Where The Inner Feeling Of Cross-Gender Identity Comes From
an introduction to autoheterosexual mental shifts
Some autoheterosexuals experience an inner sensation of slipping into a headspace reminiscent of the other sex. During these cross-gender consciousness shifts, they may feel as though they’re thinking or feeling as the other sex would, or that they’re reacting to situations like the other sex would. In this cross-gender headspace, autoandrophilic females can feel an inner sensation of masculinity or maleness, and autogynephilic males can feel an inner sensation of femininity or femaleness.
This phenomenon is a mental shift.
At first, mental shifts tend to be quite intense and markedly different from one’s usual state of consciousness. Over time, they tend to get milder and feel like less of a departure from one’s usual headspace.
Its especially common for mental shifts to initially happen alongside gender euphoria, crossdressing, or sexual arousal. However, they can also occur independently of any apparent triggers.
Mental shifts can induce a strong internal sense of cross-gender identity in which a person just knows they’re another gender. Thus, I suspect that mental shifts are the seed that sometimes grows into the continuous, crystallized sense of cross-gender identity that some trans people experience.
In my upcoming book, Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, I theorize that mental shifts are an outgrowth of psyche autoheterosexuality, a sexual or romantic interest in having the mind of the other sex. This proposed subtype of autoheterosexuality drives a desire to think, feel, or react as the other sex would, so it makes sense that, if this subtype exists, mental shifts are likely a manifestation of it. Even if future research doesn’t show psyche autoheterosexuality to be a distinct subtype, however, there is already ample evidence for the existence of mental shifts themselves.
Autoandrophilic Mental Shifts
Since the existence of autoandrophilia is so frequently ignored or downplayed, let’s start by looking at a couple examples of autoandrophilic mental shifts.
When Lou Sullivan started dabbling in transvestism, he noted how it seemed to create a “strange identity feeling”. In a diary entry dated March 7, 1973, he wrote:
For the last 3–4 days, I feel like I’ve been walking around in a daze. I think it’s cuz I have a strange identity feeling going on cuzza my leather jacket. It’s really great tho. I really love it. I like the feeling of wearing it and the identity crisis that comes with it!
Even though Sullivan referred to this feeling of masculine identity as an “identity crisis”, he obviously enjoyed the feeling: he wrote this entry near the beginning of a 3-year stint of transvestism.
A better, more lengthy example of autoandrophilic mental shifts comes from the masculine female described at length in Splitting: A Case of Female Masculinity, a book-length case study about one of Robert J. Stoller’s patients. Stoller called this individual “Mrs. G”, but I’ll refer to him with masculine pronouns and call him “Mr. G” instead. It’s much more fitting.
Stoller included Mr. G as “Case 3” in Transvestism in Women, a paper that presents three cases of females with sexual interest in wearing men’s clothing. The remarks included in Stoller’s paper indicate that Mr. G experienced sexual arousal and mental shifts from wearing Levi’s jeans. These mental shifts made him feel confident, assertive, and unafraid. Although he wore Levi’s jeans partly for sexual reasons, they also induced mental shifts which let him escape his female side:
When I put on a pair of blue denim levis – and not any other male clothing has this effect – I feel much more than just masculine. The excitement begins immediately – as I begin to pull them over my feet and up, towards my thighs. There is no sensation comparable, and that is probably because the peak of this sensation involves a large range of feelings, including impossible-to-repress sexual excitement. I feel emotionally strengthened, assertive, confident, and totally unafraid. When I put on [a] pair of levis it's as though I shed the neurotic crap that plagues me constantly, all of that stuff that makes me hate being a female, or, all of that stuff that keeps me afraid of being feminine.
Mr. G also experienced mental shifts from wearing men’s pants and boots. Although only Levi’s jeans were directly sexually arousing to him, he felt decidedly masculine while wearing pants and boots:
No other clothing provides any sexual excitement. However, if I wear any men's pants and boots, I feel strong, confident, and capable of taking whatever, or whomever, I want sexually. I do not wear boots exclusively, because of the aggressive feelings and the effect on my attitude. I do have to get along with men, for survival's sake, if for no other reason.
Mr. G’s aggressive masculinity while wearing men’s clothing began in adolescence. Dressed in men’s clothing, he felt tough and invulnerable—he even intentionally picked fights with boys to prove his masculinity:
As I began my teen years, along with my first pregnancy, and the constant shift between my mother's home and my grandparent's home, the effect of the levis changed. The changes were subtle, but clear-cut in my head. I felt strong, powerful, unafraid, assertive, less vulnerable. I'm fairly sure that these changes in my personality, when dressed in levis, were obvious to my mother, but she never insisted that I change my dressing habits. I picked fights with neighborhood boys twice my size, until there were none left who would become involved in any confrontation with me.
He also found out quite early that boots made his mental shifts stronger. Here again, he reported lifelong experience with mental shifts (“special feelings”) while dressed in Levi’s jeans:
I’ve experienced special feelings while dressed in levis since I was very young-possibly prior to attending school. I do remember feeling definitely sexually excited around eleven years old, and being fully aware that my levis were a contributing factor. The neat part is that those same feelings are still available to me now, many years later. It was during this time that I also discovered that wearing boots intensified those feelings.
The Effects and Trajectory of Mental Shifts
To see the nature of autoheterosexual mental shifts and how they progressively contribute to cross-gender identity development, let’s look at a great example from a 2015 episode of NPR’s Invisibilia podcast. In this episode, a transfem named Paige Abendroth speaks in detail about her internal experience of gender and how it kept switching back and forth between her female and male sides. At the point this episode was recorded, Abendroth was already far along in the cross-gender development process. Her internal sensation of being a woman was mostly consolidated, with experiences of maleness becoming quite infrequent.
The host, Alix Spiegel, set the context for the ensuing conversation:
SPIEGEL: Photos from a time in Paige's life when Paige was male. Paige spent the first three decades of her life as a man. But let me be clear from the top. Paige's story is not the transgender story that you typically hear. Typically, people who are transgender feel like they are one gender trapped in the body of the other gender. Their internal gender identity is misaligned with their biological sex, but it's static. It stays the same. But when I was talking to Paige, that didn't capture her experience at all. Because when I met her, Paige was flipping, flipping between the category male and the category female.
ABENDROTH: I flipped back and forth multiple times a day. I'll say maybe spend 20 percent of my time in guy mode and the rest of it in female mode.
SPIEGEL: One morning, Paige would wake up feeling strongly that the gender at the core of her being was female. But then suddenly...
ABENDROTH: It's just kind of like (snapping).
SPIEGEL: There was a change. And Paige was in guy mode. When that happened, all kinds of things about Paige changed. Her posture changed.
ABENDROTH: And my weight kind of moves up to my shoulders. Like my center of gravity is kind of up here.
SPIEGEL: More significantly, she told me, there was a real psychological shift.
ABENDROTH: The way I see the world and the way I interpret the world is different.
SPIEGEL: When Paige was in male mode, Paige was less interested in people - in talking to them, in making eye contact with them.
ABENDROTH: I'm a lot more introverted. I'm a lot more - I'm quieter.
SPIEGEL: But in female mode, she was much more expansive. And sights, sounds, smells, likes, dislikes, they were all different.
ABENDROTH: When I'm female, all my emotions are like just really vivid, like colors.
SPIEGEL: Basically, Paige was constantly and very abruptly bounced between two starkly different ways of being in and filtering the world. Paige wasn't able to dictate when or where this happened.
ABENDROTH: I really have no control over it.
SPIEGEL: She'd be sitting in her office, talking to her boss and bam, she'd be walking down the street - bam. Now, when this happened, it wasn't like Paige was an entirely different person.
ABENDROTH: I'm always the same person. I experience the world differently. But I'm still me. I still am in control of myself. I still have my same wants and desires.
SPIEGEL: There was just this profound difference beneath everything.
ABENDROTH: It's just a sense of knowing, like the way that you know you're a female right now without having to be told, it's the same way that I know that I'm a female. And when I'm a guy, it's the same way I know I'm a guy. It's just this instinctual knowing of what I am.
SPIEGEL: By the way, right now are you male or female?
ABENDROTH: Definitely in girl mode, yeah.
SPIEGEL: And how long have you been in girl mode right now?
ABENDROTH: About an hour, I'd say.
While in a mental shift, Paige held her body differently—her posture changed. Her preferences and personality also shifted, as evidenced by her altered likes, dislikes, and disposition toward people. Even her emotions became more vibrant.
Under the influence of a mental shift, Paige also perceived the world around her differently: her sensory perception was altered. In the subculture which spawned the concept of mental shifting, these types of mental shifts are called ”sensory shifts”.
This excerpt also showed how mental shifts can start or end abruptly and without warning. Since the types of shifts Paige described happened spontaneously without being consciously induced, they likely count as involuntary shifts. For people with autosexual orientations, it’s common for involuntary shifts to initially arise spontaneously in response to particular triggers or when they’re in a heightened state of physiologic or emotional arousal. Over time, however, they typically figure how to shift voluntarily.
Paige’s gender identity was also impacted by these mental shifts. When she explained, “It's just this instinctual knowing of what I am”, she accurately conveyed the distinct internal sense of femaleness or maleness that can accompany autoheterosexual mental shifts. I suspect this internal gender gnosis is what many trans people are alluding to when they say they have a strong inner knowledge of being another gender, and that this aspect of mental shifts is an especially powerful influence on one’s gender identity.
After discussing the subjective experience of mental shifts in such a concise yet accurate manner, the podcast episode pivots to a chronological examination of Paige Abendroth’s life, starting with childhood. This allows us to witness the cross-gender development process unfold over time.
At first, Paige’s cross-gender self was basically absent. But during adolescence, it started to make itself known in momentary flashes:
SPIEGEL: I wanted to talk to her about what it was like to move in this way between categories.
So let's just start with, like, your childhood.
Now, Paige didn't start off this way. She started off as a he, and really didn't even have that experience that you sometimes hear about where people describe feeling, from a very early age, like they're trapped in the wrong body. That wasn't Paige's experience.
ABENDROTH: I mean, [I] loved playing with G.I. Joes.
SPIEGEL: And as teen, too, he was a boy obsessed with the things that most boys are obsessed with.
ABENDROTH: I always thought about women.
SPIEGEL: You never thought you were gay?
ABENDROTH: Uh-uh.
SPIEGEL: Still, Paige says, there were these strange momentary flashes that were disturbing.
ABENDROTH: I remember looking at girls and not just being attracted to them, but thinking that I was supposed to be them and wishing that I could kind of go over to the girl group and be accepted because that's where I felt I should be. But these thoughts were really inconsistent. It's not - I didn't always feel that way.
SPIEGEL: So Paige grows up, graduates from high school, goes to college and then really starts to struggle. The flashes are still there. College is hard. Paige drops out and begins to feel really, really lost. And then, in a somewhat odd place, Paige finds relief in the Navy.
ABENDROTH: I love the discipline of it, the structure of it.
SPIEGEL: First of all, for some reason, those flashes go way down.
Why?
ABENDROTH: I don't know. I saw myself as being more of a guy than I ever did before.
Why would Paige feel like a guy? She was in the Navy, yes, but there was another factor: she fell in love with a woman. The episode continued:
SPIEGEL: But really, it was while stationed at a naval base in Japan that Paige found relief in a way that will be familiar to many of you.
ABENDROTH: I walked around the corner and I saw her. And she was just kind of bouncing around, and she was very energetic. And...
SPIEGEL: It was love at first sight.
ABENDROTH: Immediately, I knew that there was something, like, special about her.
SPIEGEL: And even though Paige had never been a very aggressive person, Paige completely went after this girl.
ABENDROTH: I was smitten. I was immediately smitten.
SPIEGEL: And it worked.
The new relationship energy from her newfound love directed her attention away from the woman within, and this internal woman faded to the background.
The new, externally-oriented love bond was so intense that this couple got married, moved to California, and bought a house together. Their love was also sickeningly cute:
ABENDROTH: We were just like this. We were so in tune with one another. I mean, we knew each other so good we could communicate, like, with a series of clicks.
SPIEGEL: Like, what do you mean?
ABENDROTH: We just - (clicking) - and like, the other person would answer back, and we'd know what we were, like - (clicking) - getting at.
SPIEGEL: And sometimes, it would mean, like...
ABENDROTH: It could mean, like, how are you? Or it could just be acknowledging that, you know, you're there. (Clicking).
SPIEGEL: So began the best chapter in Paige's life.
ABENDROTH: (Clicking) I can't believe you're recording this.
SPIEGEL: They get married. They move to California.
ABENDROTH: Got a home, had a car, had a steady job. I had everything that I ever wanted (clicking).
SPIEGEL: OK, what does that mean?
ABENDROTH: It depends on the context (laughter).
Although adorable as all hell, this phase of puppy love was about to end. Paige’s latent gender issues began to reassert themselves:
SPIEGEL: And then Paige turns 30, and all of a sudden, starts feeling really, really tired.
ABENDROTH: I'd - I mean, just coming up the steps, I would run out of breath.
SPIEGEL: So Paige goes to see the doctor.
ABENDROTH: And eventually, what they finally figured out was that my body thought it'd be a really fun joke on me to stop producing testosterone. Basically, at 30 years old, I had the testosterone level of an 80-plus-year-old man.
SPIEGEL: So the doctors put Paige on testosterone replacement therapy, and very quickly, the exhaustion went away.
ABENDROTH: Physically, I felt like I had before.
SPIEGEL: But the flashes - they're back with a vengeance.
ABENDROTH: I would have those feelings again where I thought I was supposed to be female, except there wasn't anything subtle about it. It was a very strong feeling that something had gone terribly wrong and that I was not supposed to be male.
To people who think of transgenderism as something akin to intersex, this outcome may be confusing. Why would testosterone treatment make Paige’s feminine mental shifts come back stronger than ever? If you understand mental shifts as a byproduct of sexual orientation, however, this reaction to testosterone is to be expected: since testosterone increases libido, it will increase the cross-gender drive in people who are attracted to being the other sex.
During these strong mental shifts, Paige experienced intense gender dysphoria from the incongruence between her feminine headspace and her masculine body. She also did something that’s common for autogynephilic males who have female spouses: she didn’t tell her partner. Instead, she chose to keep her internal gender conflict to herself:
SPIEGEL: In these moments, Paige would look down at her body - this hard torso, covered in hair - and feel utter disgust.
ABENDROTH: Imagine you woke up and your body was a cockroach. It was really unsettling.
SPIEGEL: Did you - so did you start talking to your wife about it?
ABENDROTH: No, I was terrified. I thought I was going crazy. I didn't want her to think less of me, and it was something that I kept inside.
To address this painful gender incongruence, Paige took the classic approach of adorning her body with clothing associated with the other sex:
SPIEGEL: Paige started telling me that occasionally during this period, to ease this feeling of disgust that came over her when she flipped into female mode but had a male body, she would secretly put on women's clothing. She felt a need to cover this body that felt so wrong with clothes from the right sex.
ABENDROTH: I was just trying to do anything I could to make myself feel more female.
SPIEGEL: So I started asking questions about this.
Do you remember the first time you decided to do that?
ABENDROTH: Mhm.
SPIEGEL: But suddenly, the whole tone of the conversation changed.
ABENDROTH: I don't want to talk about it.
Why the sudden silence? I suspect shame is at play here.
It’s common for autogynephilic males to initially don feminine apparel with the hope of looking like a girl. Instead of that desired outcome, however, they’re often greeted by a raging boner that not only dashes their hope of appearing feminine, but also fills them with shame. Although I can’t know if that’s what happened in Paige’s case, given that this question about her first crossdressing experience led to an abrupt end to free-flowing conversation, I suspect that’s what happened (and that this memory of upsetting arousal still made her uncomfortable.
After this hiccup (and a pause to regroup), the interview led to discussion of Paige’s efforts to understand her condition. She had found an online community of bigender people. People who identify as bigender often experience themselves as having two distinct genders. Usually one is female and the other male. These two sides can be ever-present and experienced simultaneously, or they may oscillate back and forth. Paige felt that some of the experiences described by the bigender people online matched up fairly well with her own.
Once Paige had a name for her condition, she realized she had to come out to her wife. After doing so, she then widened her range of gender expression at home. However, this still didn’t adequately address her gender incongruence. She still experienced intense gender dysphoria at times—and in one instance, it was even so strong that she threw up.
Some of the bigender people online reported that taking estrogen to attain a more androgynous appearance could help alleviate the whiplash of switching between these two states. Paige gave it a go. She reported, “The first time I got my first injection I just felt this immense relief like I was finally on the right track”.
The estrogen helped Paige’s gender dysphoria, but the physical changes contributed to the dissolution of her marriage. Her wife left, and Paige was stuck in the space between genders, not sure where she fit in.
Over a year later, the interviewer (Spiegel) called Paige for an update:
SPIEGEL: Turns out, about six months after I went to San Diego, the flipping started to fade. And eventually, Paige had settled full-time into being a woman. The last time Paige had flipped into being psychologically male was in the fast-food restaurant Five Guys, and she said it took her completely by surprise.
ABENDROTH: I had gotten so used to constantly staying like I am now, as a woman, that I thought it had stopped. And I remember I flipped really hard. It was really bizarre. I felt like I was wearing a really uncomfortable sweater or something like that.
SPIEGEL: Now, Paige couldn't really explain why the flipping had stopped any better than she could explain why it had started. She said she thought the estrogen hormones she'd taken to make her body more androgynous probably had affected her.
At this point, Paige’s cross-gender mental shift had become constant. Although at first her mental shifts were brief flashes that disappeared quickly, after years of reinforcement and escalating cross-gender embodiment, her mental shifts eventually crystallized into a stable sense of cross-gender identity.
The Hungarian Physician: “the imperative female feeling”
Mental shifts are a prominent theme in the in-depth narrative of autogynephilia contained in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the first major medical text about uncommon sexualities. In my book, I refer to the author of this narrative as the “Hungarian physician”.
The Hungarian physician wrote her account of autogynephilia in her mid-40’s, about three years after her mental shifts had coalesced into a stable sense of feminine identity (“the imperative female feeling”). Recalling the aftermath of an experience in which she felt herself transformed into a woman, she described the permanent onset of her feminine mental shift:
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.
With the internal woman in charge, the prior male self was left to atrophy. This inner woman controlled not only the mind, but also the body:
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.
As this prior quote indicates, her permanent mental shift also included changes to sensory perception that changed how she perceived and reacted to the world around her:
Three years ago I had not yet consciously seen the world with a woman’s eyes; this change in the relation of the eyes to the brain came almost suddenly, with violent headache…Since then, all my sensory impressions are as if they were feminine in form and relation. The cerebral system almost immediately adjusted itself to the vegetative; so that all my ailments were manifested in a feminine way. The sensitiveness of all nerves, particularly that of the auditory and olfactory and trigeminal, increased to a condition of nervousness. If only a window slammed, I was frightened inwardly; for a man dare not tremble at such things. If food is not absolutely fresh, I perceive a cadaverous odour.
Three years into this continuous sensation of cross-gender identity, she’d given up fighting it with reason and become resigned to her fate:
During the last three years I have never lost for an instant the feeling of being a woman, and now, owing to habit, this is no longer annoying to me…
Reason does not give any help; the imperative feeling of femininity dominates and rules everything.
Formal Studies of Gendered Mental Shifts
Some researchers have begun studying mental shifts by surveying people who report an alternating internal sense of gender. I know of two quantitative studies on this, both of which came from the same lab. The lead author, Laura Case, published the first one in 2012 and the second in 2019.
The first paper includes three qualitative responses which speak to the experience of mental shifting.
One speaks of changes to perception:
I still have the same values and beliefs, but a change in gender is really a change in the filter through which I interact with the world and through which it interacts with me.
Likely written by an autogynephilic male, this next narrative describes how in girl mode they have a higher voice and are more emotionally open and compassionate:
My voice usually ends up being higher than other times, I’ll be more emotional, my views on things like politics tend not to change, but how I react to certain things does. Like if I’m in male mode and I see someone crying I’ll think more along the lines of, ‘‘Man up...’’ while if I’m in girl mode I’ll think more along the lines of “Oh sweety!”
The third one lacks detail, but speaks to how starkly different the two modes of being can feel from the inside:
I just feel completely different, the only way I can explain it is “one minute I’m a boy, next thing I’m a girl”, everything is different.
Once again, we see that mental shifts can drastically change one’s inner subjective experience by altering perceptions, behaviors, thoughts, or feelings.
Although these shifts to mental state are seemingly a form of cross-gender consciousness embodiment, they are sometimes accompanied by the sensation of having phantom anatomy corresponding to the other sex. For example, some autoandrophilic females feel the presence of phantom testes or a phantom dick, and some autogynephilic males feel the presence of phantom breasts or a phantom vagina. Both the 2012 study and its 2019 follow-up talk about the relationship between mental shifts and phantom anatomy (and how these two states tend to correspond), but I’ll save in-depth discussion of phantom shifts for another post.
In the 2019 study of gender switches in bigender people, researchers took the time to do extensive interviews with 20 of the subjects (14 male, 6 female). Researchers asked about the kinds of things that arose with these mental states and what triggered them, and then categorized their responses. Unfortunately, they didn’t analyze each sex differently in this section, but given that the males here strongly outnumber the females, we can assume most responses are from males.
In a male mindstate, 55% respondents said they felt more angry, fearful, or threatened, and the same proportion said that in a female mindstate they could cry more easily. Forty percent said they had more technical or analytical interests in a male mindstate and more creative interests in a female mindstate. A quarter of them said their female state was connected to socializing with female friends, and 35% said their voice was deeper in a male state. During a gender switch, 35% said their touch or temperature sensitivity changed, 20% said their gait or posture changed, and 20% said their libido or sexual response changed. Again, we see that mental shifts can change how people sit, walk, or talk, how they think, react, or feel, or even how they perceive the world around them. And of course, some find that mental shifts alter their libido or sexual expression.
In fact, the types of changes to sexuality these male participants reported is very characteristic of autogynephilia. Of the 14 males, 13 were mostly attracted to women while in a male mindstate. But in a female mindstate, 12 of them shifted toward more attraction to men. The average attraction shift was analogous to a 2-point shift on the Kinsey scale (a 7-point scale that measures attraction to men and women). This is a pretty big effect!
If autosexuality is behind mental shifts, this shift in attraction is also completely expected: it’s common for autoheterosexuals to experience same-sex attraction that’s grounded in a desire for cross-gender embodiment. This gender-affirming same-sex attraction is commonly called meta-attraction. Since this huge change to sexual preferences occurred when these males were in a female mindstate, it’s likely due to meta-androphilia (attraction to being a woman with a man) rather than conventional androphilia.
Interestingly, the 6 females in this study didn’t seem to experience much meta-attraction, as only one reported that gender switches altered their sexual preferences.
Frequency of Mental Shifting
Both the 2012 study and the 2019 study of bigender people asked study participants how often they experienced gender switches. The latter study includes the data from the previous study, but let’s look at both anyway. In both of these studies, the vast majority of respondents reported gender switches at least once a week, and roughly 40% switched gender at least once a day:
To see how these rates of mental shifts compare to other studies, I’ll compare them to similar data collected from therians, a subculture of people who identify as animals. Within the autosexual theory of trans identity to which I subscribe, therians can be understood as people who are autozoophilic (attracted to being an animal). By creating a love of the beast within, autozoophilia contributes to the development of transspecies identity. This orientation commonly makes itself known through mental shifts into an animalistic mindset, or phantom shifts in which they feel animalistic phantom anatomy such as paws, ears, or a tail.
The concept of shifting is widely understood in the therian community because they created it. Thus, questions about shifting are often included in their community surveys. For example, here is the mental shifting frequency reported in the 2012 Therian Census and 2013 Therian Census:
The bigender data shows a drop-off when frequency becomes less than weekly, and the therian data shows a drop-off when frequency becomes less than a few times a month. This is pretty similar!
To make these numbers from therians more directly comparable to the data collected from bigender people (a group that can be accurately described as “gender-fluid”), I made a species-fluid subset of therians by removing therians who reported their mental shifting frequency as “constant”, "rarely", “only once”, or “never”, as these indicate fairly steady, non-fluid amounts of cross-species identity. I compared the remaining responses from therians to the gender-fluid groups that matched most closely:
Therian Responses Gender-Fluid Comparison Group
“daily” → at least daily
“every couple of days” → at least weekly
“a few times a month” → at least monthly
"a few times a year" → less than monthlyThis method of comparison is rather crude, especially for the middle two groups, but this is the best publicly-available data on mental shifting frequency that I currently know of, so it’ll have to do for now1.
Here’s what I found:
I freely acknowledge that this method of analysis has its flaws, but this is a pretty decent match! I’ll be curious to see how future data on mental shifting compares. If data on mental shifting frequency continues to show similar distributions across different types of trans identity, it’ll lend further support to the notion that a shared cause (autosexuality) underlies these various forms of trans identity.
In Sum
Some autoheterosexuals experience shifts in consciousness in which they feel more like the other sex. During these autoheterosexual mental shifts, their behavior, thoughts, or feelings can change, as can their personality or their subjective experience of sensations or perceptions. These autohet mental shifts can also create a strong inner sense of being another gender.
This internal connection with their cross-gender selves can make autoheterosexuals feel more secure and at peace within themselves. Understandably, some return to this inner sanctuary time and time again, until at some point, they never leave.
If you know of other data on mental shifting frequency among people with autosexual orientations, please point me to it.