The distinction between AGPs and gender non-conforming ("girly") boys is also critical to women's and girls' safety and rights. The fact that transvestites/AGPs/fetishists have been included under the "trans" umbrella and treated as some kind of oppressed minority in need of expanded rights and cultural uplift has meant that politicians and media alike have gotten behind pushing these fetishistic straight men into women's and girls' private spaces, prisons, rape shelters, domestic violence shelters, and sports teams. The AGPs are having a field day with this, as entry into each of these spaces feeds into their fetish while eroding the rights of women and girls to privacy, dignity, and safety.
And the TRAs have not-so-unwittingly gone along with, if not doubled down on, this in order to signal their virtue. I was never a rabid "trans rights" supporter, but I always had my doubts about even when I was going along with even the pronoun stuff. The discovery of the AGP archetype was a revelation for me and brought so much clarity to understanding how straight men could be trans.
Doesn't matter which men are pretending to be women and using women's spaces, no men should be pretending to be women and using women's spaces. Not even the gay ones. Especially now with so many straight men in the developed world being more or less accepting of male homosexuality. We've come a long way in fifty years. No more excuses, and men need to stop using women as human shields.
Agree. I've long argued that the entire problem with trans activism is that they've allowed AGPs to hijack, and thus derail, the movement.
Imagine if the gay rights movement had for some reason allowed pedophiles to become its standard flag-bearers. Since that's an entirely different cohort with different goals and a justifiably negative public perception, I'm willing to wager that same-sex marriage wouldn't exist today, and homophobia would be not just rampant but likely institutional as a result.
Instead, the gay rights movement chose the boring path of respectability politics, which included a consciously unglamourous portrayal of gayness by seeking marriage at a time when heterosexual marriages were going down the drain, and a strong rejection of the age-old homophobic conflation of gayness with pedophilia.
If lifelong, persisting gender dysphoria is indeed real, which I'm not qualified to assess, then dysphoric individuals need to leave the AGPs out of the narrative. Because, again, they're an entirely different cohort with wildly different goals, and allowing them to steer the trans ship leads exactly nowhere.
Thank you, Ben, for addressing the topic so calmly yet directly.
Question: Do you think we should drop the AGP label and just call it transvestic fetishism?
I feel like "autogynephilia" is a pseudomedical term that only draws us into arguments about whether AGP really exists and how many AGPs there are, distracting us from the actual point, which is this: Cross dressers -- ie, around 3% of adult men -- have been included under the trans umbrella and invited to flaunt and escalate their fetish while being lauded by the public as stunning and brave.
Heh, I don't think anyone belongs under the trans umbrella, because "transgender" isn't a real thing - not an ontological category, anyway.
As for what to call the so-called AGPs, I think "transvestite" is as good a word as any. Anyone born before 1980 immediately hears Tim Curry belting out "I'm just a sweet transvestite ..." and that's exactly the right image. Nothing wrong with it, in fact it can be fun and hot in the right (adults only) context, but it's not behavior to be normalized. And no one was confused about Frank N. Furter's sex, lol.
Agree with the post and that Rachel Levine is a monster. As to who belongs under the trans umbrella--not sure who should be in, but NOT children, or adults, who fail to display gender stereotypical behaviour. Those are boys and girls full stop.
I highly recommend the Gender: A Wider Lens episode with Dr. Az Hakeem as he seems to break down “trans” into four categories, including (if I remember correctly) saying that AGP and transvestic fetishism are two different things.
You act like there's any actual such thing as a trans umbrella.
Unpopular take: There's no such thing as trans.
I know there are people who think they are trans, and I know it makes a lot of us happy to pretend that's a thing, but it's not a thing.
One, human beings don't change sex. Two, thoughts and feelings don't determine sex. Three, sex-based stereotypes are not sexes. Under no definition of trans does trans actually work in the real world. It's just a thought construct people like to use to label themselves.
If people understood this was just fantasy and pretend and approached it in that spirit, I'd have no problem with seeing people talking about "trans umbrellas." But they're acting like "being trans" is on par with being a man or being a woman and nope, I'm not going to support that. Women and men are materially real. Thinking you're not the sex you were born is delusion.
100% agree with every word here. No one is “really” trans. It’s a fantasy/delusion like any other, but it’s also a particularly harmful one if indulged like it has been.
Thank you for getting to the heart of the matter. However, there is one point that I want to comment on, one that you allude to in your sole footnote: "...the huge uptick in trans identification in recent years... there are now many other reasons why a person might identify as trans (social contagion, social cache, radical politics, etc.)."
That huge uptick now constitutes the overwhelming majority of those who identify as trans. To give you an idea about the relative magnitudes, a 2015 systematic review (SR) concluded that the meta-estimate of the clinical population of transgender is 0.0046% (doi: 10.1016/j.eurpsy.2015.04.005).
(A parenthesized sidenote: I got alerted to this meta-estimate because the SR was cited by Baker et al., 2021 https://doi.org/10.1210/jendso/bvab011. This is the SR that was commissioned by WPATH to find the mental health benefits of cross-sex hormones. The short story - there was extremely weak evidence for any benefit because all the studies had a very high risk of bias, and there was no evidence at all for making any pronouncement on death by suicide, and yet, this being a WPATH-commissioned review, the authors concluded that "these benefits make hormone therapy an essential component of care that promotes the health and well-being of transgender people." Baker, incidentally, is Kellan Baker, one of the coauthors of the "Yale Integrity Project" paper that tries to strike down the Cass Report with unintentionally humorous effects.)
Anyway, back to the 0.0046% - this was the population that Blanchard, Bailey, or even Lawrence (BBL hereafter) saw more than two decades back. In fact, this was the estimate from as recently as 2015 - that is when the SR came out. Let's say that the number is now, thanks to social contagion, social cache, radical politics, and other factors, conservatively at 1%. Then, this number - 1% - is more than 217 times larger than the population that Blanchard developed his typology (1%/0.0046%).
Unfortunately, however, the BBL trio continues to insist that this new population, which is 217 times larger than the population they looked at, is the same AGP population that they looked at when Blanchard developed his typology, Bailey wrote his book "The Man Who Would Be Queen," and Lawrence compiled his (I agree with your use of pronouns) "Men Trapped in Men's Bodies." Which, scientifically speaking, is nuts! Is it possible that these 216 new boys who suddenly identify as trans have now been conditioned (I don't want to use the word "groomed" because it is so overused) to get excited by thinking of themselves in women's clothing? That is entirely possible - the human mind is infinitely pliable, after all: show an adult only videos of bestiality from the dark corners of the internet for an extended period of time, and they might just start thinking that maybe this bestiality thing is not such a perversion after all.
However, that only means that we should have an urgent discussion about how the likes of Adm. Richard Levine are essentially using these boys as a fertile ground for their unfulfilled fantasies.
If 0.0046% of the population are clinically afflicted by this paraphilia (one way to think of this extremely small number is this - if you were an extremely social person who had conversations with three *new* people *every* day of your life, it would take you roughly 18 years to have a conversation with one Richard Levine), let us try to ensure that we do not *create* 216 new Richard Levines. And not, as BBL insists, declare to these boys, "Oh yeah, you are AGP; let's make sure you get fast-tracked to hormones and castration."
Anyway, this is a side comment. Great article, and thank you.
Excellent response. You echo the data on trans I was aware of back as far as late 70’s and 80’s from sex researchers I knew from Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
There are quite some stories from time I spent at the Gay and Lesbian Center in LA about gay kids, but the phenomenon I see today is completely unlike that time. The only boys I saw presenting as female then indeed were groomed to do so by their johns, and not coincidentally they looked like… hookers.
“You are and never were like the girly young boys that wrestle with deep internal shame about their same-sex attraction.”
I share this experience as a gay man. Some people think this internal shame is only about being called a fag or being made to feel outcast. Maybe some amount. I actually think it’s as if consciously or unconsciously the wiring of the gay brain is coming to terms with not being one of the normies, and especially struggling with the mental load of not seeing the pathways forward. Who knows how heavily the understanding of possibly never having kids weighs on the brain. Or seeing the life that is laid out in your parents lives and straight friends, but never seeing your role models up close until later in life. Or being alienated from the well traveled and nurtured interactions of heterosexuality in the millions of ways they have been written about (successes and shortcomings) and exemplified for millennia. This is a deficit for a gay man to reconcile at a young age that is also shame inducing, isolating, and encumbering even if you are not called a fag. These challenges will remain challenges even in a world of perfect loving peers. These are parts of the gay journey. (As a side curiosity: trans people I have met rarely understand or conceptualize this experience, even belittling this major journey. Gay men often recognize this journey in each other instantly and it’s a deep source of comfort, camaraderie, and bonding)
Ironically the same sort of people who are great at supporting the latest causes (real or imagined) are terrible at building out pathways of dignity —like gay marriage. The plan seems to have been blow things up and then make straight people carry the burden of putting things back together in a way that intimately recognizes the needs of people very unlike themselves. That’s delusional.
Part of the youth of a gay man will always be investigating how they are different, coming to terms with their particularly different nature, and finding pathways that bring dignity and fulfillment. This will often be a lonely journey for many gay men as we are not born in clumps of a kind but in a kind of diaspora throughout the population. This journey deserves consistent thought and planning. Our well funded organizations like GLAAD, and the fast food that is the one size fits all LGBTQ movement, doesn’t care about the slow compound interest of generation over generation growth. They lack vision. They know dynamite, how to blow things up, and little else.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Sam. My sense however is that much if what you’re describing is not universal experience for gays growing up, and that to the extent that it is prevalent it’s more about homophobia of society than anything inherent about being gay. My own experience has been different and much more positive and I attribute this to the luck of being relatively young (Millenial) and being born and raised by accepting parents and society. To be clear, being a minority of any kind is never as easy as being in the majority (even being left-handed is a slight disadvantage in life !). But I want to make clear to other readers here that shame and isolation need not and today often *are not* part of the experience of many gay boys, and our dramatic advances towards legal and social equality are the main reason for that. Let us not forget that. We must protect the progress that has been made.
As for the topic of transition, as I pointed elsewhere nowadays it seems that the population most likely to be encouraged to transition are “tomboy” girls (who may or may not be Lesbian), not transitioning of boys of any orientation, which is much rarer.
I couldn’t disagree more. Compared to the past nothing looks like internalized shame. The goal post should be a comparison with contemporary heterosexuals, not gay men of the past.
I am a millennial. I rarely meet gay millennials who do not regularly deal with isolation and finding meaningful pathways to fulfillment. Two years ago I met a gen z gay guy who attempted suicide. That was powerful shame.
I’m happy for you THPacis, but turn on Grindr, and simple ask the gay men if they have struggled.
You might also believe the myth that all gay men are financially well off. Again, switch on a dating apps and ask.
There is a powerful divergence between the gays who’ve made it, and the massive majority who have not. Financial struggles, shame, isolation are the majority of the community. But we really should be finding data on these things instead of trusting our intuitions. I run three Gay Mens groups and I’m drawing on the couple hundred gay men I’ve met in Southern California over the last 5 years.
It’s always curious to me why these struggles are hard for gay men who are doing well to see. I think it might explain why the gay organizations have felt very little pushback towards mission creep and abandonment of focus. Is it possible that you are not allowing yourself to hear the struggles of your peers THPacis? Cause my guess would be 75% of gay men are struggling with isolation, shame (we would have to narrow down an operationalized definition) and have struggled junior high through college to come to terms with their sexuality.
Part of internalized homophobia is a generosity of spirit that discounts the need to keep growing and instead focus on other groups. I see this everywhere in the gay community. I want to tell gay men, you don’t just get to be “ok”, you get to be abundant. One good day is enough for a gay man to consider his needs met and start focusing on others. It’s beautiful and self destructive.
Listen, I didn't mean to be dismissive, nor to imply that being gay doesn't remain a serious disadvantage in many ways for us all. I do however think that the only way to go beyond our anecdotal experiences, which do vary a lot, is via large-scale studies based on sound statistics. Grinder, for example, is a biased dataset. Gays in happy long term relationships would be underrepresented there as are gays looking for more traditional dating experiences.* Moreover, straights struggle with relationships too, and with finances etc. (no idea where you got the stereotype about gays being all financially successful. Not only do I not believe it, I've never even heard about it!).
Again I am *not* saying that being gay has become a non-issue. I *am* saying that we've made tons of progress and shouldn't minimize that. As are a result, more of us have gone through life experiences that differ substantially from some of the common stereotypes. Acknowledging that doesn't take away our right to fight for more, because the struggle certainly isn't over, nor the danger of regression. But I think this post, and many of the comments, are taking pretty narrow stereotypes and crude generalizations about gays as gospel truth, and I found that troubling. I thought providing a different perspective may be helpful for the straight people around here, to remind them that as with every other group, gays, and their experiences, aren't a monolith.
(*This may be outdated now, but at least "back in my day" grinder had the reputation of being a hookup app more than a dating app. Thus people like myself and my now husband never even used it. We met on a more "vanilla" dating app that caters to both straights and gays. I don't know how rare or common gays like me are, but I don't think we're negligible. In other words, polling grinder users means automatically considering only a specific subset of the gay community. It's like polling Muslim or Jewish opinion via the mosque/synagogue. It may seem reasonable until you realize that It ignores all the members of those groups who aren't actually there all that often/ever!)
One of the first transwomen I ever personally interacted with (as a hair stylist, so pretty intimately and in service of his desire to look more feminine) was such a classic example of AGP it triggered something in me, even though I didn’t know about AGP and wouldn’t for a few years yet.
He had been in special forces military, was in a motorcycle group/gang, and started transitioning in his 50s. He was built like a line/backer, and while coloring and cutting his hair, he enjoyed telling me how exciting it was to go through puberty “as a girl”.
Puberty is rarely enjoyable for anyone of either sex, but my memories included so much shame and confusion around periods and my fast-developing body—including new and unwanted attention from middle aged men—that it was very difficult for me to listen and nod along to what he was saying.
Not only can no 50-something male go through “puberty as a girl”—because he is an adult—but whatever he thought puberty for girls was is so divorced from the actual experience of girlhood puberty as to be offensive.
Drag is a mockery of women. Trans women (who are eunuchs) are also a mockery of women. Very few pass. The face is too big. The chest is too big, and usually the boobs are placed too far apart. The Adam's apple is still apparent. Usually they are too tall - men over 6'2" who think that they are delicate flower-like sylphs are completely ridiculous.
You don't have to apologize for using sex-based pronouns.
We are told to be kind, that it's respectful, a courtesy, no more, to go along with the pretense. When we do, we are prioritizing the feelings of these men, and making it easier for them to claim entry to previously women-only places, from prisons to PCOS support groups, from lesbian dating apps to La Leche League meetings.
They are not another type of woman. There is only one kind of woman, and we deserve to be centered in our own spaces and the language used to refer to us.
>>The problem with all of this—besides the fact that it’s insane—is that the vast majority of the effeminate boys will desist (stop thinking they were supposed to be born as girls) once they commence through puberty, and the vast majority of those desisters will grow up to be gay men. The very few whose gender identity disorder (referred to today as “gender dysphoria”) persists might decide to medically transition as adults and attempt to live and pass as women. ...
There is no clinical test to determine which boys’ gender dysphoria will persist into adulthood and which boys’ will not persist. And since we cannot tell the future, there is no way to determine which boys will grow up to identify as gay—with their bodies and endocrine systems intact—and which boys will grow up to identify as transwomen. Therefore, it is totally unethical to subject young males to this protocol. It is, I believe, a violation of their human rights.<<
The link between AGP and trans ideology remains largely unexplored but a major tell was revealed in the reactions of transsexuals (using nomenclature of the time they transitioned) Andrea James and Lynn Conway to the publication of J. Michael Bailey's book "The Man Who Would Be Queen." In that book (which I have not read) Bailey looks at AGP in relation to transsexualism and finds that, in some instances, AGP men may turn to surgery. Conway and James were furious with that conclusion and went to great lengths to destroy Mr. Bailey's career (reported in Alice Dreger's book "Galileo's Middle Finger.") In other words, they didn't want the eros of paraphilia to be any where near their motivations because, for them, that would undermine the project itself.
Acknowledgment of AGP punctures the fantasy that they can be, or are, the vision of themselves they hold in their minds.
Not so dissimilar to how fragile many transwomen feel around women discussing periods or pregnancy—things that inevitably remind them that they are not truly female and can never be. The pain of this knowledge seems almost unbearable for them, and triggers intense loathing and often hatred.
I spoke to Lynn Conway at length in 2001 at an event I set up in a LGBT setting a few years before Bailey’s book came out.
He was in an extreme corner already on transing children. He spoke glowingly about puberty blockers using all the standard falsehoods, and simply deflected “are they really trans” questions with “kids know” responses. He spoke at length on hijra in India and how those kids were emasculated (not just castrated) so young they had beautiful vulvas for life. His website on the subject goes on at length. I realized he was completely bonkers, and dangerously misinformed in both biology, and how impressionable children are.
Bailey’s book, which has a really poor title, proposes that the post-puberty trans who operated identically as Conway did, found trans one of many options to express their fetish. I think Conway may have reacted badly to hints that he too was a male who operated as a male for decades but then found life more fulfilling to give in to the fantasy delusion.
> The vast majority of adult trans-identified males (transwomen) are thought to
> be autogynephilic.
I find this totally plausible, but a reference would be good.
Also, for what it is worth, and ignoring for a moment the thing in itself that is the obsession with highly sexualised femininity that transwomen, unlike actual women, almost universally exhibit, there is something immediately and obviously wrong with Hunter Schaefer's breasts.
Not only are Hunter's breasts 'too perfect' and actually quite weird, but everything about Hunter is stereotypically female. This propping up of the male perspective on what is seen to be attractive and sexually appealing in women and then shoe-horning a male body into it (through blockers, hormones, surgery, you name it) is deeply mysogynistic and is another symptom of the male urge to own, control, and dominate the female body.
Sean, I bow to your magnificently constructed, paragraph-long last sentence. I didn’t expect one of any of the comments on Ben’s piece to make me laugh out loud. 😹
Have you read Hunter Schafer’s old journal entries he used to have on his Instagram? They’re insane. And kind of lend some credence to the argument that the distinction between so-called “AGPs” and so-called “HSTS’s” is an over-simplification and that the through-line for both is developmental issues coupled with profound misogyny/sexism. Schafer has dated men, but has also identified as a lesbian and bi and pan- he was partially puberty blocked, so he might genuinely not know what his sexual orientation is. But anyways, I have the photos from his Instagram saved on my phone, and here’s some of the things they say:
“My sexual orientation was not gay, it was not straight, it was an attraction, IS an attraction,
always, to misogyny."
“My gender was so influenced by a need to be
used by men"
“Not feeling femme enough w/o being a victim
of rape”
Horrifying.
Hard not to wonder if exposure to violent, misogynistic pornography as a child has anything to do with this.
The distinction between AGPs and gender non-conforming ("girly") boys is also critical to women's and girls' safety and rights. The fact that transvestites/AGPs/fetishists have been included under the "trans" umbrella and treated as some kind of oppressed minority in need of expanded rights and cultural uplift has meant that politicians and media alike have gotten behind pushing these fetishistic straight men into women's and girls' private spaces, prisons, rape shelters, domestic violence shelters, and sports teams. The AGPs are having a field day with this, as entry into each of these spaces feeds into their fetish while eroding the rights of women and girls to privacy, dignity, and safety.
And the TRAs have not-so-unwittingly gone along with, if not doubled down on, this in order to signal their virtue. I was never a rabid "trans rights" supporter, but I always had my doubts about even when I was going along with even the pronoun stuff. The discovery of the AGP archetype was a revelation for me and brought so much clarity to understanding how straight men could be trans.
Yep
Doesn't matter which men are pretending to be women and using women's spaces, no men should be pretending to be women and using women's spaces. Not even the gay ones. Especially now with so many straight men in the developed world being more or less accepting of male homosexuality. We've come a long way in fifty years. No more excuses, and men need to stop using women as human shields.
Yes I agree
Agree. I've long argued that the entire problem with trans activism is that they've allowed AGPs to hijack, and thus derail, the movement.
Imagine if the gay rights movement had for some reason allowed pedophiles to become its standard flag-bearers. Since that's an entirely different cohort with different goals and a justifiably negative public perception, I'm willing to wager that same-sex marriage wouldn't exist today, and homophobia would be not just rampant but likely institutional as a result.
Instead, the gay rights movement chose the boring path of respectability politics, which included a consciously unglamourous portrayal of gayness by seeking marriage at a time when heterosexual marriages were going down the drain, and a strong rejection of the age-old homophobic conflation of gayness with pedophilia.
If lifelong, persisting gender dysphoria is indeed real, which I'm not qualified to assess, then dysphoric individuals need to leave the AGPs out of the narrative. Because, again, they're an entirely different cohort with wildly different goals, and allowing them to steer the trans ship leads exactly nowhere.
Thank you, Ben, for addressing the topic so calmly yet directly.
Question: Do you think we should drop the AGP label and just call it transvestic fetishism?
I feel like "autogynephilia" is a pseudomedical term that only draws us into arguments about whether AGP really exists and how many AGPs there are, distracting us from the actual point, which is this: Cross dressers -- ie, around 3% of adult men -- have been included under the trans umbrella and invited to flaunt and escalate their fetish while being lauded by the public as stunning and brave.
Good question. What do you think?
That’s kind of a mouthful too.
Who do you think belongs under the trans umbrella?
Heh, I don't think anyone belongs under the trans umbrella, because "transgender" isn't a real thing - not an ontological category, anyway.
As for what to call the so-called AGPs, I think "transvestite" is as good a word as any. Anyone born before 1980 immediately hears Tim Curry belting out "I'm just a sweet transvestite ..." and that's exactly the right image. Nothing wrong with it, in fact it can be fun and hot in the right (adults only) context, but it's not behavior to be normalized. And no one was confused about Frank N. Furter's sex, lol.
I think the term "transvestite" is too tied to clothing, and AGP males will point to their breast implants and say that it doesn't apply to them.
"Autogynephilia" cuts to the chase. Let them try to deny its existence. We have a thousand photos to counter that ridiculous claim.
Agree with the post and that Rachel Levine is a monster. As to who belongs under the trans umbrella--not sure who should be in, but NOT children, or adults, who fail to display gender stereotypical behaviour. Those are boys and girls full stop.
I highly recommend the Gender: A Wider Lens episode with Dr. Az Hakeem as he seems to break down “trans” into four categories, including (if I remember correctly) saying that AGP and transvestic fetishism are two different things.
You act like there's any actual such thing as a trans umbrella.
Unpopular take: There's no such thing as trans.
I know there are people who think they are trans, and I know it makes a lot of us happy to pretend that's a thing, but it's not a thing.
One, human beings don't change sex. Two, thoughts and feelings don't determine sex. Three, sex-based stereotypes are not sexes. Under no definition of trans does trans actually work in the real world. It's just a thought construct people like to use to label themselves.
If people understood this was just fantasy and pretend and approached it in that spirit, I'd have no problem with seeing people talking about "trans umbrellas." But they're acting like "being trans" is on par with being a man or being a woman and nope, I'm not going to support that. Women and men are materially real. Thinking you're not the sex you were born is delusion.
100% agree with every word here. No one is “really” trans. It’s a fantasy/delusion like any other, but it’s also a particularly harmful one if indulged like it has been.
Thank you for getting to the heart of the matter. However, there is one point that I want to comment on, one that you allude to in your sole footnote: "...the huge uptick in trans identification in recent years... there are now many other reasons why a person might identify as trans (social contagion, social cache, radical politics, etc.)."
That huge uptick now constitutes the overwhelming majority of those who identify as trans. To give you an idea about the relative magnitudes, a 2015 systematic review (SR) concluded that the meta-estimate of the clinical population of transgender is 0.0046% (doi: 10.1016/j.eurpsy.2015.04.005).
(A parenthesized sidenote: I got alerted to this meta-estimate because the SR was cited by Baker et al., 2021 https://doi.org/10.1210/jendso/bvab011. This is the SR that was commissioned by WPATH to find the mental health benefits of cross-sex hormones. The short story - there was extremely weak evidence for any benefit because all the studies had a very high risk of bias, and there was no evidence at all for making any pronouncement on death by suicide, and yet, this being a WPATH-commissioned review, the authors concluded that "these benefits make hormone therapy an essential component of care that promotes the health and well-being of transgender people." Baker, incidentally, is Kellan Baker, one of the coauthors of the "Yale Integrity Project" paper that tries to strike down the Cass Report with unintentionally humorous effects.)
Anyway, back to the 0.0046% - this was the population that Blanchard, Bailey, or even Lawrence (BBL hereafter) saw more than two decades back. In fact, this was the estimate from as recently as 2015 - that is when the SR came out. Let's say that the number is now, thanks to social contagion, social cache, radical politics, and other factors, conservatively at 1%. Then, this number - 1% - is more than 217 times larger than the population that Blanchard developed his typology (1%/0.0046%).
Unfortunately, however, the BBL trio continues to insist that this new population, which is 217 times larger than the population they looked at, is the same AGP population that they looked at when Blanchard developed his typology, Bailey wrote his book "The Man Who Would Be Queen," and Lawrence compiled his (I agree with your use of pronouns) "Men Trapped in Men's Bodies." Which, scientifically speaking, is nuts! Is it possible that these 216 new boys who suddenly identify as trans have now been conditioned (I don't want to use the word "groomed" because it is so overused) to get excited by thinking of themselves in women's clothing? That is entirely possible - the human mind is infinitely pliable, after all: show an adult only videos of bestiality from the dark corners of the internet for an extended period of time, and they might just start thinking that maybe this bestiality thing is not such a perversion after all.
However, that only means that we should have an urgent discussion about how the likes of Adm. Richard Levine are essentially using these boys as a fertile ground for their unfulfilled fantasies.
If 0.0046% of the population are clinically afflicted by this paraphilia (one way to think of this extremely small number is this - if you were an extremely social person who had conversations with three *new* people *every* day of your life, it would take you roughly 18 years to have a conversation with one Richard Levine), let us try to ensure that we do not *create* 216 new Richard Levines. And not, as BBL insists, declare to these boys, "Oh yeah, you are AGP; let's make sure you get fast-tracked to hormones and castration."
Anyway, this is a side comment. Great article, and thank you.
Excellent response. You echo the data on trans I was aware of back as far as late 70’s and 80’s from sex researchers I knew from Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
There are quite some stories from time I spent at the Gay and Lesbian Center in LA about gay kids, but the phenomenon I see today is completely unlike that time. The only boys I saw presenting as female then indeed were groomed to do so by their johns, and not coincidentally they looked like… hookers.
Thanks
“You are and never were like the girly young boys that wrestle with deep internal shame about their same-sex attraction.”
I share this experience as a gay man. Some people think this internal shame is only about being called a fag or being made to feel outcast. Maybe some amount. I actually think it’s as if consciously or unconsciously the wiring of the gay brain is coming to terms with not being one of the normies, and especially struggling with the mental load of not seeing the pathways forward. Who knows how heavily the understanding of possibly never having kids weighs on the brain. Or seeing the life that is laid out in your parents lives and straight friends, but never seeing your role models up close until later in life. Or being alienated from the well traveled and nurtured interactions of heterosexuality in the millions of ways they have been written about (successes and shortcomings) and exemplified for millennia. This is a deficit for a gay man to reconcile at a young age that is also shame inducing, isolating, and encumbering even if you are not called a fag. These challenges will remain challenges even in a world of perfect loving peers. These are parts of the gay journey. (As a side curiosity: trans people I have met rarely understand or conceptualize this experience, even belittling this major journey. Gay men often recognize this journey in each other instantly and it’s a deep source of comfort, camaraderie, and bonding)
Ironically the same sort of people who are great at supporting the latest causes (real or imagined) are terrible at building out pathways of dignity —like gay marriage. The plan seems to have been blow things up and then make straight people carry the burden of putting things back together in a way that intimately recognizes the needs of people very unlike themselves. That’s delusional.
Part of the youth of a gay man will always be investigating how they are different, coming to terms with their particularly different nature, and finding pathways that bring dignity and fulfillment. This will often be a lonely journey for many gay men as we are not born in clumps of a kind but in a kind of diaspora throughout the population. This journey deserves consistent thought and planning. Our well funded organizations like GLAAD, and the fast food that is the one size fits all LGBTQ movement, doesn’t care about the slow compound interest of generation over generation growth. They lack vision. They know dynamite, how to blow things up, and little else.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Sam. My sense however is that much if what you’re describing is not universal experience for gays growing up, and that to the extent that it is prevalent it’s more about homophobia of society than anything inherent about being gay. My own experience has been different and much more positive and I attribute this to the luck of being relatively young (Millenial) and being born and raised by accepting parents and society. To be clear, being a minority of any kind is never as easy as being in the majority (even being left-handed is a slight disadvantage in life !). But I want to make clear to other readers here that shame and isolation need not and today often *are not* part of the experience of many gay boys, and our dramatic advances towards legal and social equality are the main reason for that. Let us not forget that. We must protect the progress that has been made.
As for the topic of transition, as I pointed elsewhere nowadays it seems that the population most likely to be encouraged to transition are “tomboy” girls (who may or may not be Lesbian), not transitioning of boys of any orientation, which is much rarer.
I couldn’t disagree more. Compared to the past nothing looks like internalized shame. The goal post should be a comparison with contemporary heterosexuals, not gay men of the past.
I am a millennial. I rarely meet gay millennials who do not regularly deal with isolation and finding meaningful pathways to fulfillment. Two years ago I met a gen z gay guy who attempted suicide. That was powerful shame.
I’m happy for you THPacis, but turn on Grindr, and simple ask the gay men if they have struggled.
You might also believe the myth that all gay men are financially well off. Again, switch on a dating apps and ask.
There is a powerful divergence between the gays who’ve made it, and the massive majority who have not. Financial struggles, shame, isolation are the majority of the community. But we really should be finding data on these things instead of trusting our intuitions. I run three Gay Mens groups and I’m drawing on the couple hundred gay men I’ve met in Southern California over the last 5 years.
It’s always curious to me why these struggles are hard for gay men who are doing well to see. I think it might explain why the gay organizations have felt very little pushback towards mission creep and abandonment of focus. Is it possible that you are not allowing yourself to hear the struggles of your peers THPacis? Cause my guess would be 75% of gay men are struggling with isolation, shame (we would have to narrow down an operationalized definition) and have struggled junior high through college to come to terms with their sexuality.
Part of internalized homophobia is a generosity of spirit that discounts the need to keep growing and instead focus on other groups. I see this everywhere in the gay community. I want to tell gay men, you don’t just get to be “ok”, you get to be abundant. One good day is enough for a gay man to consider his needs met and start focusing on others. It’s beautiful and self destructive.
Listen, I didn't mean to be dismissive, nor to imply that being gay doesn't remain a serious disadvantage in many ways for us all. I do however think that the only way to go beyond our anecdotal experiences, which do vary a lot, is via large-scale studies based on sound statistics. Grinder, for example, is a biased dataset. Gays in happy long term relationships would be underrepresented there as are gays looking for more traditional dating experiences.* Moreover, straights struggle with relationships too, and with finances etc. (no idea where you got the stereotype about gays being all financially successful. Not only do I not believe it, I've never even heard about it!).
Again I am *not* saying that being gay has become a non-issue. I *am* saying that we've made tons of progress and shouldn't minimize that. As are a result, more of us have gone through life experiences that differ substantially from some of the common stereotypes. Acknowledging that doesn't take away our right to fight for more, because the struggle certainly isn't over, nor the danger of regression. But I think this post, and many of the comments, are taking pretty narrow stereotypes and crude generalizations about gays as gospel truth, and I found that troubling. I thought providing a different perspective may be helpful for the straight people around here, to remind them that as with every other group, gays, and their experiences, aren't a monolith.
(*This may be outdated now, but at least "back in my day" grinder had the reputation of being a hookup app more than a dating app. Thus people like myself and my now husband never even used it. We met on a more "vanilla" dating app that caters to both straights and gays. I don't know how rare or common gays like me are, but I don't think we're negligible. In other words, polling grinder users means automatically considering only a specific subset of the gay community. It's like polling Muslim or Jewish opinion via the mosque/synagogue. It may seem reasonable until you realize that It ignores all the members of those groups who aren't actually there all that often/ever!)
Somebody should repost this on Bluesky and report back on its reception.
One of the first transwomen I ever personally interacted with (as a hair stylist, so pretty intimately and in service of his desire to look more feminine) was such a classic example of AGP it triggered something in me, even though I didn’t know about AGP and wouldn’t for a few years yet.
He had been in special forces military, was in a motorcycle group/gang, and started transitioning in his 50s. He was built like a line/backer, and while coloring and cutting his hair, he enjoyed telling me how exciting it was to go through puberty “as a girl”.
Puberty is rarely enjoyable for anyone of either sex, but my memories included so much shame and confusion around periods and my fast-developing body—including new and unwanted attention from middle aged men—that it was very difficult for me to listen and nod along to what he was saying.
Not only can no 50-something male go through “puberty as a girl”—because he is an adult—but whatever he thought puberty for girls was is so divorced from the actual experience of girlhood puberty as to be offensive.
Drag is a mockery of women. Trans women (who are eunuchs) are also a mockery of women. Very few pass. The face is too big. The chest is too big, and usually the boobs are placed too far apart. The Adam's apple is still apparent. Usually they are too tall - men over 6'2" who think that they are delicate flower-like sylphs are completely ridiculous.
You don't have to apologize for using sex-based pronouns.
We are told to be kind, that it's respectful, a courtesy, no more, to go along with the pretense. When we do, we are prioritizing the feelings of these men, and making it easier for them to claim entry to previously women-only places, from prisons to PCOS support groups, from lesbian dating apps to La Leche League meetings.
They are not another type of woman. There is only one kind of woman, and we deserve to be centered in our own spaces and the language used to refer to us.
Ben Appel writes:
>>The problem with all of this—besides the fact that it’s insane—is that the vast majority of the effeminate boys will desist (stop thinking they were supposed to be born as girls) once they commence through puberty, and the vast majority of those desisters will grow up to be gay men. The very few whose gender identity disorder (referred to today as “gender dysphoria”) persists might decide to medically transition as adults and attempt to live and pass as women. ...
There is no clinical test to determine which boys’ gender dysphoria will persist into adulthood and which boys’ will not persist. And since we cannot tell the future, there is no way to determine which boys will grow up to identify as gay—with their bodies and endocrine systems intact—and which boys will grow up to identify as transwomen. Therefore, it is totally unethical to subject young males to this protocol. It is, I believe, a violation of their human rights.<<
Thank you for writing this.
The link between AGP and trans ideology remains largely unexplored but a major tell was revealed in the reactions of transsexuals (using nomenclature of the time they transitioned) Andrea James and Lynn Conway to the publication of J. Michael Bailey's book "The Man Who Would Be Queen." In that book (which I have not read) Bailey looks at AGP in relation to transsexualism and finds that, in some instances, AGP men may turn to surgery. Conway and James were furious with that conclusion and went to great lengths to destroy Mr. Bailey's career (reported in Alice Dreger's book "Galileo's Middle Finger.") In other words, they didn't want the eros of paraphilia to be any where near their motivations because, for them, that would undermine the project itself.
Acknowledgment of AGP punctures the fantasy that they can be, or are, the vision of themselves they hold in their minds.
Not so dissimilar to how fragile many transwomen feel around women discussing periods or pregnancy—things that inevitably remind them that they are not truly female and can never be. The pain of this knowledge seems almost unbearable for them, and triggers intense loathing and often hatred.
It's reminiscent of narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage
I think it’s been directly likened to that in papers, hasn’t it?
Yes, there is talk of overlap between the two conditions
I spoke to Lynn Conway at length in 2001 at an event I set up in a LGBT setting a few years before Bailey’s book came out.
He was in an extreme corner already on transing children. He spoke glowingly about puberty blockers using all the standard falsehoods, and simply deflected “are they really trans” questions with “kids know” responses. He spoke at length on hijra in India and how those kids were emasculated (not just castrated) so young they had beautiful vulvas for life. His website on the subject goes on at length. I realized he was completely bonkers, and dangerously misinformed in both biology, and how impressionable children are.
Bailey’s book, which has a really poor title, proposes that the post-puberty trans who operated identically as Conway did, found trans one of many options to express their fetish. I think Conway may have reacted badly to hints that he too was a male who operated as a male for decades but then found life more fulfilling to give in to the fantasy delusion.
> The vast majority of adult trans-identified males (transwomen) are thought to
> be autogynephilic.
I find this totally plausible, but a reference would be good.
Also, for what it is worth, and ignoring for a moment the thing in itself that is the obsession with highly sexualised femininity that transwomen, unlike actual women, almost universally exhibit, there is something immediately and obviously wrong with Hunter Schaefer's breasts.
Not only are Hunter's breasts 'too perfect' and actually quite weird, but everything about Hunter is stereotypically female. This propping up of the male perspective on what is seen to be attractive and sexually appealing in women and then shoe-horning a male body into it (through blockers, hormones, surgery, you name it) is deeply mysogynistic and is another symptom of the male urge to own, control, and dominate the female body.
Sean, I bow to your magnificently constructed, paragraph-long last sentence. I didn’t expect one of any of the comments on Ben’s piece to make me laugh out loud. 😹
I believe it was Blanchard who came up with this estimate, from his decades-long career working primarily with transwomen.
It struck me while reading that AGP is an NPD version of sexuality. A closed loop.
Genevieve Gluck / Reduxx has many devastating examples of the cross pollination between adult fetishes and the entire field of child transition.
Thank you for this excellent piece.
Thank you for writing this, Ben.
Thank you so much for saying it out loud.
Have you read Hunter Schafer’s old journal entries he used to have on his Instagram? They’re insane. And kind of lend some credence to the argument that the distinction between so-called “AGPs” and so-called “HSTS’s” is an over-simplification and that the through-line for both is developmental issues coupled with profound misogyny/sexism. Schafer has dated men, but has also identified as a lesbian and bi and pan- he was partially puberty blocked, so he might genuinely not know what his sexual orientation is. But anyways, I have the photos from his Instagram saved on my phone, and here’s some of the things they say:
“My sexual orientation was not gay, it was not straight, it was an attraction, IS an attraction,
always, to misogyny."
“My gender was so influenced by a need to be
used by men"
“Not feeling femme enough w/o being a victim
of rape”
Horrifying.
Hard not to wonder if exposure to violent, misogynistic pornography as a child has anything to do with this.
Trans women are eunuchs.
Not many. It's my understanding that fewer and fewer are going that route. FFS is the major surgery that most are seeking.
A respectful and informative post, but I will need to read a second or third time and perhaps create a visual or flow chart to really get it.