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Notes -
Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there. Of course, it was more accurate than the previous view at the time which would lump them all together in a single one.
I don’t think AGP males are a product of modernity - the only thing that’s new is ability to transition using hormones and surgery, and to do it openly without it being instant social and professional suicide (not that there are no social costs now, but it’s completely different to say, the 1950s).
Men who are sexually into wearing female clothing and find the idea of being a woman erotic have probably been around since the earliest proto civilisations (see François-Timoléon de Choisy, who probably lied about seeing the royal family dressed as a woman, but not about being aroused by wearing a corset).
A trans identity that’s truly the product of modernity would be the autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind (both trans masculine and trans feminine). A 50 year old masculine married man with children who transitions after years of hiding his crossdressing habit from his wife, is not the same as teen for whom transitioning is an escape from the social and physiological pressures of their biological sex. Body dysmorphia, sensory issues, discomfort with heterosexual norms, etc. would be the primary motivations - maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.
It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man. The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.
I'm curious, what would your typologies of trans people look like, if you were to describe the different categories you've seen?
One thing that I often like to note is that the Blanchard typology misses an important detail, which is that "men who find the idea of being a woman erotic" isn't exclusively a thing for men attracted to women; it's in fact extremely common among men attracted to men. So the idea of lust for women being misdirected into self-lust for the state of being a woman has never struck me as an exhaustive explanation for the crossdresser-to-trans pipeline, or even the primary one.
I think there's a mode that's almost something akin to vagina-envy, where the default attraction for most men is to women, and therefore attaining womanhood is a means of becoming the archetypal appeal to the male gaze. I've certainly known people who've seemed to fit that bill.
That said, I don't know that the general public would find this cluster more sympathetic than the AGPs -- there are often a lot of immensely sexist assumptions baked into their idea of what attaining womanhood to appeal to the male gaze would look like. You know, "I exist to serve men, my body is a means of satisfaction for men," often combined with an intense desire to appeal to bisexual or bicurious men by insisting on their willingness to debase themselves for men in ways cis women will not. What exactly that debasement might entail is left as an exercise for the reader.
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I agree that the "autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind" of trans person is in a category of its own compared to homosexual males or archetypal AGPs. I also think the etiology behind trans-identification in females is completely different from that behind trans identification in males. "Gender dysphoria" isn't a condition like "lung cancer" or "depression" which affects males and females in the same way, and diagnosing males and females with the same condition hides more than it illuminates.
I've been thinking about this a lot. As much as people criticise Catholic institutions, they were a very effective Chesterton's fence for a particular kind of person who felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wasn't terribly interested in forming romantic relationships. It makes me sad thinking about all the young women who've gotten double mastectomies they'll likely regret, who would've been perfectly happy as nuns if they'd been born a couple of generations earlier.
A couple of generations here meaning what, 600 years? The convents were dissolved in the Anglosphere in the sixteenth century, and the kinds of elite families producing trans ‘sons’ have never been Catholic.
It’s also inaccurate to point to mid-20th-century convents and monasteries as performing a warehousing function; they were high status institutions that recruited widely from a broad spectrum of the population and tended to reject overwhelming oddballs. If you go back to the pre-Pian church you saw lots of upper class women who didn’t fit in sent to the convent so they don’t have to deal with men(and autistic or downright odd monks), but this was well on its way out by the time of living memory of the boomers. The post-Pian reform RCC overproduced clergy and religious beyond its ability to accommodate, there were things like shortened formation periods to try to cope; this changed with Vatican II, of course, but it wasn’t really for unusual people- although warehoused Sheldon Cooper types in the monastery were part of the story of the reformation.
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Of course, there were sects of nuns that got double mastectomies anyway. But maybe not all of the trans-adjacent women would join those.
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Reading that essay, it appears that Duncan's primary error is that he over-values the 10-year-old-self. Liking transformer robots and looking like Jimmy Neutron is no more optimal than liking the process of sex just because liking the process of sex comes later.
It’s not about either preference being more optimal, or consciously valuing the 10 year old self more than the present self. It’s about sexuality being this uncontrollable compulsion that’s suddenly injected in your brain, and in people like Duncan (and I, before I transitioned), it doesn’t feel like it’s “you” that likes or wants sex.
Like I’m absolutely fine with my preferences shifting across time, discovering new hobbies, becoming a mature adult with a mortgage and a pension fund. But in my case, a preference for sex didn’t feel like I tried something new, liked it, and consciously decided to keep doing it. It felt like there was an alien invader in my brain that I had to pacify so I could get back to doing the things I actually liked. I didn’t actually want sex in the way that my biology was pushing me to want it. It felt like losing control over who I was, in the same way someone might suffer from binge eating when stressed - a completely different experience from being a foodie who occasionally overeats when they go to a very good restaurant.
Most people don’t seem to have trouble integrating their sexuality into their selves. They see their sexual preferences as “theirs”. Maybe something about being autistic can lead to your sense of self crystallise too early and prevents you from tolerating changes, or maybe it causes a mental separation between the self and “base” desires, I don’t know.
But at the end of the day, my happiness and quality of life is enhanced when I take medication that lets me feel like my sexuality is on my own terms.
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Yeah, but crossdressing/transvestism was not considered the same as transsexuality until we got the idea that it was all transgenderism and that was an entire separate identity of its own. The modern notion of "identities" and especially what I'm seeing online with trans issues that if you are not 100% X then of course you must be Y is what is unique, and what is driving all this.
Before, if someone was crossdressing for whatever reasons (and they're not always erotic/fetish ones), you are correct - it was something to be hidden, something considered shameful. Now, it's a protected identity that you can be proud of, now you can crossdress 100% of the time! And all you have to do is say that really you are a woman. Maybe you go on hormones, maybe you don't. You can still be sexually attracted to women, just say you're a lesbian.
Indeed, again from what I'm picking up at second- and third-hand, the push is on to shove people into adopting it as an identity: you don't just feel better psychologically when dressed and behaving as your feminine anima, it's an identity and you are trans.
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