Women Who Love Cars, Also Known as Autogynephilia

This New York Times article (which arrived in our office through a worm hole from a parallel world uncannily like our own) covers the autogynephilia theory of sexual attraction. Be ready for a bumpy ride!

Anne loves her sports car. Photo: Jupiter Images

There has been a lot of discussions lately about Ray Blanchard's controversial autogynephilia theory.

This is most likely caused by the fact that both right and left wing extremists have found that his theory can be used to attack a particular group of women.

Autogynephilia is Greek, made from the words for "self-propelling" (auto), "woman" (gyne) and "love" (philia) . In other words: Women who love cars.

A typical "autogynephiliac" would be Anne, a university professor who told us that she loves driving around in the city in her red sports car:

"I feel powerful and sexy. The car is like an extension of myself. It expresses my true self," she tells the New York Times

Rosita, a 35 year old Latina nurse living in San Diego puts it this way:

"I want a 1967 Ford Mustang. I want to feel it roaring under me. I want its beauty, its strength, its speed!"

Inside the mind of Ray Blanchard

Ray Blanchard, who is a traditionalist evolutionary psychologists, argues that autogynephilia is a paraphilia (a sexual perversion). The autogynephile women are suffering from a so-called "erotic target location error", as they -- according to him -- love cars more than men.

Americans believe "transgender" means "transsexual"

Those who have followed the transsexual/transgender debate (or "war", rather), will have seen that a major argument made by so called "classic transsexuals" against the umbrella term "transgender" is that it mixes up real transsexuals with crossdressers, crossdreamers and the genderqueer.

Because of this, they are trying to change the meaning of "transgender". They use it as a term for every type of transgender condition they do not like, and would like to keep the term "transsexual" for the real women.

Transsexual is not the same as transgender

I have no problem with limiting the use of the word transsexual those that have undergone surgery, who plan to do so or who want to transition. But the attempts at splitting at turning the umbrella term "transgender" into a label for everything perverted, makes me angry.

This is not because all crossdressers and crossdreamers are the same as transsexuals. Most of them are not.  Most of the male to female crossdreamers and crossdressers do not even identify as women. Nor do the female to male crossdreamers and crossdressers always identify as men.

Click on comic to enlarge!

That does not stop them from having a lot in common with transsexuals, though. They all are, like the transsexual men and women, suppressed by people who feel threatened by those who do not adhere to the gender stereotypes of the day.

And whatever the classic transsexuals say or believe: The real bigots out there do not accept any male bodied person who feel like a woman.

What is even more important, though, is that there a quite a few crossdreamers and crossdressers who actually suffer from severe gender dysphoria. Some of them again are actually transwomen.

If you ban every transwoman or transman who has ever crossdressed or crossdreamed from the transsexual family, there won't be that many left.

The American public supports transsexuals

It now turns out that the term "transgender" does not undermine the status of transwomen and transmen in the eyes of the American public.

It, is in fact, the non-transsexual transgender who are under threat, including many of the readers of this blog.

A study made by the Public Religion Research Institute seems to indicate that overwhelming majorities of Americans agree that transgender people should have the same general rights and legal protections as others.

Here is what they say:

• Overwhelming majorities of all major religious groups agree that transgender people should have the same rights and protections as other Americans, including approximately 8-in-10 (83%) white evangelical Protestants, and roughly 9-in-10 Catholics (93%), white mainline Protestants (90%), and the unaffiliated (95%).
• Overwhelming majorities of Republicans (86%), Independents (94%), and Democrats (92%) also agree.

Given the toxic atmosphere of current American politics, these are mind blowing numbers, indeed.

It gets better:

Transgenderisms: Outdated Psych Textbooks

It seems to be we know more about the dark side of the moon, than we know about sex and gender.

Oh sure, we believe we know it all. After all, what could be more simple: men are men and women are women and sometimes they meet and make babies, and that is all there is to it.

This is why being transgender is so interesting and so exhausting at the same time. As soon as you start to really look at sex, sexuality and gender all the certainties dissolve into thin air.

Scientists and philosophers are doing one heck of a job trying to make sense of it all, but the thing is: Most of them try to force the square blocks into the round openings, in desperate attempts to make the story they grew up with continue to make sense. You know: men are men and women are women and sometimes they meet and make babies.

Right...

wxhluyp recommended Judith Butler to me. Butler is a post-modernist philosopher who has done a very important attempt at trying to get to the core about why it is that we think about sex and gender in the way we do.  I will come back to her philosophy later. Here I will just point to her story about what made her think twice about femininity and masculinity:

"...you might as well know that in the United States the only way to describe me in my younger years was as a bar dyke who spent her days reading Hegel and her evenings, well, at the gay bar, which occasionally became a drag bar."

It was there she experienced an "implicit theorization of gender":

"...it quickly dawned on me that some of these so-called med could do femininity much better than I ever could, ever wanted to, ever would. And so I was confronted by what can only be called the transferability of the attribute. Femininity, which I understood never to have belonged to me anyway, was clearing [sic] belonging elsewhere, and I was happier to be its audience than I ever was or would be being the embodiment of it."

Judith Butler: Undoing Gender, NY 2004.

It is quotes like these that tells me that the gay and lesbian community and transgender do have something in common (apart from being outcasts): Many of us are struggling with the traditional concepts of femininity and masculinity. They do not fit!

Over at Small Pecuiliar  Eyeteeth has made a wonderful series of comic strips presenting "Outdated Psych Textbooks" -- in the process revealing how helpless and speculative many of the theories explaining homosexuality are. 

I think they say a lot about the role of sex and gender in psychology and psychiatry and therefore something about how they often think about the transgender population.

Enjoy!

(Click on images to enlarge!)

Transgenderisms 7

Another alternative look at the science of autogynephilia.

Click on comic to enlarge!

Transgenderisms 6

Another crossdreamer comic for you. Click on image to enlarge!

Transgenderisms 5

Another Ray Blanchard comic for you. Click on image to enlarge!

Transgenderisms 4

Another transgender comic for you. Click on image to enlarge!

Transgenderisms 3

Another transgender comic for you. Click on image to enlarge!

Transgenderims 2

Here is another transgender comic for you!

Click on image to enlarge!

Transgenderisms 1

I suspect that I sometimes take the subject of crossdreaming and autogynephilia far to seriously, which is why I now have decided to add a comic strip to the blog.

I am completely unable to make a drawing, but thanks to the availability of stock photo and moder software, anything is possible.

Click on image to enlarge!