How Early Psychologists Got Female Gender Dysphoria Wrong

In the early days of gender medicine, clinicians saw two types of female to male transitioners: butch lesbians and straight women who felt they were gay men. The lesbians outnumbered the straight women by a significant margin. Prior to females seeking transition, the males also presented with two distinct subtypes of gender distress. Dr. Ray Blanchard is a sexologist who had done groundbreaking (and to this day accurate) research on males seeking transition. Blanchard coined the term autogynephilia (AGP) to describe a male’s sexual desire to be female. AGPs were contrasted with the homosexual subtype of males seeking transition (HSTS). Blanchard, presented with the data on the females, assumed they were presenting with similarly dichotomous, though not necessarily analogous, gender issues. He thought that huge majority, the butch lesbians, were the female equivalent of HSTS and the straight women were something distinctly different.  Here’s why he was wrong about the females.

Female sexuality is not at all a mirror of male sexuality. Male sexuality is target driven and category specific. And once it’s set, usually by late puberty, it doesn’t shift course. Female sexuality is not target driven. It is relationally driven. Dynamic driven. Identity driven. Blanchard and the rest of the researchers incorrectly assumed the butch lesbians were exclusively same sex attracted. That their target attraction was fellow women and that it was as rigid as a gay man’s attraction to other men. The evidence begs to differ and that evidence has brought me to a different conclusion.

Butch lesbianism is a cultural identity, not an innate sexuality. For the record, some females are innately homosexual, but they aren’t necessarily ‘butch’. Butch was a cultural identity that involved performing masculinity and dating feminine women. Within the lesbian community, butches were sometimes even referred to with male pronouns and names. It is important to note, that until the rise of transgenderism, the only place where female expressions of masculinity were embraced was the lesbian community. That is, butch lesbianism was the only cultural explanation that existed for female expressions of masculinity.

Clinicians simply assumed the women’s homosexuality explained their masculinity, but they got it backwards. Many were homosexual because the lesbian community embraced and accommodated their expression of masculinity. And, perhaps more importantly, those relationships with feminine women enhanced that masculinity. Dating women allowed them to be ‘the man’ by contrast. I partly came to this conclusion because of what they did next. Since the 80s and 90s, when butch lesbians first started becoming “trans men”, a strange phenomenon presented itself. Many of those former butches stopped being lesbians. They didn’t become ‘straight men’ though, as the clinicians thought they would. A significant number of them became gay or bisexual. They started sleeping with and dating men.

Let’s turn now to the historically much rarer type of early FtM transitioners. The straight women who wanted to be gay men. Blanchard called them autohomoerotics (AHE). Unlike the straight men who were sexually fixated on having a female body, the AHEs were more focused on being gay men dating other, and this is very important, gay men. It was about the relationship dynamic and what being in relationships with gay men said about them. It said they were men. The AHEs also showed preferences for effeminate men. Because again, the contrast with the feminine accentuates the masculine in the self. Many did try to date women, but could not overcome their lack of sexual attraction.

The early clinicians were actually observing the same phenomenon. A female’s desire to be a man and using romantic relationships to manifest that.

I suspect the women who manifested their masculine identity through butch lesbianism (prior to turning to men after transition) were more sexually fluid/bisexual than the women who dated men prior to transition. The butches were able to subdue their attractions toward actual men in favor of manifesting the man in themselves. That is of course until testosterone dramatically increased their libidos. The women who dated men were not able to suppress their attraction to men, despite those relationships potentially increasing their dysphoria. The fact that the butches far outnumbered the AHEs also matches what I have observed in female sexuality in general: fixed target attractions are uncommon.

I’ve been studying female sexuality, lesbian culture, transmen, and gender dysphoria for years, primarily through firsthand accounts but also through reading the scant sexological literature, and this is the conclusion I have reached. Some girls wish to be boys or feel like they were supposed to be boys. This desire then creates a self-conception of boy. Since our female bodies contradict that internal understanding of the self (as male), we experience gender dysphoria: a sense of alienation and revulsion toward our female bodies.

Some were able to alleviate that dysphoria via a butch lesbian identity, but it also served to worsen dysphoria by concretizing the male identity. Those who could not manufacture attraction to women were sometimes able to overcome that self-conception of male in favor of developing relationships with men and even becoming mothers. Others convinced themselves their internal sense of being male combined with their attraction to men meant they were gay men. And for some, their dysphoria made them incapable of physical intimacy at all and resigned to solitude. When presented with the option to transition and live as men, how could they say no?

This newer cohort, termed Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), with no history of childhood dysphoria or nonconformity are a separate issue. While there are of course girls today who are developing gender dysphoria prior to exposure to social media, they are likely still as uncommon as they were in generations past. That astronomical increase in numbers of females seeking transition are doing so to manifest their “trans” identity, not a “male” identity. I suspect if there is a two-type dichotomy, it is this.