Autogynephilia is Arse Gravy of the highest grade
And the person who dreamt it up is an arsehole too boot.
Generally speaking, criticism of a theory is not directed at the individual. The critical analysis and response to a theory is a means to sharpen the theory. However sometimes a theory comes along so rottenly bad in light of prevailing understanding current to the theory that one must conclude the person who posited it is either incompetent, stupid or possibly arrogantly stupid.
When your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail. This is a problem when you have to deal with anything that is more complex than a nail. The problem is compounded if you are arrogant enough to think hammer ownership makes you a carpenter. It becomes a form of Super Dunning Kruger when this toxic mix of arrogance and incompetence mixes with stupidity. The result is you cannot even understand the boundaries of what carpentry is. What we call this is Ray Blanchard Phd.
Ray Blanchard posited the theory of “autogynephilia”. This is the idea that trans women who come out after puberty have somehow gotten really hardcore into a fetish and they need to transition to satisfy that urge.
“The urge to have no pockets? The urge to be the newest moral panic?” I hear you asking?
No silly, “The Urge”. You know, the urge to have sex as women.
“Huh?” I hear you emote a somewhat confused query.
Let me explain.
Ray Blanchard thinks that trans women who come out after puberty have taken the fetish of having sexual intercourse as women a tad too far. This fetish has then somehow metastasized and taken over their entire person. The end result is that the trans woman needs to transition to complete the fantasy. That’s it, Ray Blanchard PhD thinks trans women transition because the idea of having sex as women is a really huge turn on for them.
Are you seeing the problem? Well, are you seeing the laundry basket of problems?
Let’s address just a few of those problems quickly and why Ray is a shit sexologist as well.
Ray Blanchard is a sexologist, a very narrow minded one too. Consequently he sees everything as a sexual problem or a development of sexuality. Ray Blanchard doesn’t look at the entire person, he looks at this one element, sex. He then creates a shitty idea and runs with it.
“But Queer Kari, how can you make such broad sweeping accusations of arrogance and stupidity?”’
Easily, I did the laundry and I wore women’s clothing when I did it. I also did the dishes, picked up the kid from school, went to work and drank a few cups of coffee. At no stage during any of this did I break out in a wild f&£k fest with any random person. In fact, I didn’t actually think about sex.
Oh I do think about the sex, I imagine myself doing a sex too. But no more than any other woman. I do my entire life within the realm of “woman” without sexual motive or ideation beyond when myself and my monogamous wife decide it’s sexy time.
That’s the point.
I live an entire life which is feminine, I don’t suddenly break out in a fit of femininity when I am horny and then return to maleness when at resolution.
It’s a really really hard stretch to imagine a person as sexually boring as me as being motivated by a sexual fetish when I do my daily life. Specifically when that life is so mundane it looks like every other woman and I am not doing it with a raging boner all the time. Sex or fetish is not a motivation for transition.
In the early morning, when I wake up and rub estradiol gel onto my skin, I am normally wondering about coffee, not sex. In winter I am wondering why the fuck I didn’t elect to take pills because gel is cold and slimy!!!
When I do engage in the sex, my gender never seems to come up. You would think that if this was a fetish, I would at least need my partner to tell me what a sexy femme woman I am. Yet, that has strangely never been a thing either of us have needed or even thought about.
Blanchard also points to the sex fantasies of trans women as evidence for his “theory”. It’s a simple fact, just about all trans women imagine themselves as women when they think of sex. Before, during and after transition (I dunno if transition ends, that’s an entirely different conversation that I haven’t yet considered). You know who else thinks of themselves as women when they imagine sexual intercourse? Women, cis women imagine themselves being women while thinking of sex.
It’s also not unusual for people to imagine themselves as their gender or other genders during fantasies either. It’s also not unusual for people to imagine sex from the opposite point of view, as in from their partners point of view. This is not the sign of a misdirected sexual fantasy or even a fetish. It’s normal. If you polled the fantasies of cis and trans women you would note they kinda look identical in all respects. That is because trans women are women and that’s why they think of themselves as women during fantasies.
The sad truth is that prior to the “transgender moment” a lot of people, trans and cis, didn’t understand sex, gender, sexuality and the boundaries between those things. I know I didn’t understand how gender worked when I first spoke to a therapist about it. I didn’t understand the differences between sex, gender and sexuality and how they tied into each other. I had grown up with idiots who told me trans people were sicko perverts. I thought I was a pervert, I liked wearing women's clothing and when i imagined sex, I was a woman. My parents and their weirdo church told me that perverts did those things. That’s why it’s quite normal for a trans person to arrive at a therapist saying they think they are absolute perverts and degenerates. We were told that as kids and it was the accepted logic at the time. Up until we started talking about gender, the bulk of society lumped all of that together with sex and saw it as a fetish. Some parts of society still view being trans as a form of sexual deviation, Ray Blanchard to be specific. Therein lies the problem, Ray Blanchard was supposed to be an expert, he certainly sold himself as an expert. He certainly is stupid enough to think he is an expert. Ray Blanchard should have been “expert” enough to understand this. At very minimum Ray Blanchard should have seen the development in his patients as they came to understand themselves and corrected his error. He did not. This is why I don’t feel it’s not enough to merely critique the theory, but also the “scientist” who dreamt it up.
Ray Blanchard was granted the space, money and time to study trans people and the best he could do was “they fantasize they are the opposite sex when they wank so they are perverts”. He did not look at the development of his patients and subjects. He did not apply any level of analytical thought. This is not the conclusion of an astute, analytical doctor. This is the conclusion of someone who simply didn’t take the time to think beyond the two and a half minutes his poor wife must endure once a week. This is the conclusion of a person who didn’t look at the whole person, he looked squarely at the dick and said “yes, it’s the dick that’s doing this”.
So in Conclusion, do I trust anything Ray Blanchard did? No. Do I trust his academic chops on paraphilias and such? Not for one second. The dude is a bullshit artist, debunked by even the most casual thought.
If you seriously entertain the idea of autogynephilia, you are experiencing a cognitive failure and you should report to the “I need help with analytical thought” desk post haste.
