Autogynephilia

A look at Anne Lawrence’s “Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies”

I’m intending to reread Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies but in the meantime I thought I’d do a thread with some extracts from the first-person narratives of men with autogynephilia which are featured in the book of that title by Anne Lawrence.

The book contains the personal accounts of 249 Autogynephilic transsexuals.

Autogynephilia is “a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female” and is present in up to 2.8% of the male population. Some of whom transition as a result of it.

Understanding this paraphilia is imperative for all of us talking about the ongoing erosion of women’s rights

I think reading this book means a lot of confusing things fall into place for women such as the constant evocations of being a “girl” that we see from men who identify as women (colloquially known as transwomen).

As well as the surprising desire to have a cervical smear or “gynaecological care” that we have seen come up on occasion.

The humiliation fantasy and the forced feminisation fantasy mentioned here by another contributor also keep recurring in these conversations and will be familiar to many women discussing this daily. The need for others to participate in the sexual fantasy, unknowingly, even in negative ways such as through jeering and shock makes this paraphilia one which is acted out in public.

A not uncommon theme is taking on a given role that women have been more traditionally confined to such as submissive housewife. Or even becoming some kind of brood mare who only exists to reproduce and gratify a man.

This makes sense of why a conflict between women and men who identify as women was inevitably bound to arise.

Not only will many women outright reject any rewriting of women which so reduces us, but we also do not want the new definition of woman to be based on sexist ideas instead of biology.

Our subjugation in society is sexually fulfilling to many men with autogynephilia. Including the subjugation of women in cultures that still have even further to go when it comes to equality between the sexes.

Even male violence against women becomes constantly sexualised by some AGPs.

Understanding that men who identify as women have a male sex drive and a male conception of women quickly explains the vast differences between us. Even, surely, to those who like to insist that “identifying as” is the same thing as being a woman.

Many women are afraid of male violence because of the serious risks to us it poses and because of our own experiences of it. We wish for of a world that has no more male violence in it, and for the vast freedoms that world would offer us. We could walk late at night, or through forests, and alleyways and deserted places with no more risk of sexual violence. Or of never coming home.

We could travel to any land, alone, if we had the money to do so and not have to give any thought to the idea we might be murdered or kidnapped or raped there. The inherent risk that comes with being female and moving through society would be gone.

Someone masturbating over that very oppression of us cannot hope to understand it. They do not, after all, even wish to prevent it as doing so would remove their ability to have such a fantasy.

I think it is hard for women who haven’t read about this, and even for those of us who have, to fully grasp how much even our most mundane experiences can be sexually arousing for those with autogynephilia.

Or how much sexism necessarily informs this. Sitting in a “feminine way”, as quoted below, for example sounds like something out of the 1950s.

It is also just baffling to imagine something as annoying as shaving our legs could be so exciting.

More worrying is the sexualising of childhood and adolescent experiences . This projection of sexuality onto children should not be something any adults are doing for any reason whatsoever.

For girls, who are going through puberty and suddenly becoming sexualised by men, it is already a bad enough experience without potentially having adults in their life who find a whole new way to objectify them and their changing bodies.

One of the more baffling discoveries on joining the gender conversation has been how many men who identify as women claim to have periods. Several stories of women’s used tampons and sanitary towels being used as a prop for that wish, even being fished out of public bins for this purpose, have always raised questions about WHY for those who know nothing of AGP yet.

So have threads that circulated where men who identify as women discuss various ways to simulate periods, in one memorable case with ice cubes made of ketchup inserted up the bottom.

There is, however, a very simple and obvious reason some are claiming to have periods, as we see here.

The writer of the following quote later adds “I also fantasized myself being a woman and being gang raped”

Part of this paraphilia sees the continual conflation of male sexual fantasies with what a woman really is. In the eyes of these men their fantasies of being us and being abused as us make them the same as us.

Women are being redefined in law, in many countries, to include male people who think of us like this. We are being rewritten as a category. The definition of woman we are supposed to accept is no longer that we are adult, human and female but instead that we are “anyone who identifies as a woman”. What a woman is under this new process of identification is so often “person who is gang raped (and supposedly likes it)” or “person who is subjugated (and supposedly likes it)”.

Or to put it as transwoman author, Andrea Long Chu, put it in his well-known book Female: “Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is."

This next quote is not by one of the agp transsexuals featured here but instead by Dr.Levine, the famous sexologist. A few decades ago all of us knew that transvestite men existed and that they were sexually motivated.

There has been a big push to disassociate that knowledge from Transwomen and the trans movement, even though Magnus Hirschfeld who coined the term “tranvestite” did so to describe a patient cohort of men who specifically wished to be women. He even mused at the time that the term was perhaps insufficient as it suggested it only related to clothing when it didn’t.

Levine here remakes the association that has seemingly been lost in popular culture by understanding that transvestites very much have the desire to be female. The difference between transsexual and transvestite was conceived only as a medical distinction because transsexual people are those who undergo medical interventions.

This is why many of the transsexuals who contributed narratives to this book also speak about their arousal to women’s clothes. Several used to borrow their mothers clothes earlier in life for sexual purposes.

The confessed use of female relatives underwear for masturbation, whether they belong to a mother, a sister, an aunt or someone else is sufficiently common that it reads like a fairly standard story for those of us who have read the literature about AGP.

A representative sexualised clothing narrative comes from this writer:

There’s a feminist text somewhere that talks about how women’s clothes have been designed to restrict our movement, or our freedom over time. If you go back through the various iterations of keeping us demure you can analyse this yourself. Who, for example can really run free in either a corset or a bustle. The impracticality of women’s clothing was, perhaps, its practicality in a sexist society.

Here, though the very restrictive nature of our clothes and the idea of having to be constantly aware of those clothes is a fantasy. This may explain why some men who identify as women fetishise traditional islamic dress as well

Other writers find the thought of having a female body far more arousing than feminine attire.

The starkly sexist way some of them describe this is confronting.

… nothing more, nothing less?

Some informants discuss fantasies of female pregnancy, lactation and menstruation.

When men who identify as women join menopause forums, wish to breastfeed their children, seek the dream of uterus transplants or claim periods it is necessary to know this is sexual in nature.

Here are four more similar testimonies from the book by other agp transsexuals:

Numbers here simply identify what number they are presented in the book

And

It’s almost impossible as a woman, to comprehend the apparently overwhelming nature of these sexual fantasies but here even the thought of having a feminine name or tossing one’s hair is sexually arousing.

Even the most trivial experiences don’t seem to escape sexualisation if they are perceived as being a female one.

When we are discussing women’s spaces, the invasive nature of male people finding sexual satisfaction in being admitted to those spaces seems extremely relevant to me but is so inflammatory for people to hear about that it often gets sidelined entirely.

In a society that respects women do we have the right to single sex spaces? Do we have the right to spaces completely free from our sexualisation by men or do we constantly have to accommodate male desires and our own objectification?

Some examples of what I mean here

The last seems entirely contradictory as it is impossible to be in a female space, as a male, because you are sexually aroused by it and not be having sexual feelings. By definition, that is exactly what those are.

Even the nail salon, a place about as sexy to most people as a cactus becomes somehow unaccountably thrilling

Some men who identify as women also talk here about being aroused by lesbian relationships. This is a familiar idea to so many of us who have seen how lesbians who will not date transwomen are often shamed, denigrated as transphobic and in some cases physically violated

The current pressure on lesbians to accept “girldick” is a direct result of male desires.

More unexpectedly, one contributor even mentions that changing sex markers on documentation can be an arousing thought.

At one point in the book Lawrence remembers how a patient found being treated with sexism arousing. For clarity: Anne Lawrence uses she/her pronouns for the all the men who identify as women in this book.

John Money, however, does not use she/her pronouns when recounting what a patient of his said about sex with his wife.

There is a lot in the book about the rather narcissistic nature of attraction to others in autogynephilia. Sexual partners get treated as a kind of mastubatory prop which sounds harrowing and dehumanising for those partners. Most of whom will be women.

Money’s recollection:

Those with this paraphilia are so clear, here, about their experiences. That honesty allows women to understand what they are looking at when they see a trans movement built on compelling women to shut up, budge over and to no longer have any distinct needs of their own.

Reading this it is easy to understand why women are being harmed by the gender movement and why, also, it is so crucial to trans activists to stop women talking about all of this too much.

Lawrence says, in line with findings by other sexologists, that the vast majority of transwomen in western cultures are autogynephiles.

Paraphilias like to cluster and so we see co-occurring paraphilias in those who have AGP, too. Some mainly seem baffling to most of us such as leg brace paraphilia, some are disturbing such as an adult baby paraphilia and and then in rarer cases the most disturbing paraphilias, such as paedophilia, co-occur with AGP.

Men’s sexual desires are rewriting women,

Men’s sexual desires are rewriting women’s rights,

Men’s sexual desires are dominating the conversation.

You can read the whole book free here:

https://critorix.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf