I treated men with “gender issues” for about 20 years, starting in the mid-1990’s. Most of these men were struggling with conflicts about their sexualized cross dressing, with a few having arrived at the idea that they wanted to transition. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand and help them, but the task was complicated by the men’s ambivalent motives to continue the behavior versus stopping them. They essentially all acted like addicts who periodically would resolve to stop, often in reaction to others discovering their secret.
Over time I came to several conclusions about these patients. First and most importantly, they are all males. It is rare to see a psychiatric problem that is so confined to one sex. This definitely suggests that transvestic fetishism is a kink associated with male biology. The second conclusion is that most of them were diagnosable with narcissistic personality disorder. To a great extent, transvestic fetishism appears to be a complication of that disorder. There was a minority of patients who did not appear as narcissistic, although they were self-centered and immature in their marriages to a significant degree.
I stopped working with these guys for some of the same reasons I stopped working with people with eating disorders. The psychiatric issues were at least moderately severe, the patients were ambivalent about recovery, and narcissistic people are for the most part not as amenable to honest self appraisals and insight as are most other patients.
I would have loved to have been able to refer them to someone like you, Dr. Burgo, but alas, most of my colleagues were not interested in trying to work with these men. I completely support your work, and am relieved to no longer be working with these men myself.
The app is laughably poor - you can’t even financially subscribe to someone.
You must copy your article, delete it, then repost. This creates a domino reposition of a response stream, it’s 2024 and Substack can’t get a trivially simple app to do basic threading and posting which is native to WordPress.
It´s remarkable the defense and simpathy the author shows to men´s perversions and a clear paraphilia. Although interesting how this article show that feminity - sexist stereotypes forced upon women - is a male fantasy. He completly disregard the power dynamics in society and how these men pose a real threat to women. This also proves how much men need women to validate themselves and how disgusting and little they are without women.
Also, psychologists constanly have told women to be compassionate of men, who we know are dangerous. Sexologists and psychologists explain us how our rightful fear and rejection of these men should be soften through compassion: "they had a bad childhood" "life was so difficulte for them" "they suffer their shame :("; while we pay all the consequences of their sick behavior. Important to note that, OF COURSE, is the mother´s fault. All of these poor men were somehow badly treated or humillated by their mothers. There will always be a woman to blame for men´s disgusting behavior.
Agree. Women are being told to give up their hard-won sex-based rights and protections to make men with sexual and psychological problems feel better. We all have some kind of trauma from childhood, but we don't all end up trying to erase an entire sex class. I say no. I'm not giving up my rights and protections to these bullies without a fight.
Exactly, it is crazy how psycologists try to oriente us towards compassion of dangerous and missbehaved men. The reason for compassion this time is that they feel shame of their disgusting behavior, like we have to praise them and be comprehensive for them just because they are ashamed of themselves . While we loose all our sex based right, women who speak up against these sexual fetish exhibitionists get bully, threaten and violated. In the article these men who go to therapy to find simpathy for their paraphilia are portrait as brave, but the real bravery is shown by women, who were the first to opposed and dennounce the abuses of these men. I have a question: Do psychologists really care so much for mens wellbeing (and so little for womens) that women should feel compassion of sexual fetishits because they experience shame? Really? isn´t that a bit much to ask given the circumstances?
I would like to apologize for the sexist behaviors enacted by members of my profession at your expense and the expense of other people who may be reading this post. Unfortunately, I have no control over my colleagues. Most of them were openly and oppressively sexist when I was a grad student in the 1970's. It comes out differently now, in the form of the obnoxious enabling, codependence, and judgmental, holier-than-thou posturing.
We should also note that lots of men are emotionally abused within families and do not end up as transvestites. There are additional factors involved which are not well understood.
Perhaps you should consider what we are to do about them, then, as, like it or not, AGP men exist. And furthermore, these days, they are causing a problem by encouraging and amplifying the trans cult and by invading women-only spaces. I can understand you having no sympathy for them, as you don't have the problem yourself, nor is it your job to treat them (if they want that). The author has a group of patients who are not happy with their AGP and are trying to rid themselves of it, or perhaps come to accept it and let it exist in a non-harmful way.
My point is that if we wish to reduce the ills caused by AGP, we have to find out how to lead such people into a more mainstream mindset, in other words how to treat them. Sympathy is surely the first step in trying to understand and then treat them. Take a parallel case: drug addiction. If I disapprove of drug addiction, don't like addicts, don't have sympathy for them, perhaps just wish they'd all go away, I'd be the last person with any chance of helping them quit. So while I understand you railing against them, it isn't going to be part of the solution. That's one reason why I too would be useless in treating both drug addicts and autogynephiliacs!
As for the problems caused by attachment disorders, well we are only beginning to recognise how much harm is caused by them. That isn't blaming women, and does not imply that mothers treat children badly or humiliatingly. If I can convince you of one thing only it is this: the first attachment in early childhood has the greatest effect of one's ability to form relationships throughout life. The author correctly identifies all Cluster B diagnoses as stemming from this. It might be poverty, divorce, drugs/alcohol, mental illness/personality disorder and probably a host of other reasons why that attachment does not form properly, but if it does not, a pattern is set. To deny that suggests one has formed a defense against it in one's own experience...
No one is denying the existence AGP aka travestites men, they have always been around, they just used to hide it and now they find found a way not only to exhibit their sexual fetish but being celebrated by it. I don´t think it is a fair comparison the one you are doing - sexual masochits fetichists with drug addicts-; I think is more accurate to compare them with paedophiles (a lot of men have advocated for sympathy towards them, they even claim they are a sexual orientation) and I don´t think sympathy for any men who who finds pleasure in sexual fetichism it will be of any help to society, psycologist have done their bit normalizing their disgusting behavior and look where we are. They convinced the entire society they were victims, while trying to destroy every limit, right and space women rightfully aqcuired. They bully and abuse women and then they go to therapy. As another comment pointed out, they are narcisistic and go on and off with they fetish.
It doesn´t surprise me, how it is usually men who start advocating for sympathy towards their fellow missbehaved and abusive men.
I believe today that no woman is "forced" into a stereotype, although she may be pressured to fit a stereotype, but we have agency. Some choose the easy way, some choose to buck the pressure.
What do you propose we do with this analysis? From a public policy perspective I think it supports a rad fem vision of treating these guys like men, keeping them out of women's sports and prisons, etc.
There are few if any psychiatric disorders that are more exclusively male than dressing up in women’s clothes for sexual reasons. It is almost comical that men who do this usually present it as evidence that they “feel like a woman” or even that they are a woman.
I hate that feminists now routinely seem to accept the transgenderist term allocated to them- “radical” or “gender critical” feminists. This, like “cis” is a Trojan horse conjured up by TRAS, to plant the idea that there are different kinds of feminists- ie “good” (‘trans’ inclusive) and “bad” feminists (all the rest). There are just feminists. It’s TRA’s that are radical. Anyone who agrees that transwomen are women is not a feminist (or a biologist for that matter).
Second Wave Feminists coined the term "radical feminist." Most of us had been active in the radical left, especially the movement against the Vietnam War, prior to the emergence of our own movement in about 1970. There was a long period of time during the late Eighties through recent years when I didn't think of myself in those terms anymore. I was involved in the usual American lifestyle of starting a career, building a home and so on, and the level of sexism that was normalized during the Seventies seemed to be turning in a better direction. I was surprised that a small percentage of women and men in my ultra liberal city of choice still labelled me as a radical feminist and refused to work with me as a therapist because of that. (These people were all liberal Democrats). I currently am accepting that I will always be viewed as a radical, simply because I am an independent thinker.
The term "cis-gender" was coined by trans activists whose basic intent is to push the belief that having a normal sexual identity is no more normal than any of their unusual states of being. Trans activists hate it that most of us go through our days not being troubled about which sex we are. They label that acceptance as "cis-gender privilege" rather than normality.
Yes- you’re spot on. It’s becoming radical to think independently. I have friends I love, who are much smarter and more educated than me, but they are incapable of thinking critically about some things- mostly transgenderism. I think people like that have often been raised in acadaemic lefty families and we’re probably more indoctrinated than they like to think. Whereas I find that friends and colleagues who enjoy robust debate are often from different backgrounds and have found their views by themselves. I come from a religious fundamentalist family and even as a child could not help but wonder what the truth was all the time, and whether I should believe it / why etc. i think most people are more concerned about who else believes it, then they’ll decide if it’s cool to have that view. It’s lazy, and depresses me that most people are so gutless.
Yes, it seems to me that Americans have become a lot more conventional or conforming, more focused on "what do other people think?" When "everybody thinks that way" it becomes safe for them to think it and say it, but not until then. I find that many women online continue to devalue "feminism" even while they seize the opportunities that feminist women fought and won for them. They don't even acknowledge that back when those ideas too were too scary to think or to voice, some women put themselves on the line for women's rights and still do.
Absolutely. When did we all become so gutless! I’ve committed social suicide at times putting up the occasional article on Facebook about eg men being awarded women’s accolades and prizes, for which I’ve been cancelled. What’s most upsetting for me is being labelled a bigot. I’m at pains to say that while I’m unable to believe there is any evidence of such a thing as “trans” (or even “gender”) I completely accept that there are people who do believe this, in the same way I accept all my friends and neighbours, whatever their faith. The thing is too, all the most strident TRA’s are incredibly scathing of anyone else’s religious faiths, but transgenderism is absolutely faith based, a secular religion. The holy trans trinity is “me, myself and I”! And the only difference between transgenderism and other religions, is that it has nothing positive or good about it and is entirely corrosive, nasty and deceitful.
I loathe the insidious ways transgender activists insert their ideology into public life. Eg in my public service workplace, diversity and inclusion training (provided by lobby group ACON, paid by taxpayer!) includes encouraging us to all announce our pronouns etc (I never will!). There’s so much dishonesty, fakery and outright lies involved too. Eg we’re not told we HAVE to announce our pronouns, but the pint is hammered that this is THE most vulnerable group and they need to feel included and valued and well- what does it cost you to announce your pronouns, if it helps stop a tranny from feeling depressed ?
The idea of feminism has indeed become very radical again. I have received a lot of abuse and even physical threats after identifying myself as a feminist on some Substack sites. I strongly supported the authors and their work, but when the authors became identified as "conservative," many of the commenters on their sites apparently felt free to harrass feminists as well as to make a lot of openly sexist comments about women in general.
I can remember back in the 60's ad 70's, the knee-jerk, emphatic statement about not being "a feminist" that most girls would make in a conversation about girls and women's rights. Those fighting against the economic and political rights of women turned it into a dirty word. I happily state I'm a feminist, believing in the right of both males and females to self-determination.
First public policy has to change with regard to self-declaring gender. There seem to be more than a few non-AGP, heterosexual male sociopaths who find that an irresistible opportunity to game the system, e.g. women's sports, rape centers, prisons, bathrooms. Some tight gatekeeping is needed, including psych folks willing to call them on the grifting.
Rad Fem tends toward derision rather than solving the problem, and tends to frame everything in terms of privilege/power dynamics which is inappropriate when analyzing individual people and their problems. They get a lot right but the right is too mixed with other things.
Except that your role is necessarily to be sympathetic and understanding, and everyone else has to deal with the fall out.
While shame operated properly, AGP men would keep their paraphilia private, get help, share the information with as few people as possible. Now they feel no shame, they feel a right to impose their paraphilia on everyone else, including children, so we're all roped into affirming a fantasy which damages everyone, including them. Shame is useful in early development - it's also necessary to keep society on track. These men are pushing social norms off track, manipulating the culture so that young women are being groomed into believing they're trans, blocking puberty, arresting their physical, mental and emotional development. And the whole world is being coerced into denying reality.
It's not just the fetishists being harmed - I understand why you'd want to help - it's a generation of children and young people. This explanation is convincing, but "poor guys" doesn't justify the resultant abuse to everyone else.
This article undermines itself in the first sentence by using the highly misleading description "trans-rights activists (TRAs)" for the transification cultists.
The transifiers are NOT advocating for "rights" as traditionally understood, but rather for special privileges that actually abrogate the rights of women (and men) to free association in single-sex spaces, organizations, events, etc. https://womensbillofrights.com
By acquiescing to the preferred language of the cult, half the battle is already lost.
It doesn’t help me empathize with these guys. I get the claim they are suffering. As the author says - that’s part of life. It doesn’t give them a right to mock me, to invade my spaces and my daughters, to demean us, to demand we play along with their delusions. Personal suffering does not convey a right to harm and harass others. People deal with personal suffering all the time. Lots of people have issues grasping reality. Maybe if these dudes spent less time focusing on themselves, their wants, their sex fetishes, and their selfish desires they’d find some fulfillment in life. I’ve never met a happy person who sits around pontificating and engaging in self-gratification. Happiness is never found through selfishness.
I didn’t read the author as saying anything about their suffering giving them the right to do what they do, in fact, exactly the opposite. Their behavior is despicable, but understandable to me after reading this.
In his first sentence he presented a strawman argument. "For women gathering in groups to advocate for single sex spaces and female-only sports, nothing provokes more outraged disgust." Why did he even put that in there? Then he goes onto describe the profound shame the men feel, implying (above) the mean women make it worse.
I think because they ARE disgusting and their behavior is outrageous. I understand where you’re coming from. I wondered at his objectives when I started reading. But I think a careful reading of the whole article reveals how difficult he finds these individuals to treat and how unsympathetic their behavior is. The author just provides the underlying motivation for their despicable behavior.
I have a different read and find it to be standard fare, dragging women into male dysfunction. There's no reason to even be mentioning women in an article about a very specific male mental health problem. He doesn't just mention women but literally starts this article by naming "women gathering in groups" and their outrage, all in the first sentence. By the 3rd paragraph he mentions "radical feminists." He does at least put into quotation marks "as women experience," seeming to acknowledge a male cannot know how women experience feelings. Further down in the article he states, "While I can understand how many women might take offense at the idea of “womanhood” as a form of relaxation for men, reading these passages stirs deep compassion." Two points and the first is that he seems to be suggesting women need to be more compassionate. The other part of this is he never mentions how males view these AGP males, and whether or not men need to have more compassion for these AGP males. He once again lectures women with "While many women find the idea of men masturbating to pornography displayed on their computer screens to be repulsive or offensive, such men often do so because they’re lonely, sad, anxious, or depressed." Rather than just state why men masturbate to pornography, he has to get some wrongthink in there about women. This is some male self-importance, as I can state I never contemplate why men masturbate. I will give him a nod at the end for mentioning the vindictiveness of some abusive autogynephiles.
I really admire how you unpacked these passages and named the guilt message they communicate to women. I was interested in how Burgo emphasized the need to recognize that narcissism is a defense against his patients' feelings of inadequacy and shame. Narcissists are quite often bullies, or at least nasty. Don't most people know that bullies are generally overcompensating for feeling weak, small, inadequate and like a failure? One still has to deal with the bullying, no matter what the bully's unconscious fears might be.
Great, we have even more evidence, as far as it goes, of what we already knew - that AGPs are seriously fucked up.
But let's be clear, we didn't need a psychologist to tell us this. Anyone with common sense and unobscured observation can see it.
The field of psychology has been profoundly compromised by the gaslighting of AGPs, and are enabling and validating the medical mutilation of vulnerable children.
I hope Burgo is as motivated to call out this gross failing of his profession and the practitioners participating in the travesty as he is to presume to lecture the rest of us based on credentials from a discipline with serious credibility issues.
Interesting piece, judicious editing may be in order. However, I don’t agree with the premise of this article. The sample set of AGP discussion about these men are ones who have emotional issues of sufficient degree that they require help, either psychological or “Reddit” chat. That prevents generalization to a larger audience.
There are many logical contradictions in the text - for instance the AGP inevitably presents as slutty, yet it is spoken of as a maternal (e.g. non-slutty) feeling. Therefore, they don’t present as maternal to themselves. The analysis of the situation isn’t illuminating to me.
Most people embedded in Western European cultural contexts have shame over sex - anyone not accustomed to public sex displays will be feel “shamed”, AGP no different. That’s not differentiating in the experience, not explanatory.
One unique aspect of AGP presentation is non-consensual induction of others into the sex fantasy, similar to other types of exhibitionism, which is what I believe we all respond badly to, particularly women. It’s a particularly acute part of the game - not just autoerotic masturbatory fantasies. Aside from rage, that’s not touched on.
Presenting as a slutty woman, intentionally creating a situation to irritate others, narcissistic rage at intentionally evoked rejection, isolated masturbatory fantasy replay, these are content that, were we to read AGP porn (which I have in curiosity) form the narrative.
I would also counter with considering Auto-androphilia, men who derive erotic satisfaction from presenting to themselves and others as sex-stereotyped caricatures - enormously muscular, highly aggressive, militaristic, sporting, etc.
I think these are eerily similar variations on underlying drive to gain sexual satisfaction by creating and controlling responses of others through authoritarian exhibitionism, providing fodder for later sexual masturbatory replay.
AGP is easy to see, because it’s unexpected. AAP is difficult to discern because the behaviors are expected, even lauded, and others don’t see the sexual part
Thanks Sandra. Somehow people have forgotten about fetishistic exhibitionists. These people intentionally display themselves to get reactions which they get off on. With internet today it’s effortless, and trivial to avoid legal repercussions. A male AGP troll who wishes to disturb women is in paradise. Furthermore, should someone object at being drawn into the game, the authoritarian Narcissism kicks in and amplifies the sexual impact, a troll army of AGP begin shrieking. It’s stunning to me, and obvious. The TS I knew from the 80’s and 90’s are utterly different from these men. Nobody is calling out what is actually going on.
A lot of women have also experienced violence from these guys, both intimate partner violence and the well publicized assaults and physical threats by activist mobs. None of the men I worked with professionally were violent, as far as I know. The ones who transitioned all had wives who loved them, but most of the women were heterosexual and not interested in being in a pseudo lesbian relationship.
I wonder if it’s not part and parcel of the game - blame the victim: “she didn’t accept me so...”
To me it’s about getting off on controlling others as part of an abusive sexual fantasy, violently if necessary. It gaslights those in the context with the fiction of gender to disarm critical response.
The most disturbing version is extending the abusive fantasy into childhood by recruiting weak adults to project the fiction onto their own children, or children in their care, again gaslighting any critical response with the fiction of gender.
I’ve been around too many kinky men to pretend what’s actually going on is “self-actualisation” or some type of reactive formation.
I want to respond in more detail to your interesting insights on this subject, but will need to delay until tomorrow. I have a pile of paperwork here that needs my attention if I want to get paid. Please "hold a compassionate and accountable space" for me until I return. LOL!
Your observations about narcissistic and fetishistic exhibitionists are really striking and well expressed. Your point that people seem to have "forgotten" what these folks are like is very interesting. I have seen a few online comments about trans activists such as Dylan Mulvaney being "narcissistic exhibitionists," but for the most part people don't seem to recognize that this is a group of folks who have always been around, and always behaved in similar ways. Joe Biden apparently has quite a fondness for them, even though he doesn't seem to get it that they represent a special type of gender craziness that is not typical of trans-identified people in general.
Most of the transvestic fetishists I saw in my clinical practice were not at all exhibitionistic, except to themselves privately in their home mirrors. The ones who had highly cooperative (or coerced) wives were perhaps an exception. BTW, I was surprised by how many wives were actually okay with strapping on a dildo and having anal sex with their husbands while he fantasized himself as a woman. I thought I had heard everything prior to that revelation.
Your point about the exhibitionists functioning as trolls online is also important. So many trans activists and woke activists are at least as gratified by negative attention as they are by admiration. I think the ones who specifically want to offend are probably a sicker bunch than the Mulvaney types who primariy seek admiration.
I read about a research study in which a group of heterosexual men diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder were asked to rate their level of animosity towards various groups of people. I think the groups included lesbians, gay men, and a few other minorities (I don't recall for sure which ones). The results differed from what the researchers had expected. The men in the study did not admit to feeling significant levels of negative feeling towards any group except heterosexual women, whom they pretty much hated. The researchers concluded that the men hated the people who were perceived as being able to withhold the supplies that the men needed and wanted the most.
I am mom to a young man who declared a trans identity several years ago and who, I'm pretty sure, is AGP. I think it's true that shame and low self-esteem underlie AGP. However, it's distressing to read over and over again that said shame and low self-esteem result from poor attachment in infancy (from the mother being unpredictable or rejecting, according to attachment theory). I carried my baby boy around in a sling, picked him up and nursed him every time he cried, and spent almost every waking hour entertaining him and making sure his brain was stimulated (lots of reading, foreign languages, tummy time, etc.). If I made a serious mistake as a parent, it was to come too quickly to his rescue whenever he felt distress; I'm convinced that he never learned to self-soothe. Dad, on the other hand, was a bit of a cold fish, and I was often angry with him for not giving our son more attention. I saw how the lack of his father's attention pained our son, and I think it made him feel inadequate around other boys. I have also wondered if the contrast between my cheerleading, lack of attention from dad, and lukewarm reception from peers confused our son in a way that could lead to narcissism. I've heard many other mothers of mtf sons say "we used to be so close," and I don't think they are lying. Why are psychological problems always the mother's fault and the role of fathers never mentioned?
Thank you for linking to Eva's essay. She does stellar work and I am proud to be her editor. It was good meeting you at Genspect. "Being/becoming a man" has changed its meaning several times over in a short historical timespan. We have quite lost the art of inculcating manhood into boys because we are not even sure what that even means, anymore. I've been talking about this problem since 1989 and Iron John. It's only gotten worse.
Cross dressing men are a cross-cultural phenomenon, and have been reported as existing in tribal cultures where men are generally expected to be warriors. I think that male version of "dressing as a woman" is associated somehow with the Y chromosome rather than with culture, but obviously when the behavior is encouraged as it is in the U.S. we see more of it.
Really great essay! This is the first essay I have read on agp that gets at the truth, so I have many, MANY thoughts (mini essay incoming):
Part 1:
“AGPs are self-evidently evil and scarcely human. Men who derive sexual satisfaction from putting on women’s lingerie and masturbating in front of a mirror are the devil incarnate.”
If you recognize that women are people too, many of whom also have core shame, then you might understand where this reaction to men who dehumanize us by reducing us to objects for sexual use, comes from. For many women, it is terrifying, disgusting, and enraging to see men like this, because it compounds our own experiences with core shame- hence the narcissism of some women’s reactions. For me, there have been times when seeing men exhibit “agp” in public is something like seeing myself be dismembered and then used. So, to call that “distressing” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
“object relations theory, and in particular, Melanie Klein’s description of defenses against need and dependency.”
“To evade unbearable desire and envy,” I opined, “Schreber transformed himself into the object of his own libido so he wouldn’t need anyone or anything outside himself to satisfy it.”
YES!!! I have been trying to put this into words but that is what I think is going on here too. Glad to know there’s already a theory here. It’s all about narcissistic control- terror of the ego being damaged by the horror of vulnerability that comes with the necessity to give up control and seek outside ourselves for sex and love- (I said this online and got called a shrieking radical feminist who hates men, obviously, by Benjamin Boyce, Bailey et al ) which is why it’s so common among autistic people (for whom there is increased anxiety surrounding connecting with others)- females AND males. Only males tend to take it to such extremes though, which I think is bc they are aided by patriarchal society in their attempts to symbolically dismember and own women. Although women with these same personality traits/childhood issues tend to retreat into gay-male fandoms etc. VERY common in ROGD girls.
“Leading theorists such as J. Michael Bailey tend to dismiss psychodynamic explanations. Others attempt to destigmatize AGP by relabeling it autoheterosexuality–a variation on normal heterosexual attraction that just happens to boomerang back on itself. They tend to deploy scientific-sounding terms like “erotic target location error” that make AGP into a kind of computer glitch, a coding error without psychological meaning or content, and certainly without developmental/psychological roots in childhood.”
Totally agree! Just bc it sounds scientific doesn’t mean it means anything. It’s the same issue as the gender identity issue- trying to turn it into a scientific phenomenon often obscured what is actually happening psychologically.
I’m very persuaded by your take, although I wish you’d exercise a bit more compassion for women. You might consider that women often face the worst and most terrifying sexual harm from men who are extraordinarily vulnerable, insecure and sad and who have deep shame: true defensive narcissists. I actually had to tell a male therapist once that women actually tend to have very little problems from confident, handsome, masculine men who want them for “only one thing” in the therapist’s words (a handsome, masculine man being clear and open that he wants casual sex with you? What woman has a problem with that? That’s not a threat!) And that the real threat of being “used” by men who have fantasies of domination, harm, and control of women (which is the psychology behind rape) comes from the truly, deeply vulnerable men. The “incel to transbian pipeline” is another great example of this phenomenon.
“core shame as I call it throughout my work and which I define as a deeply painful sense of being damaged or defective at one’s core, usually unconscious and often experienced as feeling ugly or deformed.”
Wow great to hear this out into words. Too bad men who experience this can’t connect and seek healing on this with the women they might desire, bc 90% of the women I know have this, as a legacy of patriarchy. It often takes the form of “the mother wound” (inheriting sexual and gender based trauma from your mom and passing it down). But I guess doing that would require empathy for women, and an understanding of women as human beings, and that would render their coping mechanism ineffective.
Ha “Know it All” as a narcissistic coping mechanism! I can definitely relate to that!
I wonder when people will become more aware that Ann Lawrence got fired from his job as an anesthesiologist due to allegations of misconduct from multiple medical professionals who witnessed him examine the genitals of an unconscious female patient after the gynecologist had left the operating room. There are publicly available legal documents outlining what occurred and why he was terminated and barred from practicing. He also has two allegations of sexual impropriety from transwomen towards him. Just putting that out there- that his version of himself and his life story is often wildly divorced from reality.
“I find the Lawrence theory self-evidently wrong and, to be honest, a little preposterous.” Thank god someone said so. Me too.
"You might consider that women often face the worst and most terrifying sexual harm from men who are extraordinarily vulnerable, insecure and sad and who have deep shame."
This. My compassion ends when the "victim" harms others.
For sure! I wish male psychotherapists would listen to women more. WE are the ones on the receiving end of men’s most unguarded sexual behaviors, after all. Just MAYBE we have some insight?
Yes. It's easy to be compassionate as a male therapist on the other side of the desk from an unhappy, disturbed man. But it's much harder for the women who encounter, date or marry such guys. And the transactivists have shown the worst combination of feminine whining & male rage.
They SHOULD be ashamed of themselves for being losers who jerk off to porn for hours every day, envy women's sex-decision-making power (what the biologists call female choice) so much that they resent and hate us for it, so they dress up in woman-face costume to fall in lust with themselves so to avoid being rejected. Plus, they are getting off on the Machiavellian power trip of making every man, woman, and child use the pronouns/names of their fetishist personas.
The “incel to transbian pipeline” is hideously sinister and we're seeing it more and more. The "Cotton Ceiling" being a sickening, "rapey" case in point. It's a pathetic last-ditch attempt to get women to sleep with them and it's NEVER going to work! HOW do they not see this?!
Yes truly disgusting- just open sexual coercion of women. I think there’s a distinct difference between men who have this or similar issues as one of the cores of their cross-gender identity (which many women have as well- especially “ROGD” girls/women AND boys/men) versus men who have CHOSEN to make this their public identity and lifestyle (the men doing this in public). There’s clearly a difference in character between a man who would say “why do I do this weird thing- I hate it, someone please help!” Versus “I will violate every single person’s boundaries I need to in order to keep lying to myself about my behavior.” It’s just two totally different personality types. ROGD kids/young adults with narcissistic social and sexual coping mechanisms I have a lot of empathy and pity for. Men who have chosen to make their sexual disorder everyone’s/mainly women’s problem: zero pity.
They are brainwashed by porn into believing that lesbians like to have sex with men. It's a delusion of the average American man, not just unsophisticated rubes as it used to be back before internet porn.
“When I crossdress the primary reason is AGP. However, like you, I also crossdress to self soothe. When something happens that hurts my feelings, I often want to put on women’s clothes, cook, clean, etc.”
This is when women lose the ability to calmly listen to these men’s experience. It’s just not possible to listen to this and not feel hatred and rage. It’s like a white person claiming they need to go to their hut and pretend to be a black slave on a plantation to feel calm. It’s just too insulting to our own experiences of trauma. To have the ego so wounded on top of any core ego wounds is intolerable, and only sick people would subject themselves to it.
“I also want to make a point rarely acknowledged but which every man knows to be true: sometimes we masturbate to relieve stress and soothe ourselves.”
Every single woman I know both knows orgasms relieve stress, and masturbate specifically to relieve stress. Women are commonly encouraged by our gynecologists to ramp up masturbation during our period to relieve the increased stress and pain.
“While many women find the idea of men masturbating to pornography displayed on their computer screens to be repulsive or offensive, such men often do so because they’re lonely, sad, anxious, or depressed.”
Men also rape women bc they feel lonely, sad, anxious, or depressed. It’s not that women have a problem with men having feelings. It’s that we have a problem that men try to solve their feelings by hurting us, exploiting us, and disrespecting us. How is that so hard for men to understand?
Again, I must impress upon male psychologists that the scariest men to women (like the ones that actually commit harm against us) are the vulnerable ones (ESPECIALLY the vulnerable ones with weird sex problems). Not trying to insult men who are trying to overcome their agp coping mechanisms. Just stating a fact so male psychologists stop blaming us for something we’re not even doing wrong.
“Feeling deficient and plagued by shame, often focused on their inability to take the initiative in a “masculine” way, they take flight into cross-sex identification where to be a woman means being protected from the exigencies of life.”
It sounds like what might help these men kick their compulsive behaviors is receiving feminist education about what existing in a world set up by men to abuse, oppress, and exploit women actually entails for women (namely, endless struggle and effort on the woman’s part to not be dragged down into the depths of an unsatisfactory life- even just going on a first date for a woman requires a level of effort, stress and work in assessing the basic safety of the man that men couldn’t even imagine having to put up with- the effort required in even barely dating as a woman is often exhausting, and scary).
“In my own experience, doubts about one’s viability as a male often lie behind such “unwillingness or inability.” To take determined action in pursuit of a desired object and to persist until attaining it, whether the object be a sexual partner or a non-sexual goal,…” This is what I have been doing as a woman to cure my own issues with intimacy. Pursuing sexual pleasure, a partner, anything I want in life, without shame, is what I believe is required for all women to be comfortable as women and to accept and find worth in their femininity. It seems to me that these men’s problems are a shrinking from life, which is also my problem, and many women’s problem. Respectfully, I don’t see that as moving towards masculinity- I see that as moving towards engaging in life- which is what women with this same problem need too.
I feel comfortable in saying that these men will never heal unless they heal their misogyny, which in all men, is a form of projection for their own self hatred. I believe that, in women who have similar or adjacent issues (gay fandom obsessions, aap, etc), healing their hatred at men (while a bit more complex, since this often involves justified anger against harms men commit against women) is necessary as well- for women, accepting anger at men who deserve it, but letting go of misandry in order to overcome similar issues can be a difficult needle to thread.
Anyways, even though I don’t agree with many of your comments about women, I am completely refreshed by your understanding of this particular form of sexual compulsion. It’s sad that so few psychologists seem able to apply a comprehensive understanding of human psychology to resolve sexual issues, that clearly cause their patients unhappiness and harm. Maybe the silver lining of the gender identity debacle is that men and women with this sexual issue (psychic retreat from the ego threat caused by living one’s life as an adult- sexually and otherwise- by engaging with others) will get proper information and thus heal.
Burgo gets off on the wrong foot with the gross strawman that GC women 'loathe' AGPs. If the author had paid closer attention to what these women actually say he would have noticed that they have plenty of compassion for the gender dysphoric. Burgo, if you're listening, we don't hate anybody. The issue is not even the AGPs themselves but the trampling of women's rights and the harming of children.
The other odd thing is that Burgo never says anything about the class and ethnic composition of his clientele and seems not to wonder about it himself. Somebody give us some true enlightenment: why are the original AGPs disproportionately middle-to-upper class, white middle-aged men? And how far would this movement have got if these were not its core constituents? If AGP were largely confined to inner city blacks or poor blue collar whites would the rest of society be jumping somersaults to accommodate them?
I reacted negatively to that first sentence he wrote. There is no logical reason women should be tied to this male disorder, yet I have not yet read an article that doesn't drag women in. If women aren't "compassionate" enough, why in the heck would these men be ramming themselves into female spaces?
In answer to your last question: of course not!! If blue dress guy had been a gigantic black man promoting his fetishistic, masturbatory garbage rather than a gigantic white man doing the same, do you think ANYONE would have engaged with him, let alone promoted his “book” aka ramblings? Of course not.
Dr. Burgo, you also have a copy of my trans widow memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow, in which I do not vilify my ex, "Neddy." I simply tell the truth about his secret life, how he spent inordinate money from the family budget on himself, how he was often distant and awkward with our young sons and how he defamed me in court, in public, to my own relatives and friends. This is the common pattern of trans widows' experiences. I am the only person in the world keeping data on us, now 56 trans widows. 20 of the 56 reported to me that he sexually assaulted her prior to her departure. None of us know for sure which ex-husband was AGP. Shannon Thrace, in her trans widow memoir, writes in the second person, addressing "Jaimie" as you to avoid the accusation of misgendering this demanding, emotionally manipulative man. He's now a lobbyist for the TQ movement, having given up his career. Both Shannon and I were there in a therapy session in person with a 'professional' and our needs were completely ignored while our husbands were glorified. In the end, both of us experienced defamation and alienation of friends by him. I've been accused of cultivating this loathing, but I simply tell the truth about his deceit, financial abuse and narcissism. I hope you will add a sentence or two next time, with a recognition of what we've been through. None of the 5 attempted strangulations or 20 sexual assaults by the husbands in my data (from 20 Questions to Ask a Trans Widow survey) has been prosecuted. Nor the physical assaults, such as when Tracey Shannon (she bravely uses her real name) was pushed down the stairs by her crossdressing then-husband. Please recognize the danger trans widows are in, because these men often have a stream of violence just below the surface. Ute Heggen
Ute, thank you so much for what you are doing, and Shannon too, in documenting these men's personality changes and their treatment of their families. It's ironic that the trans movement and the media elevate children, who "know who they are," as long as they want to transition. Meanwhile, the children and wives of AGP men are abused and neglected as all the family's resources go toward the man's transition, and there's not a peep about it in the media. I cannot imagine the psychological harm this is doing to these gaslit children. It's also depressing to think about how American NGOs are exporting trans ideology to African nations where women and children already have so little agency.
Wow reading the comments I see that indeed there is a lot of work to do in this area
Joe I admire and personally relate to your willingness to try to explain this phenomenon in psychologically minded and developmentally informed terms (which is rare these days in mental health field broadly) especially because it evokes such strong feelings that I am equally interested in however that obscures the point you are making
I’ve sat with a lot of these men myself and their partners if they are married to women which they often are, who are sometimes at risk of over accommodating, yes, and deserve to be validated as well, and it’s hard to hold a space for all of it at once especially in the same room
That said I think just because we have as therapists a role to play in challenging and holding people accountable that is not incompatible with holding compassion
I don’t think you mean to be an apologist for harmful effects of this at all but instead the point is to provide real therapy for those who may be receptive to it
I’m very interested in reading more of what you have to say about masculinity issues and all the ways this can manifest including this particular type of presentation, regardless of how others may react to it with all kinds of emotions like I’m seeing here in the comments (anger, disgust, contempt)
There’s an irony in how reactions to this seem to provoke such strong confirmation bias towards anti-male sentiments when you’re saying there are underlying inadequacy issues regarding the demands of societal expectations of masculinity to begin with
Appreciate you for tackling this despite the pushback, your POV as a thoughtful insight oriented therapist is extremely important in the noise that understandably surrounds a perplexing and poorly understood issue (not unlike trans id in general)
Oh boy, another psychologist too learned to use their common sense.
Too arrogant to inquire into their own blind spots.
Who sees only the AGPs who are trying to get help. Not the ones causing the most damage.
Not the ones harassing women who insist on their single sex spaces with death threats, not the ones screaming at them, pushing them, spitting on them, ripping their shirts off and waving their moobs in women's faces, and beating them, when they dare to hold a public demonstration.
Not the ones getting women canceled, thrown out of rape shelters, taking videos of themselves jerking off in women's bathrooms and posting them online, not the ones lying about suicides and harassment. Not the ones triumphantly standing on the top podiums at the medal ceremonies of women's competitions. Not the ones claiming "Women of the Year" prizes.
Another psychologist seemingly unaware of just how much their profession has contributed to the madness by affirming delusions and recommending medicalization of children.
There is indeed a lot of work to do. By you, with your colleagues, before your entire discipline gets ridiculed out of existence.
Sure wish you and Burgo would get to work on that!
Don't leave out the transmaidens doing the dutiful role of the wife who stands by her man (men) no matter what, while attacking any woman who keeps her boundaries.
Not the ones with a urination, defecation, and/or menstruation fetish. Not the ones who dig through the bin for a used tampon to bugger themselves with during their next wank session, then write all about online.
What a reductive statement. The NATURAL emotions you list (anger, disgust, contempt) resulting from these sex pests are legitimate and perfectly natural!
How dare you portray these abusive males as victims who's needs are far more important than the constant global harm they're doing to women and girls?
Neither should be casually dismissed I agree with wholeheartedly however it’s not possible I think to effectively treat those who are in fact receptive to what I called “real” treatment without a genuine interest in psychological roots including issues with masculinity—That said I could have added that effective treatment also requires cultivating empathy for others who have been harmed as well as holding compassion for the person in front of me, which I do incorporate in the care I provide
Sometimes though I’m afraid people are more invested in accountability alone without offering any treatment and are making judgements about motives which are not so black and white such as hatred of women and narcissistic entitlement without appreciating the concept of narcissism as a defense against shame and inadequacy—as Joe points out, they are linked
Appreciate the opportunity you gave me to clarify and also reflect on what I meant which came off as possibly dismissive, I think it’s more accurate to say that although reactions like people are showing here are natural they are nonetheless based on assumptions that fit a narrative about toxic masculinity that is not necessarily wrong but misses the irony that Joe is pointing out about internalized shame and unmet dependency needs connected to men’s socialization into this same restrictive definition of mascunilty
Transgenderism will only run out of fuel when it becomes widely known that it is all being funded by your taxpayer dollars, paid to lobby groups purporting to be ‘consultants’. In Australia it’s ACON, in the UK Stonewall. All this radical nonsense gets to be continually pushed under the guise of ‘diversity and inclusion training’, through large corporations and through public service. It’s a kind of corruption known as Industry Capture. People need to know about this, but when you try and tell them, you can see them thinking you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist. It’s so depressing I feel like going to live in a cave somewhere. Have a listen to BBC ‘Nolan Investigates Stonewall’ series, where BBC journalist Chris Nolan actually investigated his own department’s relationship with Stonewall and exposed that Stonewall is in fact a lobby group for radical transgenderism, and that the BBC is anything but impartial. The level of secrecy too is astonishing. Listen and share his podcasts- Nolan’s podcast as well as the excellent ‘Tavistock- Inside the Gender Clinic’ did maybe more to turn things around than anything else in the UK.
As a former autogynephile, I found your analysis of the condition very accurate. I was cured of the symptoms with EMDR, which was very effective for decoupling the erotic urge from cross dressing. The underlying discomfort with manhood was resolved in joining a men only 12 step group and experiencing intimacy with men which ultimately led to healing the relationship with my father.
Will, I'd love to know more about that. So little is written about relationships with fathers and how they might play a role in AGP. It seems that poor mother-child attachment is usually faulted, which doesn't make sense to me.
I treated men with “gender issues” for about 20 years, starting in the mid-1990’s. Most of these men were struggling with conflicts about their sexualized cross dressing, with a few having arrived at the idea that they wanted to transition. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand and help them, but the task was complicated by the men’s ambivalent motives to continue the behavior versus stopping them. They essentially all acted like addicts who periodically would resolve to stop, often in reaction to others discovering their secret.
Over time I came to several conclusions about these patients. First and most importantly, they are all males. It is rare to see a psychiatric problem that is so confined to one sex. This definitely suggests that transvestic fetishism is a kink associated with male biology. The second conclusion is that most of them were diagnosable with narcissistic personality disorder. To a great extent, transvestic fetishism appears to be a complication of that disorder. There was a minority of patients who did not appear as narcissistic, although they were self-centered and immature in their marriages to a significant degree.
I stopped working with these guys for some of the same reasons I stopped working with people with eating disorders. The psychiatric issues were at least moderately severe, the patients were ambivalent about recovery, and narcissistic people are for the most part not as amenable to honest self appraisals and insight as are most other patients.
I would have loved to have been able to refer them to someone like you, Dr. Burgo, but alas, most of my colleagues were not interested in trying to work with these men. I completely support your work, and am relieved to no longer be working with these men myself.
Should read “sexualized cross dressing.” So annoying that these phones make nonconsensual changes.”
You can edit your posts, when you're directly online in the website anyway. Not sure about the app. Look for the three dots over on the right.
The app is laughably poor - you can’t even financially subscribe to someone.
You must copy your article, delete it, then repost. This creates a domino reposition of a response stream, it’s 2024 and Substack can’t get a trivially simple app to do basic threading and posting which is native to WordPress.
You can’t edit from the app
I write in notes then copy paste. The text change drive me insane too.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Great write up! Thanks
It´s remarkable the defense and simpathy the author shows to men´s perversions and a clear paraphilia. Although interesting how this article show that feminity - sexist stereotypes forced upon women - is a male fantasy. He completly disregard the power dynamics in society and how these men pose a real threat to women. This also proves how much men need women to validate themselves and how disgusting and little they are without women.
Also, psychologists constanly have told women to be compassionate of men, who we know are dangerous. Sexologists and psychologists explain us how our rightful fear and rejection of these men should be soften through compassion: "they had a bad childhood" "life was so difficulte for them" "they suffer their shame :("; while we pay all the consequences of their sick behavior. Important to note that, OF COURSE, is the mother´s fault. All of these poor men were somehow badly treated or humillated by their mothers. There will always be a woman to blame for men´s disgusting behavior.
Agree. Women are being told to give up their hard-won sex-based rights and protections to make men with sexual and psychological problems feel better. We all have some kind of trauma from childhood, but we don't all end up trying to erase an entire sex class. I say no. I'm not giving up my rights and protections to these bullies without a fight.
Exactly, it is crazy how psycologists try to oriente us towards compassion of dangerous and missbehaved men. The reason for compassion this time is that they feel shame of their disgusting behavior, like we have to praise them and be comprehensive for them just because they are ashamed of themselves . While we loose all our sex based right, women who speak up against these sexual fetish exhibitionists get bully, threaten and violated. In the article these men who go to therapy to find simpathy for their paraphilia are portrait as brave, but the real bravery is shown by women, who were the first to opposed and dennounce the abuses of these men. I have a question: Do psychologists really care so much for mens wellbeing (and so little for womens) that women should feel compassion of sexual fetishits because they experience shame? Really? isn´t that a bit much to ask given the circumstances?
I would like to apologize for the sexist behaviors enacted by members of my profession at your expense and the expense of other people who may be reading this post. Unfortunately, I have no control over my colleagues. Most of them were openly and oppressively sexist when I was a grad student in the 1970's. It comes out differently now, in the form of the obnoxious enabling, codependence, and judgmental, holier-than-thou posturing.
Exactly. I've heard it said before that women and girls aren't support humans for screwed up men!
We should also note that lots of men are emotionally abused within families and do not end up as transvestites. There are additional factors involved which are not well understood.
I've met a few over my lifetime, and all indications point to many of these men being sexually abused as children.
I have't researched that relationship, but it would not be surprising.
Perhaps you should consider what we are to do about them, then, as, like it or not, AGP men exist. And furthermore, these days, they are causing a problem by encouraging and amplifying the trans cult and by invading women-only spaces. I can understand you having no sympathy for them, as you don't have the problem yourself, nor is it your job to treat them (if they want that). The author has a group of patients who are not happy with their AGP and are trying to rid themselves of it, or perhaps come to accept it and let it exist in a non-harmful way.
My point is that if we wish to reduce the ills caused by AGP, we have to find out how to lead such people into a more mainstream mindset, in other words how to treat them. Sympathy is surely the first step in trying to understand and then treat them. Take a parallel case: drug addiction. If I disapprove of drug addiction, don't like addicts, don't have sympathy for them, perhaps just wish they'd all go away, I'd be the last person with any chance of helping them quit. So while I understand you railing against them, it isn't going to be part of the solution. That's one reason why I too would be useless in treating both drug addicts and autogynephiliacs!
As for the problems caused by attachment disorders, well we are only beginning to recognise how much harm is caused by them. That isn't blaming women, and does not imply that mothers treat children badly or humiliatingly. If I can convince you of one thing only it is this: the first attachment in early childhood has the greatest effect of one's ability to form relationships throughout life. The author correctly identifies all Cluster B diagnoses as stemming from this. It might be poverty, divorce, drugs/alcohol, mental illness/personality disorder and probably a host of other reasons why that attachment does not form properly, but if it does not, a pattern is set. To deny that suggests one has formed a defense against it in one's own experience...
No one is denying the existence AGP aka travestites men, they have always been around, they just used to hide it and now they find found a way not only to exhibit their sexual fetish but being celebrated by it. I don´t think it is a fair comparison the one you are doing - sexual masochits fetichists with drug addicts-; I think is more accurate to compare them with paedophiles (a lot of men have advocated for sympathy towards them, they even claim they are a sexual orientation) and I don´t think sympathy for any men who who finds pleasure in sexual fetichism it will be of any help to society, psycologist have done their bit normalizing their disgusting behavior and look where we are. They convinced the entire society they were victims, while trying to destroy every limit, right and space women rightfully aqcuired. They bully and abuse women and then they go to therapy. As another comment pointed out, they are narcisistic and go on and off with they fetish.
It doesn´t surprise me, how it is usually men who start advocating for sympathy towards their fellow missbehaved and abusive men.
Well said, underrated comment.
I believe today that no woman is "forced" into a stereotype, although she may be pressured to fit a stereotype, but we have agency. Some choose the easy way, some choose to buck the pressure.
What do you propose we do with this analysis? From a public policy perspective I think it supports a rad fem vision of treating these guys like men, keeping them out of women's sports and prisons, etc.
There are few if any psychiatric disorders that are more exclusively male than dressing up in women’s clothes for sexual reasons. It is almost comical that men who do this usually present it as evidence that they “feel like a woman” or even that they are a woman.
It doesn't have to be radfem. Many people including liberals and conservatives do not agree with males in female spaces.
I hate that feminists now routinely seem to accept the transgenderist term allocated to them- “radical” or “gender critical” feminists. This, like “cis” is a Trojan horse conjured up by TRAS, to plant the idea that there are different kinds of feminists- ie “good” (‘trans’ inclusive) and “bad” feminists (all the rest). There are just feminists. It’s TRA’s that are radical. Anyone who agrees that transwomen are women is not a feminist (or a biologist for that matter).
Second Wave Feminists coined the term "radical feminist." Most of us had been active in the radical left, especially the movement against the Vietnam War, prior to the emergence of our own movement in about 1970. There was a long period of time during the late Eighties through recent years when I didn't think of myself in those terms anymore. I was involved in the usual American lifestyle of starting a career, building a home and so on, and the level of sexism that was normalized during the Seventies seemed to be turning in a better direction. I was surprised that a small percentage of women and men in my ultra liberal city of choice still labelled me as a radical feminist and refused to work with me as a therapist because of that. (These people were all liberal Democrats). I currently am accepting that I will always be viewed as a radical, simply because I am an independent thinker.
The term "cis-gender" was coined by trans activists whose basic intent is to push the belief that having a normal sexual identity is no more normal than any of their unusual states of being. Trans activists hate it that most of us go through our days not being troubled about which sex we are. They label that acceptance as "cis-gender privilege" rather than normality.
Yes- you’re spot on. It’s becoming radical to think independently. I have friends I love, who are much smarter and more educated than me, but they are incapable of thinking critically about some things- mostly transgenderism. I think people like that have often been raised in acadaemic lefty families and we’re probably more indoctrinated than they like to think. Whereas I find that friends and colleagues who enjoy robust debate are often from different backgrounds and have found their views by themselves. I come from a religious fundamentalist family and even as a child could not help but wonder what the truth was all the time, and whether I should believe it / why etc. i think most people are more concerned about who else believes it, then they’ll decide if it’s cool to have that view. It’s lazy, and depresses me that most people are so gutless.
Yes, it seems to me that Americans have become a lot more conventional or conforming, more focused on "what do other people think?" When "everybody thinks that way" it becomes safe for them to think it and say it, but not until then. I find that many women online continue to devalue "feminism" even while they seize the opportunities that feminist women fought and won for them. They don't even acknowledge that back when those ideas too were too scary to think or to voice, some women put themselves on the line for women's rights and still do.
Absolutely. When did we all become so gutless! I’ve committed social suicide at times putting up the occasional article on Facebook about eg men being awarded women’s accolades and prizes, for which I’ve been cancelled. What’s most upsetting for me is being labelled a bigot. I’m at pains to say that while I’m unable to believe there is any evidence of such a thing as “trans” (or even “gender”) I completely accept that there are people who do believe this, in the same way I accept all my friends and neighbours, whatever their faith. The thing is too, all the most strident TRA’s are incredibly scathing of anyone else’s religious faiths, but transgenderism is absolutely faith based, a secular religion. The holy trans trinity is “me, myself and I”! And the only difference between transgenderism and other religions, is that it has nothing positive or good about it and is entirely corrosive, nasty and deceitful.
(I meant ‘were’ not ‘we’re’!)
I loathe the insidious ways transgender activists insert their ideology into public life. Eg in my public service workplace, diversity and inclusion training (provided by lobby group ACON, paid by taxpayer!) includes encouraging us to all announce our pronouns etc (I never will!). There’s so much dishonesty, fakery and outright lies involved too. Eg we’re not told we HAVE to announce our pronouns, but the pint is hammered that this is THE most vulnerable group and they need to feel included and valued and well- what does it cost you to announce your pronouns, if it helps stop a tranny from feeling depressed ?
Radical Feminism was not coined by TRAs, nor was Gender Critical. TERF was.
For sure it wasn’t - but TRAs are attempting to make the very idea of feminism radical.
The idea of feminism has indeed become very radical again. I have received a lot of abuse and even physical threats after identifying myself as a feminist on some Substack sites. I strongly supported the authors and their work, but when the authors became identified as "conservative," many of the commenters on their sites apparently felt free to harrass feminists as well as to make a lot of openly sexist comments about women in general.
I can remember back in the 60's ad 70's, the knee-jerk, emphatic statement about not being "a feminist" that most girls would make in a conversation about girls and women's rights. Those fighting against the economic and political rights of women turned it into a dirty word. I happily state I'm a feminist, believing in the right of both males and females to self-determination.
Of course. But what they’re calling “radical feminism” is just actually ‘feminism’. Nothing radical about resisting patriarchy.
Hear hear! However, there's nothing radical about not wanting potentially violent arsehole males in our safe spaces.
First public policy has to change with regard to self-declaring gender. There seem to be more than a few non-AGP, heterosexual male sociopaths who find that an irresistible opportunity to game the system, e.g. women's sports, rape centers, prisons, bathrooms. Some tight gatekeeping is needed, including psych folks willing to call them on the grifting.
Rad Fem tends toward derision rather than solving the problem, and tends to frame everything in terms of privilege/power dynamics which is inappropriate when analyzing individual people and their problems. They get a lot right but the right is too mixed with other things.
Interesting, makes a lot of sense
Except that your role is necessarily to be sympathetic and understanding, and everyone else has to deal with the fall out.
While shame operated properly, AGP men would keep their paraphilia private, get help, share the information with as few people as possible. Now they feel no shame, they feel a right to impose their paraphilia on everyone else, including children, so we're all roped into affirming a fantasy which damages everyone, including them. Shame is useful in early development - it's also necessary to keep society on track. These men are pushing social norms off track, manipulating the culture so that young women are being groomed into believing they're trans, blocking puberty, arresting their physical, mental and emotional development. And the whole world is being coerced into denying reality.
It's not just the fetishists being harmed - I understand why you'd want to help - it's a generation of children and young people. This explanation is convincing, but "poor guys" doesn't justify the resultant abuse to everyone else.
This article undermines itself in the first sentence by using the highly misleading description "trans-rights activists (TRAs)" for the transification cultists.
The transifiers are NOT advocating for "rights" as traditionally understood, but rather for special privileges that actually abrogate the rights of women (and men) to free association in single-sex spaces, organizations, events, etc. https://womensbillofrights.com
By acquiescing to the preferred language of the cult, half the battle is already lost.
Please stop doing that.
It doesn’t help me empathize with these guys. I get the claim they are suffering. As the author says - that’s part of life. It doesn’t give them a right to mock me, to invade my spaces and my daughters, to demean us, to demand we play along with their delusions. Personal suffering does not convey a right to harm and harass others. People deal with personal suffering all the time. Lots of people have issues grasping reality. Maybe if these dudes spent less time focusing on themselves, their wants, their sex fetishes, and their selfish desires they’d find some fulfillment in life. I’ve never met a happy person who sits around pontificating and engaging in self-gratification. Happiness is never found through selfishness.
I didn’t read the author as saying anything about their suffering giving them the right to do what they do, in fact, exactly the opposite. Their behavior is despicable, but understandable to me after reading this.
In his first sentence he presented a strawman argument. "For women gathering in groups to advocate for single sex spaces and female-only sports, nothing provokes more outraged disgust." Why did he even put that in there? Then he goes onto describe the profound shame the men feel, implying (above) the mean women make it worse.
I think because they ARE disgusting and their behavior is outrageous. I understand where you’re coming from. I wondered at his objectives when I started reading. But I think a careful reading of the whole article reveals how difficult he finds these individuals to treat and how unsympathetic their behavior is. The author just provides the underlying motivation for their despicable behavior.
I have a different read and find it to be standard fare, dragging women into male dysfunction. There's no reason to even be mentioning women in an article about a very specific male mental health problem. He doesn't just mention women but literally starts this article by naming "women gathering in groups" and their outrage, all in the first sentence. By the 3rd paragraph he mentions "radical feminists." He does at least put into quotation marks "as women experience," seeming to acknowledge a male cannot know how women experience feelings. Further down in the article he states, "While I can understand how many women might take offense at the idea of “womanhood” as a form of relaxation for men, reading these passages stirs deep compassion." Two points and the first is that he seems to be suggesting women need to be more compassionate. The other part of this is he never mentions how males view these AGP males, and whether or not men need to have more compassion for these AGP males. He once again lectures women with "While many women find the idea of men masturbating to pornography displayed on their computer screens to be repulsive or offensive, such men often do so because they’re lonely, sad, anxious, or depressed." Rather than just state why men masturbate to pornography, he has to get some wrongthink in there about women. This is some male self-importance, as I can state I never contemplate why men masturbate. I will give him a nod at the end for mentioning the vindictiveness of some abusive autogynephiles.
I really admire how you unpacked these passages and named the guilt message they communicate to women. I was interested in how Burgo emphasized the need to recognize that narcissism is a defense against his patients' feelings of inadequacy and shame. Narcissists are quite often bullies, or at least nasty. Don't most people know that bullies are generally overcompensating for feeling weak, small, inadequate and like a failure? One still has to deal with the bullying, no matter what the bully's unconscious fears might be.
That is a really good analysis.
I really like the term “transification cultists.” Thanks for introducing it to me!
Thank you for pointing that out, as I didn't catch on to that bit of propaganda.
Great, we have even more evidence, as far as it goes, of what we already knew - that AGPs are seriously fucked up.
But let's be clear, we didn't need a psychologist to tell us this. Anyone with common sense and unobscured observation can see it.
The field of psychology has been profoundly compromised by the gaslighting of AGPs, and are enabling and validating the medical mutilation of vulnerable children.
I hope Burgo is as motivated to call out this gross failing of his profession and the practitioners participating in the travesty as he is to presume to lecture the rest of us based on credentials from a discipline with serious credibility issues.
Psychologists, treat thyselves.
Psychology isn't science. It's cardboard/fake "science".
Psychology is no more science than tarot reading.
Interesting piece, judicious editing may be in order. However, I don’t agree with the premise of this article. The sample set of AGP discussion about these men are ones who have emotional issues of sufficient degree that they require help, either psychological or “Reddit” chat. That prevents generalization to a larger audience.
There are many logical contradictions in the text - for instance the AGP inevitably presents as slutty, yet it is spoken of as a maternal (e.g. non-slutty) feeling. Therefore, they don’t present as maternal to themselves. The analysis of the situation isn’t illuminating to me.
Most people embedded in Western European cultural contexts have shame over sex - anyone not accustomed to public sex displays will be feel “shamed”, AGP no different. That’s not differentiating in the experience, not explanatory.
One unique aspect of AGP presentation is non-consensual induction of others into the sex fantasy, similar to other types of exhibitionism, which is what I believe we all respond badly to, particularly women. It’s a particularly acute part of the game - not just autoerotic masturbatory fantasies. Aside from rage, that’s not touched on.
Presenting as a slutty woman, intentionally creating a situation to irritate others, narcissistic rage at intentionally evoked rejection, isolated masturbatory fantasy replay, these are content that, were we to read AGP porn (which I have in curiosity) form the narrative.
I would also counter with considering Auto-androphilia, men who derive erotic satisfaction from presenting to themselves and others as sex-stereotyped caricatures - enormously muscular, highly aggressive, militaristic, sporting, etc.
I think these are eerily similar variations on underlying drive to gain sexual satisfaction by creating and controlling responses of others through authoritarian exhibitionism, providing fodder for later sexual masturbatory replay.
AGP is easy to see, because it’s unexpected. AAP is difficult to discern because the behaviors are expected, even lauded, and others don’t see the sexual part
Very interesting analysis!
Thanks Sandra. Somehow people have forgotten about fetishistic exhibitionists. These people intentionally display themselves to get reactions which they get off on. With internet today it’s effortless, and trivial to avoid legal repercussions. A male AGP troll who wishes to disturb women is in paradise. Furthermore, should someone object at being drawn into the game, the authoritarian Narcissism kicks in and amplifies the sexual impact, a troll army of AGP begin shrieking. It’s stunning to me, and obvious. The TS I knew from the 80’s and 90’s are utterly different from these men. Nobody is calling out what is actually going on.
A lot of women have also experienced violence from these guys, both intimate partner violence and the well publicized assaults and physical threats by activist mobs. None of the men I worked with professionally were violent, as far as I know. The ones who transitioned all had wives who loved them, but most of the women were heterosexual and not interested in being in a pseudo lesbian relationship.
BTW great, super-clear writings.
I wonder if it’s not part and parcel of the game - blame the victim: “she didn’t accept me so...”
To me it’s about getting off on controlling others as part of an abusive sexual fantasy, violently if necessary. It gaslights those in the context with the fiction of gender to disarm critical response.
The most disturbing version is extending the abusive fantasy into childhood by recruiting weak adults to project the fiction onto their own children, or children in their care, again gaslighting any critical response with the fiction of gender.
I’ve been around too many kinky men to pretend what’s actually going on is “self-actualisation” or some type of reactive formation.
Thanks Sufeitzy!
I want to respond in more detail to your interesting insights on this subject, but will need to delay until tomorrow. I have a pile of paperwork here that needs my attention if I want to get paid. Please "hold a compassionate and accountable space" for me until I return. LOL!
Your observations about narcissistic and fetishistic exhibitionists are really striking and well expressed. Your point that people seem to have "forgotten" what these folks are like is very interesting. I have seen a few online comments about trans activists such as Dylan Mulvaney being "narcissistic exhibitionists," but for the most part people don't seem to recognize that this is a group of folks who have always been around, and always behaved in similar ways. Joe Biden apparently has quite a fondness for them, even though he doesn't seem to get it that they represent a special type of gender craziness that is not typical of trans-identified people in general.
Most of the transvestic fetishists I saw in my clinical practice were not at all exhibitionistic, except to themselves privately in their home mirrors. The ones who had highly cooperative (or coerced) wives were perhaps an exception. BTW, I was surprised by how many wives were actually okay with strapping on a dildo and having anal sex with their husbands while he fantasized himself as a woman. I thought I had heard everything prior to that revelation.
Your point about the exhibitionists functioning as trolls online is also important. So many trans activists and woke activists are at least as gratified by negative attention as they are by admiration. I think the ones who specifically want to offend are probably a sicker bunch than the Mulvaney types who primariy seek admiration.
I read about a research study in which a group of heterosexual men diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder were asked to rate their level of animosity towards various groups of people. I think the groups included lesbians, gay men, and a few other minorities (I don't recall for sure which ones). The results differed from what the researchers had expected. The men in the study did not admit to feeling significant levels of negative feeling towards any group except heterosexual women, whom they pretty much hated. The researchers concluded that the men hated the people who were perceived as being able to withhold the supplies that the men needed and wanted the most.
I am mom to a young man who declared a trans identity several years ago and who, I'm pretty sure, is AGP. I think it's true that shame and low self-esteem underlie AGP. However, it's distressing to read over and over again that said shame and low self-esteem result from poor attachment in infancy (from the mother being unpredictable or rejecting, according to attachment theory). I carried my baby boy around in a sling, picked him up and nursed him every time he cried, and spent almost every waking hour entertaining him and making sure his brain was stimulated (lots of reading, foreign languages, tummy time, etc.). If I made a serious mistake as a parent, it was to come too quickly to his rescue whenever he felt distress; I'm convinced that he never learned to self-soothe. Dad, on the other hand, was a bit of a cold fish, and I was often angry with him for not giving our son more attention. I saw how the lack of his father's attention pained our son, and I think it made him feel inadequate around other boys. I have also wondered if the contrast between my cheerleading, lack of attention from dad, and lukewarm reception from peers confused our son in a way that could lead to narcissism. I've heard many other mothers of mtf sons say "we used to be so close," and I don't think they are lying. Why are psychological problems always the mother's fault and the role of fathers never mentioned?
Thank you for linking to Eva's essay. She does stellar work and I am proud to be her editor. It was good meeting you at Genspect. "Being/becoming a man" has changed its meaning several times over in a short historical timespan. We have quite lost the art of inculcating manhood into boys because we are not even sure what that even means, anymore. I've been talking about this problem since 1989 and Iron John. It's only gotten worse.
Cross dressing men are a cross-cultural phenomenon, and have been reported as existing in tribal cultures where men are generally expected to be warriors. I think that male version of "dressing as a woman" is associated somehow with the Y chromosome rather than with culture, but obviously when the behavior is encouraged as it is in the U.S. we see more of it.
Really great essay! This is the first essay I have read on agp that gets at the truth, so I have many, MANY thoughts (mini essay incoming):
Part 1:
“AGPs are self-evidently evil and scarcely human. Men who derive sexual satisfaction from putting on women’s lingerie and masturbating in front of a mirror are the devil incarnate.”
If you recognize that women are people too, many of whom also have core shame, then you might understand where this reaction to men who dehumanize us by reducing us to objects for sexual use, comes from. For many women, it is terrifying, disgusting, and enraging to see men like this, because it compounds our own experiences with core shame- hence the narcissism of some women’s reactions. For me, there have been times when seeing men exhibit “agp” in public is something like seeing myself be dismembered and then used. So, to call that “distressing” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
“object relations theory, and in particular, Melanie Klein’s description of defenses against need and dependency.”
“To evade unbearable desire and envy,” I opined, “Schreber transformed himself into the object of his own libido so he wouldn’t need anyone or anything outside himself to satisfy it.”
YES!!! I have been trying to put this into words but that is what I think is going on here too. Glad to know there’s already a theory here. It’s all about narcissistic control- terror of the ego being damaged by the horror of vulnerability that comes with the necessity to give up control and seek outside ourselves for sex and love- (I said this online and got called a shrieking radical feminist who hates men, obviously, by Benjamin Boyce, Bailey et al ) which is why it’s so common among autistic people (for whom there is increased anxiety surrounding connecting with others)- females AND males. Only males tend to take it to such extremes though, which I think is bc they are aided by patriarchal society in their attempts to symbolically dismember and own women. Although women with these same personality traits/childhood issues tend to retreat into gay-male fandoms etc. VERY common in ROGD girls.
“Leading theorists such as J. Michael Bailey tend to dismiss psychodynamic explanations. Others attempt to destigmatize AGP by relabeling it autoheterosexuality–a variation on normal heterosexual attraction that just happens to boomerang back on itself. They tend to deploy scientific-sounding terms like “erotic target location error” that make AGP into a kind of computer glitch, a coding error without psychological meaning or content, and certainly without developmental/psychological roots in childhood.”
Totally agree! Just bc it sounds scientific doesn’t mean it means anything. It’s the same issue as the gender identity issue- trying to turn it into a scientific phenomenon often obscured what is actually happening psychologically.
I’m very persuaded by your take, although I wish you’d exercise a bit more compassion for women. You might consider that women often face the worst and most terrifying sexual harm from men who are extraordinarily vulnerable, insecure and sad and who have deep shame: true defensive narcissists. I actually had to tell a male therapist once that women actually tend to have very little problems from confident, handsome, masculine men who want them for “only one thing” in the therapist’s words (a handsome, masculine man being clear and open that he wants casual sex with you? What woman has a problem with that? That’s not a threat!) And that the real threat of being “used” by men who have fantasies of domination, harm, and control of women (which is the psychology behind rape) comes from the truly, deeply vulnerable men. The “incel to transbian pipeline” is another great example of this phenomenon.
“core shame as I call it throughout my work and which I define as a deeply painful sense of being damaged or defective at one’s core, usually unconscious and often experienced as feeling ugly or deformed.”
Wow great to hear this out into words. Too bad men who experience this can’t connect and seek healing on this with the women they might desire, bc 90% of the women I know have this, as a legacy of patriarchy. It often takes the form of “the mother wound” (inheriting sexual and gender based trauma from your mom and passing it down). But I guess doing that would require empathy for women, and an understanding of women as human beings, and that would render their coping mechanism ineffective.
Ha “Know it All” as a narcissistic coping mechanism! I can definitely relate to that!
I wonder when people will become more aware that Ann Lawrence got fired from his job as an anesthesiologist due to allegations of misconduct from multiple medical professionals who witnessed him examine the genitals of an unconscious female patient after the gynecologist had left the operating room. There are publicly available legal documents outlining what occurred and why he was terminated and barred from practicing. He also has two allegations of sexual impropriety from transwomen towards him. Just putting that out there- that his version of himself and his life story is often wildly divorced from reality.
“I find the Lawrence theory self-evidently wrong and, to be honest, a little preposterous.” Thank god someone said so. Me too.
"You might consider that women often face the worst and most terrifying sexual harm from men who are extraordinarily vulnerable, insecure and sad and who have deep shame."
This. My compassion ends when the "victim" harms others.
For sure! I wish male psychotherapists would listen to women more. WE are the ones on the receiving end of men’s most unguarded sexual behaviors, after all. Just MAYBE we have some insight?
Yes. It's easy to be compassionate as a male therapist on the other side of the desk from an unhappy, disturbed man. But it's much harder for the women who encounter, date or marry such guys. And the transactivists have shown the worst combination of feminine whining & male rage.
They SHOULD be ashamed of themselves for being losers who jerk off to porn for hours every day, envy women's sex-decision-making power (what the biologists call female choice) so much that they resent and hate us for it, so they dress up in woman-face costume to fall in lust with themselves so to avoid being rejected. Plus, they are getting off on the Machiavellian power trip of making every man, woman, and child use the pronouns/names of their fetishist personas.
The “incel to transbian pipeline” is hideously sinister and we're seeing it more and more. The "Cotton Ceiling" being a sickening, "rapey" case in point. It's a pathetic last-ditch attempt to get women to sleep with them and it's NEVER going to work! HOW do they not see this?!
Yes truly disgusting- just open sexual coercion of women. I think there’s a distinct difference between men who have this or similar issues as one of the cores of their cross-gender identity (which many women have as well- especially “ROGD” girls/women AND boys/men) versus men who have CHOSEN to make this their public identity and lifestyle (the men doing this in public). There’s clearly a difference in character between a man who would say “why do I do this weird thing- I hate it, someone please help!” Versus “I will violate every single person’s boundaries I need to in order to keep lying to myself about my behavior.” It’s just two totally different personality types. ROGD kids/young adults with narcissistic social and sexual coping mechanisms I have a lot of empathy and pity for. Men who have chosen to make their sexual disorder everyone’s/mainly women’s problem: zero pity.
They are brainwashed by porn into believing that lesbians like to have sex with men. It's a delusion of the average American man, not just unsophisticated rubes as it used to be back before internet porn.
Part 2
“When I crossdress the primary reason is AGP. However, like you, I also crossdress to self soothe. When something happens that hurts my feelings, I often want to put on women’s clothes, cook, clean, etc.”
This is when women lose the ability to calmly listen to these men’s experience. It’s just not possible to listen to this and not feel hatred and rage. It’s like a white person claiming they need to go to their hut and pretend to be a black slave on a plantation to feel calm. It’s just too insulting to our own experiences of trauma. To have the ego so wounded on top of any core ego wounds is intolerable, and only sick people would subject themselves to it.
“I also want to make a point rarely acknowledged but which every man knows to be true: sometimes we masturbate to relieve stress and soothe ourselves.”
Every single woman I know both knows orgasms relieve stress, and masturbate specifically to relieve stress. Women are commonly encouraged by our gynecologists to ramp up masturbation during our period to relieve the increased stress and pain.
“While many women find the idea of men masturbating to pornography displayed on their computer screens to be repulsive or offensive, such men often do so because they’re lonely, sad, anxious, or depressed.”
Men also rape women bc they feel lonely, sad, anxious, or depressed. It’s not that women have a problem with men having feelings. It’s that we have a problem that men try to solve their feelings by hurting us, exploiting us, and disrespecting us. How is that so hard for men to understand?
Again, I must impress upon male psychologists that the scariest men to women (like the ones that actually commit harm against us) are the vulnerable ones (ESPECIALLY the vulnerable ones with weird sex problems). Not trying to insult men who are trying to overcome their agp coping mechanisms. Just stating a fact so male psychologists stop blaming us for something we’re not even doing wrong.
“Feeling deficient and plagued by shame, often focused on their inability to take the initiative in a “masculine” way, they take flight into cross-sex identification where to be a woman means being protected from the exigencies of life.”
It sounds like what might help these men kick their compulsive behaviors is receiving feminist education about what existing in a world set up by men to abuse, oppress, and exploit women actually entails for women (namely, endless struggle and effort on the woman’s part to not be dragged down into the depths of an unsatisfactory life- even just going on a first date for a woman requires a level of effort, stress and work in assessing the basic safety of the man that men couldn’t even imagine having to put up with- the effort required in even barely dating as a woman is often exhausting, and scary).
“In my own experience, doubts about one’s viability as a male often lie behind such “unwillingness or inability.” To take determined action in pursuit of a desired object and to persist until attaining it, whether the object be a sexual partner or a non-sexual goal,…” This is what I have been doing as a woman to cure my own issues with intimacy. Pursuing sexual pleasure, a partner, anything I want in life, without shame, is what I believe is required for all women to be comfortable as women and to accept and find worth in their femininity. It seems to me that these men’s problems are a shrinking from life, which is also my problem, and many women’s problem. Respectfully, I don’t see that as moving towards masculinity- I see that as moving towards engaging in life- which is what women with this same problem need too.
I feel comfortable in saying that these men will never heal unless they heal their misogyny, which in all men, is a form of projection for their own self hatred. I believe that, in women who have similar or adjacent issues (gay fandom obsessions, aap, etc), healing their hatred at men (while a bit more complex, since this often involves justified anger against harms men commit against women) is necessary as well- for women, accepting anger at men who deserve it, but letting go of misandry in order to overcome similar issues can be a difficult needle to thread.
Anyways, even though I don’t agree with many of your comments about women, I am completely refreshed by your understanding of this particular form of sexual compulsion. It’s sad that so few psychologists seem able to apply a comprehensive understanding of human psychology to resolve sexual issues, that clearly cause their patients unhappiness and harm. Maybe the silver lining of the gender identity debacle is that men and women with this sexual issue (psychic retreat from the ego threat caused by living one’s life as an adult- sexually and otherwise- by engaging with others) will get proper information and thus heal.
Beautifully put.
Burgo gets off on the wrong foot with the gross strawman that GC women 'loathe' AGPs. If the author had paid closer attention to what these women actually say he would have noticed that they have plenty of compassion for the gender dysphoric. Burgo, if you're listening, we don't hate anybody. The issue is not even the AGPs themselves but the trampling of women's rights and the harming of children.
The other odd thing is that Burgo never says anything about the class and ethnic composition of his clientele and seems not to wonder about it himself. Somebody give us some true enlightenment: why are the original AGPs disproportionately middle-to-upper class, white middle-aged men? And how far would this movement have got if these were not its core constituents? If AGP were largely confined to inner city blacks or poor blue collar whites would the rest of society be jumping somersaults to accommodate them?
I reacted negatively to that first sentence he wrote. There is no logical reason women should be tied to this male disorder, yet I have not yet read an article that doesn't drag women in. If women aren't "compassionate" enough, why in the heck would these men be ramming themselves into female spaces?
In answer to your last question: of course not!! If blue dress guy had been a gigantic black man promoting his fetishistic, masturbatory garbage rather than a gigantic white man doing the same, do you think ANYONE would have engaged with him, let alone promoted his “book” aka ramblings? Of course not.
Dr. Burgo, you also have a copy of my trans widow memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow, in which I do not vilify my ex, "Neddy." I simply tell the truth about his secret life, how he spent inordinate money from the family budget on himself, how he was often distant and awkward with our young sons and how he defamed me in court, in public, to my own relatives and friends. This is the common pattern of trans widows' experiences. I am the only person in the world keeping data on us, now 56 trans widows. 20 of the 56 reported to me that he sexually assaulted her prior to her departure. None of us know for sure which ex-husband was AGP. Shannon Thrace, in her trans widow memoir, writes in the second person, addressing "Jaimie" as you to avoid the accusation of misgendering this demanding, emotionally manipulative man. He's now a lobbyist for the TQ movement, having given up his career. Both Shannon and I were there in a therapy session in person with a 'professional' and our needs were completely ignored while our husbands were glorified. In the end, both of us experienced defamation and alienation of friends by him. I've been accused of cultivating this loathing, but I simply tell the truth about his deceit, financial abuse and narcissism. I hope you will add a sentence or two next time, with a recognition of what we've been through. None of the 5 attempted strangulations or 20 sexual assaults by the husbands in my data (from 20 Questions to Ask a Trans Widow survey) has been prosecuted. Nor the physical assaults, such as when Tracey Shannon (she bravely uses her real name) was pushed down the stairs by her crossdressing then-husband. Please recognize the danger trans widows are in, because these men often have a stream of violence just below the surface. Ute Heggen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZViL3sZeII&t=45s
Ute, thank you so much for what you are doing, and Shannon too, in documenting these men's personality changes and their treatment of their families. It's ironic that the trans movement and the media elevate children, who "know who they are," as long as they want to transition. Meanwhile, the children and wives of AGP men are abused and neglected as all the family's resources go toward the man's transition, and there's not a peep about it in the media. I cannot imagine the psychological harm this is doing to these gaslit children. It's also depressing to think about how American NGOs are exporting trans ideology to African nations where women and children already have so little agency.
Wow reading the comments I see that indeed there is a lot of work to do in this area
Joe I admire and personally relate to your willingness to try to explain this phenomenon in psychologically minded and developmentally informed terms (which is rare these days in mental health field broadly) especially because it evokes such strong feelings that I am equally interested in however that obscures the point you are making
I’ve sat with a lot of these men myself and their partners if they are married to women which they often are, who are sometimes at risk of over accommodating, yes, and deserve to be validated as well, and it’s hard to hold a space for all of it at once especially in the same room
That said I think just because we have as therapists a role to play in challenging and holding people accountable that is not incompatible with holding compassion
I don’t think you mean to be an apologist for harmful effects of this at all but instead the point is to provide real therapy for those who may be receptive to it
I’m very interested in reading more of what you have to say about masculinity issues and all the ways this can manifest including this particular type of presentation, regardless of how others may react to it with all kinds of emotions like I’m seeing here in the comments (anger, disgust, contempt)
There’s an irony in how reactions to this seem to provoke such strong confirmation bias towards anti-male sentiments when you’re saying there are underlying inadequacy issues regarding the demands of societal expectations of masculinity to begin with
Appreciate you for tackling this despite the pushback, your POV as a thoughtful insight oriented therapist is extremely important in the noise that understandably surrounds a perplexing and poorly understood issue (not unlike trans id in general)
Oh boy, another psychologist too learned to use their common sense.
Too arrogant to inquire into their own blind spots.
Who sees only the AGPs who are trying to get help. Not the ones causing the most damage.
Not the ones harassing women who insist on their single sex spaces with death threats, not the ones screaming at them, pushing them, spitting on them, ripping their shirts off and waving their moobs in women's faces, and beating them, when they dare to hold a public demonstration.
Not the ones getting women canceled, thrown out of rape shelters, taking videos of themselves jerking off in women's bathrooms and posting them online, not the ones lying about suicides and harassment. Not the ones triumphantly standing on the top podiums at the medal ceremonies of women's competitions. Not the ones claiming "Women of the Year" prizes.
Another psychologist seemingly unaware of just how much their profession has contributed to the madness by affirming delusions and recommending medicalization of children.
There is indeed a lot of work to do. By you, with your colleagues, before your entire discipline gets ridiculed out of existence.
Sure wish you and Burgo would get to work on that!
Don't leave out the transmaidens doing the dutiful role of the wife who stands by her man (men) no matter what, while attacking any woman who keeps her boundaries.
YES!! Beautifully and thoroughly put!
Not the ones with a urination, defecation, and/or menstruation fetish. Not the ones who dig through the bin for a used tampon to bugger themselves with during their next wank session, then write all about online.
What a reductive statement. The NATURAL emotions you list (anger, disgust, contempt) resulting from these sex pests are legitimate and perfectly natural!
How dare you portray these abusive males as victims who's needs are far more important than the constant global harm they're doing to women and girls?
Neither should be casually dismissed I agree with wholeheartedly however it’s not possible I think to effectively treat those who are in fact receptive to what I called “real” treatment without a genuine interest in psychological roots including issues with masculinity—That said I could have added that effective treatment also requires cultivating empathy for others who have been harmed as well as holding compassion for the person in front of me, which I do incorporate in the care I provide
Sometimes though I’m afraid people are more invested in accountability alone without offering any treatment and are making judgements about motives which are not so black and white such as hatred of women and narcissistic entitlement without appreciating the concept of narcissism as a defense against shame and inadequacy—as Joe points out, they are linked
Appreciate the opportunity you gave me to clarify and also reflect on what I meant which came off as possibly dismissive, I think it’s more accurate to say that although reactions like people are showing here are natural they are nonetheless based on assumptions that fit a narrative about toxic masculinity that is not necessarily wrong but misses the irony that Joe is pointing out about internalized shame and unmet dependency needs connected to men’s socialization into this same restrictive definition of mascunilty
I'll second that and add that the author is minimizing the damage, the danger and the misogyny these selfish men cause.
Transgenderism will only run out of fuel when it becomes widely known that it is all being funded by your taxpayer dollars, paid to lobby groups purporting to be ‘consultants’. In Australia it’s ACON, in the UK Stonewall. All this radical nonsense gets to be continually pushed under the guise of ‘diversity and inclusion training’, through large corporations and through public service. It’s a kind of corruption known as Industry Capture. People need to know about this, but when you try and tell them, you can see them thinking you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist. It’s so depressing I feel like going to live in a cave somewhere. Have a listen to BBC ‘Nolan Investigates Stonewall’ series, where BBC journalist Chris Nolan actually investigated his own department’s relationship with Stonewall and exposed that Stonewall is in fact a lobby group for radical transgenderism, and that the BBC is anything but impartial. The level of secrecy too is astonishing. Listen and share his podcasts- Nolan’s podcast as well as the excellent ‘Tavistock- Inside the Gender Clinic’ did maybe more to turn things around than anything else in the UK.
As a former autogynephile, I found your analysis of the condition very accurate. I was cured of the symptoms with EMDR, which was very effective for decoupling the erotic urge from cross dressing. The underlying discomfort with manhood was resolved in joining a men only 12 step group and experiencing intimacy with men which ultimately led to healing the relationship with my father.
Will, I'd love to know more about that. So little is written about relationships with fathers and how they might play a role in AGP. It seems that poor mother-child attachment is usually faulted, which doesn't make sense to me.
I have no sympathy for AGP as the ones I've encountered deserve none.