It’s Just a Fetish, Right?

Maybe. Or maybe it’s gender dysphoria.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

When I was 18 years old, I discovered my most secret, shameful fantasy written out in plain text on the Internet. It was a short story I came across while using the family computer to search for anything related to gender transformation, a fairly typical routine at the time, and it perfectly captured the kind of magical scenario I’d been dreaming about for years.

My perfect fantasy was titled Shortcut Through Ovid, by someone called The Professor. It was about four college guys on a road trip through Oklahoma. They get lost, wind up in a town called Ovid, mysteriously transform into an archetypal family — dad, mom, and two kids — and settle into a peaceful existence in small-town America. The guy who becomes the mom is the only one who notices anything has happened, and the story is told from his point of view. He fights the change, refusing to accept that he’s now a wife and mother, but eventually learns to appreciate his new life.

I was entranced by this story. It was like my own personal wish fulfillment fantasy. I read the transformation scene over and over. Then I printed it out on paper because this was 1998 and computers were too big to fit in your pocket, and there was no way I was going to get caught reading that story in the living room. I took the printed sheets to my bedroom, where they kept me awake for several nights. I didn’t know what I was feeling as I hid under my blanket, reading and rereading those pages, but I knew I liked it. And I wanted more.

The Internet, as always, was eager to oblige. The website where Ovid was hosted, a place called FictionMania, was overflowing with thousands of fantastical gender transformation stories, almost universally about men becoming women. They were all indexed by keywords, character age, type of transformation, and any number of other attributes. Dozens of new stories were being uploaded every day by enthusiastic amateur writers.

My teenage mind was completely blown away by this treasure trove. No longer did I have to scour television shows and library books for rare gender-bending elements. It didn’t take long before I made a daily habit of checking for new submissions, combing through the archives, and rereading my favorite stories. I was hooked. This was my version of discovering Internet porn.

And porn it was. The stories were often explicitly sexual. The indexed keywords included things like sissification, blow jobs, latex, bondage, hypnosis, french maids, and pretty much any other kink you can imagine. It was blatantly obvious I was browsing a site full of wanking material. Even if most of it was not to my taste, the fact that the stories I did like were hosted here meant they were clearly intended for the same purpose.

By this point I was already wondering if I might be an autogynephilic transvestite fetishist (terms I’d also learned about online), and perusing the FictionMania catalog quickly dispelled any doubts. It was a porn site, and I was getting aroused by it, which meant this was definitely a sex thing. I had a fetish for gender transformation.

As much as I hated admitting that to myself, there was no denying the evidence right in front of me. All I could do was try to keep it hidden and under control. I spent the next 20 years treating my fantasies about becoming a woman as a shameful sexual kink.