It’s Just a Fetish, Right?
Maybe. Or maybe it’s gender dysphoria.
When I was 18 years old, I discovered my most secret, shameful fantasy written out in plain text on the Internet. It was a short story that perfectly captured the kind of magical scenario I’d been dreaming about for years.
My perfect fantasy was about four college guys on a road trip who are magically transformed into an archetypal family — dad, mom, and two kids — with the main character struggling to accept that he’s now a wife and mother. I was entranced by this story. It was like my own personal wish fulfillment. I read the transformation scene over and over, even printing it out on paper because in 1998 computers were too big to fit in your pocket. Those pages kept me awake at night. I didn’t know what I was feeling as I hid under my blanket, reading and rereading that story, but I knew I liked it. And I wanted more.
The Internet, as always, was eager to oblige. The website I’d discovered was called FictionMania, and it was overflowing with thousands of fantastical gender transformation stories, almost universally about men becoming women. They were all indexed by keyword, character age, type of transformation, and a number of other attributes. Dozens of new stories were being uploaded every day by enthusiastic amateur writers.
My teenage mind was blown away by this treasure trove. It didn’t take long before I made a daily habit of checking for new submissions, combing through the archives, and rereading my favorite stories. I was hooked. This was my version of discovering Internet porn.
And porn it was. The stories were often explicitly sexual. The indexed keywords included things like sissification, blow jobs, latex, bondage, hypnosis, french maids, and pretty much any other kink you can imagine. It was blatantly obvious I was browsing a site full of wanking material. By this point I was already wondering if I might be an autogynephilic transvestite fetishist (terms I’d also learned about online), and perusing the FictionMania catalog quickly dispelled any doubts. It was a porn site, and I was getting aroused by it, which meant this was definitely a sex thing. I had a fetish for gender transformation.
As much as I hated admitting that to myself, there was no denying the evidence right in front of me. All I could do was try to keep it hidden and under control. I spent the next 20 years treating my fantasies about becoming a woman as a shameful sexual kink.
It wasn’t a difficult secret to keep. In fact, believing I had a fetish actually made life easier. I could take this thing I didn’t like about myself and externalize it into something that was afflicting me. I could ignore it, fight it, or indulge it, but it was always an “it” — a thing that was not a part of me. And keeping it separate allowed the remainder of me to live an otherwise normal life.
In my younger days, I was often forced to confront the physical reality of my gender — clothes, puberty, stereotypes, etc — in ways that were uncomfortable and confusing. Before the Internet, I coped with that reality by experimenting with clothing, disassociating from my body, fronting masculinity, and various other mechanisms that did not involve my penis. It was exhausting work. FictionMania, and the thousands of other stories, drawings, and captions that followed, provided a more efficient way to cope with those confusing feelings.
Reading transformation fiction allowed me to quickly bypass uncomfortable reality in favor of magical fantasy. Turning my feelings into sexual urges made them easy to purge. Whenever the distracting thoughts arose, I could simply read a few stories about men transforming into women, get aroused, have a brief moment of release, and then move on with my life.
And for 20 years, that’s exactly what I did. See a girl wearing nice shoes and feel a disconcerting sense of longing? Read some stories. A night out with the guys pretending to care about beer and sports? Read some stories. Bored and don’t want to be alone with my thoughts? Read some stories.
Hating myself and not understanding why? Read some stories.
I knew about transgender people. I knew that gender transition was possible in the real world. But I didn’t want to live in the real world. The kind of transformation I wanted was not possible in the real world. Aside from the obvious problem of magic not existing, it was only in fantasy stories that people changed gender in a way that seemed acceptable to me.
The characters I read about didn’t just become women. They were always changed by some external force, usually against their will or out of necessity. They never asked to be women, but it happened anyway, and their lack of agency meant they weren’t responsible for their own transformation. They could always point to the wizard or the wish gone wrong and say they were merely being affected by circumstances beyond their control.
“Oh no! Fate has turned me into a girl! Guess I’ll just have to make the best of it.”
That was the real fantasy — that not only could I magically transform into a woman, but I wouldn’t have to admit, even to myself, that I wanted to be one. Someone else would make it happen. Someone else would take responsibility. Someone else would relieve me of that shame.
Of course, you know how this story ends.
Treating part of yourself like something separate means you can never be a whole person. Despite a successful career and loving family, I felt increasingly distant from everything and everyone in my life, emotionless, apathetic, never satisfied, as if watching myself and knowing I should be happy, but unable to experience it. Gradually I started to wonder, after exhausting all other options, if maybe my fetish was the reason. I thought about the people in those transition videos. I learned about hormones and their effects, how they helped some people like me alleviate their depression. I found a therapist. I met others like me. A few years later, I’m living as a woman.
A month after starting hormone therapy, I stopped reading stories. Almost overnight, they all started to seem kind of ridiculous. With the clarity of a reduced libido, and no ready mechanism to purge the distracting thoughts, I began seeing gender dysphoria where once there was only sexual arousal. As the months went by, I realized I still wanted a feminine body even when the idea did not arouse me.
Gender transition in the real world can seem impossible. Our bodies feel like inescapable destiny, and transgressing social norms can have severe consequences. One way to cope with the cognitive dissonance of wanting something so seemingly impossible is to convince yourself that you don’t really want it — that the desire you’re feeling is actually something much less consequential — a hobby, an interest, or as in my case, a fetish.
If you’re reading this, you might be asking yourself the same question I did. Is it really just a fetish? Unfortunately I can’t answer that. Only you can know who you are. But I can speak to my own experience and offer a bit of guidance.
Gender transition is possible, but it will not come from outside ourselves. It requires honest introspection, difficult decisions, awkward conversations, and the willingness to assert your own identity and accept the consequences of doing so. It will take time and money and pain. You may lose friends and family. Your body will never be perfect.
But as someone who has done the hard work, I can tell you it was worth the effort. It’s a long road, and it is indeed full of costs and imperfections, but for the first time in my life, it feels like I’m really living. I have emotions now. I feel joy and sadness. I experience the world in first-person.
It wasn’t just a fetish. It was a coping mechanism. And there’s nothing to cope with anymore.
