Recent article by Sue Donym 'The Elephant In The Room'
(extract)
"Allow me a tortured metaphor. Say that the entire LGBT community has gathered in a hall somewhere. They’ve all gathered for a nice vegan dinner, and the tables are laid out. Unfortunately for this gathering of the entire LGBT community, a large elephant has joined them. The elephant knocks over tables, eats all the lesbians dinner, and poops in the kitchen. Everyone at the gathering steadfastly ignores the elephant, despite the fact it is destroying the gathering. Eventually, one of the lesbians stands up, and complains about the elephant. The rest shout her down, kick her out of the gathering, and label her ‘elephant exclusionary’.
Gradually, the gathering and the hall is destroyed. The lesbians, kicked out in ever greater numbers for being ‘elephant exclusionary’, start making tofu in a bonfire outside. The gay men are still denying the elephant is even there as it repeatedly throws chairs at them. The elephant is smacking the bisexuals with a frying pan, and the transsexuals have been trampled. Everyone in the gathering is still trying to ignore the elephant.
Truly a tortured metaphor, but let’s give the elephant a name.
That name is ‘autogynephilia’.
I can hear you now, ‘auto-whata-philia?’. The word is difficult to get your mouth around. It is also a verboten word. People whisper it in dark alleys level verboten. Like ‘Voldemort’ in Harry Potter. The Elephant That Must Not Be Named. If you say it out loud, someone will arrive at your door and brand the four scarlet letters on your forehead ‘TERF’. I guarantee it. Even I avoided saying the word in my original article, Inauthentic Selves, which had a section on autogynephilia end up on the cutting room floor, because I wanted the broader LGBT community to be able to read about the way that LGBT activism has been austroturfed.
But I bet you’re thinking ‘I’ve never heard of these autoawhataphias’.
Are you a member of the LGBT community? If you are, surely you know a male to female transitioner. They are in their late thirties to their early fifties, they call themselves a ‘lesbian’, and they wear clothing that’s inappropriate for their age. They’re ex-cop, military, or most often, work in something involving computers.
I can see your head nodding behind the screen. Congratulations, you’ve seen autogynephilia.
But what is autogynephilia? What is the elephant? How is it relevant to the LGBT community? And why is no one pointing it out?" (continues)
concludes:
Autogynephilia is a weird concept. It can be inaccessible. But it needs to be discussed in the LGBT community, and openly. Not talking about it is causing way too much damage — we have had our organizations taken over, our spaces colonized, and our sexuality redefined. Thanks to these men, you can no longer say ‘I am, gay, meaning exclusively same-sex attracted’ without being labelled a TERF. That’s not a good thing.
Dancing around the subject isn’t helpful. While the ultimate result of autogynephilia is homophobic rhetoric, is important to remember that a sexual fantasy, not homophobia, motivates such rhetoric. That is the root cause of the problem.
Worse is the effect on autogynephiles themselves. ‘Transgender’ is not an umbrella. It is a term that erases the very different motivations and causes of various forms of gender dysphoria. It does people who claim the label absolutely no favors. The original inclusion of the ‘T’ was designed for homosexual transsexuals, and include them with other same-sex attracted individuals. It was not designed to include autogynephiles, who are heterosexual males, or ‘queer’ individuals who are heterosexual but believe dying their hair some variation of neon should mean they are included. Making ‘transgender’ an umbrella not only erases the very different causes and struggles associated with homosexual transsexuality, it also obscures the causes of, and struggles associated with autogynephilia. Autogynephilia is not a condition I would wish on anyone. It is a unique, somewhat bizarre struggle, and reading through many of the accounts of it was quite sad. It can make its sufferers lonely and unable to connect with intimate partners. But enabling it, and on a grand scale, has caused immense damage to homosexuals, particularly lesbians, who have lost almost all their spaces and communities to colonization.
Please discuss the elephant."
medium.com/@sue.donym1984/the-elephant-in-the-room-dc822144a81b