-asserts her objection to the notion of "fetishistic cross-dressing", and asserts again that she is a pioneer of men's liberation.

On the other hand in 1999, in a meeting with Vanessa Foster: "She was bemused by my use (and the community's) of the word transgender, and how the story affixed its authorship to her, even though she'd referred to it as transgenderist as a self-descriptor once she'd moved from occasional crossdressing to living as female, though not transsexual (she was quick to correct that!)".

In 2000 Prince sold four sets of Transvestia, photographs and personal papers to Rikki Swin. They were initially in the Rikki Swin Institute in Chicago, and are now at the University of Victoria. Other files and papers were donated to the Special Collections Department at California State University, Northridge.

In 2003, Michael Bailey's The Man Who Would Be Queen, revived the Freund-Blanchard notion of autogynephilia to much alarm and controversy, but still there was no dialectic with the notion of femmiphilia

Virginia with Richard Docter

In 2004, Richard F. Docter, who had become a friend of Prince and the Bulloughs, at the urging of Vern, wrote and self-published his biography of her. Bullough provided a Preface. Unlike her reluctance in Bullough's book a decade earlier, Prince was now willing that her original name of Arnold Lowman, not mentioned outside her inner circle since the court appearance in 1961, should be used. While Docter had developed a 5-part typology in his Transvestites and Transsexuals, 1988, he does not locate Prince within it, although in chapter 13 he does discuss Step a: from being a fetishistic cross dresser to being a transgender women and then Step b: from being a woman in public to having the gender identity of a woman.

From 2005 the so-called Harry Benjamin Syndrome movement was developed. The European branch had little to say about Virginia Prince: Charlotte Goiar's bête noire is rather Carla Antonelli. The US HBS people following Diane Kearny set up Prince as that which they are not. It is therefore ironic that in several respects they follow Prince more than they do Benjamin:

• they deny that there is a continuum from transvestite to transsexual
  
• they disassociate from trans women who pass less well, and whom they regard as fetishistic
  
• they disassociate from gays and lesbians
  
• they disassociate from the transgender umbrella
They are also more like Prince than Robert Stoller in talking only of Gender but not Gender Identity.

 

Vern Bullough died in 2006. In his final book, Crossing Sexual Boundaries, co-edited with Aridane Kane, Bullough still does not use Prince's original name. His take on the term 'transgender' has now altered to: "In fact, Virginia was a main source of the popularization of gender as applied to cross-dressing. She and Ariadne popularized the term transgender, which has been a more encompassing term than cross-dresser."

Prince lived till 2009 and the age of 96, lastly in a retirement home in Los Angeles, and according to her friend, Richard Docter, she developed a taste for she-male pornography. She also dabbled in astrophysics and led a discussion group on being and consciousness in her retirement complex. She willed her body to the UCLA medical school. (Hill:39)
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1. This is comparable to the way that Agnes Gonxha (generally known as Mother Teresa) was uncritically treated as a saint after being endorsed by Malcolm Muggeridge.