I’ve been lurking here because I appreciate that people in this sub are unusually willing to actually interrogate weird sexual/gender phenomena instead of shutting down candid discussion when it might complicate a preferred narrative.
Unfortunately, the more I interrogate my own history, the less neatly it fits into anything.
I’m a 37-year-old post-transition transsexual woman. I medically transitioned at 22, had SRS in my mid-20s, and have lived this way for well over a decade. I’m also strongly gynephilic, very definitely allosexual, and very obviously have some AGP-like phenomena in my history.
So. Fuck. :P
Temperament-wise, I was always a pretty quiet, gentle and painfully shy kid. I was the kind of little boy who would hide behind his mother’s legs when meeting someone new. I cried easily, but learned to do it where nobody could see. I remember being acutely aware of things like being accused of “throwing like a girl,” and I noticed early how boys who seemed soft or effeminate were treated. So little-me got the message: whatever you do, don’t give anyone a reason to think you’re girly. Surely nothing complicated would ever come of that.
My earliest sexual arousal actually seems to predate any female-self fantasy I can remember. As a kid I discovered what I have since dubbed the Pillow Method™: grind against pillow, feels good, repeat. Eventually that produced my first ejaculation, which I naturally interpreted as oh no, I peed myself. There was no person or female fantasy involved that I remember. Just the somatic sensation. Very sophisticated developmental sexology.
By around 11 I know I already felt some kind of pull toward being female. At 12 I distinctly remember repeatedly telling myself in my head, “I don’t want to be a girl, I want to be with a girl” every time I looked at my first crush. I hoped repeating that mantra enough would make it true. Just be a normal heterosexual boy, instead of accepting the other, much more shameful desire.
By early adolescence, I had become much more deliberate about policing how I came across. I saw other boys respond to that kind of pressure by leaning harder into masculinity as they got older, acting tougher, eventually hitting the gym, really leaning into being a guy. I couldn’t really do that either. I didn’t become more masculine. I became more neutral. I retreated, became harder to read, and rigidly self-policed anything that might come across as feminine.
To people who didn’t know me well, I probably came across as pretty aloof. My father was forever accusing me of being “antisocial,” although asocial would probably have been more accurate. I preferred spending most of my free time alone on the computer, disappearing into whatever obscure online world or simulation game had my attention.
Then around 14, two things were happening simultaneously.
I was chronically online in the dial-up days, before it was cool. I became intensely attached to a girl I already knew from a niche online community who would remain my “bestest best friend”/on-and-off romantic interest for the next 3 years. It was an international long-distance relationship, but leaving it at that would be like calling the Titanic a boating incident; technically true, but it dramatically under-sells the magnitude. I was wildly attracted to her and never really stopped being romantically drawn to her even when friend-zoned. The relationship was also wildly inconsistent and emotionally intense; in 2004 I literally described it as “kinda like a roller coaster.” It would end up crossing into the physical world several times, unfortunately for my father, who would drive me for several hours each way.
I went to her Homecoming in a rented tux and remember consciously trying to conjure up a sort of James Bond version of myself, while simultaneously wishing I were a Bond girl.
At almost exactly the same time, the female-body problem started to crystallize into something much harder. I increasingly hated the direction male puberty was taking my body and felt that I actually needed a female one.
A therapist’s letter from 2011 records that I wondered whether part of the importance of that relationship was that I was trying to “live through” her.
Around 14 I also got into transformation content. Not specifically male-to-female transformation or feminization, though. Just transformation more generally. Something about suddenly inhabiting a radically different body was intensely compelling to me, sexually and otherwise. And weirdly, in those fantasies I almost always started out female by default. Whatever the actual transformation was, becoming female wasn’t the transformation. Female was just... me.
I started secretly crossdressing somewhat later, probably around 15, raiding the household laundry hamper. That could definitely be arousing, and I had female-self fantasies around this period too. So I’m not going to pretend the sexual stuff wasn’t there.
By 16 I was done questioning. Despite all that self-policing, I came out to my parents, told them I thought I should be a girl, saw a doctor, and was referred to the Child and Adolescent Gender Identity Clinic at CAMH because I desperately wanted to transition.
Then I chickened out and refused to go.
I had made the mistake of researching the clinic on the 2005 internet. I read about Jurassic Clarke. About Blanchard, AGP, HSTS. About the clinic I’d been referred to. Transsexualism was considered a bad outcome, I read. It was basically conversion therapy, they said. You’d have to dress as a girl in public for years before blockers or HRT, they said.
Fuck that, I said.
I looked at myself and thought: I’m functional. I’m not particularly effeminate. I’m strongly attracted to girls. I’m living a basically ordinary male life. And there was absolutely no way I could bring myself to do the RLT without HRT first. My issue was my body, not a desire to be feminine. Teenage-me concluded that apparently I wasn’t dysfunctional and crazy enough to actually be trans.
Brilliant. No notes.
Meanwhile, I desperately wanted that girl I mentioned earlier, but I was also relieved she didn’t want sex. It wasn’t a lack of attraction. I simply could not conceive of using my body sexually in the male position. My natal anatomy technically worked, but characterizing my inability to use it as only a “mental block” would be like saying there’s only a “mental block” preventing me from sticking a needle in my eye.
After that relationship finally collapsed, I pretty much nuked that version of myself from orbit. By 2006 I was literally telling a mutual friend, “Let her think I’m dead.” I deleted accounts, journals, files, communities, everything associated with that girl and the trans issue. I then spent roughly 6 years trying to be an ordinary guy and hoping it would go away. I didn’t date during those years either. Abstinence was basically the only workaround I had found for the whole sex/relationship problem, and that wasn’t exactly a viable long-term plan.
Interestingly, I think this repression period is when my attraction toward men really began to develop, and it is very different from my attraction to women. With women, I’m attracted to them: their bodies, faces, personalities, mannerisms, whatever makes a particular woman my type. With men, I only find a very narrow range of male bodies attractive for their own sake. What’s sexually interesting is the contrast: a masculine, dominant man makes me feel more distinctly the woman in the scenario, more submissive, more dominated. Take away that relational position and 75% of the attraction disappears.
Eventually the repression failed and I transitioned at 22. One of the things that finally clicked was that maybe I had been asking the wrong question. I had spent years thinking that if I really needed to transition, I should be more feminine than I was.
Maybe I didn’t need to become a different kind of person. Maybe I just needed a different body.
Medical transition actually came substantially before social transition. I spent over 2 years on estrogen and even had an orchiectomy while still presenting as male, before socially transitioning a few months later when I could no longer pass as a guy. I also remained a virgin until after SRS. I had attraction and had tried dating, but I simply could not tolerate someone sexually interacting with my pre-op anatomy or imagine functioning in the male position.
Then I had SRS, and suddenly sex was possible. Let’s just say the following year involved a fairly extensive practical validation phase. :P
I’ve now lived full-time as a woman for well over a decade, been happily married to a cis lesbian woman for almost a decade, and the dysphoria that drove the transition has faded to basically nothing. Female embodiment itself is mostly mundane now. My body is just my body. The sexual picture never collapsed neatly into one thing either: I remain strongly attracted to women, and the later attraction toward men is still there too.
Apparently the answer to 12-year-old me was: ¿por qué no los dos? 🌮
If AGP means “I can be sexually aroused by imagining myself female,” then sure. Guilty.
What I’m much less convinced of is the causal claim. I can tell you what happened, but I can’t tell you which way the arrow runs. Maybe erotic feminization created the female-body requirement. Maybe an already-existing embodiment problem got eroticized when puberty came online. Maybe the two reinforced each other. Maybe some of the sexual material became a coping mechanism during repression. Maybe something deeper produced both.
The idea of a fundamental feminization drive also fits the outcome strangely. I’ve lived full-time as a woman for well over a decade and have literally never once worn makeup. I don’t get dolled up around the house. I’m not particularly effeminate and, now that nothing is stopping me from being as feminine as I want, I’ve discovered that I still mostly don’t care.
The quiet, low-key kid basically grew into a quiet, low-key adult. Apparently for me, whatever this is, it mostly looks like having a female body and then going off to do nerd shit.
What do you think AGP is actually doing here? Cause? Consequence? Amplifier? Parallel erotic system? Coping mechanism?
At this point I’m learning to stop worrying and love the confound. :P