‘Behind the Looking Glass’—Reflections on the Wives and Children Trapped with Men
A more complicated world behind closed doors
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Devotion he expects as a matter of course, as his natural right, for no other reason than that he is his mother’s son. He prides himself on such powers of intellect and will that he cannot tolerate any independence on the part of his lover. The more goodness, self-sacrifice, abnegation, and kindness she displays toward him, the more he scorns her. She must permit herself to be ruled, possessed, absorbed by him, for the privilege of adoring him as a god. He is unaware that any man who is adored as a god is deceived, mocked, and flattered.
- George Sand, June 13, 1837, from The Intimate Journal1
With Behind the Looking Glass, as with Dysphoric in 2021, Vaishnavi Sundar has gone where few would go—listening to the women and children so often treated as nonexistent in conversations around transgenderism. A woman who uses the pseudonym Tinsel, the founder of Trans Widows’ Voices, is one of the women featured in Sundar’s film. Trans Widows’ Voices has been necessary in bringing greater awareness to women’s lives in marriages to male transvestic fetishists and these women’s policy needs—including the Spousal Exit Clause. As Tinsel explains in Sundar’s film, “It was a simple idea where we have website, women can tell their stories, and people can read their stories.” When she and I had a conversation for Women Are Human in 2021, Tinsel observed that the desire not to look bigoted toward men can transition into bigotry against women. “We all want others to think that we are not bigots,” she said, “but it behooves us all to think about when our performance of not being bigoted toward crossdressing men becomes actively bigoted against women.”2 Trans Widows’ Voices has been important to me in learning about women neglected in rhetoric that favors men having the “right” to do whatever they desire “behind closed doors”—a convenient platitude too frequently left unquestioned.
Alongside Tinsel, Jennifer Kimmel, another woman in Sundar’s film, makes an important point on the connection between protecting mothers and protecting children. Concerns about women’s lives seem hastily dismissed as merely feminist issues, misunderstood as disconnected from children’s lives. Women’s rights appear imagined as obviously irrelevant, utterly divorced from children’s rights. However, as Kimmel explains:
But see, that’s the problem in this whole fight against gender ideology is people say you’ve got to focus on the children—‘We’ve got to save the children. The feminists are over here doing this, but we must focus on the children.’ But we can’t protect the children if we don’t protect their mothers. If women can’t talk about our experience and talk about protecting our kids, then the kids aren’t safe. People don’t seem to connect those things.
Yet a number of people have given more serious attention to men claiming to be “reasonable transsexuals” than women formerly in relationships with these men—quite a mistake. But, as Kimmel very rightly argues, women being unable to talk about their experiences undermines ensuring children’s safety. Tinsel was right when she advised us to think about how “our performance of not being bigoted toward crossdressing men becomes actively bigoted against women.”
Organizations in opposition to the social and medical transitioning of children and young people should give more serious attention to mothers, including trans widows, who have lived with male transvestic fetishists—who truly know these men. Currently, however, there is an opposing tendency to prioritize male sexologists, mainly due to their purported “expertise” from listening to their male patients. The very same problem returns: Women and children do not count in men’s narratives as much as the men take their desires into account. Critical approaches to transgenderism cannot be effective without attention to the bond women have with children, which corresponds to their bondage relative to men around them. A reasonable paradigm would recognize the deterioration of women’s rights and boundaries precedes the same happening to children’s rights. We do well to remember the mothers.
The “Love” That Is Not
There have been underlying issues with the accepted language, which Sundar’s film draws out for discussion. “Autogynephilia” (AGP) has been a term used for men’s fetishism of women since Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard coined it in 1989.3 According to Blanchard, as quoted in Behind the Looking Glass, “autogynephilia” refers to “a heterosexual man’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.” Referencing Skirt Go Spinny’s 2022 documentary What Is a Woman? Wrong Answers Only, Sundar gives us helpful visual representations to keep us grounded in the fact that these behaviors are not merely happening in men’s heads. Seeing these behaviors helps move beyond theory to practice, making it harder not to reckon with the implications.
As quoted in Sundar’s film, Blanchard classifies men’s autogynephilic “symptoms” in four ways: physiologic, behavioral, anatomic, and transvestic. Men fetishize physiological functions like menstruation, pregnancy, and breastfeeding. Men fetishize behavior regarded as “feminine,” symbolizing a man’s “inner woman” surfacing in his acting. Men fetishize women’s anatomy, fantasizing about possessing female body parts, such as breasts, vaginas, and wombs. Men fetishize women’s clothing, typically underclothes, including ones the men “borrow”—especially without the women knowing. Whatever the “symptomatic” category, each involves sexual fantasies and masturbation enactments. Applying Blanchard’s theorizing, others—most notably American sexologist Anne A. Lawrence in his 2013 Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism—have framed “autogynephilia” in terms of “men who love women and want to become what they love.”4
Not coincidentally, Lawrence’s Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies does not account for harm to women and children around the men. Lawrence’s conceptualizing of “autogynephilia” as “romantic love” does not consider women and girls subjected to fetishism by men close to them—their husbands, their fathers. Wives and children may as well not exist in these men’s worlds—for they appear, when they do, as stage props, otherwise being scenery too distracting from the man’s “other woman”: himself.
Researchers and devotees have assumed women and children to be acceptable “collateral damage” for male sexual desire, an issue to which Sundar’s documentary provides a necessary corrective. For contrast, reading Lawrence’s Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies, one notices jealousy and envy in the men’s narratives—even rage toward the very women the men wish to impersonate. Yet we find no more thorough analysis of how “love,” never explicitly defined, may end up inadvertently encompassing harmful behavior perpetrated behind closed doors.
Examples of romantic ideology being invoked to rationalize men abusing, even murdering, women and children seem numerous enough to warrant caution toward vague appeals to “love.” There was O.J. Simpson, who, discussing the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, posed a “hypothetical”: “Even if I did do this, it would have to have been because I loved her very much, right?”5 Family annihilators like Christopher Watts murder their entire families in acts of familicide that run counter to the men’s claims of “loving” their wives and children. Before murdering his thirty-four-year-old pregnant wife Shanann Watts and their two daughters Celeste and Bella—ages three and four, respectively—Watts texted his wife the following in July: “I love you to the moon and back.”6 One month later, having desired a new life with a new woman, he murdered his wife and their children, strangling his pregnant wife and suffocating his two daughters to death. Cases of these kinds confirm women’s fear of their dissociated husbands falling in love with themselves at the expense of their wives and their children. Unfortunately, Simone de Beauvoir was right when she wrote, “The word ‘love’ has not at all the same meaning for both sexes, and this is a source of the grave misunderstandings that separate them.”7
Narrating Our Terms of Engagement
Sexology takes “romantic love” at face value in theory, but life teaches women otherwise in practice. Paradoxically, men’s “love” in “autogynephilia” may well refer to hate and fear toward women, a desire to impose control, not simply admiration in a vague sense. Founder of Children of Transitioners Emma Thomas talks about her father, who would fit the definition of “autogynephilic”:
I lived with quite a lot of people who said that they were women. They didn’t have a clue what a woman was. These were objects of an obsession, of a fetish, but the thing about objects of a fetish is you’re only interested in them as objects. My father treated both his wives so incredibly badly—just mean. What I saw was, really, a hatred of women.
Related to Thomas’s observation, Kimmel says that, among these male transvestic fetishists, we keep seeing how “their frame of reference for what it is to be a woman is based on particularly brutal pornography.” There is not consideration for how what men call “love” refers more to men’s attempt to control women by asserting a kind of property claim to womanhood, like annexing territory. But the assumption that it has a simple “born this way” explanation, like homosexuality, covers up the social reality of how transvestic fetishism comes into being for males versus for females. Why, then, do we still talk on sexology’s terms? Like the use of “pedophilia” as “the love of children,” the use of “autogynephilia” seems misleading, if not confounding, as opposed to using male transvestic fetishism as realistic and not euphemistic language.
Contrasting the research that relies almost entirely, if not exclusively, on the men’s narratives, Behind the Looking Glass shares narratives from the women and children, underscoring lives the researchers have omitted. Referencing the trans widow’s conundrum, this problem with conflicting narratives where the husband’s fictive life eclipses the wife, Tinsel says:
You just don’t know which version of reality to believe: your own or theirs, which changes. You’ve got all the rest of society believing their changing version. But everybody can’t be wrong, and you have to start thinking, ‘Well, yes, everybody can be wrong—and other women like me can be right.’ But it’s very strange to have all of society telling you that your husband is actually worse than he presented himself as—and that’s supposed to be a good thing. It’s observable, within all conversations about trans widows, you spend more than fifty percent of the time talking about the men and why they do it. Essentially, I don’t care why they do it; I care about the women affected.
On the similar conundrum experienced by children, what she calls “the pressure to pretend that it’s all OK,” Thomas says:
I lived this very quite sheltered life, really, in some ways, and then I moved to this situation where there were a lot of people who were crossdressing and selling sex. There was a guy who was a prostitute. He’d left a wife and two little children to sell sex. He moved in with us for like three months. We lived in a tiny flat. He was very nasty to me. I had expressed to my father that I didn’t want him to be there anymore, and my father said to me, ‘If you make a more of a fuss about this, I won’t love you anymore.’ This was, oh my God, I was, what, fourteen? Any time we were with anybody, I couldn’t say anything that was in any way negative about my experience, about my father, about anything. And I couldn’t question anything at all—despite the fact that my father made up stuff. My father would be angry with me, not so much that I attacked my father, but that I was kind of letting other transsexuals down.
For women and children, they find themselves compelled to submit to their husbands and their fathers to keep up appearances. But why, as Tinsel notes, is there disproportionately more focus on the men—not only why they do it but also how to help them do it? We should care more about the women and children affected than “diagnosing” the men and, consequently, giving them a medical excuse to rationalize harmful behavior. “Blanchard talked about homosexual transexuals being one thing, and then you’ve got AGP males,” Tinsel says. “I’ve always wondered if, in between, you’ve got men who just find it impossible to perform masculinity.” Of course, there is Blanchard, who says it remains difficult to know, “because many individuals of the autogynephilic type have all kinds of motivation both to lie to themselves and to be dishonest with other people.”
Speaking of dishonesty, Lawrence’s “Autogynephilia at 35,” from last month, reiterates the false analogy between male transvestic fetishism and homosexuality, arguing in favor of “gender-affirming care” as “a moral necessity.” He writes:
Finally, we should advocate for the unrestricted availability of medically prescribed puberty-blocking and cross-gender hormone therapy for severely gender dysphoric adolescents and especially for autogynephilic ones, who will almost certainly prove to be the best candidates. This medical treatment has the potential to greatly reduce the suffering of autogynephilic adolescents and improve the quality of their lives in adulthood. Its unrestricted availability is a moral necessity. (emphasis added)8
There has been a transition from the medico-legal “making” of “the transgender child” to “the autogynephilic boy”—and, presumably, “the autoandrophilic girl” will be next by way of so-called “moral necessity,” if the “research” dictates it.9 In 2021, Tinsel and I talked about the political use of “the narrative of the trans child” to naturalize and depoliticize male transvestic fetishism. “If they choose to transition, rather than live secret lives as crossdressers,” she says, “then they very quickly have to start to project the idea that it was not a choice at all, but rather was really inevitable.” The recent push to “diagnose” boys as being “autogynephilic” seems like an evident repackaging of the same rationale. There is the heightened visibility of “reasonable transsexuals,” including “former” transgender rights activists, rebranding themselves in a variety of ways. So, virtually all conversations around this issue focus on the men—why they do what they do, even why they “need” to do it, conspicuously missing those impacted around them: their wives and their children.
“Romantic love” demystified, men’s narratives of “autogynephilia” come from the men’s perspectives of discomfort with their male bodies and their desire to find personal identity through impersonating women. This impersonation extends to men wanting to experience “girlhood,” which has serious implications for the self-perception of the men’s daughters. In Sundar’s film, Marigold talks about her husband specifically buying their daughters underwear while not buying any other clothing necessities—buying girls’ panties but “not buying them shoes.” The women’s narratives raise the additional issue of how fathers’ male transvestic fetishism can impact their daughters’ sense of themselves as women. In our talk, Tinsel said:
Something else, that I think is significant, is that some trans widows have told me that they are put off by any performance of femininity themselves, because they associate it too strongly with their autogynephilic or transgender-identifying husband. For example, they have cut their hair and dressed in a more unisex way or stopped wearing makeup. This is also a strategy for not getting your clothes and makeup stolen, of course. My suspicion is that this is a dynamic which will also show itself in daughters of such fathers. How can you identify with femininity if you associate it with your father’s exaggerated performance of it?
Hard in only the ways that should not matter, sexology has not given sufficient consideration to the men’s wives and their children. These counternarratives overwhelmingly conflict with both the men’s self-perceptions and sexology’s purportedly “neutral” approach to “autogynephilia” that, not coincidentally, sides with the sexologists’ male patients in opposition to the men’s female partners. Obviously, the underlying conflicts have not been merely about clothes. The husband who “borrows” his wife’s lingerie for masturbation, without her knowledge, violates her boundaries, which transcends beyond the outfit. The man’s sexual gratification derives from his infringement on her, which appears to be a continuous theme among male transvestic fetishists: “getting off” at others’ expense—particularly women and children. While “diagnosing” kinds of paraphilia, based on “symptoms” in male sexual behavior, sexology provides no paradigm for addressing men’s social interactions with the women and children in their lives. In this sense, the field is no more useful than Freudian psychoanalysis stressing an individualistic approach to the neglect of social factors. In fact, recent proponents of “autosexuality” to explain not only male transvestic fetishism but also homosexuality unwittingly repeat Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of narcissism. Why should it be surprising, then, that women take issue—those whom Lawrence dismisses as being “aggrieved radical feminists”?
Marriages as Prisons, Therapists as Wardens
Naturally, the vast majority of women, especially the wives, have always complied with male transvestic fetishism, so the surveys tell us—or have they? In Sundar’s film, Genevieve Gluck references psychiatrist John F. Oliven, who published his Sexual Hygiene and Pathology: A Manual for the Physician in 1955, followed by its second edition in 1965. In this latter edition, Oliven argues for the use of “transgenderism,” he explains, “because sexuality is not a major factor in primary transvestism.”10 The framing that divorces male transvestic fetishism from male sexual behavior originated with psychiatrists like Oliven in the 1960s—not modern transgender rights activists. Gluck notes Oliven’s advice for physicians to intervene and persuade men’s wives to comply with their behavior rather than leave. According to Oliven, as quoted by Gluck in Sundar’s film:
If the patient is married, and the wife has accidentally discovered his abnormality, sometimes it must be the physician’s most immediate concern to do everything to keep the marriage intact . . . The wife must be dissuaded from packing up in a panic and taking departure . . . The milder cases, among single men, if fairly adequate sexually, are perhaps best advised to seek marriage; in each case the problem of whether to advise the bride beforehand of his chronic deviation requires thought. (emphasis added)11
Oliven’s Sexual Hygiene and Pathology has multiple passages focused on exacting women’s compliance to men’s “variant sexual practices,” which he claims to require “the sharpest possible distinction”—his emphasis—from “sexual deviations.” According to Oliven:
For clinical purposes the sharpest possible distinction should be made between variant sexual practices (‘varietism’) and sexual deviations. Where, for instance, a wife expresses serious concern or a sense of outrage at her husband’s ‘perverted’ practices, great discernment and diagnostic restraint is required of the physician so as not unwittingly to help disrupt an otherwise good or promising marriage. In some borderline-deviate husbands an opportunity to ‘act out’ unusual impulses in a legitimate manner actually may have a self-remedial effect. It may be noted that complaints of marital ‘perversion’ most often reach the physician where the wife is either excessively naive or where the marriage has become disaffected for some reason other than sexual. Some wives’ initial resolve, ‘I’ll be anything he wants, anything he needs’ tends to reverse itself as marital discord increases.12
Women’s narratives typically feature marriage counselors, varieties of “mental health professionals,” who act in the role of wardens over prisoners rather than mediators for the couple. More concerningly, from the passage Gluck cites and the above passage here, the sexologist even becomes a collaborator with the husband against the wife. “In milder cases,” Oliven says, “the wife may be guided toward an initial attitude of toleration which gradually can give way to amiable resistance.”13 A recurring theme is the physician stopping the wives from leaving their husbands, where marriage to women has the purpose of containing troubling male sexual behavior. To Oliven, as Gluck notes, men’s wives served as “a buffer for their condition,” a mechanism to help keep the men “from acting out in society.” While he recognizes “no true curative value has been claimed for castration and related measures,” Oliven nevertheless calls it “palliative, perhaps an emergency measure only.”14 But would it be ethical, from a medical point of view, to maintain addictions, such as drugs and alcohol, as “palliative” interventions that patients “need” under threat of suicide?
As to Oliven’s marital advice, there are no equivalent passages on how physicians should work to persuade husbands to accept their wives’ sexual perversions or that husbands should help contain wives’ sexuality as expected of wives in caring for their husbands. So, if women always have naturally complied, from the beginning, then why did mental health professionals, à la Oliven, publish manuals on how to wear them down? Oliven’s Sexual Hygiene and Pathology represents typical sex advice in marriage counseling following Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde’s 1926 “scientific treatise” Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. Ideally, marriages would not be prisons and therapists would not be wardens, but reality has indicated otherwise—according to the “professional” advice. But do trust “the science,” we hear, for scientists are models of that much lauded “objectivity.”
Pornography as Conditioning in Male Transvestic Fetishism
Dating back to Alfred Kinsey and John Money, sexologists have dismissed pornography’s influence on male sexual behavior, believing, as Money did, that men had been conditioned beforehand to denigrate, objectify, and abuse women. According to Money, pornography must not be part of this conditioning—for some reason—and interestingly, Money never explained why pornography does not condition male sexual behavior, with orgasm as reinforcement. Today’s sexologists dismiss serious consideration of pornography under a similar rationale that it must simply be a “boogeyman” for Puritans and moralizers. For women living with male transvestic fetishists, however, pornography very clearly shapes the men’s sexual practices. In Sundar’s film, Abigail talks about her husband’s pornography:
He would just go off when he wanted to do some of his filming or meet like-minded men. I didn’t know then that he had a separate premises, where he could live quite comfortably and indulge in his interest in pornography. There were lights set up, as though filming was going to happen any moment, makeup—thousands and thousands of photographs. I just had the breath knocked out of me. At that time, I couldn’t at first take it all in.
Listening to other women in Behind the Looking Glass, as well as reading women’s narratives on Trans Widows’ Voices, the role of pornography as conditioning in male transvestic fetishism seems pervasive, quite painfully evident, yet still denied. In Behind the Looking Glass, Gluck notes a history that has been overlooked: mid-twentieth-century forums for male transvestic fetishists made possible by the publishers of pornography. She explains:
Beginning around the 1950s and 1960s, BDSM-themed magazines featuring men dressed as women began to appear in the United States. One such example of this is Letters from Female Impersonators, which was being published by Nutrix, the very same company that was also putting out bondage erotica and pornography of Bettie Page at the time. In Letters from Female Impersonators, men submit photos of themselves dressed as women, usually in underwear, sometimes in bondage. Within some of these letters, you can clearly see this escalation—starting from social contagion or maybe they have heard about this practice from other men who did it. In some cases, they have said that it motivated them to begin crossdressing in public full time.
Although it may seem obvious, Nutrix did not publish an equivalent publication for women desiring to be men. There was no Letters from Male Impersonators published at the same time. Wives did not stop doing the housework and caring for their children to pose in their husband’s clothes and underclothes, take photographs, and send these materials to other wives. Even the most otherwise thoughtful commentators seem to forget such disparities. There is no way to confirm how many of these men socially and medically transitioned, but they certainly qualify as “transgender,” given that Letters from Female Impersonators appears in the Digital Transgender Archive. Given how pornography has become even more pervasive since the 1960s, its online presence being all-consuming, it seems foolish to handwave its significance. Gluck says:
I strongly believe that pornography is spreading a social contagion of fetishism, especially body modification fetishism, among men. This is the most extreme form of misogyny because it reduces women entirely to objectified parts and to pornography itself. It is utterly dehumanizing, and it is devastating women’s rights on a massive scale.
Considering pornography’s role in transvestic fetishism, even for women desiring to be men, would reveal more about the conditioning of sexual behavior than simply attributing it to atypical neurological development. In recent years, the extreme rise in teenage girls being subjected to social and medical transitioning gives the false impression of “gender-affirming care” as being traditionally female-dominated. Statistics, however, indicate the opposite to be true in the founding of the industry. Far more men than women pursued and underwent “sex change” during the 1960s and 1970s—with Harry Benjamin reporting one woman for every eight men in his clinical practice. Based on the scientific literature, as noted in Janice G. Raymond’s 1979 Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, the highest for women was one woman for every two men, but the accepted ratio was one woman for every three or four men.15 This disparity indicates a male-dominated enterprise that has catered overwhelmingly to male patients—and the predominately male professionals. In tokenism, the female presence has maintained what Raymond has termed “the illusion of inclusion”: a false equality of the sexes rather than primary and secondary roles for males and females in the making of transgenderism.16
Combatting the New Coverture
“Being your husband’s secret keeper and sharing his ‘closet’ is claustrophobic,” Tinsel says. Women feel trapped with men trapped in men’s bodies. All too often, the closet looks far more like a coffin. Mystified by “romantic love,” marriage can hinder female self-actualization in service to the husband “discovering” himself in a variety of ways—which is why every wife needs a safe exit. In Sundar’s film, Ute Heggen, author of the 2022 In The Curated Woods: True Tales from a Grass Widow, argues for mothers to have fully custody of the children when the men get “caught up in cross-sex ideation.” Considering the children’s perspective, Thomas says:
You have to realize that your dad has fallen in love with himself, and there’s no part for you in that where you’re not just a prop. You’re a child, and you have this attachment to your father that you’re always going to love him, right? Always. And, then, it’s like this person came along and said, ‘You know how you had a dad? Well, that was all a lie, and all that time, your dad didn’t like being your dad.’ My dad was kind of replaced by this other person, this other person who didn’t love me like my dad loved me, who wasn’t interested in me in the way my dad was, and whose love was conditional. It’s like my dad died when I was eleven, but I didn’t realize, and I’ve been mourning him for forty years. What you see is, initially, there’s the divorce. He wants control over the woman, so he wants custody; he wants to see the kids. There’s a power thing that goes on, but he’s not interested in the kids, because he’s now validating and going on and doing this other thing, so the interest in old family dwindles.
Women in Behind the Looking Glass note how men wanting to be considered “mothers” does not apply to having actual responsibility. Like his understanding of womanhood, the man wants semblance rather than substance. “Not all men,” but certainly more than enough, tacitly endorse, if not enthusiastically support, the new coverture. Sundar’s film gives a look into this other world, the one in which husbands’ wives and their children must live. Over decades, marriage counseling, à la Oliven, has enclosed women into compliance, even in their “amiable resistance.”
In his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), Sir William Blackstone, an Oxford-educated English judge and law professor, defined coverture as the husband’s lordship over his wife, her personhood in marriage becoming an extension of him. According to Blackstone, under such law, “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”17 In other words, legally speaking, the husband absorbs the wife into his existence. This view of marriage runs counter to the modern perspective emphasizing mutuality between the sexes. Women in marriages to male transvestic fetishists experience a suspension of their existence in the sense of their fundamental conundrum existing as props. This social phenomenon behaves like coverture in the husband’s negation of the wife’s personhood as he authors not only his life but also hers. With both legal and medical institutions collaborating in transgenderism, the new coverture permits men to impersonate women and infringe upon their rights and dignity in both private and public spheres of life.
Women’s male partners frequently attempt to appear like the women, “borrowing” their clothes and underclothes, styling themselves similarly, as if attempting to assimilate the women into the men’s impersonation. Sexologists like Michael Bailey insist that “honest and open AGPs not in denial” do not desire to transgress women’s spaces and services, for the “self-aware, honest, and open AGPs,” as “good men,” would not violate women’s boundaries in the way the “bad men” do.18 To the extent that sexual gratification for male transvestic fetishists derives from boundary violation, it seems worth questioning the plausibility of an easy “good” (“self-aware”) versus “bad” (not “self-aware”) framing.
A cautionary tale, Annie Woodhouse, author of the 1989 Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender, and Feminism, bought into the idea that “transsexual lesbian feminists”—like David “Carol” Riddell—are the “self-aware” counterparts to the misogynistic transvestic fetishists she found married to women. “Most transvestites do not express any desire to become a woman in any permanent sense,” Woodhouse writes. “Their cross-dressing is a periodic activity, interspersed with work, social life, and possibly marriage and fatherhood.”19 Displaying her naïveté, Woodhouse takes Riddell, who asserted men’s right to women’s spaces, including lesbian spaces, to be a world apart from the male transvestic fetishist husbands she criticizes. The move toward constructing the “virtuous autogynephilic male” seems like a new way of selling the “transsexual lesbian feminist”—yet another synonym for the “self-aware” man. However, we remain faced with virtually the same problem of narratives mainly curated by sexologists and their male patients.
“Not all men,” so they say, but certainly more than enough that men’s self-identification as “virtuous” warrants skepticism—as should the value judgments of sexologists. There is Blanchard, as quoted in Sundar’s film, saying, “I one hundred percent sympathize with the viewpoint of these wives; I agree with those women who complain that their plight has been ignored in all of the ‘stunning and brave’ celebration of what’s happening.” Of course, there is also Bailey, who confused Behind the Looking Glass for What Is a Woman? Wrong Answers Only—such is the sexologist’s concern for women. Bailey replied the following on a link to Sundar’s documentary:
The men in that film are definitely AGP. Do we think they are open and honest about their AGP?
Also, btw, it wouldn’t be hard to make a very creepy film about plain old heterosexual men, if we focused on their sexual fantasies and behavior. If we selected the right men.
I am empathic towards women. That doesn’t prevent me from having empathy towards good AGPs. And doesn’t obligate me to accept any complaint from any woman.
Just because I don’t agree with everything you say doesn’t mean I lack empathy. The world is more complicated than you seem to believe. I have never advocated for AGPs to behave badly towards women (or anyone) and am sure I’ve experienced the wrath of bad AGPs more than you have.20
Sexology certainly has its limitations. There are “good” men, there are “bad” men, so it goes, and telling the difference can be hard, but men get to impersonate women, and there is no consideration of how it actually impacts the women. The sexologist affirms that male transvestic fetishists have a “disorder,” which means they have “needs”—and so we return to Oliven’s notion of the “palliative.” The male patient finds a handy medical excuse to justify his behavior—even believing he “needs” his female impersonation to live. To quote Jennifer Bilek, “Women as human beings escape him entirely.”21
From women’s even more complicated world, Sundar’s Behind the Looking Glass presents evidence supporting a needed critique of sexology’s collaboration in harm. By default, prioritizing the male transvestic fetishist as the victim overcoming a hostile family poses a variety of issues when he may well be the victimizer behind closed doors. When a man claims to be “virtuous,” the sexologist may just take his word for it. In fact, men do lie, quite a lot when not a little. Like the word “love,” the word “virtuous” is not to be taken at face value. Sexology has too long passed off the subjective as the objective. How do we know purportedly “self-aware, honest, and open” men will not persist in self-deception about themselves, still pretending harmful behavior does no harm? We do well to remember the women deceived and the consequences they suffer.
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George Sand, The Intimate Journal, in Miriam Schneir, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, 1972 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 33.
Tinsel of Trans Widows’ Voices, “These Chains That Have No Name—Interview with Trans Widows’ Voices,” by Donovan Cleckley, Women Are Human, March 31, 2021, reposted October 17, 2024, https://www.donovancleckley.com/these-chains-that-have-no-name-interview.
See Ray Blanchard, “The Concept of Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male Gender Dysphoria,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 177, no. 10 (October 1989): 616-623. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-198910000-00004. See also Blanchard, “The Classification and Labeling of Nonhomosexual Gender Dysphorias,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 18, no. 4 (August 1989): 315-334. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01541951.
Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism (New York: Springer, 2013), 30. See also Lawrence, “Becoming What We Love: Autogynephilic Transsexualism Conceptualized as an Expression of Romantic Love,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50, no. 4 (Autumn 2007): 506-520.
O.J. Simpson, quoted in Alan Abrahamson, “Simpson Expands on Slaying Remark Made to Magazine,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1998, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jan-17-mn-9193-story.html. See also Andrea Dworkin, “Trapped in a Pattern of Pain Where No One Can Help,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1994, http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/TrappedinaPattern.html; Dworkin, “In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson,” Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (New York: Free Press, 1997), 41-50.
Christopher Watts, quoted in Joseph Diaz, Denise Martinez-Ramundo, Allie Yang, and Carol McKinley, “Leading a Double Life: While Appearing as a Family Man, Chris Watts Wrote Love letters to Another Woman Before Murdering Wife, Two Daughters,” ABC News, December 8, 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/US/deadly-double-life-appearing-family-man-chris-watts/story?id=59635945. See also Erin Donaghue, “‘Daddy, No!’: Christopher Watts Confesses Killing Family in Disturbing Account,” CBS News, March 8, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-watts-confession-murders-pregnant-wife-daughters.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 683.
Anne A. Lawrence, “Autogynephilia at 35,” October 2024, https://annelawrence.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/autogynephilia-at-35.pdf.
See Heather Brunskell-Evans, “The Medico-Legal ‘Making’ of ‘The Transgender Child,’” Medical Law Review 27, no. 4 (Autumn 2019): 640-657. https://doi.org/10.1093/medlaw/fwz013.
John F. Oliven, Sexual Hygiene and Pathology: A Manual for the Physician and the Professions, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965), 514.
Oliven, Sexual Hygiene and Pathology: A Manual for the Physician (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1955), 401-402; Oliven, 1965, 517.
Oliven, 1965, 228.
Oliven, 229.
Oliven, 518.
Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, 1979 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994), 24.
Raymond, 27.
William Blackstone, “Of Husband and Wife,” 1765, in Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton (eds.), Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 134.
Michael Bailey (@profjmb), X, November 1, 2024, 7:38 AM, https://x.com/profjmb/status/1852329378316792111: “Honest and open AGPs not in denial don’t want that.” Bailey (@profjmb), X, November 2, 2024, 1:14 PM, https://x.com/profjmb/status/1852776312647123141: “Those aren’t self-aware, honest, and open AGPs.”
Annie Woodhouse, Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender, and Transvestism (New Brunsrick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 82.
Bailey (@profjmb), X, October 31, 2024, 6:56 PM, https://x.com/profjmb/status/1852137631351480441; Bailey, X, November 1, 2024, 9:52 AM, https://x.com/profjmb/status/1852363047626502146; Bailey, X, November 1, 2024, 10:02 AM, https://x.com/profjmb/status/1852365574916960368.
Jennifer Bilek, “Autogynephilic Confessions and the Sacrifice of Women’s Humanity,” 2021, Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from the 11th Hour (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2024), 181.