#autogynephiliac

[michelle71sworld]

I'm in love with this lady.....

[crossdreamers]

Ozymandias picks the autogynephilia explanation for transgender lives apart, and suggests an alternative

For more than 20 years the so-called “autogynephilia” theory has been used to invalidate male to female transgender people. Even if the theory has been dismissed by both LGBTQA activists and most scientists in the field, people still have to respond to it. That has caused a lot of suffering.

Here is a great blog post by Ozymandias, that explains why this is a failed theory that does not capture the realities of being transgender.

Bookmark it, and use it for reference the next time a bigot uses the theory to dismiss you or a transgender friend!

Ozymandias suggests an alternative to  stigmatizing explanations based on “fetishes”, “effeminate homosexuality” and “paraphilias”:

It is almost as if there are three switches, 

one of which says Figure Out What People Of Your Sex Are Supposed To Do In Your Culture And Do That, 

one of which says Be Attracted To People Of The Other Sex, 

and one of which says Feel Strongly That You Are A Member Of Your Sex. 

And then some factor– perhaps prenatal?– has something like a 50% chance of flipping over each individual switch. So a minority of the population has all three (that is, they are straight feminine trans women), and a lot of people have one or two, but there’s still a strong correlation between the positions of the three switches.

Photo: RomoloTavani

[crossdreamers]

“Treating trans women as sexual deviants has done them real, concrete harm.”

Noah Berlatsky has an interesting article on the sexualization of trans identities over at The Establishment. Noah looks at how the pseudo-scientific theory of “autogynephilia” has been used to invalidate trans women in particular:

As activist Julia Serano writes, “Reducing a person to their sexual bodies or behaviors sexualizes them. And in our culture, sexualizing someone (i.e., reducing them to their sexuality, rather than seeing them as a whole person) is one of the most effective ways of invalidating a person.”

Feministing editor Jos Truitt writes that that the diagnosis of autogynephilia presumes that “the concept of autogynephilia has had a cruel impact on trans women who aren’t straight, telling us our genders are actually just sexual perversions.”

 Berlatsky argues, correctly in my view, that sexual “embodiment” fantasies are quite normal among cis as well as trans people:

In romance novels, in fashion magazines, in spy stories, in porn, men and women and others imagine themselves in different bodies, whether of the same gender or of a different gender. In most cases, these fantasies are not seen as wrong because they are part of cis sexuality, and cis people aren’t seen as abnormal. Trans people’s fantasies are labeled as deviant because trans people themselves are seen as deviant—and then, in a perfect (read: twisted) circle, the “deviant” fantasies become a way to say that trans people, and in this case especially trans women, are broken.

Read the whole article here!

And here is my take on why “feeling sexy” should be considered natural and healthy in both cis and trans people.

Illustration photo: Boggy 22