Autogynephelia, and the Men Behind the Curtain

The thread we dread

I’m just back from a two-week vacation to which I brought one book: The Man Who Would Be Queen, published by J. Michael Bailey in 2003. Written for a general audience, the book describes the two typologies that characterize male transsexuals (as they were called twenty years ago), which differ from each other in almost every way. I started and finished the book on the outbound flight, yet two weeks later I’m still struggling with how to pull on the all-important thread of autogynephelia, or AGP, without delivering a glib-sounding riff on an Austin Powers-style cabal of Dr. Evils. The book is much kinder than that to sexual minorities of all kinds and especially the men who seek sex reassignment; yet the drama following its publication paints a more complicated and disturbing picture of AGP.

Here is a concise summary of the two male transsexual types offered by Dr. Ray Blanchard, the sex researcher Bailey credits with describing, through replicated studies, the presentation of autogynephelia:

There are two fundamentally different types of male-to-female transsexualism. The homosexual type are erotically aroused by other (biological) males, and the autogynephilic type are erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women.

In The Man Who Would Be Queen, the autogynephile is further described as a typically masculine heterosexual, often married with children, up to the time he feels the need to change sex. That decision typically occurs much later — most often after age 40 — than it does for homosexual transsexuals. AGPs have higher levels of education and are over-represented in data science careers, as well as other male-dominated fields: electrical engineering, military and police officers, etc. They are aroused by an erotic ‘target error’ that first appears in adolescence as an urge to masturbate in front of a mirror wearing women’s clothing or underwear. This urge is defined as a paraphilia, or sexual fetish, which is important because paraphilias tend to occur in multiples.

Of all these unique features, what strikes me as the most unique is the feminized self as the AGP’s erotic target. Bailey has studied numerous cases of divorce resulting from autogynephilic sex reassignment, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, but finds that the newly single AGP is often somewhat indifferent to the sex of his next partner. Once he can plausibly persuade himself that he’s now a woman, she becomes the sole object of his desire. A whole new category of memoir has emerged to describe a whole new experience no one could have foreseen: that of ‘trans widows’ who lose husbands to rivals that are somehow embedded in those very same husbands.

This much seems undeniable to me: if not for autogynephelia, there would not be an epidemic of young people identifying as ‘trans.’ I say this not because the rapid-onset population presents with anything resembling AGP, but because the ‘founding fathers,’ prominent activists and powerful donors advancing the trans project all appear to be textbook autogynephiles (with the notable exception of the ACLU’s Chase Strangio). The Man Who Would Be Queen is the textbook.

The first thing to know about this book is that you almost can’t buy it. (I found one used hardcover copy on Amazon for $100 and grudgingly made the investment.) The second thing to know is that the author, a Northwestern University professor of sex psychology, became, right after the book’s publication, the target of a cancelation campaign by ‘trans’ activists so vicious and unhinged that it might leave you affirming the otherwise stupid notion that words can equal violence.

It’s that campaign of terror that I want to examine here, because it looks in retrospect like the dress rehearsal for a strategic template designed to simply torch all science and commentary that a particular power-wielding trans troika finds displeasing. Each of the troika’s three members has publicly demonstrated his autogynephilic-transsexual bona fides; but would you be surprised to learn two are distinguished professors at major universities? More on them later.

As mentioned above, Mike Bailey doesn’t claim to have discovered autogynephelia; he credits Dr. Ray Blanchard and before him Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld with that distinction. As Bailey tells it, Hirschfeld suggested the idea toward the end of his career in human sexuality research, and then Blanchard studied it with thorough scientific rigor but limited his reach to scholarly papers that aren’t very accessible to the lay reader.

Bailey felt he would serve the interests of science and the interests of all transsexuals by publishing a sympathetic portrayal of both types in a book written for a wide audience. He writes, “True acceptance of the transgendered requires that we truly understand who they are,” and the book leaves no doubt about his sympathies, even affection, for these men. Bailey, a heterosexual father of two, had longstanding personal and professional connections with numerous gay men and transsexuals for many years prior to writing the book. These included both ‘Juanita,’ the homosexual transsexual and ‘Cher,’ the autogynephilic transsexual subjects of the book who eagerly participated in crafting the intimate profiles Bailey drew of them in order to illustrate the stark contrast between the two typologies and their targets of attraction.

What Bailey seemed not to realize was that the activist AGPs did not expect their fortunes to rise as a result of being ‘understood.’ The evidence of this is in the lengths they proved willing to go to prevent that understanding. A play-by-play analysis of their tactics was meticulously autopsied by the research scientist Alice Dreger, in the best-titled book ever published: Galileo’s Middle Finger. Dreger walks the reader through the calculated dragging of Mike Bailey by what I referred to as the troika: Lynn Conway (Professor ‘Emerita’ of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan), Deirdre McCloskey (professor of History and Economics at the University of Illinois, Chicago) and Andrea James, a professional trans activist and creator of a perceived-enemy slandering website called ‘Transgender Map.’ These three men personally threatened Bailey’s friends and subjects with doxing, physical violence and in-group shunning to extort what they knew to be lies leading to specific charges against Bailey, all of them fictional. The barrage of attacks was relentless. The bad faith in which they were devised was paraded flamboyantly as if to gloat over the untouchability of an identity group (aging men dressed as women) willing to trade on its members’ discomfiting appearance to gain unearned points for powerlessness and pitiable social status.

Oh, but there’s more. Quoting from Galileo’s Middle Finger:

“Andrea James… downloaded pictures of Bailey’s two children, Kate and Drew, from Bailey’s website, and put them up on her own site. When the photos were taken, Kate was in elementary school, Drew in junior high. James had blacked out the children’s eyes, making them look like pathology specimens, and asked in the caption below whether Kate was ‘a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who gets off on the idea of it.’ The text went on to say, ‘there are two types of children in the Bailey household, namely: those who have been sodomized by their father and those who have not.’

Alice Dreger, a staunch ‘trans’ ally, had written to Andrea James to suggest he tone down the rhetoric lest he risk undermining the ‘trans’ rights movement. Dreger, of course, used James’s preferred pronouns in her message.

“James wrote back a series of nasty emails, including one referring to my son as my ‘precious womb turd.’ She showed up at my office, leaving her card in my mailbox. Then she emailed me with the subject line ‘Mommy knows best,’ saying, ‘Sorry I missed you the other day. Your colleagues seemed quite affable and not as fearful as you. Bad move, Mommy.’ She closed, ‘we’ll chat in person soon.’

Dreger contacted campus police, then considered her options. She writes, “Now I really needed to know: what was going on here?” Galileo’s Middle Finger contains the answer. It’s a book-length scholarly research paper unearthing the surprisingly wide scale corruption of science — not just in Genderland but all over —by activists with extravagantly perverse incentives.

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On a recent episode of the podcast ‘Making Sense’, the author and columnist David Brooks remarked to host Sam Harris: “I always ascribe to stupidity things that could be ascribed to malevolence.” It’s noble, and healthy, to approach life this way, ceding the benefit of any doubt to others’ innocent miscalculations. But in the case described above, and in countless other cases of activist abuse and slander toward (for instance) parents protecting their children’s health, women athletes wanting Title IX enforcement, and advocates for the safety of female prison inmates: there isn’t any ‘doubt’ to concede concerning the motives of the activists. They know everything we know. Their official slogan is #NoDebate for precisely this reason — even they realize florid lunacy is a bad look on a debate stage — so they double down on the tools that remain available to them: internet-based ad hominem attacks, threats and mob pile-ons fueled by narcissistic rage.

In another post, I listed seven examples of victims who stumbled into the crosshairs of ‘trans’ activists for violating the #NoDebate commandment. The consequences range from losing custody of a child to losing a child to suicide, among other outrages that go unpunished and mostly unnoticed. I could have added dozens, maybe hundreds, more examples by mining sources like Reduxx and the LGB Courage Coalition. It’s inconceivable that this routinized malevolence could prevail in the absence of whatever toxin spews from the admixture of AGP, synthetic estrogen, surgical castration and extreme narcissism.

As society gradually opens its eyes to the ongoing medical scandal that is ‘gender affirming care,’ and to the numerous assaults on the rights of women and girls that form a parallel legal scandal, the activists are bound to feel the walls closing in. What kind of reaction should we brace for? How complete is their detachment from reality, and how secure their inocculation from consequence?

Despite my good intentions, I’m afraid we’ve got ourselves a post that avoids the campy Dr. Evil vibes only to settle in a much darker place. I can still turn it around, though, by giving Mike Bailey the last word. He said this on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast after his newest research paper was retracted in response to the petulant foot stomping of guess-what-group:

“I know many a fine autogynephilic person. In fact, I know more of them than I know of the bad autogynephilic persons, and the latter tried to ruin my life.”