Any person who uses terms like “fetish” and “autogynephilia” to invalidate a transgender person does not understand the basics of bigotry and marginalization. This applies to other LGBTQA persons as well. Stop it now!
Over at Transcend Movement Felix Conrad argues that trans people should stop arguing as if the autogynephilia theory – which is often used to invalidate trans people – is a real scientific theory:
Firstly, let’s stop spending so much time on autogynephilia…it’s not worth it. Better you think: how can we improve LGBT rights in this country?
Secondly, let’s stop thinking of transgender psychology as a science with right and wrong theories. No one knows shit about why people are transgender or why they transition or why it turns me on to be a girl. All we have are ideas that each transperson finds helpful, slightly helpful, not helpful at all, or…toxic.
The particular narrative you choose is not, therefore, something scientific, but a story that is deeply personal and expressive of how you see yourself and your gender variance. Your theory about your gender variance is as personal as a tattoo or your female name.
The crime of the autogynephiliac troll is, therefore, not that they are promoting an idea that is scientifically wrong, but that they are framing something as science that is not science. It’s just a narrative.
I agree with most of what Felix’ says in this post.
But there is one thing to be said for arguing against the theory in public fora. For new generations of trans people the arguments made by the transphobic autogynephilia-supporters may be destructive.
It helps them to see that other trans people have been through this before and are vigilant. It helps them to read arguments about why the theory is pseudo-science, arguments like these.
The main problem, as I see it, is that while some trans women (…) probably are aroused by their erotic imagery of their bodies as female, so are other women, cisgender women (or women assigned female at birth) who might identify as straight, or bi, or lesbian.
We’re all taught that women’s bodies are sexy (thanks, patriarchal male gaze!) and we all probably identify with our bodies as sexual objects to various degrees. So until there’s better research on how women of different types experience their bodies as arousing, it’s unfair to single out and stigmatize trans women as unnaturally drawn to this kind of self-eroticizing imagery.
She also draws attention to the fact that science has often been used to bully those marginalized:
I mean, imagine if male doctors were still intently insisting that all women suffered from hysteria, but every time we tried to speak up and said, “No, actually we are unhappy with the lack of opportunities in our sh*tty Victorian-era lives,” they just shushed us. Or if whenever African-Americans tried to challenge stereotypes that make them out to be more primitive and violent than whites, they were told, “Shut up, because science.”
Arousal from imagining yourself as a sexy and attractive human being is quite normal among both men and women, cis and straight. “Feeling sexy” is a good and healthy feeling, not a sign of a mental illness.
Popular media actually provides cis straight women with advice on how to feel sexy, including tips on masturbation, dressing up and use of lingerie.
Click here for one such article. Sure, it is pretty sexist, but it gives a good example of what is commonly expected of modern Western women.
To give you one recommendation from the article:
#3 Dress sexy. Wear clothes that make you feel good and confident. What looks good on one person may not look great on another. Experiment, pick the colors that look good on you and fill your wardrobe with clothes that makes you look good and feel good.
If cis women follow such advice, they are considered healthy.
If male to female transgender persons do so, they are classified as autoerotic perverts. A cis woman is dressing up. A trans woman is told she is a crossdressing fetishist.
This is why we should never use the word fetish to invalidate transgender and queer identities. Judge cis and trans people by the same standards.
There is a kind of scientist that hides their bigotry behind pseudo-scientific terms and really bad science. One of these theories is the autogynephilia theory.
It has been thoroughly debunked by those who really know something about the sexuality of trans men and trans women, but it fits the prejudices of transphobes so well, that it is still used to invalidate and harass trans people.
I decided to make a little experiment. What if transferred the logic behind the autogynephilia theory to another group of people? The Greek term Autogynephilia could just as well man “a woman’s love of cars” as “love of oneself as a woman.”
What if we used the logic of autogynephilia on cis women who love cars?
You know what? It worked like a charm.
You can use the old-fashioned gender stereotypes of this kind of sexology to invalidate any group of people who do not live up to the sexual hang-ups of the researchers.
Are you confused about your gender, but someone has told you that you cannot be trans because you have erotic dreams about being the “other” gender? They used the “fetish” word, didn’t they? Or maybe they referred to the “autogynephilia” theory of Ray Blanchard.
Here’s the fact: It is all bullshit. It is all bad science. It is all yet another attempt from a transphobic society to force you stay in your closet, and stop you from becoming your true self.
There is more about this thread over at Crossdream Life!
There is a very interesting discussion on this twitter thread over at Crossdream Life.
LisaM tears the autogynephilia theory apart, documenting that this is indeed pseudo-science based on old-fashioned sexist views of gender and sexuality. Use it as reference the next time you end up discussing autogynephilia with bigots!
Are you confused about your gender, but someone has told you that you cannot be trans because you have erotic dreams about being the “other” gender? They used the “fetish” word, didn’t they? Or maybe they referred to the “autogynephilia” theory of Ray Blanchard.
Here’s the fact: It is all bullshit. It is all bad science. It is all yet another attempt from a transphobic society to force you stay in your closet, and stop you from becoming your true self.
Cristan Williams has started a fascinating series on the history of transphobic sexology and its main proponents Zucker, Blanchard and Green.
Williams writes over at Transadvocate:
In the process of doing research for this article I noticed there seems to be a particular set of ideas, propagated around the time of the disco era, that stand in stark contrast to contemporary ethical therapeutic models for working with transgender individuals. I came to think of these particular views as “Disco Sexology.” …
Sexologists who postulated that sexual fetishes and/or gender roles drove trans people to implicitly experience their bodies in the way they do in no small way comprised the ontological foundation of trans care for decades.
For instance, Drs. Ray Blanchard (creator of “autogynephilia”) and Zucker (who believed he could cure trans kids) were opinion leaders at CAMH [Toronto center for mental health] and in the DSM [American psychiatric manual] committee on so-called “gender identity disorders” while Drs. Zucker and Richard Green (creator of the Sissy Boy Syndrome) were opinion leaders at the Archives of Sexual Behavior and in the DSM GID committee.
I believe that over time Dr. Zucker came to represent the power of a particular type of sexology personified at CAMH because he held leadership roles at CAMH, the DSM GID Committee, and the Archives of Sexual Behavior all at the same time.
The power-knowledge Disco Sexology held over the lives of trans people is waning and newer therapeutic patient-centered models, informed by decades of clinically observing the value of Disco Sexology gender postulations, are proving themselves to be more efficacious.
However, Disco Sexology advocates claim they are being oppressed and that their postulations are being discarded because of politics, not clinical observations. Disco Sexology advocates publicly fret that while trans youth and young adults show consistently good outcomes when they encounter treatment informed by contemporary best practices, these youth and young adults may nevertheless, later in life, come to regret that they had not undergone Disco Sexology-informed therapy…
Perhaps most troubling is that Disco Sexology informs the way hate groups target trans people.
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.
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.
I have been reading Felix Conrad’s new ebook on gender variance and sexology. Well written, interesting and provocative, as always. This post will not be so much a review of the book as a commentary on what it covers. We agree that we need a new narrative that makes sense of the sexuality of gender variant people.
We need a new model, a new narrative, a new way of thinking about sexual desire and gender variance, because right now we are far too busy reacting to the belief systems of old:
You know, the ones that sort gender variant people into categories like “effeminate gay men” and “autogynephiliacs”, “real trans women” and “fetishists”, people “trapped in the wrong bodies” and “sexual perverts”.
We are lacking a new synthesis
The fact that we are arguing against the old is inevitable. This is how human thought evolves. To use the vocabulary of Hegel: We start out with one way of looking at the world (thesis), which is then challenged by another (antithesis) until the world moves on to a third position (synthesis).
What we are lacking is the synthesis. Felix does not provide us with that new model in the book, or at least not fully, but he gives as a pretty good idea about where we have to go.
If I understand him correctly we have to get to the point where we discuss the sexuality and sexual desires of queer and gender variant people freely and openly. We have to get to a point where we are able to make those fantasies an integrated part of transgender identities of all kinds (and I use the word transgender here as an umbrella term for all types of gender variance here).
Right now sexual fantasies of the crossdreamer kind are considered invalidating not only for transsexual women and men – who have transitioned or who want to do so – but also for non-transitioning transgender people (including those genderqueer, crossdressing, drag and more).
