Documenting the West’s descent into Satanic receivership.
Meaning “love of self as a woman” in its original Greek, autogynephilia is a serious problem for the transgender narrative that transgender people are actually real women just trying to live their lives in conformity with who they really are.
Rather than an expression of the true self, autogynephilia is a sexual fetish in which a man gets off on imagining himself as a woman.
Ray Blanchard, the pioneer of the term and concept, explains briefly via Quillette (emphasis added):
I introduced the word and the concept of autogynephilia—the tendency of certain males to become sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as females—in 1989 as an extension of the concept of transvestic fetishism. The DSM diagnosis, Transvestic Fetishism, was defined in psychiatry at that time as sexual urges and fantasies involving cross-dressing in heterosexual males.
I published my early writings on autogynephilia in specialty journals with very small circulations. I intended them for a tiny readership of clinicians who specialized in the assessment and management of gender-dysphoric patients. However, this work attracted the attention of two individuals who decided to promote it more broadly, one online (Anne A. Lawrence) and one in a book (J. Michael Bailey). These efforts, especially the book, enraged three influential trans women—two of them senior academics—who attempted to get Bailey fired from his teaching position at Northwestern University for writing it. This campaign has been documented in detail by Alice D. Dreger, a medical historian. Paradoxically, the efforts of trans activists, then and today, to completely suppress any mention of autogynephilia in public discourse has resulted in an increased public awareness of it. I think the self-defeating behavior of trans activists has persisted because the idea of autogynephilia cuts too close to the bone. If the idea had no resonance with them, they would simply have ignored it, and the idea of autogynephilia would just be one of many forgotten hypotheses of gender identity disorder.
Subsequently other strange and unexpected (to me) events befell my notion of autogynephilia. Modern trans activists reframed transsexualism/transgenderism as a political problem rather than a clinical problem. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, trans activism become a sub-department of the Social Justice Movement, and the Social Justice Movement became a primary combatant in the ongoing, pervasive Culture Wars.
In other words, autogynephilia, in contrast to the construction of transgenderism in modern discourse, is a sexual fetish, not a sacred identity that deserves respect and affirmation by society.
Related: 'Transage': Adults Who Sexually Identify as Toddlers
There have been two major depictions of this phenomenon in pop culture in recent memory, both of which have created backlash from the rainbow people with the usual denunciations of “transphobia.”
The first was Sam Rockwell’s harrowing recounting of his sexcapades as an expat in Bangkok — a not unrealistic one, let me tell you — in which he eventually realized that his ultimate fantasy wasn’t to fornicate with the Asian girls that he paid — but to be the Asian girl.
The second was the depiction of real-life serial killer and autogynephile Ed Gein in a Netflix series, in which he exhibits a psychotic erotic fixation on women’s mannerisms and dress. A male fetish for dressing up like a woman to experience the sexual gratification of cosplaying a woman as a kink — often involving acts of degradation as some kind of sub-human sex object, as seen in sissy hypno — is obviously not compatible with the alphabet people’s narrative that trans-identified men actually view themselves as full-fledged women.In most rational people’s minds, strange sexual proclivities don’t count as special categories of immutable identity, such as race or sex, that deserve any kind of special legal protections or cultural carve-outs.
Accordingly, they are desperate to debunk autogynephilia as a concept.
Via Out Magazine (emphasis added):
This autogynephilia plotline peddles a debunked theory that has been outside of accepted science for years, while reinvigorating it. It presents a new face for this anti-trans talking point: Ed Gein…
In this new version from showrunner Brennan, Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) plays the killer with a lilting voice and feminine affectations. But the show goes even further in conflating deviance with queerness in proposing that Gein was an autogynephile.
Unfortunately, by doing this, Brennan and the show are not only repeating and amplifying TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) talking points. They are potentially putting real-life trans women in danger. In 2025, the word “autogynephile” is used in the same sentences where trans women are labeled as groomers and pedophiles. It’s used by politicians who are banning healthcare and access to public spaces for trans people, and it's used in conversation therapy…
In fact, autogynephilia has become one of the main talking points for anti-trans activists who say that trans women – and particularly trans women who are attracted to other women – are sexual deviants and mentally ill.
Related: ‘Adult Baby’ Terrorizes Multiple Daycares With Feces
Drag queens — you know, the ones who read porn-lit to kindergarteners in public school — represent a clear manifestation of autogynephilia.
Jimmy Kimmel brought in a grown man dressed up provocatively as a woman to read a book to kids and mock Trump on his show
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 20, 2025
The goal of drag is to expose kids to alternate queer identities.
Disgusting groomers pic.twitter.com/HRYNJCOIQ6
These are not men who actually believe themselves to be women — “trapped in the wrong body,” as the expression goes — but rather they enjoy re-imagining themselves as wildly exaggerated caricatures of women.
It’s not an identity; it’s a fetish — the ultimate distinction that transgender activists are keen to obfuscate.
