Misogyny on the Left

Islam, Autogynephilia, and Ideological Capture

When a nation’s laws subsist on an ideology like Islam, it subjugates about half of its population. I have written for years about the ways in which Islam deprives women of autonomy, choice, and personhood – today I want to bring this into comparison with a new ideology which threatens to deprive half of the population of basic and crucial rights.

“Which societies view womanhood as a cluster of feminine stereotypes (an ultimately male-supremacist worldview)? A certain organized religion comes to mind.”

I wrote these words last week to hint towards the regressive implications of redefining “woman” to mean “cluster of sexualized stereotypes” unmoored from the unglamorous reality of embodiment. When men decide in adulthood that they want to be women, they don’t refer to womanhood itself, but to a hyper-feminine, hyper-sexual fantasy. Under this model, womanhood can be adopted and discarded by men as they wish: “Anything you can do, I can do better.” See this sign at a recent Trans Rights protest, whose message has become quite normal in the movement: “Admit it, you want a girlfriend with a cock.”

This leads me to my discussion of an aspect of gender ideology which is quite unlike the phenomenon of teenage girls transitioning in the midst of hormonal change and insecurity. I want to discuss a condition which deserves far more attention than it receives: “Autogynephilia” (AGP).

When the sexologist Ray Blanchard introduced the term autogynephilia to the medical world in the 1980s, he described a phenomenon which was almost entirely hidden from the public eye. AGP is a paraphilia – which is an acute sexual fetish, often involving “taboo” desires and activities – in which men experience sexual pleasure by imagining themselves as women. Adult heterosexual men who identify as women, with no history of typically feminine behavior, make up a growing proportion of trans-identifying males. They have very little in common with the (typically younger) boys and men who strongly identify with femininity and possess the typical female trait of being attracted to men.

This idea was explored further in J. Michael Bailey’s 2003 book The Man Who Would be Queen. Research into AGPs is now considered automatically transphobic, a claim which fails to grapple with the fact that as many as 3% of the male population erotically cross-dress and admit to experiencing thrills from imagining themselves with female anatomy. This conversation between Blanchard and UK feminist Julie Bindel is enlightening; I recommend it to all those who wish to understand the phenomenon of straight men who identify as women. The glaring irony in all this is that having paraphilias is far more prevalent in men. Nothing could be less typically female than touting a paraphilia in public. Who knew?

The recent tide of transgender activism, which used to focus more on the tribulations of men who were typically feminine and women typically masculine, has been a boon for AGPs. Not only can these men, many of whom are high-powered, high-IQ, and even narcissistic and sociopathic (as posited by the ever-prescient journalist Steve Sailer) now impose their fetishes onto others. They can be hailed as virtuous and brave for doing so.

Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill, an autogynephile character from The Silence of the Lambs. Credit: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill_%28The_Silence_of_the_Lambs%29

Reduxx is a ground-breaking publication and database which keeps track of the exploding cases of men invading women’s spaces and exhibiting paraphilic behavior. If you want to ruin your day, please take a look at their reporting: It is based in undeniable fact and reveals that a slew of the most demanding and misogynistic trans-identifying males are not transitioning out of a sense of their own femininity, but out of a sense of sexual excitement. Take the classic example of Jessica Yaniv who demanded that he be serviced by women offering intimate female-only waxing services and who attempted to set up a topless swimming event for “LBTQ2S+ youth” as young as twelve. A rummage through Reduxx shows us that Yaniv is far from the only public case of a man seeking sexual thrills by taking advantage of trans activism to violate women’s boundaries. They have reported dozens of cases of male prisoners who demand “gender-affirming care” and even successfully transition into women’s prisons. These are men either with a history of AGP or, it seems, men who opportunistically claim a trans identity in order to move prisons. Take this horrifying recent case in Spain. I shudder to imagine how many cases have not yet been made public.

One of many false equivalences which activists draw between transgenderism and homosexuality, which is a provably hard-wired attraction towards members of the same sex, is that both have been considered mental disorders or disruptions of some kind. Specifically, trans activists claim that AGP is a false and benighted label designed to stigmatize transgenderism as a kind of perversion, just as the DSM-II classified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1968, a decision which was reversed in 1987. For decades in the 20^th century, homosexuality was treated, sometimes with cruel and pseudoscientific methods, some as extreme as electroshock therapy. Do not let activists wield this fact of history against your critical thinking: Homosexuality and transgender identities are not remotely equivalent. If there is something hardwired about the autogynephilic fetish, then the men who experience it should receive the private and empathetic therapy they need in order not to be consumed by it. Nobody is suggesting a return to electroshock therapy – arguably, those who wish to castrate these men and risk giving them permanent complications in the hope of giving them “gender euphoria” are more ready to disregard these men’s wellbeing than those who question the safety of transgender surgeries.

It must be difficult to have a paraphilia consume one’s everyday thoughts. But the demand that we call people with these fetishes women in order to satisfy their sexual compulsions is an assault on the very nature of womanhood and a failure to help those individuals to accept reality: That they are men with fetishes. 

Perhaps the most crucial difference between homosexuality and transgender identification is that the former is not a self-given “identity” which others must affirm as real. The latter is just that: A denial that women are a sex class, not a feeling or a fantasy. Women do not have to identify as women – we don’t “opt in” to womanhood – we just are. Simply bending to the demands of AGPs (demands which will surely increase in extremity, as fetishes become more extreme when they are indulged) and their legions of activists is not an option. 

Before I conclude, I want to return to the way Islam has paradoxically captured the Left. Footage of high-up British Labour Party politician, Angela Rayner, shows her appealing for Muslim votes in a room devoid of women. Needless to say, Rayner identifies as a feminist but will never criticize the Islamic culture of female silence, absence, and subordination. Similarly, the uncomfortable truth is that gender ideology is naively driven by women in the West as well as the relatively small, but incredibly empowered, numbers of men with perverse incentives. Women who support gender ideology often haven’t experienced the violations which women in hospitals, salons, or sports face when men invade their space. Women, too, make up a vocal portion of the far left who lend their support to radical Islam as part of their anti-White activism. This can be explained by what I call “right side of historyism.” The obscurantism of gender ideology, which reshapes language away from clarity, dupes well-meaning liberals into defending old-fashioned misogyny. 

At the same time, it is the political right who have taken steps to protect women’s rights and children’s safety in the wake of gender ideology capturing the left. Last year, among many other legislative checks on medical malpractice, Texan Republican Senators passed Senate Bill 249 which broadened the prohibition on genital mutilation to include “various procedures that involve the partial or total removal of, or other injury to, the genitals of a person.” If you told me twenty years ago that the rise in genital mutilation in the West would not just be thanks to Islam, but to leftist “progressive” ideology, I would think you were utterly mad. 

So, there is hope. The GOP have been particularly efficacious, as have “TERFs” in the UK. JK Rowling is, of course, a beacon; she recently put to the test a new hate speech law in Scotland which aimed to criminalize women who described transgender women as men (i.e. women who utter banal truths). All she had to do was tweet: “If [the Scottish police] go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I'll repeat that woman's words and they can charge us both at once.”

Without her bravery, I believe the stronghold for gender-critical or sex-realist women in the UK would be far less powerful.

Clearly, as women grow older, they realize the dystopian reality of the same things which young women often idealistically champion. Mothers realize the threat which mixed-sex intimate spaces like changing rooms and bathrooms pose to them and their children. They will not be browbeaten into denying the reality of paraphilias among trans-identifying males.

To my readers who are encountering the bewildering concept of “AGP” for the first time: Understanding that many trans-identifying males are expressing a paraphilia is not hateful or conspiratorial, though it may sound harsh. The topic may make you wince and cringe, but do not bury your heads in the sand. Describing reality is not hateful. It is the first and final purpose of language.