I Was a Teenage Autogynephile

When being female is an I Wish, not an I Am

As I’ve struggled with gender dysphoria over the course of my life, the biggest hindrance I faced in coming to terms with my condition was simply not recognizing it for what it was. I knew about transgender people from a young age, but I couldn’t identify with them because their experience did not match mine. What I didn’t realize until recently is that I was only hearing one kind of experience.

For many years, the only people who were allowed to transition had to meet a strict set of criteria, which meant that only a certain type of person could represent the trans population in the public perception. Anyone who suffered in a different way remained invisible. Their stories were not told, and therefore not heard by people like me.

We’re still seeing the lingering effects of this today. Documentaries and magazine articles tend to focus on the transgender narrative that remains most accessible and non-threatening to cisgender people. Namely, the one that gatekeepers approved of for the same reasons of being accessible and non-threatening. The common elements are: gender non-conforming behavior from a very young age, strong identity with the opposite sex, and desire for full transition including reassignment surgery.

In other words, there's a sense in our culture that the earlier you recognize gender dysphoria, and the more distress it causes you, the more valid your trans identity is in the eyes of others.

For people like me, it’s hard for us to understand what we’re going through because we don’t see our experience reflected in the stories being told about transgender people. We did not know our true gender from a young age. We don’t associate what we feel with gender dysphoria. We hear the phrase, “woman trapped in a man’s body,” and we don’t identify with it. We wish we were female, but we don’t believe we are.

In short, we lack representation.

So, here it is. This is my story. A very small part of it. I hope that someone out there will see themselves reflected in it.

It is 1992, and I am 12 years old. It’s picture day at school and the girls are dressed up in skirts and nice shoes. I am strangely fascinated by this. I’m staring at them, at their clothes, not understanding what I’m feeling. I don’t even know if I like this feeling or not. I just know it’s something I haven’t felt before.

It should have been simple sexual attraction. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was envy. I’ve never been entirely clear on the distinction between the two. Whatever it was, it was focused on the clothes, not the girls.

This really was new. I’d never wanted to wear a dress before, never thought I was a girl, never disliked my body in any way. I liked wrestling and computers and Lord of the Rings and I played Little League and went fishing with my dad. I was a boy. A smart, nerdy boy. It was obvious.

Now, suddenly, I was secretly exploring my mother’s closet. Cross-dressing became a compulsion. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t not.

It may be more accurate to say that prior to this incident I didn’t really give my gender much thought. If I did think about it, it was just another attribute, like my height and weight. I was neither masculine nor feminine, but there was no doubt that I would grow up to be a man, and no consternation about that fact.

This is not the common narrative. If you listen to any trans woman whose story is shown on TV or written about in a magazine, you’ll eventually hear the phrase, “I’ve known since I was a child.”

Well, I didn’t. My gender identity, if I had such a thing, was male. This strange new obsession with feminine presentation did not feel like a repressed identity trying to emerge; it felt like an unwelcome guest. I had to indulge it because it wouldn’t leave.

It is 1994, and it’s late at night. I’m in bed looking at pictures of women in lingerie, but I am not masturbating. I’m imagining turning into them. Slow, vivid transformations go through my mind, and I enjoy the sensations I’m getting from these mental images. I create elaborate scenarios where these magical transformations can occur and I play them over and over again in my mind. I may or may not have an erection, but it doesn’t matter. That’s not my focus.

If you subscribe to the theory of autogynephilia, which you shouldn’t, then you’ll recognize this description. I certainly did, when I discovered that theory years later. It was exactly the wrong message I needed to hear at a time when I was most vulnerable. It confirmed what I already feared, that I had a paraphilia. I was some variation of a transvestic fetishist, a cross-dresser, and this was all just a sex thing. I was aroused by the idea of becoming a woman, and this was due to a misplaced manifestation of my heterosexual attraction to women.

I hated knowing this about myself.

Believing I had a mental disorder made it easier to externalize my feelings, and there was comfort in that. This was something I had, not something I was. I could fight against it, rise above it.

Every tranny joke I heard, every image of a pathetic balding cross-dresser, every gag on TV showing a delusional man with a mustache wearing a dress, these all made my resolve stronger. I would not be like those perverts. I was better than them. I could be normal.

There was, however, something missing from my fantasies that should have made me skeptical of my self-diagnosis — sex. At no point in any of these imaginary scenarios did I have sex with anyone, male or female. Once the transformation was complete, that was the end of the fantasy. I, in the real world, was aroused by these thoughts, but the person in my mind was not.

It is 1995, and I have a slow dial-up connection to the internet. I am in a Prodigy chat room and I’m asked, “a/s/l?” 16F, I say. My name is Jessica. Everything else I say is true, and people talk to me like nothing is out of the ordinary. For the first time someone refers to me with female pronouns. I see the words “She said she was …” appear on the screen, and I feel a rush of excitement.

I’ve been female in every anonymous online space ever since (except this one). Different names, but always my own age with my real personality and interests and background. At first it was a thrill, like I was getting away with something, but eventually it just became comfortable.

It was never a sex thing. I did not cyber. The few times I agreed to try, it was just weird and unpleasant, and I quickly disconnected.

As an adult, I found an outlet in online role-playing games. My characters were always female, and I let people assume I was too. Between quests, we created elaborate stories and acted them out together. As time passed, I grew closer to the players behind the characters, and they knew me as a cool gamer chick. After a few years I realized I’d grown too comfortable, and these online friendships were threatening to interfere with my real life. I broke contact.

That was about 5 years ago. My depression increased drastically after I lost that outlet.

It is 1996, and it’s my birthday. I know what I’m going to wish for. I have the exact wording worked out in my head, so there could be no chance for misinterpretation. I wish that I could change anything about my body by simply willing it, at whatever speed I wanted the transformation to occur, that I could do the same with my clothes, and that I could change everything back to normal at any time. I blow out the candles, and I do not get my wish.

Some of my daydream fantasies involved wishes too. I would find a magic lamp with a genie and use my first wish to gain shape-shifting ability. The second and third wishes? I don’t know. Money and health, I guess. Whatever.

Recently, a friend’s young son was asking everybody at a party what their superpower would be. When he got to me, I said, “transformation.” He gave me a look like that was the strangest answer he’d ever received.

One important thing to note about these wishes is that I never asked for the change to be permanent. I wanted to control my transformation, so I could keep doing it in secret. This was not about realizing my true self or becoming the person I knew I needed to be. I just wanted to live out my fantasies without causing any other disruption in my life.

Of course, some part of me also knew that if I did gain shape-shifting powers, I would probably just use them to change between various female forms like some kind of super-makeover.

It is 1996, and the internet is becoming more accessible. I ask Jeeves about ‘hermaphrodite’, a word I’d just discovered in a book on Greek mythology. I learn about intersex people, and I’m jealous of them. I feel a strange hope that maybe I have both parts and don’t realize it. I follow the links about corrective surgical procedures, and I learn about sex change operations. I’m fascinated, but I have no interest in getting one.

In my mind, transsexuals (as was the term in those days) were people who got their genitals rearranged with a scalpel. It was all about the surgery. I liked my penis, and therefore I was not a transsexual.

Not that I was overly attached to it. I never really associated genitalia with masculinity, and I did not understand other boys’ obsession with whose was bigger. But I had no desire to get rid of it.

Gender and sex were both an absolute binary to me. Part of that was due to the cultural messages I received every day, but also my somewhat autistic brain just did not grasp nuance in any form. If someone had tried telling me that self-perception could differ from objective reality, I would have just stared dumbly at them.

I sometimes wonder how my life would be different if we talked about gender then the way we talk about it now. Would I have recognized my transformation fantasies as an indicator of some sort of non-binary or trans identity? Would I have been more comfortable viewing gender as a spectrum?

Probably not. I might have understood myself better, but I still would have likely decided I could power through this. Then as now, I really, really wanted to be normal.

It is 1997, the end of my junior year of high school. I’m at a restaurant with my best friend. He jokes that people might think we’re gay and on a date. “We should pretend we are!” he says excitedly. I stare at him, not comprehending the situation at all. “I’m just kidding!” He laughs and grabs my wrist reassuringly. “I just wanted to see how you’d react. Some of the girls asked me to find out if you’re gay. Y’know, since you don’t seem interested in that stuff.”

I’m not gay. Or, maybe I should say, I’m not attracted to men. Hearing this from my friend flustered me because it seemed to come out of nowhere. I liked girls. I was interested. Why would anyone think otherwise?

The idea of being gay had never crossed my mind. I barely understood what the word even meant, aside from knowing it was used as an insult. As an experiment, I tried to think of men in a sexual way, but it never worked. Even in my fantasies, when I was a woman, the image was entirely unappealing.

This was another piece of evidence I used to support my later autogynephilia self-diagnosis. Autogynephiles are heterosexual, to the extent that their paraphilia doesn’t interfere with regular sexual attraction. That was actually reassuring to me, because it meant I could still be a normal male, as long as I kept my fantasies under control.

The last part of my friend’s statement, however, wasn’t entirely off base. I did want a girlfriend, and I even had one briefly, but it wasn’t a big concern of mine like it was for most teenage boys. I didn’t care that I was a virgin. I had other interests. I would have liked to be friends with some girls and maybe go on dates with them, but I was shy, and they didn’t have any interest in me.

It is 1998, and I’ve just discovered Fictionmania. I can’t read these stories fast enough. One in particular — Shortcut Through Ovid, by The Professor — catches my attention. The transformation scene is exactly the sort of thing I would come up with. It’s like finding my secret fantasies available for download. I print out just that part of the story, on actual paper, so I can read it in my bed at night.

I’d somehow managed to avoid porn on the internet until this point. Once I realized that this sort of material was available, I lost any doubts I still had about my feelings being purely related to sex. This was clearly a fetish. It even had an online fetish community.

I worried this would affect my ability to love and to be aroused by normal heterosexual activity. That turned out not to be a problem. My solo activities always involved transformations or cross-dressing, but with women I performed fine. I was present with them, I didn’t need my imagination, and I was focused on their bodies, not my own. In retrospect, maybe a little too focused.

In my earlier teen years, cross-dressing and transformation fantasies were pleasurable, but not really sexual. Masturbation wasn’t the point. The point, if there even was one, was to just sort of live the experience for a while and enjoy what I was feeling.

Not anymore. Now it was my way to get off. In a way, that made it even easier to compartmentalize. I could do it, be done, and move on with my life.

It is 2017, and I am writing an epilogue.

Whether I did move on is debatable. College, wife, work, kids, they all happened just like I wanted them to, and if I’m honest I don’t think they would have if I hadn’t hidden that part of myself from the world.

It couldn’t stay hidden. Love reduced its power for a long time, but it never went away. It grew stronger after each milestone of life, after each moment I had to look forward to fell behind me, and especially after my first child was born. I needed every bit of strength I had to endure the stresses of new parenthood, and my reserves were low from a lifetime of hiding secrets. Depression set in, but it was a few more years before despair for my marriage and my future got bad enough to make me take it seriously.

I needed help, but I wouldn’t admit it. I needed therapy. And drugs. And honesty. Eventually I got them. Still working on the honesty, though.

Now, with my testosterone level reduced, I haven’t looked at any of my usual TG caption and story sites in months, and I don’t miss it. My head is clearer and I can process these feelings uninterrupted. They’re still there, even though they don’t arouse me anymore. I still have a ways to go, but at least I’ve removed one variable from the equation.

I no longer believe I have a fetish, or autogynephilia, and I don’t call my desires fantasies anymore. If I wear women’s clothes, it’s because they’re comfortable, not exciting. Surprisingly, that happens less often now than it did at the beginning of this process. I don’t yet know the exact nature of my condition, or what I need to do to manage it in the future, but at least now I can figure it out.

So, it may not be fair to say that this section of my story is an epilogue. It may be a prologue.