Growing up and absorbing all of the mainstream social stereotypes about trans women, I learned to think of my body as disgusting and wrong, and my own sexual urges as something dirty. If anyone wanted me, I believed, it could only be for a fetish, something deviant and sick. So when I started hormone replacement therapy and my libido did diminish somewhat, I experienced this as a relief, at first. Without the pangs of erotic desire, I didn’t have to think as much about all of the shame I felt around my sexuality.



But the more time passed, the more I started to miss my eroticism — the more I began to wonder if the physical transformation that was happening to me had to mean the end of my sexual life. I began to feel angry that, for me and so many of my trans feminine friends, sex was this source of unending pain, when for others, it was a source of joy.

Being the incorrigible geek that I am, I decided to do some research. It turned out that a lot of other trans women I knew who were just starting or considering starting hormone replacement therapy had the same worries and questions as me. And just like me, none of them had heard anything useful from their doctors or health care workers about it. Even more disturbingly, some had gotten the message from their doctors and psychologists that they really weren’t supposed to desire sexuality or sexual pleasure. This would mean, they were told, that they “weren’t really transsexual.”

This idea comes from an outdated psychological theory, developed by (white, cisgender male) psychologist Ray Blanchard in the 1980s, that there two kinds of trans women: “true transsexuals” and “fake transsexuals.” According to this theory, “fake transsexuals,” or autogynephiles, are really men who fetishize the idea of playing a female role, wearing female clothing, or having a female body. This philosophy posits that both kinds of transsexuals are afflicted by mental illness.

While current psychological and sociological literature has thoroughly refuted this idea — with “transsexualism” having been removed from the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — many misguided health professionals and members of the public remain deeply influenced by it.

What I find both disturbing and intriguing about so-called autogynephiles is that, according to Blanchard, “true” trans women wouldn’t be disturbed by lacking a sex drive or sexual pleasure — which seems to imply that “real” women shouldn’t have or desire sexuality.

This, to me, is the place where transphobia and misogyny meet, where the repression and rejection of trans women’s sexuality speaks to the rejection of all women’s sexuality. The punishing idea that in order to “become real women,” trans women should give up their erotic potential comes from the same place that the orgasm gap between men and women does: the hatred of the concept that women — any women — could and should actually enjoy having sex.