Can Autogynephilia Be Suppressed?
If not, then the question becomes about practical and ethical management.
I’m coming around to the conclusion that if AGP is your primary sexuality, aka the number one thing that turns you on, then complete repression is (nearly) psychologically impossible.
The only question is how best to channel that sexual energy in a way that (1) minimizes social cost (2) doesn’t violate ethical boundaries (3) leads to maximal sexual fulfillment (4) and best enables you to either maintain existing social and relationship commitments in a healthy way (e.g. of you have existing marital and familial obligations) or to develop new relationships that lead to fulfillment and happiness.
Repression is only possible if you could be completely sexually satisfied spending the rest of your life only have regular allosexual (other oriented) sex as a masculine heterosexual male.
But I suspect for most AGPs the autosexuality (internally oriented autogynephilic attraction) is a big enough part of their identity that even if they tried to fully embrace being a masculine heterosexual male who dated heterosexual females there would always be a residual part of themselves that is sexually unsatisfied and that feeling would always create an unfulfilled fantasy that leads to cognitive dissonance or psychological torment, as well as creating the potential for taking a life partner by total surprise 10 years into a relationship, blowing up your marriage and ending in a messy divorce because of fundamental sexual incompatibility.
It’s like if you were homosexual and trying to spend your entire life dating the opposite sex. While sure it’d be possible to try to just be heterosexual and monogamous for the rest of your life, it’s doubtful this is either psychologically possible or healthy to sustain long term.
Or imagine you had a foot fetish. Would it be realistic or psychologically healthy to spend the rest of your life denying the fulfillment of your sexual fantasies around feet when there is an alternative of finding someone to engage in that fantasy in a healthy way?
It seems plausible that fulfillment of one’s primary sexual attraction is a good thing, unless the fulfillment of that attraction would be inherently harmful.
For example, what if your core sexuality is something that’s actually unethical to act upon, such as necrophilia? In that case, it does seem like the best thing to do is to try to repress the actual fulfillment of the desire as much as possible and redirect that energy into actions that are not inherently harmful. There definitely are some paraphilias/orientations that are just plain wrong to act upon.
The key question though is whether AGP is more like a harmless foot fetish or whether it’s harmful like necrophilia, and furthermore, is it possible to define the principle upon which that distinction between harmful vs nonharmful is based? Consent is obviously an important factor to consider.
But unlike the foot fetish, which is usually kept just in the bedroom, as a paraphilia, AGP almost inevitably escalates to the point of needing to decide whether to express it in public or not, creating a far more complicated ethical concern when evaluating whether its indulgence is socially and psychologically healthy.
There are arguably social norms that are violated when a male who has feminization/AGP as a kink feminizes in public. For better or worse, some AGPs have made peace with such normative violations and don’t care that they are violating norms as the dominant motivation in their life is the fulfillment of that deep seated need no matter the stigma surrounding it.
And some of the more political, trans activist AGPs are actively trying to change the underlying social norms that stigmatize full blown feminization in males in an attempt to completely remove the social stigma around AGP males feminizing in a public setting, including some AGPs actively lobbying at the legislative level for public accommodation of their kink via ideological policies like self-id, which have serious implications and potential ethical risks for society, especially on women and girls. This activism has led to an erosion of the protection of female-spaces, including in bathrooms, changing rooms, sports, domestic violence/rape centers, female prisons, lesbian only spaces, etc.
But regardless of your ethical beliefs on whether indulgence in AGP in public ought to be destigmatized, in reality there currently exists a stigma, which creates shame and feelings of taboo, particularly for AGPs who were raised in conservative, religious households that discouraged any and all hints of gender nonconformity.
So regardless of your thoughts on whether it is ultimately right or wrong, as a matter of current social reality, there is a big social cost in “living the lifestyle” 24/7 in full blown transition given how many people have an instinctive recoil or “ick factor” when it comes to seeing feminized males overtly crossdressing or having female-like secondary sex characteristics like breasts.
There are definitely some people who are specifically attracted to feminized males (a paraphilia known as gynoandromorphophilia, or GAMP), but they are by far the minority in the population. Most people likely have an unconscious “ick” factor and think that a male who has feminized himself has made himself far less attractive as a person.
But if AGP is the core aspect of your sexuality, to lead a satisfying sex life it seems necessary to indulge in it to some extent or another. And arguably having a satisfying sex life is a key component of overall life satisfaction given how fundamental our sexualities are to driving so much of our thinking, feeling, and behavior.
The question is how much indulgence the “goldilocks” amount is, because arguably there are downsides to full-blown escalation. I already “indulged” in it to a highly escalated extent when I transed myself for 8 years, took HRT, legally changed my name, crossdressed 24/7, took on a female social persona, went by a female persona at work, in my social life, out and about, etc.
But that lead to so many problems, both personally and at the psychological level and also socially and ethically insofar as it led to me taking up space in single-sex female spaces by using female bathrooms, etc.
Psychologically, the omnipresent anxieties about blending in socially in a female social role led to a lot of internal neurosis and feeling like everyone was walking on eggshells around me with things like pronouns and “inclusion” given existing political correctness and rampant woke ideology.
And ethically, I definitely put my own needs above that of women and girls and enabled via association with transgender ideology the erosion of protections for female-spaces, which was highly ethically questionable.
To my mind, it seems preferable, all things considered, to keep your full blown AGP expression in the bedroom as much as possible. That way you are expressing it only to people who are actively turned on and consenting in joining you in that full blown expression, minimizing how many people feel that “ick” factor.
But if you take it out of the bedroom and into 24/7 social life, you are now expressing it people who might have strong social-normative compulsions and unconscious “ick” factors against seeing it, unless you can manage to be 100% stealth, which is incredibly rare if not impossible for 99% of AGPs.
To my mind then, it seems the best of all possible worlds is to keep AGP in the bedroom and express it only as a kink or sexual fetish among consenting partners who are into that sort of thing, while maintaining a more normal, masculine expression in regular social life and trying to find the balance between this duality in as healthy as way as possible while working to minimize any feelings of shame that lead to binge-purge cycles.
Which is not to say you have to be the most masculine-presenting macho guy in regular social life. I feel like, for example, if you kept your legs shaved or your facial hair smooth or had long hair or dressed a bit androgynous, that wouldn’t be the biggest deal in the world.
Where it runs into problems is when there is a clear disconnect between your male presentation and clear female signifiers, such as if you had visible breasts but had a male sounding voice while fully crossdressed and definitely clockable as male.
That incongruence in expression violates too many social norms and will inevitably cause a breakdown in the social contract, leading to stress, anxiety, and ethical issues insofar as we assume it’s a bad thing to extravagantly break the social contract, which is not to say that we have to be completely gender conforming, or that the social contract itself isn’t evolving over time as collective society itself evolves and progresses (not all social progress is a bad thing in my opinion e.g. changing social norms around the expression of homosexuality.)
But there is a big difference between being a little bit gender nonconforming and full-blown female imitation and incongruence, which can lead to all kinds of social difficulties.
All things considered, it seems preferable to maintain the freedom to be able to present as an unambiguous regular dude while doing whatever feminization you can get away with and keeping the full-blown manifestation of it in the bedroom as part of an expression of a feminization kink.
But hey, this is all just based on my own personal experience and opinions trying to live with this damnable thing called autogynephilia.
Strongly agree, thanks for your honesty Ray!.