Attraction and AGP
I wrote this long email to one of my online trans friends to share my thoughts on some things she was concerned about. I have copied it here as it might be useful for me at some point.
Autogynephilia is often shortened to AGP as it’s a pain to type and difficult to spell! If you want to do the background reading on what this is, the Wikipedia page is pretty good as a starting point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology
-—
I relate to some of those feelings and you’re not alone in them. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from social media it’s that what I thought were my unique problems are actually shared by many trans people and far from being the only one, I’m more like a “textbook case”.
The confusion of being attracted to women and also wanting to be them is apparently really normal (for us!). I guess we never really share those sorts of things with other people so our only basis for comparison is our own experience against an assumption of what other people feel. I only know how I think about a woman I’m attracted to, I have no way of knowing how any other man would think about her. Because I have no way of knowing, I probably assumed in earlier life that all men wanted to touch their girlfriend’s boobs to get a sense of how it would feel to have boobs. But I think that is probably not the case! A friend I haven’t seen in a long time put it well. We used to work together and I accidentally came out to her at a dinner when we were both very drunk. She said “you want to take me up to your room and tear my clothes off with desire but then you don’t know whether you want to f**k me or put my dress on”. That conversation really unlocked my ability to talk about being trans. She changed my life.
So I 100% get the way you’re attracted to women because that is me too, and I think lots of other trans women share that experience. For us, that is “normal”!
And so I think, is some element of so-called AGP. This is harder to talk about on social media because it seems to be taboo in our community so to talk about it will either see you condemned as “not real trans” or focus on why Blanchard is discredited and AGP is nonsense. I don’t think either is helpful when trying to understand your own feelings. It implies that there is a “right” kind of trans, which is valid, and a “wrong” kind of trans which isn’t really trans, it’s just a perverted man. That is just transphobia I guess, but because we all fear how the outside world will perceive us and in particular that they see us as perverted men, we are all desperate to prove we are the “right” type of trans and therefore need to hide and repress any AGP feelings and certainly never admit to them. I only have my own thoughts to base this on, but I would be amazed if most trans women don’t have some AGP feelings.
I certainly do, and it has changed over time.
Sorry if this gets a bit NSFW but for the purposes of illustrating a point, it’s hard not to.
When I was in 11 or 12 and girls at school were starting to develop boobs and wear bras, I put on my mum’s bra to try how it felt because I wanted to experience being a girl. Some combination of the novel sensation of a bra, the forbidden and shameful nature of putting on someone else’s underwear, associating lingerie with sexiness, and teenagers being horny all the time, whatever, wearing a bra was arousing.
Similarly, I put on my mum’s skirts and dresses because I wanted to feel how girls feel when they walk with a skirt on. And for the aforementioned reasons, that was arousing.
When I first got together with a girl, and felt her nipple through the fabric of her bra, that was obviously wonderful but when alone, I put on a bra and tried to replicate the experience from her point of view to feel my nipple being touched through a bra. That obviously was arousing too.
I won’t go on, but the point is, that was all probably AGP. Or was it? Where it gets confusing is the direction of causality. The AGP version of the world would tell me I’m not really trans, I just started doing cross dressing because I’m AGP and actually I’m a filthy pervert man who should be ashamed of himself. Or, did I start doing cross dressing because I am trans and was trying to experience being a girl, and AGP followed from that as a symptom not the cause? I’m not a psychologist but the latter is how I view myself.
As I said, it changed over time. I went through a phase of buying lingerie and tight clothing for the arousal, but that is very different to how I feel now. Wearing women’s underwear everyday is not erotic in the slightest. Nor are my bras. Nor are my dresses or skirts. They are just clothes and I feel pretty wearing them but not in any way aroused by them. In fact, even when I was experimenting with lingerie and clothes for a thrill in my twenties, I was always disappointed that the clothes didn’t turn me on at all, it was only the tight lingerie and that was as much about the sensation of it as being a female thing. A basque and stockings feel sexy to wear. That’s probably as true for cis women as much as for me. Also true for cis women and me, an everyday bra is just something you wear. So whilst some of what I have done is maybe AGP, it’s maybe also true of cis women.
As for fantasies, I again only have the contents of my own head to base this on, but I don’t think I have ever fantasised about sex from the male point of view. I’m there in the fantasy obviously, but it is what she feels as it happens that I am focused on. Is that AGP or is it that I am a woman and don’t relate to the male role? I don’t see how wishing to experience being penetrated rather than the penetrating makes me definitely a man and not a woman because of AGP. Surely that’s counterintuitive? If I’m a man, then logically I would be wanting to be doing the man role.
The other aspect of the AGP argument is female embodiment fantasies, which is similar to the way I fantasise about sex, but about how I feel about developing a female body. Does the thought of my breasts growing with hormones arouse me? Yes. Do I wish to develop breasts because I’m a woman and I wish for my body to reflect that? Yes. Does one invalidate the other? I don’t know. Does the idea of GRS and having a vagina arouse me? Yes. Do I need to do that because I’m a woman and I need my body to be congruent with that? Yes. Does one invalidate the other? I still don’t know, but the idea of AGP that if you think about your genitals as a sex thing, then you’re not really trans, it’s just a perversion, how does that make any sense? For a start, genitals are very literally sex things, so how can it be invalidating to think of them in a sexual context? I would imagine most trans women have some AGP type feelings about transitioning and if we were all comfortable talking about it we would know that and not be so scared of it.
That you say you are scared of AGP is interesting in itself. Fear of being judged and shamed for it is part of it? But also do you fear that it means you’re the “wrong kind of trans” or not really trans at all? From which you could infer that you feel fear of being AGP because you really want to be trans (and the “right kind of trans”)? So aside from the AGP theory being a load of judgmental rubbish, does your fear of it actually confirm that you are trans and it’s what you truly want?
But as I said, I’m not a psychologist so what would I know?!
Comments
Post a Comment