March 17, 2025 - 10:50pm
On Sunday night, viewers of the latest The White Lotus episode were treated to a soulful guest performance from Sam Rockwell as Frank, an old pal of series regular Rick (played by Walton Goggins). Frank meets Rick at a Bangkok hotel bar with a duffel bag of weapons, and orders chamomile tea as Rick sips Dewar’s.
Why the sobriety, Rick wants to know. And so, Frank tells him.
“I got it in my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked by me, and to feel that,” he explains. Frank donned lingerie and perfume and advertised for his middle-aged white guy doppelganger, and hired an Asian girl to watch them have sex. “I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me and think, I am her, and I’m fucking me.”
Franks waxes philosophical about sex and identity, asking the befuddled Rick: “Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside too, or inside, could I be an Asian girl? In that brief but compelling monologue, Frank has introduced viewers to one of the most controversial ideas in the cultural battle over all things trans: autogynephilia.
The term was coined by Dr Ray Blanchard, a Canadian psychologist and sexologist who worked in the Eighties with patients seeking sex changes. A subset of the men had always been feminine, and grew to be attracted to men — those he dubbed “homosexual transsexuals”. But the majority were masculine men with gender-typical childhoods. They were “erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women,” which could mean wearing women’s clothes or masturbating to the idea of themselves lactating or menstruating, or wanting men to have sex with them — not because they were gay, but because they wanted to “feel like a woman”.
Blanchard coined the term “autogynephilia” — Greek for “love of oneself as a woman”, sometimes shortened to AGP. He estimated that the majority of transwomen were autogynephiles, or AGPs — though the truth is, we have no way to tell.
That’s because no one is allowed to talk about AGP. Transwomen insist it’s not real, even as they describe their own propensities which line up with it. As Caitlin Jenner put it: “Sometimes I wonder if dressing up like this is the equivalent of having sex with myself, male and female at the same time.” But that didn’t stop some trans activists transforming Blanchard’s name into an insult: this “Blanchardian” idea was “alleging that most trans and transsexual women are psychosexually disordered ‘paraphilic’ ‘men’”.
The truth is that Blanchard, and other sexologists who’ve studied and written about AGP, don’t judge it. It’s but a clinical description of a cohort seeking sex-change surgery. It might not have seemed heretical at the time to ask why they wanted it. But indeed, to name AGP — to ask why someone might want to transition, rather than accept a simple gender identity/body mismatch — is so heretical that some sexologists who recognise it have had their livelihoods and reputations threatened. Any of us who write seriously about it find our dossiers on a website — a kind of “Wanted” poster for thought criminals.
And that’s where censorship really gets dangerous. Young men struggling with these erotic urges will have heard that gender identity and sexuality are separate, but for many people, they’re deeply intertwined. Maybe some AGPs will find more peace in physical transition, but maybe not. Maybe, like Frank, they’ll find that indulging the fantasy of being a woman only increases the obsession, only intensifies the need — because it can never truly be fulfilled. “I was trying to fuck my way to the answer,” Frank confesses.
Frank gives up sex altogether — along with booze, hence the chamomile tea, and the commitment to Buddhism over the “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering”. But maybe, if he’d grown up in a world that admitted autogynephilia existed, he wouldn’t have had to stop being sexual. Maybe he would have found a way to navigate AGP, or manage it.
Will a one-off scene in an HBO series open up that space for others struggling with those desires? I doubt it. Mike White, the series creator, hasn’t shied away from poking fun at the gender-elite classes. In season two, a young woman laments about how hard it is to find a nice boy who’s not non-binary. But just because he’s willing to portray a man aroused by the thought of himself as a woman doesn’t mean the cultural screaming matches around gender identity will calm down enough to tell the truth about it.
We don’t even know if White understands Frank as autogynephilic. What’s more important is that the rest of us watching do.
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SubscribeAny ‘Gender Affirmation’ theorist or ‘trans lobby’ fellow traveller who kids themselves (and the rest of us) that there’s no such thing as AGP and that gender fluidity has no erotic element needs to go and check out the PornHub stats for ‘sissy porn’, ‘forced feminisation’, ‘Futarani’, ‘furries’, ‘cuckhold’…or, if you’re even tougher of constitution (and have a bloody good lawyer), truly noxious w**k-sites like NIFTY, KIRSTEN’s ARCHIVE, and worse. There is a vast, vast, vast and growing underbelly out there of men who jerk off to weirder and weirder iterations and permutations of ‘gender fluid’ erotica. Many of the story arcs, images, tropes and sexual titillations mirror the language and tone of ‘respectable’ public debate about ‘gender fluidity’. Just with explicit – usually criminal – sexualised content. Many are, as their primary driving masturbatory element, couched in explicitly predatory terms, too. (Boys/men being kidnapped and turned forcibly into women/girls, via a narrative of serial sexual abuse and tiorture, until they accept womanhood as their true selves, complete with sexual milestones and awakenings, discovering the sexual girl-woman within…that sort of junk. Every step of the way garnished with explicit w**k fodder.
If you honestly want to understand the ‘Gender Affirmation therapy’ catastrophe – the greatest ‘medical’ outrage/crime since the Nazi medical experiments – go and check out the pornography our society’s most
dysfunctional and complexf**ked-up physically adult men are increasingly looking at and reading about on their lonely computer screens, while they jerk themselves off to lonely orgasm. The ‘trans lobby”s bullying of us all into an acquiescing mass-pretence that this rancid predatory sexuality both a) doesn’t exist, and b) anyway, has nothing to do with ‘gender affirmation’ trends of recent decades…has been central to enabling what ought to have been unthinkable: the ‘progressive’ community handing over our most vulnerable kids – those of uncertain adolescent-evolving sexuality (often, simply, a gay sexuality) – to precisely the kind of sexually predatory mindset – and in some cases, actual sexual predators – most likely to exploit that vulnerability for erotic ends, using the made-up lure-idea of ‘gender’.The parallels with the mournful history of similarly sexually vulnerable children and pedophile priests – using the made-up lure-idea of ‘god’s will/strictures’ (small ‘g’ only) – are of course deeply unpalatable for people who regard themselves as ‘progressive’, and ‘secular’ and ‘rational’. As are the parallels with the mournful history of, for example, those ‘progressives’ at the BBC who enabled the ruinous behaviours of sexually predatory men like Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris for so long – the lure-idea in that case being ‘feelgood celebrity’, or something. But such parallels are absolutely accurate, utterly apposite and – rightly – brutally accusatory. History will eventually heave the anti-CIS gender zealots, the anti-gay religious zealots, the multitude of anti-conservative Show Biz zealots, and all the various social apparati of their times that fell into enabling line, into the same dismal trash bin. It can’t happen soon enough.
But the appeal of these sites does not appear to be limited to trans people. Human sexual tastes are pretty broad – especially at the level of fantasy.
The same stats will tell you that gay male porn is pretty popular with women. Hard to explain, but it presumably does not mean that these women are “really” gay men, or want to be.
Personally, I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola.
I’m unsure if UK grammarians have the same lexicon as US grammarians, but that statement in the US is known as a dangling participle. Coincidentally.
I know someone, actually we’re friends, who worked in my late mother’s assisted living facility (and was wonderful to her), who was gender ambiguous, appeared to be a boy who identified as a girl, but didn’t get mad when the elderly redidents misgendered her. She’s an artist, and I was really puzzled when she showed some of her art in the common room of the facility. They were the most sensuous, erotic pencil drawings of—women! I was like, s/he loves women so much s/he wants to BE one? It’s a boy who wants to be a lesbian?? I had never heard of AGP.
Interesting post but you seem to have got confused as you describe this ‘boy’ as ‘she’. Boys are he.
Interesting, as historically and across cultures trans phenomena and homosexual phenomena have been associated. And, of course, there is no reason to suppose that trans phenomena have a single cause. The problem is when it is asserted (without real evidence) that all trans people are autoG.
It always gets me tons of downvotes, but I suspect that masculine presenting lesbians and effeminate gay men are “trans” in this broad sense, and close to what has been considered a “third gender” and the like historically.
European researchers discovered that a large proportion of homosexuals carry a gene associated with fertility.
In other words, gay men tend to have female relatives with more children than average.
I’m of the opinion that the sexual revolution, mostly a result of effective birth control and antibiotics for social diseases, profoundly changed most people’s relation to their own sexuality. It also birthed modern feminism, as women gained more control over childbirth, and sent birth rates plummetting.
This is now culminating in unusual expressions of sexuality, such as transgenderism.
There have probably always been tendencies for alternative sexualities among humans, but loosened social constraints allow them to arise. There probably are profound future implications for much of society in the future; for the present, sexuality is a private, individual matter, and should remain so.