July 30, 2009

My life as a crossdreamer

So you are a man dreaming of having a woman's body. Yes, you get turned on by the idea of having breasts, a curvy bottom, long feminine hair and a vagina.

You are probably not especially feminine in appearance, and none of your friends suspect that you have such fantasies. In fact, you may have a girl friend or a wife. Kids even.

Still, you cannot stop dreaming about having a woman's body.

Welcome to the world of the autogynephiliac crossdreamer.

A curse

Let's be honest. It is like a curse. Yes, homosexuals are becoming accepted in more liberal societies -- like in Scandinavia. Transsexuals even. More and more people seem to understand that some persons are trapped in the wrong body. This man is really a woman. His personality is female. His identity is female.

I am not ruling out the option that I am one of them, but it is not clear cut for me. I am too much of a man, as well.

Boyish childhood

I didn't play with dolls as a kid. I enacted World War II on the living room floor with soldiers and planes, fortresses and tanks.

I was not good at sports, but did take part in the rough and tumble games of the boys in the neighborhood. I loved playing both cowboys and indians. Did I ever play mother and father and kids? Probably, if the girls insisted, but that was not my main focus of interest. I normally played with the boys.

I didn't sneak into my sister's or mother's closet and borrow her clothes. I didn't find clothing interesting at all.

I never told my parents that I wanted to be a girl, because at that time, I didn't.

My feminie side

I do have a strong "feminine side" as well, though.

I used be a "good boy". I spite of all the wargames, I didn't get called in to the headmaster's office very often. Never, actually. Even now I am understood to be a patient and understanding man. A good listener. Never cruel.

As a young man I found it hard to make room for myself in social situations, to assert myself. After some therapy, I managed to get over that hurdle. These days I can make presentations to conference groups of hundreds of people, without breaking a sweat.

I have strong opinions and people do listen to me, when I talk. I even have a senior management job. But I don't feel much like an alpha male, and do not take advantage of it.

Boys or girls?

When I grew up I didn't get interested in boys. My first puppy love at 12 was for a girl in my class. I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world. I did not tell her, of course.

Given my condition I have often asked myself if I am gay. I wouldn't mind, anymore. Some of my best friends are gay.

Still, after having gone down main street, I only remember the girls and the women -- their walk, their bosoms, their hair, and their smiles; the way they dress even. I seldom remember the men, unless they wear a clown's costume or something.

I have seen a few attractive men in my life time, but boy are there few of them. Men seem to be to be exceptionally bland. They are bulky and hairy. Ugly even. At the same time I find nearly all women beautiful. I do! Really!

This is a problem of course, as I am a man. Finding men ugly means that I find myself unattractive. I am probably not especially bad looking in objective terms. Pretty average looking, I guess. But I find it hard to understand why my girlfriend seems to like my body.

Fish or fowl?

So what am I really? I love women. I want to be near them. I want to touch them and have sex with them.

But when it comes to the act itself, I get confused. I am supposed to be the assertive one. The dominant one that takes initiative. But I have so low esteem that I find that very hard.

I am the one with the penis. I am supposed to enjoy entering her, letting my body move by its own accord with strong manly thrusts.

Still, that is the part of intercourse that means nothing to me. My body knows how to do it. The erection is there, but I get no pleasure out of it. I don't feel my dick inside her, and I often get off by imagining myself in the other position, where I am the catcher.

I get my strongest orgasms when my girlfriend plays with me with her hand.

So I am gay after all, eh? "Imagining myself in the other position".

Well, although I can imagine myself in a girl's body being taken by a man, those men are unspecific, faceless, without substance. I cannot imagine myself being bed with a real man. But I do imagine myself being in bed with a real woman.

The power of words

The reason I got so enthusiastic about the term autogynephiliac is that it gave me a term, a word, a concept. I was not the only one out there feeling like this.

Moreover, language is an absolute essential ingredient in self-discovery, and I know that I have to come to the bottom of this if I am to find some kind of peace with myself.

This does not mean that I buy the theories that have been proposed as an explanation for this syndrome. I'll come back to that in a later blog post.



UPDATE ON TERMINOLOGY

Since this blog post was written I have stopped using the terms "autogynephilia" and "autoandrophilia" to describe people. The reason for this is that the terms implicitly communicates an explanation for why some people get aroused by imagining themselves as the opposite sex . This explanation, that this is some kind of autoerotic paraphilia,  is both wrong and stigmatizing. Instead I use the neutral term "crossdreamers".

I have changed the headline from "My life as an autogynephiliac" to "My life as a crossdreamer"

Click here for a discussion of the dark side of the autogynephilia theory.

15 comments:

  1. I had no clue there was a term for this. I feel very much the same way except for a few things. I did enjoy mother's clothes when I was young. And it seems, that I maybe be bisexual. Of course, there is only one man I am attracted to and he lets me pretend I am the woman. I wonder if the attraction is part of the newly named condition?

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  2. This is a great post. Please consider cross-posting it and other things by yourself at http://sexgenderbody.com. A lot of people that read the site would like it very much.

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  3. I've heard the term before, and it seems like whenever the word gets mentioned it upsets the majority of crossdressers for some reason (I think it has to do with some psychologist that analyzes us and tries to put us into a box). Many people don't like labels because they feel like they're getting mushed together with a group of people they might not completely agree with. With that said...

    I truly believe I completely fit this category, and I've never been able to express those feelings, or explain what it feels like. You truly captured what this "category" really is all about, so much so that it nearly made me cry. Never have I felt so normal knowing someone else thinks EXACTLY the way I do about sex. Thank you for updating your blog, and thank you to rebecca for linking to this blog!

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  4. I posted a comment on a youtube video, and as usual got flamed:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn94kMZlzvQ

    I think I'm beginning to understand the hatred of this term. Apparently this psychologist is has convinced the scientific community to believe that there is no such thing as transgendered, that they are all in fact autogynephiliacs, and are modifying their own bodies as an extreme case of satisfying a fetish.

    Since this word seems to have as much dirt attached to it as "Auschwitz", yet this word so accurately described what so many of us feel, that someone needs to make a new word popular until it catches on. Today I thought of MT-ferotica (male to female erotica), which has as double meaning since the first two letters imply (empty), as in there is no substance (because it's a fantasy, not real)

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  5. Thank for all the great comments.

    As for the term autogynephilia. You are right. it is highly controversial, mainly because its proponents (people like Blanchard, Lawrence and Bailey) although sympathetic to transexuals (Lawrence is a self-confessed M2F autogynephiliac)they do argue that autogynephilia is a paraphilia. A paraphilia is -- to use a more colloquial word --a kind of perversion. I am preparing several blog posts where I present their view and discuss it.

    I do not think there is any clear dividing line between autogynephiliacs and other transgendered, but the term is good for discussions.

    As to whether we are a subset of a minority group: There is no doubt that there are not that many transsexuals out there. I believe I have seen research that as many as one out of 12000 men can be considered M2F transsexual. I suspect that a majority of them get turned on by imagining themselves as a woman.

    I took a look at the statistics for Rebecca's World, a blog that contains a lot of erotic sex change fantasies. In May alone that blog had 136000 visits from 51000 visitors. Admittedly some of these are one time visitors, but still, this is a lot of people for an obscure erotic blog at the outskirts of the web. All of the returning visitors get turned on by imagining themselves as women. There are other sites that are much larger, and for which I do not have statistics, but I have reason to believe that the number of men consuming M2F transgender erotica is much bigger.

    A majority of these visitors are from the US. If we say Rebecca had 40000 visitors in May from the US and that they constitute some 10 percent of the autogynephiliacs in the US (this is a totally unscientific guess), we end up with some 400 000 in the US alone. I suspect there a more.

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  6. To Ashley:

    You have a man that lets you pretend you are a woman? Good for you!!!
    You are actually the kind of transsexual that messes up the categorization of researchers like Blanchard (more about him later). You admit to getting aroused by the thought of having a woman's body, but still you live with a man. He would probably categorize you as a homosexual rather than a autgynephiliac. But I believe you are right in calling yourself a bisexual.

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  7. To tg-captioner:

    You are right about this. The term is hated because Blanchard and Co argued that no transsexual is truly a woman. We are autogynephiliacs (heterosexual men with a mis-directed sex drive) or feminine homosexuals.

    No wonder transsexuals get upset by this. The problem is that the debate ended with transsexuals starting to deny everything with Blancard's theories, even denying that M2F transsexuals have erotic fantasies about being women. That's bad, because so many of us do have such fantasies.

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  8. To Tg captioner.

    "MT-ferotica". Hm, I kind of like that term.

    I agree with you that we have to find a better term for this, and make it ours. Let's have a discussion later on!

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  9. Hi Jack, thanks for "coming out" so to speak and for starting this blog.

    I have recently discovered the term Autogynephile and was very glad to finally be able to "label" myself. It gave me something to Google and find out more about myself and others like me.

    I have been fantasising about being a girl ever since puberty (11yo). Come to think of it, it has in fact totally dominated all my (sexual)fantasies from then onwards.

    I don't have Gender Dysphoria (in other words I don't feel like a girl trapped in a man's body) and therefore don't want to have a sex change operation. Neither do I Cross-Dress.

    I don't feel an attraction to men, but I do want to have sex with them (thus making me feel like a woman).

    I am happy I found out about all of this and I am at peace with it.

    The only thing I face now is, seen that I am in a happy relationship with my girlfriend for the past 8 years, that I CAN have sex with another man (whom I know already) but I don't because of my girlfriend and the guilt it would impose on myself.

    This predicament is even more frustrating than not understanding my own inner-workings. I want to express my Autogynephile feelings but cant.

    Just wanted to get this out of my system :-)

    Please keep up the good work!
    With kind regards,

    ilas

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  10. Well, this is the place to get such feelings out in the open!

    Thanks for the comment!

    Is there anyway you can experience this feeling WITH your girlfriend? Some couples use strap-ons and so on.

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  11. Nah...that's totally out of the question...alas.

    She is an absolute "vanilla" when it comes to sex.

    I love her to bits...but sexually we just don't match at all and she knows this.

    I'm not willing to give up the life we build together though.

    What can you do ey :-)
    Guess I have to burry my feelings once again.

    Grtz.
    ilas

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  12. Wow, where can I find a man like you? It sounds as if this would be the perfect match for me. I wish guys like you came out so that I could find them.

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  13. @Anonymous

    "Wow, where can I find a man like you? "

    I am taken, I'm afraid ;)

    But there are many like me out there, and they are all struggling with the same problem: How do you find a compatible partner when you are not allowed to say who you are and when the female to male crossdreamers often keep their preferences to themselves? There is no crossdreamer fashion and there are no crossdreamer secret handshakes.

    We did establish a forum for "personals" over at Crossdream Life, but that has not been a big success. We probably have not reached that critical mass yet...

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  14. How could you describe my life with such precision? (Although I never wondered if I were gay...)

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  15. @Forestier

    There are many of us out there!

    (And I am glad to see you here!)

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