Gender Euphoria: Good Gender Feelings
the inner love that drives gender transition
Here, in chapter 6.1 of Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, I speak about the joy, peace, and love to be found in the cross-gender self.
Gender euphoria is one of the most cherished parts of the autoheterosexual experience.
Gender euphoria is emotionally compelling because it feels like love, and it feels that way because it is love—it comes from union with an autoheterosexual’s inner cross-gender self.
Increased heart rate is a particularly common physical response to experiencing gender euphoria[ii]. Goose bumps, a feeling of warmth, or butterflies in the stomach are common too. Depending on the particular stimulus and individual, as well as the context and intensity, sexual arousal may also be part of the euphoric response[iii].
On the milder side, gender euphoria feels similar to the pleasure of holding hands or cuddling with a loved one. On the more intense side, it provides an intoxicating deluge of joy that truly earns the “euphoria” label.
The intensely euphoric feelings tend to be short-lived, but the milder ones can stick around for the long haul[iv]. In general, repeated exposure to the same stimulus yields a weaker euphoria response over time.
Initially Intense
As A. T.’s testimony at the start of this chapter shows, the first experience of gender euphoria can be so intense that it’s downright revelatory.
Looking back on the fledgling stages of his cross-gender exploration, a queer transgender man recounted how dressing in men’s clothes brought forth his masculine self and a new high:
“In the dressing room, I watched myself transform into the handsome devil I secretly believed I could be. I stood in awe of my new, more definitively masculine figure and aesthetic, and experienced a high I’d never felt before.”[v]
The “luxuriously happy frame of mind”[vi] produced by crossdressing can dispel “the most pressing fatigue and dullness”[vii], leaving behind a residual feeling of wellness that can last into the next day:
“The miraculous effect of feminine clothes still made me tremble [the] next day at my work. Clear, peaceful, and serene the world seemed to me. Intoxicated with happiness, I went gaily to work under the fading stars. With half the expenditure of energy I did the work of three.”[viii]
This sartorial union with the inner cross-gender spirit helps autohets feel at home in themselves, providing safety, security, and comfort. Although enjoyable, these feelings aren’t always easy to interpret. One transsexual woman reported, “When I put on the dress for the first time, after I let myself relax for a few minutes, I started to cry and felt very safe and at peace. I’m not sure what to make of this”[ix].
Not only can these intense feelings be hard to interpret, but they can also be hard to put into words.
The Transformative Potential of Unspeakable Delight
Sometimes autohet gender euphoria is so powerful that the people experiencing it have trouble conveying the profound depth of their emotions. These ineffable emotions are transformative.
The Hungarian physician had a life-changing gender experience when she “almost died of hashish poisoning” after consuming a high dose of cannabis extract[x]. During this subjectively near-death experience, she saw herself transform into a woman—a change that was hard to put into words: “All at once I saw myself a woman from my toes to my breast; I felt, as before while in the bath, that the genitals had shrunken, the pelvis broadened, the breasts swollen out; a feeling of unspeakable delight came over me”[xi].
Upon waking the next day, she had a phantom vulva and phantom breasts, and she felt herself fully changed into a woman. Although she wrote this account three years after that transformative euphoria, her mental and phantom shifts remained as permanent features of her everyday life.
A modern-day transfem who held back on fulfilling her cross-gender aspirations for the sake of her marriage also wrote about unspeakably delightful gender euphoria. After encountering medical issues that required her to be castrated, she was put on a low dose of estrogen. Force-feminized by fate, she was awash in gender euphoria:
“While all this is certainly unfortunate, painful, and potentially life threatening, I am inwardly welcoming these health problems and their treatment…The flood of emotions concerning the limited fulfillment of my great desire is nearly indescribable.”[xii]
Her situation was potentially life-threatening and painful, but she was thankful for it. Looking like a woman carried such immense spiritual worth to her that the risk of death felt worthwhile. She isn’t alone in accepting this risk—even though gender-affirming surgeries carry some risk of death, thousands of autohet transsexuals get them anyway.
The unspeakably blissful joy of gender euphoria beckons to autoheterosexuals, encouraging them to cross the gender divide one meaningful experience at a time.
The High of New Love
For autoheterosexuals, the start of cross-gender exploration can feel like the excited joy of budding love or the “honeymoon period” of a relationship. The polyamorous refer to this feeling as “new relationship energy”[xiii]. Trans women sometimes call it “pink haze”[xiv].
Most people know the feeling of being high on newfound love. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. Countless songs, stories, and poems have been written about it.
These loving feelings are a product of our evolutionary history. They help us form strong attachments to others lasting several years—long enough to become pregnant, give birth, and wean the resulting child[xv]. For this reason, love is one of the most powerful motivating forces in our lives. It’s why some people work jobs they loathe for years on end just to support their loved ones—even if it ends up killing them physically, mentally, or spiritually.
Autoheterosexuality directs that same powerful motivating force toward a cross-gender version of oneself. Since gender euphoria feels like love, it’s a powerful signifier of meaning and importance that says you’re on the right path. It’s like that classic R & B song: “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right”[xvi].
After hundreds or thousands of these positive mood shifts, attachment to the cross-gender self grows stronger. Eventually, it may feel more real and vital than the default self. Some autoheterosexuals even come to believe their cross-gender self is the only version of themselves worth living for, and their default self is a veil or mask which obscures their true self.
If they haven’t already transitioned, at this point, autohets may decide that becoming what they love via gender transition is the best path forward—that being true to their most deeply held feelings is the best way to live out the rest of their days.
Becoming What We Love: The Romance Hypothesis
The simplest way to make sense of gender transition among autoheterosexuals is to think of it as a form of internal marriage to the cross-gendered self.
Few autohet transsexuals would describe their internal experience in this way, but it’s a useful metaphor. In a sense, they love the other sex and want to become what they love. This interpretive lens—which frames autoheterosexual gender transition as the result of an internal pair-bond with the cross-gender self—is sometimes called the romance hypothesis[xvii].
Sexual orientations come with the propensity for attachment and the desire to be in union with the object of affection, so attachment to embodying the other sex is a logical consequence of attraction to embodying the other sex. Of course attraction leads to attachment—it would be strange if it didn’t.
The romance hypothesis was originally proposed because there was an aspect of autogynephilic transsexualism that didn’t seem to make sense: if autogynephilic gender transition was motivated by sexuality, but feminizing hormone treatment lowered libido, why were so many trans women sticking with gender transition even after hormones decreased their libido?
By focusing on the emotional and sentimental aspects of gender transition, the romance hypothesis offers a deeper understanding than one that portrays autoheterosexuality as a purely erotic phenomenon[xviii]. It also helps make autohet transgenderism comprehensible to anyone who has fallen in love before.
In her influential essay, “Becoming What We Love”[xix], Anne Lawrence makes a convincing case that we can understand autogynephilic trans women as males who “love women and want to become what they love”[xx]. Likewise, we can understand autoandrophilic trans men as females who “love men and want to become what they love”.
Seven years prior to his gender transition, Lou Sullivan touched on this theme of internal union in his diary. Just before he got his first leather jacket and began to commit more deeply to transvestism, he wrote, “I love to blend female and male—I think of myself as two people finally coming together in peace with each other. Of my other half, I sing, ‘Nobody loves me but me adores you!’”[xxi].
Internal Union with the Cross-Gender Self
Although some critics[xxii] contest the idea that autoheterosexuality can create an internal pair-bond with the cross-gender self, observers have noticed this internal union and remarked on it for generations now.
Before Lawrence proposed that autogynephilic gender transition was a matter of “becoming what we love”, Blanchard compared the desire that some trans women had for bottom surgery to a long-term marriage in which the eroticism had waned but the desire to stay together remained[xxiii].
Writing in 1970, a decade before Blanchard embarked on his gender research, H. Taylor Buckner described “the transvestic career path”[xxiv]. He saw these inner unions as an “internal marriage”[xxv] and said they were a “synthetic dyad within the individual”[xxvi]. He also described the male transvestite as an autoerotic individual “who has internalized his dyadic relationship with an autoerotic object”[xxvii] and noted that after a transvestite incorporates the femme persona into their personal identity, “he begins to relate toward himself…as if he were his own wife”[xxviii].
Sixty years before Buckner’s observations, Hirschfeld noted that among the transvestites he studied, “the masculine part in the psyche of these people is sexually excited by their feminine side…they feel attracted not only by women outside themselves, but also more so by the women within themselves”[xxix]. One of Hirschfeld’s patients even admitted, “I was my own best friend”, when recalling her solitary cross-gender practices[xxx].
What are the odds that critics of this “internal pair-bond” idea are right? Were reputable observers like Lawrence, Blanchard, and Hirschfeld mistaken when they alluded to internal unions in autohet trans people?
Probably not—it’s unlikely that all these experts are wrong. If anything, the strong emotions in the trans community around autoheterosexuality and the two-type model are what we’d expect to see if many trans people truly do have this inner union and are motivated by inner love to protect their self-image from ideas they regard as threats to it.
In Sum
Autoheterosexual gender euphoria confers comfort, joy, and other positive feelings in response to perceptions of cross-gender embodiment. At first, it may cause goose bumps, increased heart rate, or the feeling of butterflies in the stomach. Over time, it can develop into a deeper, more companionate love-bond that persists even if overt eroticism has waned.
The bliss of gender euphoria can be so intense that it’s hard to put into words, and this intensity underlies its transformative potential. These warm fuzzy feelings motivate autohets to cross the gender divide.
Sexual attraction can lead to romantic attachment. Thus, sexual attraction to being the other sex can lead to emotional attachment to being the other sex. This intuitive insight is the basis for the romance hypothesis, an interpretive lens that treats autohet gender transition as an outward expression of an internal marriage to the cross-gender self.
[i] Havelock Ellis, “Eonism,” in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 7, Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1928), 46–47, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/njv7bbq7.
[ii] Richard F. Docter, Transvestites and Transsexuals: Toward a Theory of Cross-Gender Behavior, Perspectives in Sexuality (New York: Plenum Press, 1988), 103, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0997-0.
[iii] Jocelyn Badgley and other contributors, “The Gender Dysphoria Bible,” 9, accessed August 18, 2022, https://genderdysphoria.fyi/gdb.pdf.
[iv] William J. Beischel, “Gender Pleasure: The Positive Affective Component of Gender/Sex” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2022), 39, https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/174393.
[v] Adrian Silbernagel, “Gender Euphoria: The Bright Side of Trans Experience,” Thinking Queerly, Queer Kentucky, accessed January 13, 2023, https://queerkentucky.com/gender-euphoria-the-bright-side-of-trans-experience/.
[vi] Ellis, “Eonism,” 67.
[vii] Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 29.
[viii] Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions: A Summary of the Works of the Late Professor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, ed. Norman Haire (London: Encyclopaedic Press, 1966), 200–201.
[ix] Anne A. Lawrence, ed., “Thirty-One New Narratives About Autogynephilia: Plus Five Revealing Fantasy Narratives,” AnneLawrence.com, 1999, no. 50, accessed January 30, 2023, available at https://web.archive.org/web/20120208181716/http:/www.annelawrence.com/31narratives.html.
[x] Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 12th ed., trans. F. J. Rebman (Rebman Company, 1906), 312.
[xi] Von Krafft-Ebing, 312.
[xii] Lawrence, “Thirty-One New Narratives About Autogynephilia,” no. 48.
[xiii] Zhahai Stewart, “What’s All This NRE Stuff, Anyway? Reflections 15 Years Later,” Aphrodite’s Web, 2001, http://aphroweb.net/articles/nre.htm.
[xiv] Megan Haynes, “Transgender Toronto Actress Set to Take on L.A.,” Toronto Star, February 1, 2017, https://www.thestar.com/life/2017/02/01/transgender-toronto-actress-takes-on-the-us.html.
[xv] Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).
[xvi] “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right,” featuring Luther Ingram, produced by John Baylor, on vinyl, KoKo, 1972.
[xvii] Tailcalled, “Response to Contrapoints on Autogynephilia,” Survey Anon’s Gender Blog (blog), January 26, 2019, https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/01/26/response-to-contrapoints-on-autogynephilia/.
[xviii] Anne A. Lawrence, “Becoming What We Love: Autogynephilic Transsexualism Conceptualized as an Expression of Romantic Love,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50, no. 4 (Autumn 2007): 518, https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2007.0050.
[xix] Lawrence, “Becoming What We Love.”
[xx] Lawrence, 518.
[xxi] Lanei M. Rodemeyer, Lou Sullivan Diaries (1970-1980) and Theories of Sexual Embodiment, Crossroads of Knowledge (New York: Springer, 2018), 163.
[xxii] Julia M. Serano, “The Case Against Autogynephilia,” International Journal of Transgenderism 12, no. 3 (2010): 182, https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2010.514223; “Autogynephilia,” ContraPoints, February 1, 2018, YouTube video, 48:54.
[xxiii] Ray Blanchard, “Clinical Observations and Systematic Studies of Autogynephilia,” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy 17, no. 4 (1991): 248, https://doi.org/10.1080/00926239108404348.
[xxiv] H. Taylor Buckner, “The Transvestic Career Path,” Psychiatry 33, no. 3 (1970): 381–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1970.11023637.
[xxv] Buckner, 386.
[xxvi] Buckner, 385.
[xxvii] Buckner, 385.
[xxviii] Buckner, 387.
[xxix] Hirschfeld, Transvestites, 140.
[xxx] Hirschfeld, 39.