Thank you for this. I was frustrated that Burgo's essays appeared here when they seemed to me very hand-wavey. He is obviously an empathetic therapist, which is probably a good thing in the consulting room (though I suspect challenging patients on some of their ideas is another component of being a good therapist). The idea that women should share his level of empathy for men who want to come into their changing rooms and get naked: well, our experience suggests men in general and these men in particular might have some motivations for that which don't require compassion but instead a flat "nope".
This is quite apart from the goodness or badness of psychoanalysis: I say this as someone who thinks Freud's _Interpretation of Dreams_ is a truly brilliant book. But it's brilliant in the way novels are brilliant. It thoughtfully picks apart the life of the mind, the strange motivations we hide even from ourselves, the furious inventive busy-ness of the brain even while we are asleep. It does not present a "method" which can be taught, any more than reading and appreciating Tolstoy prepares one to write a novel of similar quality. I suppose I agree with Dr. Bailey that it is not scientific, but it can still usefully inform an attentive reader.
I write this to ask if Prof. Bailey is aware that Sam Kaye detransitioned, and is no longer Maya? This "son of transitioner" was used long ago by you and Blanchard and Cantor as a "case study" for the theorized "father to son" link. Sam, the son, had all the surgeries 25 years ago, now tells the world how much he regrets them on his YouTube channel, Call Me Sam. Bob Withers, a Jungian therapist in the UK, mentioned your citation of Maya (now back to Sam) Kaye in your research literature. The father-son dyads in this social contagion clearly do not represent a genetic or biological link, and the contagion in families now demonstrates just how this cult appeals and grooms towards dangerous medical treatments. The pornography link, unlike the father-son link, is clear in AGP behavior, based on the information from wives described below. The recent small but growing wave of deaths from sepsis and kidney failure attest to the iatrogenic harm of treatments the Blanchard Protocol culminated in, now completely collapsed to months or even weeks from the original 2 years. (Griffin Sivret, natal female, 24--sepsis Liam Johns, natal female, 35--kidney failure Yarden Seveira, natal male, 24, sepsis/suicide Surgeries at lauded institutions, Boston Children's Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan) Liver cancer is cited also recently in a Mayo Clinic study.
As the ex wife of an AGP who says he's "true trans" and also says he's me, the mother of our 2 grown sons, I'd like you, Michael Bailey, together with Cantor, Blanchard and Zucker to put out a statement that you now have some idea of the trauma caused by these men to the women they married and the children they fathered, by behavior actually sanctioned by therapists. You've never commissioned an independent parallel study of us, despite Ray Blanchard's famous quote, "Oh, the women don't like it." These men do not self-report their domestic violence, coercive control and sexual demands in their therapy sessions with your colleagues in the field.
I collect the only data in the world on trans widows, and my results include 64 of us. A steady third were sexually assaulted by lingerie-wearing husband. These men often had serious alcohol abuse issues. Also a steady third of us were physically assaulted, as in strangulation, shoving into a wall, being pushed down the stairs, held in a vise-like hold until involuntary urination occurred. In the case of the 5 rapes, 3 repeated rapes, by AGP husband, none were prosecuted, though 1 brutal rape was reported to the Met Police in London and DNA evidence and witness statements were collected.
We typically cannot use our given names when we tell of our experiences, as husband still threatens defamation, violence in some cases, and cancellation by his friends and allies frequently follows. The new documentary on us: Behind the Looking Glass at Lime Soda Films by cancelled auteur, Vaishnavi Sundar.
You need to watch it, Michael Bailey. The above rates of violence, ritual manipulation and coercive control are evident in the testimonies of the 18 of us in Behind the Looking Glass. In my data are many women who stayed for 2 or 5 or 10 years, and they covered up the violence they experienced while staying, often not speaking of it until years after getting out.
Nice brief piece. It’s interesting to me that not only is it not science as you point out (as are most things relating to trans), also realize the conceptual basis of AGP is insufficiently questioned, like for instance the men involved wish to be “female” as a sexual kick.
They don’t, they want to be hookers.
If you read fantasy literature about this behavior, men don’t fantasize about wearing a teeshirt and jeans, perhaps the most common female garment, with no makeup or perhaps lip gloss. In fashion that’s a very specific uniform (perhaps “normcore”).
They fantasize, dress, and groom in what in fashion is called hookerwear - look at old episodes of “Project Runway” for the lethal designation hookerwear to see the example. A recent hoo-ha involved a man at a Genspect conference who was dressed in a blue dress with mitaines - the mitaines were the giveaway that it was hookerwear. Female hookerwear is a hard look to pull off over 20.
Men also dress in the equivalent male hustler wear, usually short shorts, perhaps short boots, crop top or similar, as though they were a 12 year old Hustler on Polk street circa 1981. It’s just that they are also over 20 years old and it’s a hard look to pull off, especially at 50.
At a typical trans gathering in SF you really have a group which wouldn’t be out of place on any street hooker locale in the US.
Blanchard calling this fetish about women conveys a real lack of knowledge or imagination of how the world works.
It also conveys what Blanchard thought of women.
The fetish is prostitution, and the better term would be autopornosphilia - (APP) not in the concept “pornography” but from the term “pornos” (πόρνος) which refers to male prostitutes. It would handily encompass both male-style and female-style hooker looks adopted by adult men who aren’t prostitutes.
I find the “gynos” somewhat irrelevant, the primary fantasy component - and I speak empirically, from the literature - is the implied degradation of prostitution, and subsumption to the needs of a man. Forced to dress like a prostitute. Forced to service others sexually, and forced to perform degrading acts for both men and women. 90% of the “AGP” literature.
Except for makeup there is very little difference between APP’s who target men as a man or as a woman, the difference is APP’s who target straight men vs gay men.
This tiny objective simplification wipes such men entirely off the trans radar and puts them back into the fetish radar.
The last task is to classify the delusion correctly.
This accurately explains the strange non-sequitar you bring up:
“David was raised by alcoholic parents who had no affection for each other or for him. He felt ugly, “deformed and defective,” “too repulsive and strange for anyone to care about.” During puberty, David discovered that he was especially aroused by pornography featuring psychological humiliation, such as “forced feminization videos where a contemptuous, dominant woman would humiliate a man. This led to cross dressing […]”
I had to laugh as I read this - the non-sequitar is so strange, “”such as” “dominant woman humiliating a man” of course leads to … cross dressing. As opposed to the obvious … masochistic humiliation by women.
Consider that he wants to be a humiliated man by playing the role of a prostitute. It’s not being a woman it’s being humiliated. That’s how I would connect the dots, but then for me anything a mentally ill person says, who is delusional, doesn’t follow reason. It follows statistics but not reason.
I stood in line to get a beer a few years back next to two women and a man with a collar at a street fair in SF. The women were dressed expensively, hot kinky, he was nude and collared, and tumescent. Every time he “detumesced” one of the women gave him a whack with a riding crop where it would hurt. He “re-tumesced.” I know an awful lot of men like to be punished and humiliated, and some of the most aggressive masochists are men as hookers. And they love pulling others into the game to be berated, it’s part of the “oh poor me” fantasy kick.
I would agree that we really know very little about this phenomenon.
What even is autogynephilia? Is it the phenomenon of having sexual excitement when a man with it dresses up like a woman (or girl in some cases), is referred to as such, and/or, in the extreme, chemically and/or surgically alters his body to appear female? Does there have to be a sexual element or can it just be a preference for such things? Can it exist if the man doesn't want to chemically and/or surgically alter his body, but just wants to dress up or maybe doesn't even want to dress up but just wants to think of himself or be referred to as others as female?
I'm not sure how to scientifically confirm what it is or why it happens, but I look forward to reading what you have to say about it. I also wonder if the female equivalent exists, and, if not, is that because of the less extreme sexual feelings females have?
Most importantly, is there a way to alleviate any feelings of discomfort that come from autogynephilia without the need to medically alter the body, or even without the need for anyone to pretend the man is a woman? For instance, could the man just have sexual fantasies about being a woman and leave it at that, as long as he isn't made to feel like a freak for having them?
There is no evidence that women engage in solitary cross dressing during which they are aroused by the feel of the clothes. AGP's almost always talk about getting off on "the feel of hose on a clean shaven leg" and the like. Women who cross dress tend to be lesbians who want to look butch. Like the AGP males, many of them have images in mind of how they would prefer to look in menswear, and they might admire themselves in mirrors like the guys do. The difference is that the women don't report getting turned on by this process, they just want to look like men.
The fact that sexual fetishes in general and sexualized cross dressing are mostly or entirely observed in men leads me to conclude that these are biologically sex-linked patterns of behavior. They may or may not require certain conditions to become active, such as poor parenting or whatever, but girls experience the same kinds of treatment and do not develop similar behaviors.
Thanks Sandra. I agree the elephant in the room might be Pavlovian conditioning with testosterone and having a penis being the relevant antecedents to explain sex differences in fetishistic interests more generally. Sexologists have noted that men are more expansive in their sexual interests (call them deviations if we wish) than women. The latter seem to be reduced mainly to S&M at times, but men's sexual interests and obsessions seem to go on and on! We do not have to be biological reductionists to recognise that testosterone has a lot to answer for. As for having a penis, adolescent boys telling the truth will admit that it is like being chained to a lunatic at times.
"As for having a penis, adolescent boys telling the truth will admit that it is like being chained to a lunatic at times."
LOL!! When dads talk to me about their felt need to protect their adolescent daughters, they always say their fears are based on memories of what they wanted to do with girls when they were that age.
I don't know much about ADHD. Do the girls or women in that 5% couple the cross dressing with masturbation? For male transvestic fetishists, sexual activity is the ultimate purpose of "dressing up." They all masturbate at some point in the process, and if they have willing partners, they persuade them to engage in various kinds of kinky sex while the male fetishist is cross dressed.
I think that they masturbate. Without orgasm there would be no sexual reward. Sexual arousal in itself is a weak reward. Gialu is an example of autoandrophilic female to male transgender I think. She has 1.3 million followers.
Are you saying we had an epidemic of AGP from 34 boys at GIDS in 2009 to 557 in 2016 just coincidentally when there was an epidemic of ROGD among the girls, who went up by a further factor of about 4?
Why would boys not be subject to social influences, albeit on average to a lesser extent (but are we talking about average kids here? these are particularly vulnerable ones, often). Didn't the Werther effect hit boys?
One man documented being agp when being too involved in porn and that it went away once he stopped the porn. And even in the past, colleagues saw other things happening, even then. (Pfafflin, 1992 said he saw that the data supported "transsexual behavior is a form of more or less successful and stable behavior which serves to defend the self against phantasized or real trauma.").
Are you saying AGP might be a contributing factor for some, or are you claiming it is the only and full description of gender distress for anyone who is not gay or ?
Yes, pornography is the impetus. Bailey and Burgo shirk their responsibilities and put women at risk by pretending these men do not sexually attack women and girls.
I read Burgo's recent essay on RLS that you reference in your piece and came away with it feeling like I hadn't learned that much about autogynophilia. Maybe a person steeped in psychoanalysis would, but a couple of case studies from that perspective didn't strike me as being informative, and far from scientific.
Strikes me that looking at a number of psychoanalysis can provide a means of formulating hypothesis driven quantitative studies, which is what you are suggesting. Challenge seems to be to construct survey instrument that captures instructive data across to cohort of AGPs. Even looking at case studies of AGPs that are in or have gone though psychotherapy is a somewhat selective group in that they (apperently) feel they have an issue they want to deal with, and have chosen psychotherapy as a means they feel will be constructive. Seems that is going to miss a lot of men that don't think they have an issue. So besides constructing a robust analytical tool that can uncover causative factors across the entire AGP population, seems it may be somewhat of a barrier to study recruitment. But you know what you're doing, so good luck on getting something off the ground. Looking forward to future essays on the subject.
Shame is felt when one is disgusted. AGP men feel sexual disgust because their masturbation focused sexuality is not arousing enough. Shame is rather a consequence than a cause of AGP, but there can also be a positive feedback look.
I agree that AGP is a target error. Why does it happen? I think that it is a learning error (in Pavlovian conditioning) that happens either due to overactive Behavioral Activation System (mediated by dopamine) in extroverts, addicted personalities, or due to overactive Behavioral Inhibition System (mediated by serotonin) in introverted anxious and depressed personalities. Stimulants, porn can cause AGP.
A physician recounts how his autogynephilic fantasies were born under the effect of cocaine (a stimulant):
"In my imagination I let the doors open to allow in an extraordinarily beautiful woman to whom I first spoke (without having true auditory hallucinations; I had only visual and somatic hallucinations); I then undressed her, and finally had intercourse with her. During this repeated imaginary coitus I could vividly feel my penis entering the vagina and had a sensation of voluptuous pleasure in the loins and penis. This happened 30 times in one night although, of course, without ejaculation. My heart rate, already accelerated, would go up to 140 per minute after each imaginary coitus. At the same time, I would look at pictures and postcards and was able, at will, to enlarge the individuals represented in them, to identify them as friends or simple acquaintances, to have intercourse with them, or to make them have intercourse with each other. My hallucinations at that time never had a perverted content. As my states of cocaine intoxication became more frequent, my hallucinations became more limited to the sexual area, until one fine day the perversions also made their appearance.
The feelings of voluptuousness became weaker and weaker, and the images followed each other more quickly than at the beginning. The sexual perversions finally reached such proportions that from then on I was able to see myself as a woman. I would see myself quite willingly as a prostitute having intercourse with several men at the same time, and I dreamed of nothing but sodomy, masochism and sadism."
Also, the study “A Systematic Review of the Relationship Between Neurodiversity and Psychosexual Functioning in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)” (2023) has found that “compared with neurotypical females, females with ADHD were more prone to report transvestic fetishistic desire (5% vs 0%), transvestic fetishistic activity (5% vs 0%)… No significant differences were found between ADHD and neurotypical males."
AGP may be a side effect of the stimulant drugs used for ADHD.
No actual woman has fantasies of being used by several men at the same time. This is a quite dangerous delusion that criminals foist on the women they pimp and sex traffic. It is not enjoyable for a woman to have intercourse for 8 hours a day with 20 or so men. Where do they get this?
I think we need a better, more clear definition of autogynephilia. I have heard it described as: "love of oneself as a woman" but what does that really mean? I love being a woman but I'm not AGP, I'm just a woman who is comfortable in her skin. I have heard it described as "wanting to be what you are attracted to." But I wanted to be Gwen Stefani when I was younger because I found her completely intoxicating. However, I did not want to have sex with Gwen Stefani, it wasn't sexual, it was completely different. My daughter fantasized about having wings and being able to fly from the time she was very young. But she didn't want to have sex with birds, fantasizing about being something else doesn't have to be sexual. I have heard AGP described as attraction to oneself with woman's body parts. In this case, whether or not the individual is "straight" or "gay" seems to have no bearing. If it's merely attraction to oneself with female body parts then this can't be thought of as the straight man's version of the HSTS. Then you have people saying any guy who enjoys wearing any article of women's clothing (including a billowy poet style blouse) is AGP. And I'd ask, were all the "hair bands" of the 80s closet AGPs? The members of Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, etc. wore more makeup than most of the women at the time. Were they AGP? Or what about Harry Styles? What happened to good old-fashioned "gender-bending"? And what happened to the category of transvestite? Didn't that category serve a purpose? Are all transvestites now AGPs? Why? How is this helpful to understanding the condition? One of the biggest problems in the AGP discourse seems to be no one really knows what AGP is. I think we need to back way up... look at the original definition, see if it still holds, and see if it's being applied correctly to the current cohort.
When you gave a talk for FAIR, it appeared to me that you implied that it was beneficial for those who were AGP to medically transition. In particular, you introduced two young people who had done so. You often allude to people in the past having had better outcomes. My understanding is that outcome studies were flawed in the past and remain flawed now. One doesn't know how those people were doing in general.
The Gijs and Brewaeys 2007 review found:
"In addition to the design problems of the studies, patient numbers are seriously skewed. A large number of patients who received surgery were lost at follow-up (see Table 1): For the FMs the attrition rate varies between 0% and 81%, with an average of 24% (based on Boldund & Kullgren, 1996; Eldh et al., 1997; Hepp et al., 2002; Lobato et al., 2006; Raufleish et al., 1998; Smith et al., 2005a, Tsoi et al., 1995). For the MFs, between 0% and 73% did not participate in the follow-up, with an average attrition rate of 39%..."
They say it is an effective treatment quoting a study with 1 year followup, but then say why you can't trust the studies they quote! (Their reasons are good.)
Even the 2014 Swedish regret study, which checked for regret by looking for a name change, appears to have undercounted. They found a median time to regret of about 8 years, but their study of 681 people included 360 who had first applied to the program between 2001 and 2010, which is a 3 year process with surgery at the end. But these people from 2001-2010 do not seem to have been followed-up 8 years. So dropping that last group as not having median regret time (table 4), the name change rate is 4.4% . And then there is the fact that about 6-8% died (with a suicide rate of 19x the general population). So even their small regret number is suspect.
And there are those who say they can't reverse the changes and it is too exhausting to try again and give up, who certainly aren't your positive outcomes, but I don't think anyone is counting them. The reason the Dutch went to younger people was in part because many adults were having poor outcomes.
You have your anecdotes of good outcomes, I'm sure.
Are you claiming that any boys who are aroused to any extent at any time by thinking of themselves as women means they are AGP and should medically transition? Would be likely to benefit from it?
The Swedish death study (Cecilia Dhejne, Karolinska Inst. 2011) found the death by suicide in post op natal females who identified as "trans men" was actually 40 TIMES HIGHER than the rate of death by suicide of the age matched control group Swedes. This was so shocking that they combined the natal males and natal females in the post op category to come up with 19X higher. There were more males so the math hid the terrible results for females. Not sure if this is the same study. My understanding is the famed "Dutch study" (DeVries, Steensma, et al, 2014) assumed that treatment at a younger age would result in greater happiness, as they theorized that the examples of transitioned adults' dissatisfaction had to do with "not passing."
Thanks for this piece. The gap between the positions of Bailey and Burgo reflects a deeper and longer unresolved tension in modern times about the possibility of a psychological science. If the latter can exist (not a given) then what should it look like? One answer is methodological (stick to correlational studies) and the other is philosophical (stick to operationalised externally visible behaviour). The problem is that answer, of a mixture of empiricism, methodologism and behaviourism, cannot deal comprehensively with the complexity of human conduct and agency. The Wann symposium on behaviorism and phenomenology in the 1960s started a debate still not resolved. Standard naive empiricism is not axiologically reflexive (see the work of Jan Smedslund here). Why do psychologists take an interest in this and not that topic and why do they value things as human beings, just as others do? In this case for example, is it clear that a paraphilia can be conceptually distinguished simply and self-evidently from an habitual sexual orientation? Is a paraphilia an orientation that we simply do not approve of, and so is this a normative not a value-neutral matter to be resolved by smart methodology? Psychologists are human beings and so are embedded in their own field of inquiry. Moreover, as Don Bannister classically noted in his piece 'Psychology as an exercise in paradox', in the psychological laboratory, 'the test tube talks back'. Psychologists can keep their blinkers on about their implicit values, while being methodologically self-satisfied, but once they come off, then the complexity of being human, in fluxing open systems, requires non-empirical skills of exploration. As a psychologist I discovered that the answer lies in philosophy and that the compromise of methodologism is a false dawn for the discipline's legitimacy. Another false dawn was Nitezschean Idealism (the 'postmodern turn') triggering the seduction for psychologists that 'everything is socially constructed' and 'there are no facts there are only interpretations'. As a consequence, the madness of the transgender movement is predicated on these assumptions, leading to unending perspectivism and judgmental relativism. If empiricism had been naive, then this Idealist response threw the baby out with the bathwater and ignored the importance of real forces in both nature and our socio-economic context, independent of our understanding and discussion of them. Epistemology is an emergent property of the ontology of being human, but the latter comes first and has to be privileged. Try writing a postmodernist book without a brain.
Naive realism (the amalgam of empiricism and positivism) still hovers in psychology but since Popper we must concede as Realists that science is both value laden and theory laden. (I explore this point more extensively in my book 'Critical Realism for Psychologists' (Routledge)). The actuarial-correlational approach advocated by Bailey scores a few goals but does not win the game. The inductive-illuminative approach favoured by Burgo is certainly limited in scope but it does not necessarily reject philosophical realism because our interiority is real but complex and so invites epistemic humility (as does all science but in this case more so). Freud was a 'hope-for-reductionist' (Wolman's phrase not mine); he hoped psychology eventually could be reduced to neurological explanations. But he was canny and he realised that in the meantime description and interpretation are still a fair and necessary compromise, turning psychology then into a hermeneutic project. Explanation and prediction then had to be backgrounded as plausible possibilities in psychology. Correlational studies, which do not explore their pre-empirical value base of their knowledge claims, and the interpretive approach, which operates inductively from limited case studies, both have a valuable role, but neither is perfect. Both need to be understood in the context of post-Popperian philosophy of science that can now explore thoroughly the relationship between ontology, epistemology and axiology. In my view critical realism is a good resource to make sense of the tension between the positions of Bailey and Burgo and I really look forward to more from them. The 'last stand' is not about reality (it will stand on its own when we are all dead and gone at the end of the Anthropocene) but credible scientific Realism, while our species survives. Happy to send more references on all the above (d.pilgrim@soton.ac.uk) if anyone is interested.
Bailey and Burgo both pretend these men live and act in a vacuum, rather than the reality of broken families, physically and sexually abused wives, narcissistically abused children. For info on the children, a website started by daughter of a transitioner, childrenoftransitioners.org
Not sure if they pretend what you say as I do not know them. Your point about the wreckage created by TRAs and the pseudoscience of gender medicine is fair comment though
I appreciate Bailey reminding everyone of this important aspect of scientific research:
"Most scientists regard a central, if not defining, characteristic of the scientific method to be what Karl Popper called “the principle of falsifiability”: For a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable —you can’t just show me observations that confirm it, but also those that might show the theory to be wrong, false. If you can twist any result of your research into a confirmation of your hypothesis, you aren’t thinking scientifically. For that reason, many of Sigmund Freud’s notions were unfalsifiable."
I have been deeply frustrated by the general failure to adhere to this principle, among those advocates who claim:
• sexual orientation is an innate immutable trait which implies that
• changing sexual orientation is impossible.
These claims are falsifiable in principle. Even a single counter-example should be enough to cause people to question these claims. I’m personally acquainted with many individuals who once fully embraced an LGBT identity and who no longer do. Data on identity-behavior discordance suggests there are many more counter-examples. But the committed activists consistently dismiss these data in one of two ways. Either:
• “You weren’t really gay in the first place.” (Which raises the question of how much pro-gay activism and same sex sexual activity is sufficient to prove a person is “really gay.”)
• “You will surely revert to your true self, meaning your ‘gay’ identity.” (Which raises the question of how long a person has to be living in a different manner, perhaps even in a marriage to an opposite sex partner to prove his “real identity.”)
In other words, people who talk this way are not being scientific: they are skating away from the implications of the evidence.
As someone with quant training, I appreciate a good RCT and large datasets. That said, I know that some of the most interesting information in large household surveys comes in the qualitative responses and a trip to the field provides insights to the data.
Just as Angus Fox's (Alisdair Gunn) 7-part essays in Quilette provided a great deal of insight into the teenage boys drawn into the ROGD phenomenon, I believe Burgo's essays insightful. At the same time, understanding this paraphilia on a broader scale is important, so surveys are fine and I am glad you are working with Littman. I saw your Genspect presentation in Chicago, and while I understand that you are reporting on the data (a very small sample of which were natal males, so statistically insignificant), and parents do not know anything about their kids' sexuality, I felt that there was a lack of empathy or curiosity in your responses.
Thank you for this. I was frustrated that Burgo's essays appeared here when they seemed to me very hand-wavey. He is obviously an empathetic therapist, which is probably a good thing in the consulting room (though I suspect challenging patients on some of their ideas is another component of being a good therapist). The idea that women should share his level of empathy for men who want to come into their changing rooms and get naked: well, our experience suggests men in general and these men in particular might have some motivations for that which don't require compassion but instead a flat "nope".
This is quite apart from the goodness or badness of psychoanalysis: I say this as someone who thinks Freud's _Interpretation of Dreams_ is a truly brilliant book. But it's brilliant in the way novels are brilliant. It thoughtfully picks apart the life of the mind, the strange motivations we hide even from ourselves, the furious inventive busy-ness of the brain even while we are asleep. It does not present a "method" which can be taught, any more than reading and appreciating Tolstoy prepares one to write a novel of similar quality. I suppose I agree with Dr. Bailey that it is not scientific, but it can still usefully inform an attentive reader.
I write this to ask if Prof. Bailey is aware that Sam Kaye detransitioned, and is no longer Maya? This "son of transitioner" was used long ago by you and Blanchard and Cantor as a "case study" for the theorized "father to son" link. Sam, the son, had all the surgeries 25 years ago, now tells the world how much he regrets them on his YouTube channel, Call Me Sam. Bob Withers, a Jungian therapist in the UK, mentioned your citation of Maya (now back to Sam) Kaye in your research literature. The father-son dyads in this social contagion clearly do not represent a genetic or biological link, and the contagion in families now demonstrates just how this cult appeals and grooms towards dangerous medical treatments. The pornography link, unlike the father-son link, is clear in AGP behavior, based on the information from wives described below. The recent small but growing wave of deaths from sepsis and kidney failure attest to the iatrogenic harm of treatments the Blanchard Protocol culminated in, now completely collapsed to months or even weeks from the original 2 years. (Griffin Sivret, natal female, 24--sepsis Liam Johns, natal female, 35--kidney failure Yarden Seveira, natal male, 24, sepsis/suicide Surgeries at lauded institutions, Boston Children's Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan) Liver cancer is cited also recently in a Mayo Clinic study.
As the ex wife of an AGP who says he's "true trans" and also says he's me, the mother of our 2 grown sons, I'd like you, Michael Bailey, together with Cantor, Blanchard and Zucker to put out a statement that you now have some idea of the trauma caused by these men to the women they married and the children they fathered, by behavior actually sanctioned by therapists. You've never commissioned an independent parallel study of us, despite Ray Blanchard's famous quote, "Oh, the women don't like it." These men do not self-report their domestic violence, coercive control and sexual demands in their therapy sessions with your colleagues in the field.
I collect the only data in the world on trans widows, and my results include 64 of us. A steady third were sexually assaulted by lingerie-wearing husband. These men often had serious alcohol abuse issues. Also a steady third of us were physically assaulted, as in strangulation, shoving into a wall, being pushed down the stairs, held in a vise-like hold until involuntary urination occurred. In the case of the 5 rapes, 3 repeated rapes, by AGP husband, none were prosecuted, though 1 brutal rape was reported to the Met Police in London and DNA evidence and witness statements were collected.
We typically cannot use our given names when we tell of our experiences, as husband still threatens defamation, violence in some cases, and cancellation by his friends and allies frequently follows. The new documentary on us: Behind the Looking Glass at Lime Soda Films by cancelled auteur, Vaishnavi Sundar.
You need to watch it, Michael Bailey. The above rates of violence, ritual manipulation and coercive control are evident in the testimonies of the 18 of us in Behind the Looking Glass. In my data are many women who stayed for 2 or 5 or 10 years, and they covered up the violence they experienced while staying, often not speaking of it until years after getting out.
Here's the recent part 1 of my Gracie profile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=386T-PB098k&t=17s
Hey Dr. Bailey! I loved your essay. Can't wait for the next one.
Nice brief piece. It’s interesting to me that not only is it not science as you point out (as are most things relating to trans), also realize the conceptual basis of AGP is insufficiently questioned, like for instance the men involved wish to be “female” as a sexual kick.
They don’t, they want to be hookers.
If you read fantasy literature about this behavior, men don’t fantasize about wearing a teeshirt and jeans, perhaps the most common female garment, with no makeup or perhaps lip gloss. In fashion that’s a very specific uniform (perhaps “normcore”).
They fantasize, dress, and groom in what in fashion is called hookerwear - look at old episodes of “Project Runway” for the lethal designation hookerwear to see the example. A recent hoo-ha involved a man at a Genspect conference who was dressed in a blue dress with mitaines - the mitaines were the giveaway that it was hookerwear. Female hookerwear is a hard look to pull off over 20.
Men also dress in the equivalent male hustler wear, usually short shorts, perhaps short boots, crop top or similar, as though they were a 12 year old Hustler on Polk street circa 1981. It’s just that they are also over 20 years old and it’s a hard look to pull off, especially at 50.
At a typical trans gathering in SF you really have a group which wouldn’t be out of place on any street hooker locale in the US.
Blanchard calling this fetish about women conveys a real lack of knowledge or imagination of how the world works.
It also conveys what Blanchard thought of women.
The fetish is prostitution, and the better term would be autopornosphilia - (APP) not in the concept “pornography” but from the term “pornos” (πόρνος) which refers to male prostitutes. It would handily encompass both male-style and female-style hooker looks adopted by adult men who aren’t prostitutes.
I find the “gynos” somewhat irrelevant, the primary fantasy component - and I speak empirically, from the literature - is the implied degradation of prostitution, and subsumption to the needs of a man. Forced to dress like a prostitute. Forced to service others sexually, and forced to perform degrading acts for both men and women. 90% of the “AGP” literature.
Except for makeup there is very little difference between APP’s who target men as a man or as a woman, the difference is APP’s who target straight men vs gay men.
This tiny objective simplification wipes such men entirely off the trans radar and puts them back into the fetish radar.
The last task is to classify the delusion correctly.
This accurately explains the strange non-sequitar you bring up:
“David was raised by alcoholic parents who had no affection for each other or for him. He felt ugly, “deformed and defective,” “too repulsive and strange for anyone to care about.” During puberty, David discovered that he was especially aroused by pornography featuring psychological humiliation, such as “forced feminization videos where a contemptuous, dominant woman would humiliate a man. This led to cross dressing […]”
I had to laugh as I read this - the non-sequitar is so strange, “”such as” “dominant woman humiliating a man” of course leads to … cross dressing. As opposed to the obvious … masochistic humiliation by women.
Consider that he wants to be a humiliated man by playing the role of a prostitute. It’s not being a woman it’s being humiliated. That’s how I would connect the dots, but then for me anything a mentally ill person says, who is delusional, doesn’t follow reason. It follows statistics but not reason.
*mind blown*
I stood in line to get a beer a few years back next to two women and a man with a collar at a street fair in SF. The women were dressed expensively, hot kinky, he was nude and collared, and tumescent. Every time he “detumesced” one of the women gave him a whack with a riding crop where it would hurt. He “re-tumesced.” I know an awful lot of men like to be punished and humiliated, and some of the most aggressive masochists are men as hookers. And they love pulling others into the game to be berated, it’s part of the “oh poor me” fantasy kick.
There’s a great article
https://open.substack.com/pub/grahamlinehan/p/from-the-memory-hole-rolling-stones
About a spectacular hooker bdsm flameout by the directors of “The Matrix”. You can see the formula.
As I said, it doesn’t follow reason, but it does follow statistics.
If a 50 year old man wanted to actually resemble a woman he’d look like Mrs. Doubtfire.
I would agree that we really know very little about this phenomenon.
What even is autogynephilia? Is it the phenomenon of having sexual excitement when a man with it dresses up like a woman (or girl in some cases), is referred to as such, and/or, in the extreme, chemically and/or surgically alters his body to appear female? Does there have to be a sexual element or can it just be a preference for such things? Can it exist if the man doesn't want to chemically and/or surgically alter his body, but just wants to dress up or maybe doesn't even want to dress up but just wants to think of himself or be referred to as others as female?
I'm not sure how to scientifically confirm what it is or why it happens, but I look forward to reading what you have to say about it. I also wonder if the female equivalent exists, and, if not, is that because of the less extreme sexual feelings females have?
Most importantly, is there a way to alleviate any feelings of discomfort that come from autogynephilia without the need to medically alter the body, or even without the need for anyone to pretend the man is a woman? For instance, could the man just have sexual fantasies about being a woman and leave it at that, as long as he isn't made to feel like a freak for having them?
So many questions, and so few answers...
There is no evidence that women engage in solitary cross dressing during which they are aroused by the feel of the clothes. AGP's almost always talk about getting off on "the feel of hose on a clean shaven leg" and the like. Women who cross dress tend to be lesbians who want to look butch. Like the AGP males, many of them have images in mind of how they would prefer to look in menswear, and they might admire themselves in mirrors like the guys do. The difference is that the women don't report getting turned on by this process, they just want to look like men.
The fact that sexual fetishes in general and sexualized cross dressing are mostly or entirely observed in men leads me to conclude that these are biologically sex-linked patterns of behavior. They may or may not require certain conditions to become active, such as poor parenting or whatever, but girls experience the same kinds of treatment and do not develop similar behaviors.
Thanks Sandra. I agree the elephant in the room might be Pavlovian conditioning with testosterone and having a penis being the relevant antecedents to explain sex differences in fetishistic interests more generally. Sexologists have noted that men are more expansive in their sexual interests (call them deviations if we wish) than women. The latter seem to be reduced mainly to S&M at times, but men's sexual interests and obsessions seem to go on and on! We do not have to be biological reductionists to recognise that testosterone has a lot to answer for. As for having a penis, adolescent boys telling the truth will admit that it is like being chained to a lunatic at times.
"As for having a penis, adolescent boys telling the truth will admit that it is like being chained to a lunatic at times."
LOL!! When dads talk to me about their felt need to protect their adolescent daughters, they always say their fears are based on memories of what they wanted to do with girls when they were that age.
Exactly….
Transvestitism has been found in 5% of females with ADHD. It's due to the disease, or due to the stimulant medications?
I don't know much about ADHD. Do the girls or women in that 5% couple the cross dressing with masturbation? For male transvestic fetishists, sexual activity is the ultimate purpose of "dressing up." They all masturbate at some point in the process, and if they have willing partners, they persuade them to engage in various kinds of kinky sex while the male fetishist is cross dressed.
I think that they masturbate. Without orgasm there would be no sexual reward. Sexual arousal in itself is a weak reward. Gialu is an example of autoandrophilic female to male transgender I think. She has 1.3 million followers.
Second question:
Are you saying we had an epidemic of AGP from 34 boys at GIDS in 2009 to 557 in 2016 just coincidentally when there was an epidemic of ROGD among the girls, who went up by a further factor of about 4?
Why would boys not be subject to social influences, albeit on average to a lesser extent (but are we talking about average kids here? these are particularly vulnerable ones, often). Didn't the Werther effect hit boys?
One man documented being agp when being too involved in porn and that it went away once he stopped the porn. And even in the past, colleagues saw other things happening, even then. (Pfafflin, 1992 said he saw that the data supported "transsexual behavior is a form of more or less successful and stable behavior which serves to defend the self against phantasized or real trauma.").
Are you saying AGP might be a contributing factor for some, or are you claiming it is the only and full description of gender distress for anyone who is not gay or ?
Yes, pornography is the impetus. Bailey and Burgo shirk their responsibilities and put women at risk by pretending these men do not sexually attack women and girls.
My understanding is that some do but not all do (your own experience seems horrific and tragic...).
I read Burgo's recent essay on RLS that you reference in your piece and came away with it feeling like I hadn't learned that much about autogynophilia. Maybe a person steeped in psychoanalysis would, but a couple of case studies from that perspective didn't strike me as being informative, and far from scientific.
Strikes me that looking at a number of psychoanalysis can provide a means of formulating hypothesis driven quantitative studies, which is what you are suggesting. Challenge seems to be to construct survey instrument that captures instructive data across to cohort of AGPs. Even looking at case studies of AGPs that are in or have gone though psychotherapy is a somewhat selective group in that they (apperently) feel they have an issue they want to deal with, and have chosen psychotherapy as a means they feel will be constructive. Seems that is going to miss a lot of men that don't think they have an issue. So besides constructing a robust analytical tool that can uncover causative factors across the entire AGP population, seems it may be somewhat of a barrier to study recruitment. But you know what you're doing, so good luck on getting something off the ground. Looking forward to future essays on the subject.
Shame is felt when one is disgusted. AGP men feel sexual disgust because their masturbation focused sexuality is not arousing enough. Shame is rather a consequence than a cause of AGP, but there can also be a positive feedback look.
I agree that AGP is a target error. Why does it happen? I think that it is a learning error (in Pavlovian conditioning) that happens either due to overactive Behavioral Activation System (mediated by dopamine) in extroverts, addicted personalities, or due to overactive Behavioral Inhibition System (mediated by serotonin) in introverted anxious and depressed personalities. Stimulants, porn can cause AGP.
A physician recounts how his autogynephilic fantasies were born under the effect of cocaine (a stimulant):
"In my imagination I let the doors open to allow in an extraordinarily beautiful woman to whom I first spoke (without having true auditory hallucinations; I had only visual and somatic hallucinations); I then undressed her, and finally had intercourse with her. During this repeated imaginary coitus I could vividly feel my penis entering the vagina and had a sensation of voluptuous pleasure in the loins and penis. This happened 30 times in one night although, of course, without ejaculation. My heart rate, already accelerated, would go up to 140 per minute after each imaginary coitus. At the same time, I would look at pictures and postcards and was able, at will, to enlarge the individuals represented in them, to identify them as friends or simple acquaintances, to have intercourse with them, or to make them have intercourse with each other. My hallucinations at that time never had a perverted content. As my states of cocaine intoxication became more frequent, my hallucinations became more limited to the sexual area, until one fine day the perversions also made their appearance.
The feelings of voluptuousness became weaker and weaker, and the images followed each other more quickly than at the beginning. The sexual perversions finally reached such proportions that from then on I was able to see myself as a woman. I would see myself quite willingly as a prostitute having intercourse with several men at the same time, and I dreamed of nothing but sodomy, masochism and sadism."
(Maier’s cocaine addiction, https://archive.org/stream/maierscocaineadd00maie/maierscocaineadd00maie_djvu.txt page 84).
Also, the study “A Systematic Review of the Relationship Between Neurodiversity and Psychosexual Functioning in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)” (2023) has found that “compared with neurotypical females, females with ADHD were more prone to report transvestic fetishistic desire (5% vs 0%), transvestic fetishistic activity (5% vs 0%)… No significant differences were found between ADHD and neurotypical males."
AGP may be a side effect of the stimulant drugs used for ADHD.
No actual woman has fantasies of being used by several men at the same time. This is a quite dangerous delusion that criminals foist on the women they pimp and sex traffic. It is not enjoyable for a woman to have intercourse for 8 hours a day with 20 or so men. Where do they get this?
It was a man on cocaine having sexual fantasies.
Right. Why does Bailey want to study this through comments on Reddit?
I think we need a better, more clear definition of autogynephilia. I have heard it described as: "love of oneself as a woman" but what does that really mean? I love being a woman but I'm not AGP, I'm just a woman who is comfortable in her skin. I have heard it described as "wanting to be what you are attracted to." But I wanted to be Gwen Stefani when I was younger because I found her completely intoxicating. However, I did not want to have sex with Gwen Stefani, it wasn't sexual, it was completely different. My daughter fantasized about having wings and being able to fly from the time she was very young. But she didn't want to have sex with birds, fantasizing about being something else doesn't have to be sexual. I have heard AGP described as attraction to oneself with woman's body parts. In this case, whether or not the individual is "straight" or "gay" seems to have no bearing. If it's merely attraction to oneself with female body parts then this can't be thought of as the straight man's version of the HSTS. Then you have people saying any guy who enjoys wearing any article of women's clothing (including a billowy poet style blouse) is AGP. And I'd ask, were all the "hair bands" of the 80s closet AGPs? The members of Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, etc. wore more makeup than most of the women at the time. Were they AGP? Or what about Harry Styles? What happened to good old-fashioned "gender-bending"? And what happened to the category of transvestite? Didn't that category serve a purpose? Are all transvestites now AGPs? Why? How is this helpful to understanding the condition? One of the biggest problems in the AGP discourse seems to be no one really knows what AGP is. I think we need to back way up... look at the original definition, see if it still holds, and see if it's being applied correctly to the current cohort.
When you gave a talk for FAIR, it appeared to me that you implied that it was beneficial for those who were AGP to medically transition. In particular, you introduced two young people who had done so. You often allude to people in the past having had better outcomes. My understanding is that outcome studies were flawed in the past and remain flawed now. One doesn't know how those people were doing in general.
The Gijs and Brewaeys 2007 review found:
"In addition to the design problems of the studies, patient numbers are seriously skewed. A large number of patients who received surgery were lost at follow-up (see Table 1): For the FMs the attrition rate varies between 0% and 81%, with an average of 24% (based on Boldund & Kullgren, 1996; Eldh et al., 1997; Hepp et al., 2002; Lobato et al., 2006; Raufleish et al., 1998; Smith et al., 2005a, Tsoi et al., 1995). For the MFs, between 0% and 73% did not participate in the follow-up, with an average attrition rate of 39%..."
They say it is an effective treatment quoting a study with 1 year followup, but then say why you can't trust the studies they quote! (Their reasons are good.)
Even the 2014 Swedish regret study, which checked for regret by looking for a name change, appears to have undercounted. They found a median time to regret of about 8 years, but their study of 681 people included 360 who had first applied to the program between 2001 and 2010, which is a 3 year process with surgery at the end. But these people from 2001-2010 do not seem to have been followed-up 8 years. So dropping that last group as not having median regret time (table 4), the name change rate is 4.4% . And then there is the fact that about 6-8% died (with a suicide rate of 19x the general population). So even their small regret number is suspect.
And there are those who say they can't reverse the changes and it is too exhausting to try again and give up, who certainly aren't your positive outcomes, but I don't think anyone is counting them. The reason the Dutch went to younger people was in part because many adults were having poor outcomes.
You have your anecdotes of good outcomes, I'm sure.
Are you claiming that any boys who are aroused to any extent at any time by thinking of themselves as women means they are AGP and should medically transition? Would be likely to benefit from it?
The Swedish death study (Cecilia Dhejne, Karolinska Inst. 2011) found the death by suicide in post op natal females who identified as "trans men" was actually 40 TIMES HIGHER than the rate of death by suicide of the age matched control group Swedes. This was so shocking that they combined the natal males and natal females in the post op category to come up with 19X higher. There were more males so the math hid the terrible results for females. Not sure if this is the same study. My understanding is the famed "Dutch study" (DeVries, Steensma, et al, 2014) assumed that treatment at a younger age would result in greater happiness, as they theorized that the examples of transitioned adults' dissatisfaction had to do with "not passing."
Wow.
Even if they don't regret it, it does not make transition less damaging to their fertility. It is common for delusions to never to go away.
Thanks for this piece. The gap between the positions of Bailey and Burgo reflects a deeper and longer unresolved tension in modern times about the possibility of a psychological science. If the latter can exist (not a given) then what should it look like? One answer is methodological (stick to correlational studies) and the other is philosophical (stick to operationalised externally visible behaviour). The problem is that answer, of a mixture of empiricism, methodologism and behaviourism, cannot deal comprehensively with the complexity of human conduct and agency. The Wann symposium on behaviorism and phenomenology in the 1960s started a debate still not resolved. Standard naive empiricism is not axiologically reflexive (see the work of Jan Smedslund here). Why do psychologists take an interest in this and not that topic and why do they value things as human beings, just as others do? In this case for example, is it clear that a paraphilia can be conceptually distinguished simply and self-evidently from an habitual sexual orientation? Is a paraphilia an orientation that we simply do not approve of, and so is this a normative not a value-neutral matter to be resolved by smart methodology? Psychologists are human beings and so are embedded in their own field of inquiry. Moreover, as Don Bannister classically noted in his piece 'Psychology as an exercise in paradox', in the psychological laboratory, 'the test tube talks back'. Psychologists can keep their blinkers on about their implicit values, while being methodologically self-satisfied, but once they come off, then the complexity of being human, in fluxing open systems, requires non-empirical skills of exploration. As a psychologist I discovered that the answer lies in philosophy and that the compromise of methodologism is a false dawn for the discipline's legitimacy. Another false dawn was Nitezschean Idealism (the 'postmodern turn') triggering the seduction for psychologists that 'everything is socially constructed' and 'there are no facts there are only interpretations'. As a consequence, the madness of the transgender movement is predicated on these assumptions, leading to unending perspectivism and judgmental relativism. If empiricism had been naive, then this Idealist response threw the baby out with the bathwater and ignored the importance of real forces in both nature and our socio-economic context, independent of our understanding and discussion of them. Epistemology is an emergent property of the ontology of being human, but the latter comes first and has to be privileged. Try writing a postmodernist book without a brain.
Naive realism (the amalgam of empiricism and positivism) still hovers in psychology but since Popper we must concede as Realists that science is both value laden and theory laden. (I explore this point more extensively in my book 'Critical Realism for Psychologists' (Routledge)). The actuarial-correlational approach advocated by Bailey scores a few goals but does not win the game. The inductive-illuminative approach favoured by Burgo is certainly limited in scope but it does not necessarily reject philosophical realism because our interiority is real but complex and so invites epistemic humility (as does all science but in this case more so). Freud was a 'hope-for-reductionist' (Wolman's phrase not mine); he hoped psychology eventually could be reduced to neurological explanations. But he was canny and he realised that in the meantime description and interpretation are still a fair and necessary compromise, turning psychology then into a hermeneutic project. Explanation and prediction then had to be backgrounded as plausible possibilities in psychology. Correlational studies, which do not explore their pre-empirical value base of their knowledge claims, and the interpretive approach, which operates inductively from limited case studies, both have a valuable role, but neither is perfect. Both need to be understood in the context of post-Popperian philosophy of science that can now explore thoroughly the relationship between ontology, epistemology and axiology. In my view critical realism is a good resource to make sense of the tension between the positions of Bailey and Burgo and I really look forward to more from them. The 'last stand' is not about reality (it will stand on its own when we are all dead and gone at the end of the Anthropocene) but credible scientific Realism, while our species survives. Happy to send more references on all the above (d.pilgrim@soton.ac.uk) if anyone is interested.
Bailey and Burgo both pretend these men live and act in a vacuum, rather than the reality of broken families, physically and sexually abused wives, narcissistically abused children. For info on the children, a website started by daughter of a transitioner, childrenoftransitioners.org
Not sure if they pretend what you say as I do not know them. Your point about the wreckage created by TRAs and the pseudoscience of gender medicine is fair comment though
I don't 'get' poetry either.
I appreciate Bailey reminding everyone of this important aspect of scientific research:
"Most scientists regard a central, if not defining, characteristic of the scientific method to be what Karl Popper called “the principle of falsifiability”: For a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable —you can’t just show me observations that confirm it, but also those that might show the theory to be wrong, false. If you can twist any result of your research into a confirmation of your hypothesis, you aren’t thinking scientifically. For that reason, many of Sigmund Freud’s notions were unfalsifiable."
I have been deeply frustrated by the general failure to adhere to this principle, among those advocates who claim:
• sexual orientation is an innate immutable trait which implies that
• changing sexual orientation is impossible.
These claims are falsifiable in principle. Even a single counter-example should be enough to cause people to question these claims. I’m personally acquainted with many individuals who once fully embraced an LGBT identity and who no longer do. Data on identity-behavior discordance suggests there are many more counter-examples. But the committed activists consistently dismiss these data in one of two ways. Either:
• “You weren’t really gay in the first place.” (Which raises the question of how much pro-gay activism and same sex sexual activity is sufficient to prove a person is “really gay.”)
• “You will surely revert to your true self, meaning your ‘gay’ identity.” (Which raises the question of how long a person has to be living in a different manner, perhaps even in a marriage to an opposite sex partner to prove his “real identity.”)
In other words, people who talk this way are not being scientific: they are skating away from the implications of the evidence.
As someone with quant training, I appreciate a good RCT and large datasets. That said, I know that some of the most interesting information in large household surveys comes in the qualitative responses and a trip to the field provides insights to the data.
Just as Angus Fox's (Alisdair Gunn) 7-part essays in Quilette provided a great deal of insight into the teenage boys drawn into the ROGD phenomenon, I believe Burgo's essays insightful. At the same time, understanding this paraphilia on a broader scale is important, so surveys are fine and I am glad you are working with Littman. I saw your Genspect presentation in Chicago, and while I understand that you are reporting on the data (a very small sample of which were natal males, so statistically insignificant), and parents do not know anything about their kids' sexuality, I felt that there was a lack of empathy or curiosity in your responses.
Good luck with your research