My experience of "late-onset gender dysphoria"
I’ve been concerned about the “trans” issue for a long time, as my life experience tells me that the “gender identity” model of understanding “trans”, that it is possible to have the “gender identity” of the opposite sex, is untrue and is leading to children, primarily girls, to misdiagnose themselves as “transgender”.
The trans issue for me started around two decades ago. I was a nerdy, typically masculine, teenage boy. At the onset of puberty, at around 13-14, I found I had an unusual sexuality. I was not only attracted to women, but also attracted to the thought of being a woman. This included in sexual fantasy, with men. In real life, however, I had no attraction to men; only women. As a teenager, I was one of the first generations to grow up with wide acceptance of “LGB”, so I didn’t mind who I was, but I didn’t appear to fit in anywhere.
I had sensory processing issues. Sometimes I wanted to wear what women wore, as their clothes seemed softer, more flowing. Somewhere there was a path in my mind that also found embodying what I found attractive desirable. The feeling, although not the reality, was that I was somehow a “male” lesbian, a supposed woman attracted to women, inside a man’s body. I found myself questioning who I was supposed to be. At the time, this would have been called “gender identity disorder”.
I didn’t talk to anyone about what I felt. Instead, I searched on the internet, using terms such as “faceless man”. I found some webpages with a synopses of the research by a Canadian sexologist named Dr. Ray Blanchard. It was uncanny, as it was as if Blanchard were a homunculus with a video-camera sitting inside my head, as he accurately described the phenomenon of what I felt and gave it the name “autogynephilia” and “pseudobisexuality”.
I was able to put a name against what I felt, and I remember it being a relief that somebody else knew what was going on. It crystallised my identity as a male with an unusual sexuality; not someone somehow born in the wrong body.
I didn’t think a lot about what I had found out in subsequent years. It has come as a great surprise that autogynephilia, and “trans” has become one of the big social issues of our time. I watched, bewildered, as “Caitlyn” Jenner featured on the front of Vanity Fair magazine. I didn’t, at first, put two-and-two together: I didn’t realise autogynephilia could also lead to the wish to embody the opposite sex to such a degree.
I read Prof. J. Michael Bailey’s book The Man who would be Queen.1 Although it didn’t narrate my experience, it was obvious that Jenner and I shared essentially the same phenomenon: autogynephilia. The book The Man who would be Queen introduced me to other type of transsexual: homosexual transsexuals, where a remarkably feminine boy would grow up attracted to men, and want to become a woman.
My life experience has made it obvious, for a long time, that medicalising the sudden surge in girls identifying as “trans” is dangerous.
I haven’t seen any indication that that these girls experience a paraphilia nor do I see that they are remarkably masculine and homosexual. They do not share any of the pathways that would have previously led to “gender identity disorder”.
My view, therefore, was that this cohort would not have experienced “gender dysphoria” in previous generations, but rather would have suffered from alternative social contagions, such as cutting or anorexia. What is different now, is that society is handing them the tools to enable their own self harm, through puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.
That is not to say either, that I think that the children, who would have experienced issues with cross-sex identity in previous generations, as I did, can consent to these medical interventions.
It is difficult to talk about this issue clearly, as the vocabulary of this issue is dominated by the language of activists. George Orwell knew that if you could control the language that people used, then you could control what people could think. It is why I now choose to describe what I felt as “cross-sex identity disorder” rather than “gender identity disorder” or “gender dysphoria”.
I read material produced by those who disagree with child medical transition, which talks about the need of being “gender expansive” or the need to examine “gender” through a “wider lens”, and it feels like they have already lost half the battle, as they are arguably accepting the framework of thought and language created by activists that led to childhood transition in the first place. The words and phrases “gender identity” “gender” “gender dysphoria” suggest there is something different to your sex, that can float around and land in the wrong body.
In my view, these terms are really just a cynical means to an end, which is medical transition with no safeguarding. The change from what was previously known as “gender identity disorder” to being a matter of “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria” was arguably so that doctors could no longer question what was now reframed as a matter of personal “gender identity”; they were only required to treat the “dysphoria”, which was retained in order to retain medical insurance coverage.
I don’t think activists could have known how successful they could have been with the creation of the idea that everyone has a “gender identity”. It has captured the imagination of the whole medical establishment, who have now been left with the “affirmation only” model of treatment.
I think that counselors and philosophers that talk at length about the possible meanings of “gender”, “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria”, are well-meaning, however I think they are inadvertently doing the work of activists for themselves: their discourse lending legitimacy to these ethereal concepts as if they were something concrete, that everyone has an intuitive understanding of, when arguably they are in fact just tools to serve the means to an end — medical transition, with no safeguarding.
Many autogynephilic males themselves, who were also going to be the most likely to have issues with identity, are amongst the victims of the idea that everyone has a “gender identity”.
When the Western world is telling that those who have a propensity to believe that they are Napoleon — “trans women are women” – that they literally are Napoleon, one should not be surprised when they (we) come to literally believe this. I can see how now some autogynephilic males in the Millennial generation are wasting their lives on social media, believing that they are part of a struggle for social justice, when they are in fact profoundly mentally ill.
Rather than accept the framing of activists, I describe my own experiences using the language of “cross-sex identity disorder”, as this does not suggest that you can be something separate from your sex, as do “gender identity” and “gender dysphoria”.
“Cross-sex identity disorder” encapsulates the idea that finding not being the opposite sex distressing, is a disorder. “Cross-sex identity disorder” marks any attempt to teach children indiscriminately about this topic, as we do now under the guise of “gender identity”, as being obviously inappropriate, and indeed in itself a form of abuse: it is to confuse children, where no confusion would have occurred otherwise, as we can see now in the dramatic rise in girls who now believe they have the “gender identity” of the opposite sex.
Available for free legally from Prof. Bailey’s faculty’s website: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/JMichael-Bailey/TMWWBQ.pdf