Fetishes and Autogynephilia

I'm not interested in what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home. It only becomes any of my business if forced on to others, especially if that includes children.

@ScrollingLeaves

Some mention strange fantasies very young but then getting sexually hooked in at about 14 trying on their mother it sister’s clothes in secret. I wonder if it gets hard wired because they are so young and they get hooked?

THIS. But they get hooked because they have a rampant personality disorder. Playing dress-up is cool. Normal. Where it becomes a-typical is when they attempt to lever their sense of entitlement again women.

I mean, just look at the incels. Fighting their own little war against women. State, sponsored rape.

I mean, if you had a choice, would you really want to be female? Be honest? I would not. Therefore why do these cretins want to be women? Attention. FFS.
I think that they will learn The Hard Way.

@SmokedDuck

Oops - posted too soon. When we consider that fetish, by definition, tends to mean that a person often will not be able to have a very satisfying "normal" sex life, I think it becomes questionable that it isn't harmful, at least to the person involved.

Totally agree. Bang on. The question is, does the activity fall within SSC and RACK? Can both parties fall within giving to each other Positive Informed Consent? That is key.

I had to google what the term meant.

Here is the definition

Autogynephilia is defined as a male's propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22005209/#:~:text=Autogynephilia%20is%20defined%20as%20a,%2Dfemale%20(MtF)%20transsexualism.

It is labelled as a paraphilia. Other paraphilas (NOT fets) are incest, bestiality. Paedophilia.

Used to run Kink events in London. It was always the cross-dressers who gave me the headache. Always. Not just me but other female kink organisers had to deal with these cretins. They were attempting to get into female only safe spaces running the argument that if we didn't let them in then we are being transphobic. No were were not. We had zero tolerance for abusers. Even then, we bent over backwards for these losers.

And yes, we can talk about how being 'female' impacts on our lives. The girl I was in 1995 thought that I could do anything. In 2022, all I see is our rights as female are being quietly dissembled. To the point where an semi-epsilon won a beauty contest in America looking like the back end of a route master.

Anyway. Us, females need to fight for our right not to be cancelled. We are half of homo sapiens. Half.

@LobsterNapkin
“A poetic image of human persons being filled with monsters and demons and gods is very apt, I think. But we have somehow completely reduced that to something like a bit of Twilight fan fiction.“

That seems to me to be a very wise summing up. Thanks.

You know, I wanted to be a boy for a number of years as a kid. Not that even, I thought I was a boy. I felt like I had boy hands, I wanted to have jeans and a leather jacket like the Fonz, I figured I'd have beautiful women following me around once I was a grown man. (For the record, as an adult I have no interest in dating women.)

I can remember thinking and feeling these things very clearly, but there was not any real basis for those feelings. They were based on an immature understanding - totally subconscious - of masculinity and femininity and maleness and femaleness.

All of this completely flipped one day when I was about ten when I realized, in a fit of jealousy, that the heroic figure I idolized, (no longer the Fonz,) I actually wanted to marry. (Go to Hell Princess Leia.)

I'm sure the Freudian's might have something to say about all that, but what it says to me, being pragmatic, is that our developing psyche and self image and sexuality are a sea of odd ideas and influences and hormones and god knows what else. A poetic image of human persons being filled with monsters and demons and gods is very apt, I think. But we have somehow completely reduced that to something like a bit of Twilight fan fiction.

“But none of this really supports the "born in the wrong body" idea. Feeling attracted to femininity, or turned on by it, or turned on by being masculine or feminine, does not mean that a person is actually the other sex or even gender.“

No it does not suggest they are the wrong sex, as such, but I was struck by how forceful the thoughts of wanting to be opposite gender seemed to be in that persons report of themselves as a child.

In comparing that state of the child’s mind to the views I and others have had to hearing of children who were ‘transitioning’, I was thinking if a thread where a 4 year (old natal girl ), a trans boy far as his parents were concerned, was in the news. He had a twin brother.

Every one responding on MN thought the little twin girl would have simply wanted to have the same more comfortable clothes as her brother and play with his toys and that his parents really just wanted another boy. This seems possible.

But what if that little girl feels far more of a real yearning than everyone presumed?

I personally have an acquaintance who announced his 4 year old son had transitioned. This person normally seemed very rational. Maybe his son/daughter, who does not have siblings to compare themselves to, really does think of themselves as a girl.

I'm not sure there is a "GC" view of this as such. I suspect you would find people have a number of quite different views on the origins of adult sexuality and how they develop over time in children.

I don't think there is any question that children can experience a low-level, almost latent sexuality, while in some other children it remains completely underground. It's also clear that children can feel in some sense attracted to or identify with masculine and feminine images.

And there seems in many adults and sometimes younger people to be a relation between sexuality or emergent sexuality and identification with masculinity or femininity. Which is something we don't really understand scientifically though I believe traditional psychology has more to say. And is probably more useful.

But none of this really supports the "born in the wrong body" idea. Feeling attracted to femininity, or turned on by it, or turned on by being masculine or feminine, does not mean that a person is actually the other sex or even gender.

Thank you Vexed.

Having briefly looked looked at the first chapter about the two sorts of MtF trans sexual, the first is described as feeling from a very young age that they were feminine etc. A case study describes how an individual felt as a child.

I found the account of the person remembering [his] feelings as a child believable in that the account was so detailed. Surely they were not imagining it. He wanted to dress as a girl and was sexually aroused even when very very young when he was. But, if this is true, it does not correspond with the GC view I read on here, that young children do not really feel they are born in the wrong body but they are simply being mixed up by stereotypes.

I feel rather confused.

I was disappointed because the book was too expensive for me - but then I noticed this link at the bottom of the Twitter thread.

critorix.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf

Lisa Marchiano has done some excellent work.

I have often wondered about imprinting of some kind taking hold of the mind, seeing as it can with animals.

Also, the part of the mind that causes Tourette’s syndrome must work in a strange way. No word is a swear word except in a culture or context. How does the brain pick up on the taboo so soon then want to express it?

I've wondered if fetishes don't represent some sort of imprinting capacity in men, particularly. Human beings are fairly flexible in our capacity to accept different culturally derived types of sexual markers and customs, but people really are affected by them, and so there must be some way that a boy in one culture learns to respond to one set of cues and a boy in another culture learns something quite different.

In the past, people also had much less privacy around sex, so most young people would have been exposed to the sounds and even sights of whatever types of sexual activity were normative in the culture.

We seem over the last decades to have moved away from the idea that early sexual experiences and exposures can shape children's sexual development in significant ways, but it seems to me that's a mainly ideological change rather than an evidence based one. And while there is almost complete privacy expected for children from mundane adult sex, there is on the other hand exposure through the media to all kinds of images and fantasy type scenarios. Even before the internet but much more so now. And kids and teens have oodles of leisure time.

If there is some kind of imprinting capacity, the late age of sexual activity plus the lack of exposure to real mundane adult activities in neutral settings plus porn and film and advertising could make for some very odd outcomes.

It was this. I saw it linked on a thread a few weeks back.
Gender detransition: a case study - Marchiano - 2021 - Journal of Analytical Psychology - Wiley Online Library

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.12711

@ LangClegsInSpace Thank you for your answers.

I read a very interesting article by Lisa Marchiano exploring a case. It showed how important it is to help a young person find all the other elements that are really troubling them apart from gender dysphoria.

She also ends by showing a general sympathy as to why the rage occurs in a convincing way. Her suggestion that the term ‘autogynephilia’ might be better tolerated as ‘men wanting to be what they love’ could be true. But I wonder if perhaps that is obfuscating by being too romantic?

Well yes, Lawrence is AGP so ...

Apropos psychoanalytical ideas, in the 1960s and ‘70s wasn’t it popular to accept that all women had an inner male aspect and vice versa? I never hear this anymore, but this idea seemed to conjure a harmonious. perception of the human state.

This is Jung's anima/animus. Lisa Marchiano writes about gender from a Jungian perspective. She focuses on young people and ROGD though, rather than the AGP cohort.

Error, the paste repeated LangClegsInSpace in the middle of that sentence

@ LangClegsInSpace
Thank you for the links to those articles, which I have read through, though it is all complex and difficult to follow.

Anne Lawrence’s views about the narcissistic rage felt by a lot of trans women explain a lot about why the present debates are so difficult.

She also ends by showing a general sympathy as to why the rage occurs in a convincing way. Her suggestion that the term ‘autogynephilia’ might be better tolerated as ‘men wanting to be what they love’ could be true. But I wonder if perhaps that is obfuscating by being too romantic?

It is interesting to see ( first article) that theories about autogynephilia can now longer really be discussed. The only permitted idea is that of an inborn ‘gender identity’. In the end this may mean trans sexual MtFs will never receive detailed psychological counselling.

The MtF who were always more feminine, and attracted to men, seem very different to those who are masculine, and attracted to women but want to be women themselves, and may also have other fetishes.

What a complicated state of mind to have.
I wo

Apropos psychoanalytical ideas, in the 1960s and ‘70s wasn’t it popular to accept that all women had an inner male aspect and vice versa? I never hear this anymore, but this idea seemed to conjure a harmonious. perception of the human state. The idea that we all have a gender identity LangClegsInSpace that might be at war with the body lacks that implicit harmony. It seems however to have gained a lot of ground with young people.

Thank you, Fox. Very clear.

There are only a couple of things left on Lawrence's website:

www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html

www.annelawrence.com/shame_&_narcissistic_rage.pdf

There used to be a lot more, which can still be found via wayback machine.

It's by Anne A Lawrence, a self-described AGP and retired gender therapist.

www.amazon.co.uk/Trapped-Mens-Bodies-Autogynephilic-Transsexualism-ebook/dp/B00APXDL9E?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

It's very pricey, even on Kindle, but full text of some of Lawrence's shorter works can be found online.

But you’re aware of course that no medical or psychiatric / psychological work in the NHS, academic psychology or private psychiatry has had anything to do with psychoanalysts for a very long time? (Except the Tavistock, which only started promoting gender ideology when it largely abandoned its remaining analytic focus.)

This is an extremely complex issue. When I worked in the NHS (many years ago) consultant psychiatrists I knew who were also analytic psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists often bemoaned the fact that organic psychiatry was prevalent in the NHS and that many psychiatrists were psychoanalytically / psychodynamically naive, which created all kinds of systemic conflicts and problems.

I cannot comment on the extent to which organic psychiatry is prevalent these days and would be genuinely interested to hear more from you in this respect.

Certainly my own research indicates that many NHS mental health trusts and services promote the most outrageous quackery.

The theories of Wilhelm Reich / energy psychotherapy / false memory therapies / yoga cults the list is endless, are promoted to staff via CPD training courses and workshops and to extremely vulnerable clients via extremely concerning “recovery colleges”.

The issue of so called “trauma-informed therapy” is something of extreme concern to me. Quackery and recovered memory therapies abound and I can prove it.

The situation is an utter disgrace.

Don’t ge me started on the kinds of extremely dangerous pseudo-therapies and cults that are provided to traumatised police officers, fire fighters and other blue light / front line staff.

Gender ideology is really not being driven by analysis.

I disagree. Again I would invite you to check out the videos via the link I posted earlier. I cannot force you to watch them but I feel curious about your resistance to engage with them.

I am not claiming that psychoanalysis is the sole driving force behind transgenderism. It seems to me that the combination of psychoanalysis with various influences from new age charlatanry, the New Thought Movement and the influences of Wilhelm Reich have been extremely influential.

It may be that some of the more traditional psychoanalytically inclined are critical of gender ideology and the gender identity movement, however there are novel branches of the psychoanalytic tree that are promoting transgenderism and dangerous cults / quackery via CPD accredited training courses for psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and other NHS mental health professionals.

I am pushed for time but can provide details later.

As this is a bit of a diversion from the main subject of the thread I think it might be better on a new thread. I would welcome your views.

I also need to say that my physical health is being impacted by my passion for research and for posting here and I need to post on dozens of old threads here. I would be better off if there were several of me so I could do it all but there is just me so readers will have to bear with me as I need to take some time to take care of myself.

But you’re aware of course that no medical or psychiatric / psychological work in the NHS, academic psychology or private psychiatry has had anything to do with psychoanalysts for a very long time? (Except the Tavistock, which only started promoting gender ideology when it largely abandoned its remaining analytic focus.)

Gender ideology is really not being driven by analysis.

ScrollingLeaves

You are most welcome :)

Please do not make the mistake of considering me an expert on the subject

I have a naturally analytic mind and also worked in the sex industry for some years, I have known dominatrixes, transsexuals, people on the BDSM scene and so I have a lot of real life experience to draw my thoughts from, even before I studied psychoanalysis

I am quite rusty re theory and was just sharing some thoughts, whilst very tired

:) time for me to get some sleep

The videos are of a variety of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists and relational psychoanalysts promoting transgenderism.

If you are suggesting that we need more talking things through, more curiosity and more care when dealing with people who are tormeted about feelings of gender dysphoria, I couldn't agree more :)

I was simply trying to alert you to some surprising new trends in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Hoodathinkit
I am grateful to you for your time in explaining that. I can now imagine that container of all things that a mother’s body is from a baby’s point of view, and also understand how distress could be projected back to it. Even if it is just a theory.

The idea of the power of the patriarchy being represented by the phallus in a general way also makes sense to me, even if the presumption (as expressed to me,) that penises were something I envied, because girls are by necessity somehow deficient, never was.

You seem extremely knowledgeable and I am not at all. Thanks again.