Autogynephilia (AGP): Love of Self as a Woman
loving the woman within
Here, in chapter 2.0 of Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, I briefly introduce autogynephilia and its embodiment subtypes, and describe how the positive and negative feelings from it contribute to the development of transfeminine identity.
“At that time I began to get the idea what I was all about. Today I know what it is; I know that I was not aroused by anything physical, that it was not the lover’s kiss that caused my first ejaculation, but rather only the intensive wish to be a woman, to feel and to think feminine.”
—Case 4, from Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress by Magnus Hirschfeld, translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash
At its core, autogynephilia is a sexual interest in being a woman.
The DSM-5 defines it as “sexual arousal of a natal male associated with the idea or image of being a woman”[i].
Like conventional heterosexuality, male autoheterosexuality is much more than mere eroticism. Its emotional side impacts sentiments, moods, and even identity. It changes how people think of gender, as well as their place in it.
Autogynephilia drives a desire to embody femininity, and its manifestations vary across individuals: no two people are exactly the same. It also shifts over the course of life.
Just as people vary from being unsentimental horndogs to being true romantics, autogynephilic people range from having primarily sexual feminine embodiment all the way to having a profoundly sentimental longing to simply be a woman. Most show a mixture of lust and love.
Depending on the way an autogynephilic person perceives their state of feminine embodiment, their mood can shift up or down. Successful embodiment tends to shift their mood up, and shortcomings of embodiment tend to shift it down. Any stimulus that implies a state of gendered embodiment can lead to these gender-related shifts to mood.
Positive gender-related feelings are gender euphoria. Negative gender-related feelings are gender dysphoria.
The good feelings associated with femininity attract autogynephilic people, pulling them closer. The bad feelings associated with masculinity repel them, pushing them away from their default gender.
Both good and bad gender feelings work together to shift their gendered sentiments. Over time, femininity rises in importance and masculinity becomes devalued. After years of this dynamic, masculinity can become synonymous with bad and femininity with good. At this point, autogynephilic people are likely to cherish their feminine traits and regard their masculine traits as aversive or worthless.
It doesn’t always start there though.
A stimulus that was exciting or arousing at first will often shift toward feeling nice or comforting as the cross-gender journey progresses. Eventually, doing feminine things just feels right: it’s the new normal. At that point, removing the stimulus can feel uncomfortable, as though something is missing.
These gender feelings and the resulting attachment to femininity are the emotional and romantic aspects of autogynephilia. Like conventional romantic feelings, they originate from a sexual orientation but ultimately have wide-ranging effects on behaviors, emotions, and sentiments that go far beyond the lusty eroticism commonly associated with sexuality.
When Ray Blanchard formally introduced the concept of autogynephilia, he noted that it “includes the capacity for pair-bond formation (or something like it)”[ii]. The understanding that autogynephilia can foster a romantic attachment to one’s feminine side has always been a part of the theory.
The capacity to bond with one’s feminine self can grow into a deep familiarity and comfort with feminine embodiment that eventually leads to gender transition. The emotional side of autogynephilia also influences the development of various gender identities.
Think about it: if embodying femininity made you feel better and embodying masculinity made you feel worse, in which direction would your gender identity shift over time?
Toward femininity, right?
It would be weird if it didn’t, honestly.
This cross-gender development process can take a while to unfold, which is why it’s common for autogynephilic people to take on an intermediary gender identity such as nonbinary or genderqueer before ultimately arriving at woman.
Autogynephilic Embodiment Subtypes
Sexologists study sexuality, so they tend to focus on the erotic side of autogynephilia when they write about it. That’s their job. It’s what they do.
Still, the romantic side of autogynephilia is such a huge part of the autogynephilic experience that focusing solely on eroticism seems misguided or tone-deaf. Those who fixate on eroticism can easily miss the broader emotional picture.
I’ll talk about many different autogynephilic interests with the understanding that we are all individuals who experience life in our own unique ways. We don’t all have the same interests, and even if we did, we wouldn’t all have the same feelings about our experiences.
One person may feel aroused by having breasts, while another just feels reassured by having them. Both want breasts, but their feelings and thoughts about them vary.
For this reason, it can make more sense to categorize based on interests themselves, rather than the thoughts and feelings about these interests.
So far, there is evidence that autogynephilic interests fall into five main subtypes[iii]. These subtypes represent aspects of life that tend to be different for women and men—bodies, clothing, behaviors, bodily functions, and social experiences:
Anatomic AGP—having a woman’s body
Sartorial AGP—donning women’s fashion
Behavioral AGP—behaving like a woman
Physiologic AGP—having a woman’s bodily functions
Interpersonal AGP—socially being a woman
These are the same subtypes I mentioned in the introductory chapter. I will use them as scaffolding to structure the autogynephilia chapters.
Although these categories are helpful conceptual tools for understanding autogynephilia, they’re not as useful for attributing motivations to others in everyday life.
Consider the example of an autogynephilic person who is dressed en femme. They may not be interested in clothing but instead want to be seen socially as a woman.
Or say that person presents femme at a hair salon. Are they motivated by a desire to get a woman’s hairstyle, behave like a woman, or be one of the ladies? It’s not possible to know for sure through observation alone.
These categories may not be useful for attributing specific motivations to the behavior of others, but they are conceptually useful for making sense of autogynephilia. Autogynephilic people can use these categories to help interpret their own motivations and aid introspection when trying to decide what to do about their gender feelings.
If they want to behave and dress as a woman but have little interest in having a female body or in being treated as if they do, they may reasonably conclude that behaving and dressing as a woman will meet most of their sexual and emotional needs arising from autogynephilia and that gender transition may not help them much.
However, if they want to be seen as a woman and have a feminine body but don’t care about clothing, they might conclude that medical interventions are the best way to get what they want.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to living with autogynephilia, so each autogynephilic person must choose for themself the best way to proceed.
The Importance of Historical Narratives
In many places in this book, I’ll reference historical narratives of autogynephilia that were first published roughly a century ago.
I prefer older narratives to newer ones because they’re far less tainted by received cultural ideas about transgenderism, and they’re completely free of modern political considerations.
When writing, these trans people weren’t concerned with how their narratives might shape political discourse in the twenty-first century. Nowhere did they mention a fear that what they were writing would affect public perception of them in a way that could harm them.
Their thoughts about their condition came from direct experience to a degree that won’t happen again, because people today have preconceived ideas about transgenderism.
Strong societal forces compelled past generations to hide their cross-gender inclinations, which left them isolated. Many went their entire lives without knowingly meeting others like them.
To better understand their condition, they wrote to sexologists or became their patients. Those sexologists then published these firsthand accounts to advance scientific understanding of human sexuality.
In 1890, a male Hungarian physician who felt herself to be a woman shared her extensive account with sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who included it in his next edition of Psychopathia Sexualis.
In 1910, Magnus Hirschfeld presented sixteen new case histories in Die Transvestiten, the book that kicked off the “trans” category we know today as “transgender”.
A few years later, in 1913, Havelock Ellis published six new cases in an article titled “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion”[iv]. Ellis understood autoheterosexuality well: he regarded the “aesthetic heterosexual inversion”[v] he was seeing as “really a modification of normal hetero-sexuality”[vi].
These twenty-three historical accounts of autogynephilia are an important reminder that inborn sexual orientations like autoheterosexuality and homosexuality have appeared across widely varying cultures and times and will continue to do so.
Beauty ideals and fashions can drastically change from one generation to the next, but sexual orientations are perennial.
Modern Autogynephilic Sexuality
Today, autogynephilic people are more likely to be called “transfems” rather than “transvestites”, but the underlying erotic predisposition is identical: they want to be women.
Some of them satiate their erotic desire for feminine transformation through transgender transformation stories. These stories depict the fantasy of turning into a woman, often by invoking methods of cross-gender transformation that are magical or based in science fiction[vii]. Gender transformation also occurs through forced feminization, a genre in which women forcibly transform the male protagonist into a beautiful woman.
These stories of gender metamorphosis usually end with the main character permanently transformed into a woman—the autogynephilic version of “happily ever after”.
Erotic feminization of males is called sissification. Sissification is extremely popular among autogynephilic people. For many, it’s their first outlet to express their autogynephilia. Some of them even identify as sissies.
A lot of them watch sissy hypno, an autogynephilic remix of pornography that rapidly cycles through shots from various pornographic videos while a voice-over speaks directly to the viewer, commanding them to feminize themselves in various ways, many of which involve sexual submission to men. For a lot of autogynephilic people, sissy hypno is their most powerful erotic stimulus.
Quite a few trans women originally realized they wanted to transition after consuming sissy media. Trans woman Andrea Long Chu provocatively admitted, “Sissy porn did make me trans”[viii]. She’s not alone—thousands have been down that road.
Watching porn depicting “pre-op” MTFs is another way trans women have realized they want to transition. Through continual exposure to erotic imagery of feminized males, some autogynephilic people realize they, too, want to be feminized.
Another genre of erotic media popular with autogynephilic people is femdom, which features females or trans women positioned in an assertive, dominant role over a subject, who is usually male. It sometimes involves feminization of the male subject.
Another way that autogynephilic people express their sexuality is through receptive anal penetration, through which they can enact a sex role they associate with being female. A lot of autogynephilic people are into getting pegged by women, fucked by men, or even just penetrating themselves.
It’s also common for them to shave their body hair, dress up in sexy clothes such as thigh-highs, panties, and bra, or lock their penis in a chastity cage as part of their autoerotic expression.
Psyche Autogynephilia, Shifting, and Transfeminine Identity
Autogynephilic people initially feel feminine or like a woman for short spurts, often in association with crossdressing.
This feeling is an autogynephilic mental shift—a change toward a mind state associated with women or femininity. I suspect that these mental shifts originate in a desire to have a woman’s consciousness, an aspect of autogynephilia I call psyche autogynephilia.
Psyche autogynephilia drives a desire to perceive, sense, feel, or think as a woman would. It’s about seeing the world through a woman’s eyes. It can feel like having a female soul.
Autogynephilia can also create autogynephilic phantom shifts, the sensation of having female-typical phantom anatomy such as breasts, a vulva, wide hips, or long hair. Phantom shifts and mental shifts can both contribute to body–mind incongruence.
Any autosexual orientation can lead to mental shifts and phantom shifts. In fact, people who identify as animals created the concept of shifting (see Chapter 7.4).
Autogynephilic mental shifts are initially transient and their arrival unexpected. In the beginning, triggers such as crossdressing tend to induce them, but with practice, some autogynephilic people learn how to directly will them into being.
Eventually, this feminine mind state may become a permanent sensation, at which point it is a form of permanent cross-gender identity. If an autogynephilic person hands the reigns to their internal femme self, their default self can become subdued and fade into the background[ix].
Males who continually feel feminine or see themselves as women can be considered to have a transfeminine gender identity.
Transfeminine (or transfem) is an umbrella term for MTF-spectrum people. MTF transvestites, MTF transsexuals, and transgender women all fall under the transfem umbrella.
One of the best early accounts of autogynephilic transfeminine identity comes from the middle-aged Hungarian medical doctor whose story appeared in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. She had a permanent feeling of femininity that altered her relationship to herself and the world around her. She referred to these autogynephilic mental shifts as “the imperative female feeling”[x], “the imperative feeling of femininity”[xi], or “the feeling of being a woman”[xii].
The Hungarian physician wrote down her account of autogynephilia and mailed it to von Krafft-Ebing. Her account is so compelling and thorough that Hirschfeld reprinted it in Transvestites[xiii]. Over 130 years later, the Hungarian physician’s account is still one of the best.
The Hungarian Physician: The Feminine Imperative
When the Hungarian physician wrote her narrative in her forties, she had already developed a strong feminine identity. She hadn’t always felt that way though. When she was younger, the feminine feeling was milder and more fleeting. Recalling her high school years, she reported, “Gradually I began to feel like a girl”[xiv].
By middle age, her mental shifts and phantom shifts had become permanent aspects of everyday life. Every morning, her mental shift into a feminine mindset started within moments of waking and never dissipated[xv], and she constantly sensed the presence of phantom anatomy:
General feeling: I feel like a woman in a man’s form; and even though I often am sensible of the man’s form, yet it is always in a feminine sense. Thus, for example, I feel the penis as clitoris; the urethra and vaginal orifice, which always feels a little wet, even when it is actually dry; the scrotum as labia majora; in short, I always feel the vulva. And all that that means one alone can know who feels or has felt so.[xvi]
In addition to female genitals, the Hungarian physician also felt as though she had female breasts[xvii] and a female pelvis[xviii]. Even her waist felt female[xix].
She also experienced a type of mental shift known as a sensory shift which made her feel as though she had the senses and perception of a woman. Her stomach rebelled against every deviation from a “female diet”[xx]. Food that wasn’t completely fresh had “a cadaverous odour”[xxi].
Her skin felt feminine; it had become sensitive to both hot and cold temperatures, as well as direct sunlight[xxii]. She resented social norms that kept her from using sun parasols to protect her sensitive face skin[xxiii] and took to wearing gloves as much as possible—even while sleeping.
These mental and phantom shifts reinforced each other—her phantom anatomy made her feel like a woman[xxiv], and feeling like a woman reinforced her phantom anatomy[xxv].
By the time she wrote her account, her feminine identity was dominant, and her default self had already become subordinate to her feminine self:
It is as if I were robbed of my own skin, and put in a woman’s skin that fitted me perfectly, but which felt everything as if it covered a woman; and whose sensations passed through the man’s body, and exterminated the masculine element.[xxvi]
The imperative female feeling remained, and became so strong that I wear only the mask of a man, and in everything else feel like a woman; and gradually I have lost memory of the former individuality.[xxvii]
She was in control now.
In Sum
Autogynephilia is a sexual and romantic attraction to being a woman. As with conventional heterosexuality, this form of male autoheterosexuality can range in expression from overt eroticism to romantic sentimentality.
Autogynephilia can drive progressively larger commitments to feminine embodiment that resemble the escalating commitment of conventional sexual relationships. Through reinforcement from gender-related feelings, the way an autogynephilic person sees themselves can shift over time—usually toward femininity. In some cases, a person who starts out firmly convinced they are a man may ultimately become just as firmly convinced they are a woman.
Autogynephilia has various subtypes that pertain to having a woman’s body, bodily functions, style of dress, behavior, or social treatment. Any given autogynephilic person may have just one of these aspects of the orientation, or all of them. In its most simple, stripped-down form, autogynephilia presents as a stand-alone interest in having a woman’s body. But more commonly, autogynephilic people also want to embody womanly behavior, dress, or social standing.
Autogynephilic mental shifts create a sense of feminine consciousness, which contributes to the development of a feminine gender identity. Autogynephilic phantom shifts create a sense of having phantom anatomy corresponding to female-typical physical features such as breasts, a vulva, or wide hips. Mental shifts and phantom shifts both contribute to the body–mind incongruence that is so commonly associated with transsexualism.
Erotic feminization (sissification) is popular among autogynephilic people. Some even identify as sissies. Their preferred erotic media is likely to contain themes of gender transformation, forced feminization, or female domination. They may crossdress, penetrate themselves anally, or wear a chastity cage as part of their autoeroticism.
[i] American Psychiatric Association, ed., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2013), 818, https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596.
[ii] Ray Blanchard, “The Concept of Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male Gender Dysphoria,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 177, no. 10 (October 1989): 616, https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-198910000-00004.
[iii] Kevin J. Hsu, A. M. Rosenthal, and J. Michael Bailey, “The Psychometric Structure of Items Assessing Autogynephilia,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 44, no. 5 (July 2015): 1301–12, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0397-9.
[iv] Havelock Ellis, “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion,” Alienist and Neurologist 34, no. 2 (May 1913): 156–67, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015067286420&view=1up&seq=176; Havelock Ellis, “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion,” Alienist and Neurologist 34, no. 3 (August 1913): 249–79, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015067286420&view=1up&seq=269.
[v] Ellis, “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion,” May 1913, 164.
[vi] Ellis, “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion,” August 1913, 275.
[vii] “Fictionmania,” accessed January 9, 2023,
https://www.fictionmania.tv/
.
[viii] Andrea Long Chu, Females (New York: Verso, 2019), 65.
[ix] Richard F. Docter, Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior, Perspectives in Sexuality (New York: Plenum Press, 1988), 215, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0997-0.
[x] Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 12th ed., trans. F. J. Rebman (Rebman Company, 1906), 313.
[xi] Von Krafft-Ebing, 317.
[xii] Von Krafft-Ebing, 317.
[xiii] Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 184–96.
[xiv] Von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 309.
[xv] Von Krafft-Ebing, 314.
[xvi] Von Krafft-Ebing, 314.
[xvii] Von Krafft-Ebing, 312, 321.
[xviii] Von Krafft-Ebing, 316.
[xix] Von Krafft-Ebing, 316.
[xx] Von Krafft-Ebing, 315.
[xxi] Von Krafft-Ebing, 315.
[xxii] Von Krafft-Ebing, 314.
[xxiii] Von Krafft-Ebing, 314.
[xxiv] Von Krafft-Ebing, 316.
[xxv] Von Krafft-Ebing, 315.
[xxvi] Von Krafft-Ebing, 316.
[xxvii] Von Krafft-Ebing, 313.