Episode 6

Warning: this episode contains explicit language and sexually explicit descriptions. It is not suitable for young children. Listener discretion is advised.

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Michael Bailey 

Autogynephilia is a very strange condition anyway that is difficult even for autogynephilic people to understand very well. It is sexual arousal by a male about the fantasy that he is a woman or by imitating women, usually via cross dressing. And that’s just a weird kind of thing for most people, including autogynephilic people. But it is made more difficult to understand by the fact that many, though not all autogynephilic males, try to suppress any discussion of this idea.

If you’re like I once was, you’ve probably never heard the word autogynephilia. You might be surprised to learn that most men who transition do so because they have this condition. It’s the modern transgender movement’s best kept secret. So let’s shine a light on this sexual paraphilia that’s one of the driving forces behind trans activism.

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Welcome back to Desexing Society. I’m your host, Stassja Frei. Episode 6: Autogynephilia.

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Dr Michael Bailey is a psychologist specialising in sex research. In 2003 he published, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism. The book explores a number of topics,like the link between childhood gender nonconformity and homosexuality in adulthood, and gender identity formation in children with intersex conditions. But it was his exploration of the two type typology of male to female transsexualism that made his book famous. So what are the two types?

Michael Bailey 

There is one type that is more consistent with our traditional beliefs and that is what I call child onset gender dysphoria, this is the kind in which a very feminine boy or a very masculine girl, and we’re talking about early childhood, aged 2, 3, 4, they’re extremely cross-sexed in their behaviour and they may tell their parents that they want to be the other sex. That kind is I think what the average person tends to think of when they think about a transsexual.

Once upon a time, this is exactly what I thought was going on for all males who transition. In adulthood, this type is known as homosexual transsexualism because they’re exclusively attracted to men. But it’s the second type of male to female transsexualism that’s far more prevalent in western societies. Some estimate that round 75% of males who transition are autogynephiles.

Michael Bailey 

The typical history is that during adolescence with the onset of sexual arousal that most men can remember, you know the onset associated with strong sexual fantasies and masturbation and so on, boys who are autogynephilic, again in their adolescence, we’re talking about 13, 14, 15, they discover that it’s quite arousing to them to wear say their mother’s lingerie, their panties and a bra, or their sister’s, look at themselves in a mirror and masturbate. That is by far the most common first manifestation of autogynephilia.

That’s a very different description from the narrative pushed by the trans lobby – the narrative that says these men have an inner feminine essence, that they were born in the wrong body.

It’s understandable then, that most autogynephilic men keep this part of themselves hidden.

Michael Bailey 

They typically, at least in the past, struggled with this. They felt like this was abnormal, they were ashamed, some tried not to do it but it’s difficult not to do it if that’s what is sexually arousing to you.

It’s not hard to imagine that for a 14 year old boy discovering this about himself, that yeah, it would be weird and confusing and he’d be mortified if his friends or family ever found out. 

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The term autogynephilia was coined by sexologist Dr Ray Blanchard in 1989. He had worked with men seeking medical transition for a number of years and noted that there was no consensus when it came to classifying the different types of male to female transsexuals. It was well known since Dr Magnus Hirschfield’s pioneering research in the early 1900s that for some men, there was an erotic element to their cross dressing. Hirschfield coined the term transvestite in 1910. Blanchard started with Hirschfield’s system which classified men according to their sexual orientation – homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual and asexual. He found that 73% of the non homosexual subjects reported a history of sexual arousal connected to cross dressing. But for the homosexual transsexuals, the figure was much less – only 15%. Over time, Blanchard further developed and tested his theory. He discovered other significant differences that suggested there were two distinct aetiologies, or causes of gender dysphoria in males. The homosexual group reported far more feminine interests and behaviours in childhood, whereas the non homosexual group were typically masculine. And the homosexual transsexuals tended to present for treatment at a much younger age than the non homosexuals who tended to come out in their 40s or later. 

Blanchard was curious about the 27% of non homosexual men who reported no history of arousal associated with cross dressing. He couldn’t put forth his two type typology theory without an explanation for this group. So he and two colleagues ran a study. Participants were connected to a device that measures penile blood volume. They then listened to four narrated scripts describing different scenarios: cross dressing, being a woman having sex with a man, being a man having sex with a woman, and a solitary, non sexual activity. The participants who had reported no sexual arousal connected with cross dressing showed greater arousal while listening to the cross dressing script than they did during the non sexual script. Whether they were intentionally misreporting their experiences of cross dressing, or were genuinely unaware of their arousal, is up for debate. Blanchard suspected it was unintentional.

It was clear that what these men were experiencing wasn’t just a fetish for women’s clothing. The clothing was a symptom of the underlying erotic fantasy of literally being a woman. Blanchard searched the literature for a word to describe this phenomenon. Finding none, he invented one by combining three Greek words: auto meaning self, gyne meaning woman, and philia meaning love. Autogynephilia: love of oneself as a woman. In 1989 the term made its way into recorded history when Blanchard published his first paper on the topic, titled, The concept of autogynephilia and the typology of male gender dysphoria.

This was pre-internet. Blanchard has said in interviews since, that at the time, he was writing for maybe a few thousand specialists who subscribed to those niche journals. And that’s where the idea remained for more than a decade, before Michael Bailey published The Man Who Would Be Queen.

With the release of Michae’s book came a vicious and prolonged campaign to destroy his life, led by three, outraged male to female transsexuals. They went after his career, accusing him, among other things, of having had sex with one of his transsexual research subjects. They went after him personally, publishing photos of his children online, and describing his young daughter as a “cock starved exhibitionist”. They suggested that Michael had sexually abused both of his children. And they compared him to Nazi race scientists. Michael survived. The professional complaints were proven to be false and he kept his research position at Northwestern University. If you want the full account of this early example of cancel culture, Alice Dreger covers the saga in her book, Galileo’s Middle Finger. 

Michael Bailey 

Believe me, nobody knows more than I do that there’s a subgroup of autogynephiles who are quite obnoxious and mean and intending to suppress any discussion of autogynephila and invade women’s spaces and so on. They exist. They tend I believe to be autogynephiles in denial about autogynephila. I think that occurs for a couple of related reasons, first, they don’t want people to think of them that way, that’s embarrassing to them and second, what they really value is that people think of them as women. That is their deep need and it’s a narcissistic injury to them to be told that they’re not really like women in their sexual interests, they’re males with this weird sexual interest.

For a long time, for those that would listen, I described autogynephilia as an extreme sexual fetish. But this isn’t entirely accurate. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual, or DSM, the so called bible of American psychiatry, defines a paraphilia as an atypical sexual interest that the individual feels personal distress about and not merely distress resulting from society’s disapproval; or, a sexual desire or behaviour that involves another person’s psychological distress, injury, or death; or a desire for sexual behaviours involving unwilling persons or a person unable to give legal consent. 

Michael Bailey 

Paraphilias are the category of unusual sexual interests that include a variety of atypical sexual interests found almost exclusively in men and the paraphilias that are listed in the DSM currently include, and I , there are only – I don’t know –  8, 9 ,10 of them and I probably won’t remember all of them, but they include for example, sadism, masochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism – being a peeping tom, frotteurism – liking to rub up against people like on a train, fetishistic transvestism which is erotic cross dressing and that is a form of autogynephila, paedophilia

There are eight recognised paraphilias in the DSM. The eighth one is fetishistic disorder. So the next questions is, what is a fetish?

Michael Bailey 

Technically speaking, fetishism means when a man typically, or a person let’s say more generally, gets turned on by non human things, like panties and a bra, or high heeled shoes, those are not human, but somebody who gets turned on by them has a fetish. 

Autogynephilia is often described as a fetish because it usually involves women’s clothing which is a non human object. But strictly speaking, it’s a paraphilia. What’s more unusual about autogynephilia is that the target of one’s sexual attraction is oneself. 

Michael Bailey 

There’s a general syndrome called erotic target identity inversion and in this syndrome, paraphilic men are attracted to some kind of person or thing on the outside, the most common type of person or thing that men are ever attracted to is women. But in an erotic target identity inversion, they invert that outward target inside themselves and want to be that.

Whilst autogynephilia is the most common version of this syndrome, it also applies to other paraphilias. In 2023 Michael published a paper demonstrating that the same phenomenon is at play in other paraphilias.

Michael Bailey 

One of these was in men attracted to amputees. A subset of these men wanted to become amputees. Another was men attracted to animals. A subset of these men wanted to become animals. And then the other was men who are attracted to morbidly obese people and a subset of these men wanted to become morbidly obese people. These erotic target identity inversions are fascinating and interesting, and they have the same structure no matter what the outward target is, somehow, for some reason, there’s been an internalisation of the sexual target. 

To demonstrate how all-consuming these paraphilias can become, some men have succeeded in becoming amputees. They’ve been known to inflict extreme injuries on themselves that then require amputation of a limb. And in one bizarre case, a Scottish surgeon agreed to perform the procedure on two healthy men before he was stopped.

At this point, you might be wondering how autogynephilia could possibly lead to sex reassignment surgery. If it’s all about sexual arousal, doesn’t the surgery negate that? 

Michael Bailey 

Whether a man goes on to really desire transition is related to how strong his internalised sexual feelings are. So a man who is very strongly autogynephilic and having lots of sexual fantasies about being a woman, well that’s the man that’s going to be most likely to try to become a woman.

Autogynephilia can be thought of as a spectrum. At one end are men who are entirely enamoured with themselves and have no interest in external romantic or sexual relationships. They’re most likely to transition. And at the other end of the spectrum are men who are mostly outwardly attracted to women but still partly inwardly attracted to themselves. They’re less likely to go all the way. 

There are some other factors that explain the pursuit of medical transition. Firstly, it’s not just about sexual arousal. Autogynephiles also develop romantic feelings toward that feminine idea of themselves. Like any romantic relationship, they’re not permanently in a state of arousal or engaging in sexual activities. So what starts out as an erotic activity, over time develops into a romantic relationship and a desire to permanently bond with their feminine gender identity. 

There are also different types of autogynephilia, first described by Ray Blanchard in the early 90s. The obvious one is transvestic – wearing women’s clothing. But the clothing is often an aid for the fantasy of what lies beneath the clothing. Which brings us to anatomic autogynephilia – arousal at the idea of having breasts and female genitalia. There’s also physiologic autogynephilia, which is arousal at the thought of having female bodily functions such as menstruation, lactation and pregnancy. And there’s behavioural autogynephilia which is arousal by acting out or fantasising about acting out stereotypically feminine behaviours. 

For autogynephiles who very strongly have the fantasy of having female genitalia, well, they’re more likely to develop gender dysphoria and pursue sex reassignment surgery. 

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There’s one more thing by way of background that I think is important to know about autogynephilia. There’s no polite way to talk about this so I’ll just let Michael lay it out for you.

Michael Bailey 

Paraphilias sometimes co-occur with each other so that if a man has one paraphilia the chances are elevated that he may have certain others. So for example one association like this is between autogynephilia and masochism and this actually has the best evidence although some people might find it disturbing, you can decide how you want to, whether and how you want to include this but, one form of masochism is called autoerotic asphyxia, this is enacted by, again, almost always men, who in private they will hang themselves with a noose until they are about to lose consciousness and then they will save themselves and this is a masochistic activity, we know this because some of these men accidentally die. It’s a very dangerous activity and we know a lot about their death scenes and there’s usually a lot of masochistic pornography but the really interesting thing with respect to our current discussion is that about 40% of the time, these men who die accidentally during this masochistic activity are cross dressed. And cross dressing, sexual cross dressing is invariably a form of autogynephilia.

One detail Michael left out regarding autoerotic asphyxiation is that the hanging is done whilst masturbating. In follow up emails with Michael, he clarifies that the correct figure is that 30% of these accidental deaths involve cross dressing. 

I decided to include this description because it lays the ground for our next topic – forced feminisation.

Michael Bailey 

Forced feminsation is the fantasy again, typically by a man with autogynephilia that he is being forced to cross dress or to engage in other feminine activities, including sometimes, have sex with a man as a, in a feminine role let’s say. Forced feminisation always has been as far as we know, a common fantasy amongst autogynephilic men, and I think it brings in the two paraphilias we’ve just been talking about, it’s autogynephila and it’s also masochism. 

Forced feminisation has been prevalent in transgender pornography and literature since before the 1960s when two sexologists first wrote about it in the journal Advances in Sex Research. More recently, psychologist Dr Anne Lawrence, who’s also an autogynephilic transsexual, covered the topic in his 2013 book, Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies. From 1998 to 2011 Lawrence collected hundreds of written narratives from autogynephilic men and then analysed their stories looking for common themes. One theme he found was the fantasy of forced feminisation. Here’s an example of one such account: “My sexual fantasies usually involve being made into a woman in some way, usually against my will. Specifically, I experience erotic fantasies of being coerced or duped into being a woman, against my will initially but then gradually being won over until I can’t go back.”

A new variation of the forced feminisation genre is sissy hypno porn. Here’s a snippet from a supposedly YouTube friendly version that’s had 119,000 views:

Sissy Hypno

Weak. Stupid. Loser. Bitch boy. Faggot. Unmanly. Girly. Beta. Pervert. Porn addict. Sissy. Bimbo. Slut. Cum dump. Whore. Think of all the times these sorts of thoughts made you hard. Think back to the first time you realised your true nature of being a pathetic beta boy. It must have felt pretty humiliating, right? Shameful. But don’t deny, it secretly felt good, didn’t it?

It’s easy to see why it’s called sissy hypno porn. It’s essentially a hypnosis script set to pulsing white noise. Whilst the YouTube videos are relatively tame, showing images like pink stiletto high heels or a silver butt plug with a pink fluffy tail attached, the actual porn versions are of course sexually explicit, encouraging the viewer to be aroused by, as Michael mentioned, having sex with a man in a feminine role. Which is a strange characteristic of autogynephilia. If most autogynephiles are exclusively heterosexual, then why are they fantasising about having sex with men? Well it isn’t that they’re attracted to the male physique in the way that gay men are. It’s about validation of their feminine identity. As Anne Lawrence wrote in Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: “It is difficult to think of a female-typical behaviour that is more basic, culturally universal, or archetypal than being the recipient of vaginal penetration by a man.” Essentially, it’s the ultimate female experience outside of pregnancy and breastfeeding. 

One final note on sissy hypno porn. The idea that this porn genre is influencing boys and men to pursue medical transition, has become widespread in the gender critical movement. But Michael isn’t convinced.

Michael Bailey 

One thing one hears these days which I think is false and it is that there’s a new kind of pornography called sissy hypno porn and that is true, that is new, but that that is causing autogynephila in men, I think that’s false. Rather, I think that men with this propensity to become aroused by autogynephila and related paraphilias like masochism, they find sissy hypno porn and they find it arousing and they watch it repeatedly. I don’t think sissy hypno porn is causing men to be autogynephilic.

Michael’s explanation makes sense, but given what we know about porn addiction, it’s feasible that the more autogynephiles consume sissy porn, the more it pushes them towards medical transition. Especially if you’re a 14 year old boy. 

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In November 2023 a photo of a man wearing a sleeveless, blue velvet dress was uploaded to twitter and an intense twitter storm ensued. The photo was taken at The Bigger Picture Conference in Denver, USA. The organiser of the event, Genspect, is an international group that advocates for a non medicalised approach to gender questioning children and young people. The conference was a huge success and included the launch of their important document, The Gender Framework. It was created largely in response to version 8 of the Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People released by WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Genspect described WPATH’s standards of care as “eccentric and alarming”. The success of the conference was sadly overshadowed by Genspect uploading that photo. It triggered a civil war within the gender critical movement between those condemning the man and those defending him. The main argument against, was that this man was indulging his fetish in public and it was inappropriate, especially at a conference where he knew there would be many gender critical women. The main argument in defence of his attire was, it’s just a dress. What’s wrong with gender non conformity? 

The man in the blue velvet dress was Phil Illy, an open autogynephile.

Phil Illy

I wrote the book Autoheterosexual: Being Attracted to Being the Other Sex because I think that the people who have this orientation will be best served by understanding how it actually works so that they can, not only understand themselves but also give a greater degree of informed consent for medical interventions if they do pursue that path.

I had interviewed Phil several months prior to the twitter storm. And I must say, the whole affair has given me some anxiety about writing this episode. I expect to get the usual fierce criticism from trans activists. But I’m now expecting many gender criticals will be unhappy with me for platforming Phil.

However, I think it’s important that autogynephilic men are heard because it helps raise awareness of the condition. And that’s quite useful to the gender critical movement. Plus, I wholly agree with Phil that autogynephiles should understand what it is before deciding whether or not to transition.

So with that in mind, what’s it like discovering that you’re an autogynephile?

Phil Illy

I was at a Lady Gaga concert and I was cross dressed but in a way that I was kind of denying to myself that I was cross dressing, but I was, I was wearing a kilt and stuff like that there was this point in the show where I had this really intense feeling inside of me that it was like there was a female soul inside of me and just this powerful feminine energy that built up, and it made me, physiologically made me overheat and get kind of sweaty. I was just sitting down so that was kind of weird, you know I wasn’t moving. And yeah it was just a really powerful euphoria that was unmistakably feminine in nature, in terms of how my brain interpreted it and that felt good in the moment but the rest of the night I was kind of freaking out ‘cause I did not want to be trans, I was like, oh no, I better not be trans, just because, cos of my like passing ability, I was like, no way in hell, I’m 6’4″ I cannot be, there’s no way. 

For the next six years, Phil mostly repressed his autogynephilic feelings. He occasionally wore some women’s clothing, but he tells me that it mostly manifested through hula hooping. Then, when he was 31, he encountered the term autogynephilia for the first time and recognised that it described his experience. 

He posted in online trans communities, in search of answers and in search of others who he could talk to about what it’s like living with autogynephilia.

Phil Illy

Early on in my learning about this, I was honestly confused. I had a lot of doubt cos like transwomen online had told me that I was wrong, like unanimously so, so I was like, oh I must be wrong if literally everyone is saying I’m wrong. 

He read everything he could find on male gender dysphoria.

Phil Illy

I read Alice Dreger’s book, Gallileo’s Middle Finger as well as Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen, and the two type typology was introduced in those books and I rationally concluded that I was definitely not the homosexual type which meant it left only the other type. It felt like an icky revelation. It was revelatory but I wasn’t really that positive about it at first, but it doesn’t help that all the books out there and all the discourse about it tends to be pretty bad so, or at least to portray it negatively. Yeah, it took me a few months to get over it, by get over it I mean just adapt and update my identity to include the fact that that was my sexuality and then I just kept researching and reading to learn more cos yeah, it just blew my mind that this existed and was supposedly a major cause of gender dysphoria but I’d never heard of it. 

Through his reading and research, Phil decided that medical transition was not going to be effective given his rather masculine body type. He still calls himself a man and still uses the men’s toilets. He’s settled simply for cross dressing and his twitter bio states “transvestite”. But there’s a lot of men who do pursue transition who don’t pass as women. So what compels them to embark on this eternal, uphill battle?

Phil Illy

It’s a very individual case basis. I’d say that some likely factors are the fact that most people with this orientation have never heard of it and they’re just presented with the transgender movement’s perspective which involves gender transition and so if they have gender feelings like this, get slotted into the transition path with no other alternative presented you know that’s one thing. Another factor could be simply that they have the orientation more strongly and it doesn’t matter what their physique is they just won’t be happy unless they transition. 

You may have noticed Phil used the word “orientation”. That’s because he believes autogynephilia is a sexual orientation, hence the title of his book Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Opposite Sex. This is a controversial idea. The general criticism is that if it’s a sexual orientation, that means autogynephilia is innate. It would then follow that other sexual paraphilias are also innate sexual orientations. And among gender critical gays and lesbians, there’s a strong desire to protect the category of sexual orientation.

I asked Michael Bailey what he thinks.

Michael Bailey 

I think that the term sexual orientation can be stretched a bit once we get to things like autogynephila, nevertheless, I think it is a sexual orientation in the that sense that it is an intense preference that is rigid despite attempts to change it and it’s a preference over just other kinds of sexuality, including normal heterosexuality. Autogynephilic males, many of them are going to prefer cross dressing and transition to having sex with their wives.

This brings us to the question of what causes autogynephilia. Michael suspects it’s genetic. He’s aware that this isn’t well established, so it’s just speculation, but he points to cases where close relatives, like father and son, or two brothers discover that they’re both cross dressers. 

Others point to psychological causes such as core shame stemming from childhood trauma or poor relationships in early life. Psychotherapist Dr Joseph Burgo suggests that autogyenphilia is an attempt to overcome core shame by sexualising it. He writes: “sexualization is an additional strategy for coping with unbearable shame. By deriving sexual pleasure from the experience of humiliation, the person transforms intolerable and unpredictable pain into a controlled source of gratification, even comfort.” Author and psychiatrist Dr Az Hakeem echoed this idea in an interview with YouTuber Benjamin Boyce. He suggested that autogynephilia can be traced back to an original trauma that the mind has unwittingly sexualised in an attempt to triumph over it.

These are interesting ideas. If there are psychological causes, then it’s not an innate sexual orientation and that would mean there’s hope for men who find the condition distressing and wish to change it. But if it is innate or genetic, then attempts to correct it are bound to fail. The fact is, no one knows for sure what causes autogynephilia.

Nonetheless, Phil considers it to be a sexual orientation. And viewed in this light, he’s come to accept it as part of who he is.

Phil Illy

In my personal experience, I stopped repressing once I learned that autogynephilia was why I wanted to dress in women’s clothes and why I wish that I was a woman. Because once you know that it’s an orientation causing it and there’s no amount of logic that’ll make it go away cos we can’t change sexual orientation, I think it can make the decision making process around transition much simpler because instead of being, oh, am I trans? Instead you realise I have this type of gender dysphoria, how do I wanna deal with it. It’s a simpler question.

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The gender affirmation model of care does not acknowledge the existence of autogynephilia. For example, the Australian Standards of Care, which we looked at in previous episodes, makes no mention of the causes of gender dysphoria in males. Phil raised the topic with three different clinicians – two doctors and one therapist, and none of them had ever heard of autogynephilia.

Phil Illy

My personal anecdotal experience supports the idea that clinicians don’t know jack shit about this but more importantly than my personal experience is the fact that you can clearly read the documents put out by WPATH and they omit reference to the most common cause of gender dysphoria. They also don’t name the homosexual type either. 

WPATH and its Australian offshoot, AusPATH are not just professional bodies. Journalist Bernard Lane described them to me as hybrid organisations – a blend of health care and activism. Many members are qualified doctors and healthcare workers, creating the veneer of a professional health body, but membership is also open to the community, meaning that many autogynephilic men who have an interest in suppressing awareness of the condition, are also members. Michael is critical of WPATH.

Michael Bailey

I think WPATH is a motley crew of, that is, I would say, mutually parasitic between health care providers, some of which are very ideological, some are also trying to make a lot of money, and the people who they’re treating who tend to be disproportionately autogynephilic males, not only, but disproportionately, and the clinicians and researchers, the researchers there are not very good, and the researchers most associated with WPATH are not very good. They have this tacit agreement not to mention or study autogynephila and transition is always good and, WPATH is a, it’s a very bad organisation that has, I think, been quite destructive.

I mentioned earlier that Genspect described WPATH’s latest Standards of Care as eccentric and alarming. Perhaps the most eccentric and alarming part of the document is the chapter on eunuchs. Here’s a snippet: “Eunuch individuals are those assigned male at birth and wish to eliminate masculine physical features, masculine genitals, or genital functioning. They also include those whose testicles have been surgically removed or rendered nonfunctional by chemical or physical means and who identify as eunuch.” Essentially, WPATH is presenting eunuchs, that’s men who are obsessed with having their testicles removed, as a gender identity.

Michael Bailey 

The researchers say that some of these men like relief from their male libido and that may be one of their rationales for getting it, although, I don’t believe that that is a very strong rationale. I think all these guys have a paraphilia, they have a kink, it turns them on to be castrated, that’s why they do it. And I think that treating that as a gender identity was a mistake, it’s not gender identity, it’s a paraphilia and just as wanting an amputation, it’s not a gender identity, it’s a paraphilia. So I recommend kind of staying in one’s lane and calling things the way they are.

There’s good evidence to support the idea that this is a sexual paraphilia. Genevieve Gluck, journalist and co-founder of the online magazine Reduxx, noticed something in the draft version of WPATH’s latest standards of care. They had referenced an online forum called The Eunuch Archives. So she did some sleuthing. She joined the Eunuch Archives and then wrote an expose about what she found. Here she is speaking on GB News to Andrew Doyle of Free Speech Nation. 

Genevieve Gluck

And that website has on its main site a link to a fiction archive where there are thousands of stories written about graphic castration, explicit sexual castration, even of children, a total of about 10,000 stories altogether and of that total nearly 40% or nearly 4000 of those stories are tagged specifically with the term minor meaning they deal with themes of children. Some of these stories included themes of doctors halting the puberty of children to then sexually abuse them. Some of those stories involved forcible surgical castration of children, primarily boys, in fact these stories were some of the most popular on the website and others include depictions of chemical castration, there being an overlap with the drugs that are given to children that are called puberty blockers.

You would think, considering all this, that even gender therapists might seek to distance themselves from WPATH. Incredibly, on their website, Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service still lists WPATH as one of their Professional Affiliations. 

For men like Phil, who are trying to raise awareness of autogynephilia, WPATH simply can’t be taken seriously.

Phil Illy

They are captured by activists, completely captured, they’re not amenable to reality because it’s controlled by ideological things. And so, the Standards of Care it’s, this latest edition is particularly bad. The fact that there’s a whole eunuch chapter but they still don’t name the most common type of transgenderism, it’s just negligent and basically the clinicians are overall just completely dropping the ball when it comes to understanding gender dysphoria.

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I’ve come to think of WPATH and AusPATH more as clubs for autogynephilic men in denial, rather than health associations to be taken seriously. For example, at the 2022 AusPATH conference, endocrinologist Naomi Achong gave a presentation titled “lactation induction in transfemales, a case series”. By transfemales she meant males. Rumour has it, it was the most attended session of the entire conference. The male desire to breastfeed is an example of physiologic autogynephilia – arousal at the idea of having female bodily functions. Most of us recoil at the thought of a man doing this to an infant. But AusPATH takes it very seriously and promotes male breastfeeding as just another progressive step forward in transgender healthcare.

What’s even more alarming, is the staggering amount of influence autogynephilic men have had on the treatment of children with gender dysphoria. Men who transition due to autogynephilia have nothing in common with the new cohort of teenage girls who have rapid onset gender dysphoria. There are many adult women who believe we would’ve been one of those girls had it been the latest fad when we were teens. We recall things like hating our breasts, hating our periods, being sexually harassed or worse, by boys and adult men, or feeling there was something wrong with us for not embracing make up and sexualised clothing. At puberty, we have to grapple with the inferior status imposed on us by society. Women remember these experiences and we can empathise with today’s girls who seem to be seeking an escape from womanhood through medical transition. Now, with unlimited access to violent, degrading pornography, girls have even more reason to want to escape womanhood. But our experience is ignored. Worse, we’re branded bigots, transphobes, fascists, nazis. Instead, autogynephilic men who suddenly come out as trans in their 40s are believed. They’ve been suffering in the wrong body since they were children; they’ve always known they were trans; if only they’d had access to puberty blockers when they were 12 years old; of course their lived experience applies teenage girls. 

Autogynephilic men need the transgender child to exist because it provides cover for their sexual paraphilia. And the largest sacrifice in service of this cover up are the bodies of teenage girls. 

Michael Bailey 

I believe that ROGD is a tragedy that should never be resolved by transition. These girls do not have real gender dysphoria and amputating their breasts and giving them testosterone is just, a disaster.

But teenage girls aren’t the only ones being sacrificed. As we’ve heard already in this series, young, impressionable lesbians are becoming convinced that they’re transboys because they don’t conform to feminine stereotypes. And the same is true for feminine gay males. The messaging they receive online and in schools is leading some of these boys to confuse their gender non conformity with being trans.

From listening to gay men who have detransitioned, it’s apparent that internalised homophobia can play a part in teens and young men pursuing transition. Michael observed this 20 years ago.

Michael Bailey 

Back in the early 2000s most of the homosexual transsexuals who I met and knew and saw were, in Chicago, were ethnic minorities, especially Latina, also some Black, also some, a few Asian and some of them said as much that, in their local culture it was easier to be trans than gay – a feminine gay person. 

With the dramatic increase in girls identifying as boys, there’s also been an increase in teenage boys identifying as girls. There are several possible factors at play. In past decades autogynephilic males tended to stay in the closet for many years.

Michael Bailey 

Often these males would try to suppress their autogynephila, maybe they would find a woman who they liked and was attracted to – and autogynephilic males are very often sexually attracted to other people and when they are, it’s to women. And a lot of autogynephilic men in the past would get married, have a family. Some of them would suppress their autogynephila, forever. Others would, be able to suppress their autogynephila while their relationships with their wives were still new and exciting, but when that faded they would feel a desire to start cross dressing again and some of those would decide – similar to a man having a midlife crisis, that they must make up their minds and transition and some of them would do that.

Now, in 2024, this pattern has changed. It seems that autogynephiles are transitioning much younger than middle age. It’s likely that many boys with adolescent onset gender dysphoria, are autogynephiles.

Michael Bailey 

Yeah, that would be my guess that now it is much less stigmatising to be trans and in fact in certain groups, like progressive peer groups and so on, it actually has some cache to be trans.

Michael doesn’t think that transitioning young is a bad thing. Firstly, he believes many autogynephiles will be happier if they transition.

Michael Bailey 

Another reason why I don’t think that that’s necessarily bad for autogynephiles is that means they’re not starting families that they may walk away from later. I don’t know if you plan to talk to transwidows. That can be a sad thing. It’d be better off if they, in my mind, if they never married, or if both parties married with their eyes wide open. 

I did talk to transwidows for this project. They’re the wives and partners of men who transition. It’s often quite devasting for them and their children when this happens. It’s much like he’s leaving them for another woman, except the other woman is himself. The impact on families is something we’ll explore more in season 2 of Desexing Society.

While it may be a good thing for the autogynephilic individual to transition young, this has implications for girls and women. Transitioning young makes it easier for males to pass as women, which makes it easier for them to access women’s spaces like public toilets and changerooms. If their motivation for accessing those spaces is sexual gratification, well, women aren’t comfortable with that. It feels like a violation. A quote from Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies demonstrates this: “I am really turned on by the idea of going into the women’s shower and being surrounded by femaleness and of just being able to legally belong in the women’s restroom. What I’m saying is that to truly fit in as another woman in these places means a great deal sexually to me.”

The other possible explanation for the increase in teen boys identifying as girls, is that there’s a male form of rapid onset gender dysphoria. One therapist I spoke to for this series described a new type of adolescent male who has started showing up at his clinic. They don’t have a history of early childhood gender dysphoria. They’re heterosexual but don’t acknowledge having autogynephilic feelings. But this subgroup has an extreme aversion to masculinity. They hate machoism and the expectations of stereotypical masculinity. And they’re more emotionally sensitive compared to other boys and are often drawn to social justice causes. 

It could be that because these boys feel they’ll never live up to masculine stereotypes, that they’ve interpreted this to mean they should become women. This would indeed be a new, third category that we can think of as male rapid onset gender dysphoria. Many parents of such boys believe this to be the case. And there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to support it, not just from parents, but from therapists as well. 

But others believe that these boys are autogynephiles and they’re either unaware or unable to admit to having those feelings. This is a hard pill to swallow for parents who see no outward signs of autogynephilia.

Time will tell whether there’s a new rapid onset gender dysphoria subtype driving boys toward transition. I think it’s likely there is. Girls may be more susceptible to social contagion, but that doesn’t mean that boys are entirely immune to it. 

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If you mention autogynephilia to a trans activist you’ll probably get one of two responses. Either, that’s just a theory or that theory’s been debunked. The fiercest critics themselves often fit the typology of autogynephilia. 

Phil Illy

And so I read both the pro and anti AGP theory stuff. YOU know I’ve read Julia Serano’s many essays on autogynephila theory and, she’s full of shit, if I were to just say it bluntly but um, I find the critiques are, too much of the time they’re based in morality rather than the scientific question of whether it’s real. When it comes to figuring out what’s real in science, morals, they’re irrelevant, they’re a separate thing. 

Julia Serano who Phil mentioned here, is a male to female transsexual who has written extensively on transgenderism. In his 2007 book, Whipping Girl, he wrote the following: “while I never really believed the cliché about women being good for only one thing, I found that sentiment kept creeping into my fantasies. I would imagine myself being sold into sex slavery and having strange men take advantage of me. It’s called forced feminisation, and it’s not really about sex. It is about turning the humiliation you feel into pleasure, transforming the loss of male privilege into the best fuck ever.” In light of all that we’ve heard so far in this episode, I’ll let you make of that what you will.

Michael Bailey is also unconvinced by the claim that autogynephilia has been debunked.

Michael Bailey 

Well I think that that’s entirely false. They would like that to be true and it’s worked for them in their limited worlds just to say it’s been debunked and people who want to believe it, believe it. In fact, the science of autogynephila has advanced considerably, including by research I’ve been involved in. It’s a very strong theory, it’s true and you know I would invite anybody interested in the science to read it.

Another popular claim made by those in denial is that women also get turned on by dressing up, putting on make up and looking sexy. So women must therefore be autogynephiles as well. Which is just more evidence that male to female transsexuals really are just like women. There have even been research studies claiming to prove this – studies conducted by WPATH members and male to female transsexuals. Michael wasn’t buying it and ran his own study comparing three groups – autogynephilic males, non-autogynephilic males and women. Using the Core Autogynephilia Scale developed by Ray Blanchard, Michael found the following:

Michael Bailey 

The results were hugely different. Autogynephiles scored much, much higher on these scales than either the control natal males or the control natal females. There’s really very little overlap. That’s a hypothesis that’s been around for a while and we showed it wrong.

The debunking has been debunked. But no evidence will ever be enough for trans activists. Not the narratives of autogynephilic men recorded in Men Trapped in men’s Bodies. Not the nature of the pornography made by transsexual for transsexuals. Not the growing online communities of open autogynephiles. And not even the testimony of men like Phil Illy who are under no illusions about what’s driving them.

Phil Illy

Shame is at the core of the transgender movement’s refusal to acknowledge this orientation’s role in the development of their cross-gender identity. There’s a lot of shame and it’s pretty corrosive to the people that have it and it’s much more comforting to just believe that you’re literally a woman you know because that’s what the orientation is making you want to be and so it’s, a lot of people just choose to believe things cos it makes them feel good rather than because it’s true.

Michael Bailey 

Autogynephiles who are honest and open about their autogynephila are out there and increasingly common. I have many twitter followers like that and I find them, I would say admirable people and they don’t want to be bothering women and they don’t want to be denying autogynephila in fact I think that they have been the group most harmed by the trans women who are in denial about their autogynephila. 

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The final thing you might be wondering, is whether there’s a female version of autogynephilia. If there is, then it’s called autoandrophilia. And this is hotly debated. Phil is convinced that it exists which is partly why he uses the term autoheterosexuality, because it can be applied to both sexes.

Phil Illy

I’ve talked to hundreds of people about this and there have been a couple of times where I’ve told some women about it and, they were like, jaws dropped and like, omg, they had the recognition that what I was describing was something that they had dealt with and that had caused them a lot of distress in the past that they couldn’t make sense of and so it was just like revelatory for them.

We know that some autogynephilic men are aroused by the idea of sitting down to urinate or even squatting. So if we assume that autoandrophilia is real, then it could explain why so many young women who undergo phalloplasty surgery list standing to pee as their number one desired outcome from the surgery. 

Phil Illy

That seems to be a big one for – I assume that those ones that care about standing up to pee are the autoandrophilic type rather than the homosexual type, I mean I might be wrong about that but I think there’s a lot of symbolic power in standing up to pee in the sense that that is something from a young age, boys and girls can tell that they do differently and so I could see that as being something that’s very symbolically important for an autoandrophilic female to be able to do. 

But Michael isn’t so convinced.

Michael Bailey 

And I do believe that they have found people who report this motivation, what I am very sceptical of is that it is at all analogous to what we find among males. I mean, you know, females are just so susceptible to all kinds of things like social contagions and, and their, women’s sexuality is very different than men in a way that I think that they’re unlikely to have paraphilias in the same way that men do. So I’m sceptical but I don’t think that this is currently resolvable. We’re studying it and people should study it, I wish Phil would be a little more circumspect in talking about this because he’s out there saying oh yeah for sure it exists and it’s not for sure it exists.

The jury is out. Hopefully with more research we’ll know whether autoandrophilia really exists. 

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“Caitlyn” Jenner

Well first of all I think doctors have to realise that this is not a sexual issue. Although we are in the L the G the B, we are the T, the first three letters are about sexual orientation. Being trans is about identity and I think that’s probably the first thing they have to know, it’s not about sex, ok, nothing to do with it. It has about who you are in your soul, as a person, and that may be different than the way the world sees you.

That’s Caitlyn, formerly Bruce Jenner speaking on the YouTube channel GIBLIB. His explanation couldn’t be further from the truth. After all we’ve learnt in this episode, it’s easy to understand why autogynephiles don’t want us to know the truth. Of course it’s embarrassing for them. But more importantly, it would be impossible to argue for male access to women’s toilets and change rooms on the grounds that it’s sexually exciting for them to be in those places. So instead, we get the gender identity narrative, or the “born in the wrong body” explanation. After all, “Trans rights are human rights” is far catchier than “autogynephile rights are human rights.”

But the most distressing part of the lie, is that children and teens are being lied to, and they’re developing a manufactured kind of gender dysphoria that clinicians are all too eager to treat.

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We’ll learn more about autogynephilia and the impact on girls, women and lesbians in the next season of Desexing Society.

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Coming up in the next episode, we’ll meet detransitioner Courtney Coulson. We’ll hear how she was drawn into believing that she was trans.

Courtney Coulson

A lot of detransitoners who were on Tumblr say the same thing. We started out in our little fandoms whether that be anime or Steven Universe or Superwholock and then little by little, that trans rhetoric creeps in there. It is very cult like 

What hear about what made her wake up.

Courtney Coulson

I was in lock down, I was in a house all by my, well an apartment, a studio apartment all by myself and I just slowly realised, why am I doing this?

And we’ll learn about what it’s like picking up the pieces.

Courtney Coulson

Detransitioning? There is no road map. Doctors are not given any information and you the patient have no information. 

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Thanks for listening to Desexing Society. Written and produced by me, Stassja Frei. Thank you to my script editor, Ms Edie Wyatt, my sound technician, Matthew Friend, and to everyone who made this podcast possible. For more information, or to donate towards this project – which I paid for myself – please visit desexingsociety.com