Source: Women are Human
“So often when husbands are trumpeting, one wonders what the silent wife is really thinking.”
– Germaine Greer, “Review of Conundrum by Jan Morris” (1974), The Madwoman’s Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings (1986)
“You lose your partner and your access to his memories. One day he comes to you in different clothes, with different hair, and in a travesty of his voice he tells you that his name is something other than the one you have always known him by. He tells you that he has been posing as your partner, a fictitious character of his own and perhaps your invention throughout your relationship. Tells you every memory you’ve stored needs to be rewritten. This person, the one standing before you now, who looks and sounds and moves in a manner that strikes you as being just about as authentic as a child playing dress-up, tells you: I’m real. The man you knew was not. It’s like losing a part of one’s mind.”
– Christine Benvenuto, Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On (2012)
“The wife’s role in relation to the hero is to be a handmaiden, not a critic or an obstacle.”
– Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (2014)
Trans Widows Voices is a website that works to support the former partners of males who have socially and medically transitioned, and to amplify the voices of women, those who are most forgotten in the narratives of men’s heroic journeys to conquer ‘womanhood’ as theirs. Under the “Our Voices” heading of the site, we see a selection of stories from women. Despite charges that these women make their male partners into monsters, these narratives show us new dimensions in the subjection of women. Most relationships in these cases involve married heterosexual males, many of whom have fathered children, “coming out” as “women” after many years of crossdressing behind closed doors. “It is their wives who suffer,” Andrea Dworkin wrote in a review of Amy Bloom’s book Normal in 2003. To voice their experiences, these women write under pseudonyms, staying anonymous, primarily because of how relentlessly their former husbands would pursue them to punish them for speaking. The case of Christine Benvenuto, author of the 2012 memoir Sex Changes, exemplifies this sort of situation, where the husband’s identity appears to matter more than his wife’s humanity. Men seek to silence women for speaking the truth of gender as a reality in which men possess women. As Dworkin said in 1995: “Gender itself—what men are, what women are—is based on the forced silence of women; and beliefs about community—what a community is, what a community should be—are based on this silence.” Women Are Human presents for our readers an exchange with the founder of Trans Widows Voices. And, as Dworkin would tell us today, in our time: remember, resist, do not comply.1
When I have seen narratives from women, who could be called ‘trans widows,’ even if they might not call themselves that, one characteristic among them that I have noticed has been a consistent sense of isolation. Aside from being wives, many of these women are mothers who, with their children, begin feeling as if imprisoned by their husbands’ identities as ‘women.’ As seen in your story, what might have seemed to be, at first, a loving marriage between man and woman comes to feel as though a cage. Given both your own experiences and those of other women whose stories you have seen, what would you say about this dynamic between husbands and wives?
I know that I felt very isolated during my marriage. Being your husband’s secret keeper and sharing his ‘closet’ is claustrophobic. When my ex-husband started to think about leaving the closet, he quickly gained a Greek chorus of online supporters cheering on his progress toward transition. I had nobody until very late on when I told my best friends.
I didn’t find any groups or support networks for trans widows, indeed that name didn’t exist back then. The only thing I found was the Women of the Beaumont Society (WOBS), and this seemed to consist of older women putting up with teeth grindingly miserable relationships with crossdressers – or younger women in what I now know to be abusive relationships with autogynephilic men. I didn’t relate to either of these.
After I had left the marriage and begun to reflect, this is what motivated me to start connecting with other trans widows on Mumsnet and what motivated me to start Trans Widows Voices. I passionately believe that women should not feel like they are on their own when they are in that situation. I also realized that nobody was going to step up and help us – we have to make connections and help ourselves and each other.
Additionally, there is a cycle present in many relationships with crossdressers, where women stay in the relationship because they are constantly being convinced that their husband has stopped his activities, or that a compromise has been reached, and for a while things go back to an illusion of normality.
There is a repeating pattern of behavior being discovered, upset and distress as a result, compromises being made and boundaries being put in place, then there being brief periods of calm, followed by boundaries being pushed and agreements being broken. Rinse and repeat. This cycle can go on for years with the crossdresser’s behavior escalating each time as they travel down a path which, generally, these days ends in transition.
The other pressure on women to stay comes from society. The rewards for staying can be great on one level – praise from the LGBT community, opportunities for book deals and lifestyle blogs. The women who stay are able to write about their experiences under their own names, whilst those of us who leave generally have to be anonymous for fear of reprisals. But the cage that these women are in is the most insidious in my view – as they are totally dependent on the approval and acceptance of the transgender community. If they put a foot wrong, online retribution can be swift and merciless. I don’t judge women who take this route, but I do fear for their well-being, as the level of cognitive dissonance that they live with day to day must be debilitating. My friend at Children of Transitioners calls this “the pressure to pretend that it’s all OK.”
All of this is, of course, on top of the economic difficulties that most women face when leaving marriages and facing single parenthood.
While husbands ‘coming out’ as ‘women’ generally receive support in being ‘wives,’ with their wives expected to be their supporters, it would seem that the wives who have been women all along tend to receive far less support. Or, to be more precise, as you say, the wives can receive far more support, certainly in the form of rewards for their servitude, as long as they perform self-abnegation. And even the wives who do perform the role seen as proper for them, as much as they feign the appearance of everything being fine, end up seen as only appendages. All of it depends, of course, on the wives further subordinating themselves to their husbands. But, in either case, the cage can become a way of life.
A narrative that we hear most commonly has been that, if the husbands cannot have their wives’ fullest submission, the men will die by suicide. As we also know, seldom do such discussions, presumably concerned with mental health and wellbeing, discuss the situation of the wives. In your experience, what have you found most revealing about this inconsistency in concern for males over females from otherwise progressive people, especially coming from those who claim to be feminists?
You correctly identify that one of the main leverage tactics that trans widows’ husbands tend to use is saying if they do not do this or that, whatever it might be, then they will become so depressed they will inevitably kill themselves. Aside from enabling them to get their own way, it enables them to free themselves of any blame or guilt for their actions. This use of suicide threats cuts through the whole transgender rights movement – parents of trans identifying children are subjected to it, too, and it’s a common claim of groups like Mermaids.
Threatening suicide is a well-known manipulation tactic. In the UK we have a brilliant organisation called the Freedom Programme, something I recommend all trans widows complete. The Freedom Programme teaches women―in particular, domestic abuse survivors―how to identify and avoid being subjected to further abuse, by showing abuse tactics as different personas of a template domestic abuser, who is called “The Dominator.” The side of the abuser that uses suicide threats, according to the Freedom Programme, is “The Persuader,” who controls by threats and coercion.
At the same time, as suicidal ideation is being used as justification for transition, many LGBT organisations take the understandable upset and confusion which trans widows experience, which may result in suicidal thoughts, as attempts to abuse and control the transitioner. This is a DARVO tactic, which echoes the way trans widows are treated in the home.2
The despair and grief of the trans widow as she loses any control over the future of her marriage is reframed as an attempt to abuse and control her husband – and the language of domestic violence is appropriated. It is a narcissistic tactic. LGBT organisations actually postulate that it is domestic abuse if a trans widow does not ‘affirm’ her husband’s gender identity.
No doubt it is part of a strategy to silence trans widows into compliance. The wife is not even allowed to feel upset without it being framed as her being transphobic and controlling toward her husband. I begin to believe that, so tightly are the doors locked on the echo chambers in which some people live, that they start to believe that only trans people experience real feelings. I can see no other reason for how trans widow’s feelings are completely disregarded – unless, of course, it is just garden variety misogyny and male entitlement and I am overthinking it.
Male violence against women and girls, whether it happens in marriage or in prostitution, either in private or in public, seems like one of the most pervasively denied phenomena across societies and cultures. But, for trans widows, especially with the kind of gaslighting they experience, the method seems even more so psychosexual. One example could be a husband trying on his wife’s clothing without her consent, even wearing her bras and underwear, and him masturbating while imagining himself as ‘female.’ Another could be the husband’s insistence that, in his new identity as ‘female,’ he and his wife become ‘lesbians.’ Far more examples likely exist, as could be told by trans widows, of male fantasies where the wife becomes a mere prop to the husband’s desire. Such cases, as we know, also likely would be dismissed as not seeming harmful. After all, crossdressing can be seen as a clearly victimless cultural practice. Against the pervasive denial of harm, what have you noticed about stories of these sorts, where a husband declares himself a wife to his wife, in terms of the damage men can do to women mentally if not also physically?
My view of autogynephilia is that it is a fetish, which damages women by its very existence – as by its nature, it is never victimless.3 It can damage women directly, because they are coerced into participating in it in the bedroom, or in everyday life where a man gets off on crossing women’s boundaries and making them uncomfortable. Women are also affected indirectly, because autogynephilia perpetuates a patriarchal – and ‘sissified’ – version of womanhood.
What I have observed from trans widows’ stories about sexual relationships with males who exhibit autogynephilia is the phenomenon that I have come to understand as ‘topping from the bottom.’ The man with autogynephilia more often than not has a fantasy of being submissive and, to indulge in this fantasy, has to rope in the only person available – his wife – who is usually varying degrees of unwilling. He then sets all of the parameters of the encounter and acts out submission, persuading and coercing his wife to take the supposedly dominant role.
One example of this, which I found particularly upsetting, involved a woman who was coerced into ‘pegging’ her husband with a strap-on, even though it caused her pain to her caesarean scar. Throughout this, the husband was role-playing that he was a ‘slave’ and she was his dominant ‘mistress.’4
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?
In the past, I have pointed readers toward the stories of trans widows, both those seen at Trans Widows’ Voices and elsewhere, such as Christine Benvenuto’s 2012 book Sex Changes. But one characteristic I have noticed, though, even strikingly exhibited among women, is denialism. And it tends to manifest in multiple layers. First and foremost, one denies that any man would do what these men do in the private sphere to women around them. It resembles the denialism toward domestic violence more generally. One might assume that a man would only identify as a woman from love, as a man would only marry a woman for love.
We are all, men and women alike, guilty at one time or another of denying the evidence before our own eyes, because it does not fit in with what we have previously believed – or because it enables us to reinforce an aspect of our beliefs or personality that is important to us. For example, I have just spent a disturbing weekend watching the recent Woody Allen documentary and asking myself why I ignored for so long what was in plain sight. But it was because it concerned a man whose work I admired.
I encountered an interesting example of denialism recently among gender-critical feminists in the UK. There was a story in the newspapers here about a man who worked in a supermarket and how he had obtained the agreement of his employers to wear a skirt – that is, the female uniform, rather than the trousers customary for male employees. He said that he doesn’t think that he is a woman; he just finds women’s clothes more comfortable.5
Gender-critical feminists believe that gender nonconformity is perfectly acceptable, and that, if more people were accepted when they showed nonconformity with sex-role stereotypes, there would be no need for people to feel that they have to transition. These feminists believe that the problem is not in what you wear; it is in the idea that what you wear can change your sex.
Unfortunately, in this instance, the desire of many feminists to show that they are accepting of gender-nonconforming behavior entirely overrode their usual ability to think critically. They took the man’s claims entirely at face value, and, for a couple of days, gender-critical social media was full of women saying “Good on him!,” “We need more of this!,” etc. What they failed to notice was that the man in question, if you applied a modicum of critical thought to the article, was very plainly autogynephilic and had been given a license to exercise his fetish at work. Aside from wearing a skirt, if you actually looked at the images of him, he was wearing women’s shoes, stockings/tights, and a padded bra. Further, he described a typical pattern of escalating boundary-breaching behavior – and that he had high heels, makeup, and wigs at home. Also, he described, in his own words, ‘borrowing’ clothes from girlfriends. He was duping everybody around him about his motivation.
Some of the women supportively sharing the article became very defensive when challenged, even when challenged by women who had their own experience of living with this kind of behavior and who they would usually support. The only bright side of the whole sorry incident, is that it convinced me that those women who look down on us for not leaving sooner, and who say they would have left at the first sign of that sort of behaviour, are actually just as gullible as we were, if not more so. We all want others to think that we are not bigots, but it behooves us all to think about when our performance of not being bigoted toward crossdressing men becomes actively bigoted against women.
As far back as Jan Morris’s 1974 autobiography Conundrum, transition as man’s exploration of his ‘womanhood’ has been a trope in the tales that resemble, as Dr Sheila Jeffreys has observed, “an epic adventure in which individuals seek to find themselves.”6 It is what could be called ‘the hero’s journey’ toward authenticity through artificiality. More recently, in 2019, this trope appeared in The New York Times, with best-selling transgender author Jennifer Finney Boylan comparing heterosexual males coming out as ‘women’ and ‘lesbians’ to immigrant girls of color mistreated at the Mexico-United States border. But, as Boylan is a wealthy white heterosexual male, who fathered two children with his wife,colonization is not immigration.7
Men insist on imagining themselves as simply being included into womanhood, without force, by the submissive inhabitants of what Boylan calls “the land I struggled so hard to reach”: womanhood. Man claims the role of the adventurer, womanhood exists as the land to which he seeks claim, and woman, as Jeffreys puts it, must be the hero’s “handmaiden, not a critic or an obstacle.” Her role is to be his helpmate to his claim over her own kind. Both from your own story and, given what you have seen from other former partners of these men, in what ways has a similar kind of story manifested itself in the lives of women?
It is absolutely true that the role of women in relationships with crossdressers, or trans-identifying men generally, is entirely that of ‘support humans.’ If the husband is climbing a metaphorical Mount Everest to ‘womanhood,’ then she is there to trail behind, carrying the rucksack and mopping his brow. At the time of Jan Morris’s death, there was commentary from several sources which seemed congratulatory that he had sustained his marriage. There was very little questioning as to whether expecting your wife to stay in a relationship where you end up living as brother and sister, or as good friends, is a reasonable expectation on the wife.
I came across this article recently, written by Amy Bloom in 2002 for The Atlantic.8 It describes the author’s experience of going on a cruise with crossdressing men and their wives. It is an interesting insight into the historical role of the crossdresser’s wife. Then the wife’s support role was to help with hair and makeup, and to fasten her husband’s bra – why they cannot do it all themselves, like all women do every day, is never explained to us – and to arrange support groups to help other women in tolerating the otherwise intolerable.
Nowadays, these same husbands more than likely identify as ‘stunning and brave’ ‘transgender women,’ rather than remaining as secret heterosexual male crossdressers. And, while this change in the times is no doubt better for them, it is an entirely different life for the wives whose support is dragged from the private to the public sphere, who are pressured into being ‘allies’ to transgenderism – marching at Pride wearing an ‘ally’ t-shirt and waving a banner. This dynamic of being dragged along in somebody else’s wake, with no control over the direction, was extremely detrimental to my mental health. Yet now women are expected not only to accept the situation but also to cheer it on.
The invention of ‘the transgender child’ serves differing purposes in debates on transgenderism, with false analogies being drawn between LGB people and those who identify themselves as the opposite sex on the basis of gender identity. In Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans’s book Transgender Body Politics, she argues that “the medico-legal ‘making’ of ‘the transgender child,’” making them “exist as natural figures,” serves “to fabricate the illusion that transgender identity is apolitical.”9 What Brunskell-Evans writes would seem to apply to the shrouding of sexual politics at play in transgenderism as an ideology, an industry, and an institution. It would seem that ‘the transgender child,’ constructed as a commodity, has become a kind of shield against criticism of how men treat women under transgenderism.
Similar to Brunskell-Evans, in one of your tweets, you observe that, for men with autogynephilia, inventing ‘the transgender child’ serves, in your words, “to convince the world that autogynephilia is not a fetish.” For heterosexual males, especially those who have abused and exploited their wives, this naturalization of what they do, as if it cannot be helped, seems to be a cover for their coercive patterns of behavior. What have you noticed about the appropriation of “the transgender child” as a sort of symbol for the innocence of men subjecting women to otherwise severe mistreatment?
This is connected to something which I call the trans widow’s conundrum. During our marriages, to a greater or lesser degree, we see our husbands go through some kind of struggle relating to their identity. Often, we see them move from secret crossdresser to identifying as a ‘trans woman.’ There comes a point where they have to make a choice between continuing to live in a ‘male’ role, so to speak, or socially and medically transitioning.
If they choose to transition, rather than live secret lives as crossdressers, then they very quickly have to start to project the idea that it was not a choice at all, but rather was really inevitable. Usually, they will say that they had to make the decision to transition – or else, as it goes, they would have killed themselves. They also have to begin to say that they were “born this way,” despite all the evidence to the contrary that the wife will have seen of her husband. This tactic aligns with ‘queer theory,’ attempting to bring the crossdressing husbands’ situations into line with that of LGB people.
The thing is, though, that in doing this, while they may feel it excuses their actions to the rest of the world, it makes the situation only more of a conundrum for the wife. Which version should we believe? It is possible to accept that your husband married you in good faith, but then changed – especially when you have seen this situation develop with your own eyes. But it is impossible to accept that he married you under false pretenses, always knowing who he was, deep down, and what he needed to do for himself. If we believe the “born this way” interpretation, then, in fact, it makes our exes more, not less, like villains. We can never think well of those who hoodwinked us into acting as their ‘beards.’
For ‘born this way’ to be true, it is necessary for ‘the transgender child’ to exist. We are expected to believe that the middle-aged male transitioner, both a husband and a father, has so much in common with teenage girls who are struggling with their sexuality and gender identity. This expectation is why many of our exes become very vocal in supporting the idea of children and young people being ‘transgender.’ They may even say that they do not want gender-nonconforming children now to go through what they suffered in childhood, but, more often than not, even that is a total misrepresentation of history. Indeed, our exes often had seemingly normal, otherwise happy, gender-conforming childhoods, going from boyhood into manhood.
Additionally, men with autogynephilia do not want the world to know that, in reality, they are motivated by a form of fetishism.10 To this end, they deny the existence of autogynephilia, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And so, if ‘the transgender child’ exists, then social and medical transition for middle-aged heterosexual males cannot be a fetish, they argue, because children cannot have fetishes. I have even had it implied to me that I am sexualizing children themselves by talking about autogynephilia exhibited by adult heterosexual males. I am asked if I am calling a three-year-old ‘transgender’ child a fetishist. The younger it can be proved that children can be ‘transgender,’ the more potent the ‘proof’ now used to hide the fetishism of adult heterosexual males.
This piece features an illustration by Stella Perrett. More of her cartoons and illustrations can be seen at her website via the following link:
http://www.spanglefish.com/stellaillustrator
Perrett’s cartoons appear on a weekly basis at uncancelled. In addition, her work can be found not only here at Women Are Human but also at Uncommon Ground Media.
Notes
1.See Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Teachers College Press, 1994/1979), especially “Sappho by Surgery: The Transsexually Constructed Lesbian-Feminist,” pp. 99-119, and Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (Plume, 1989/1981), especially “Objects,” pp. 101-128.
2.See Scottish Transgender Alliance, Transgender People’s Experiences of Domestic Abuse, 2010, p. 14. Notably, almost all of what the report classifies as “emotional abuse” can be a depressed and/or suicidal wife, whose self-harm could very well be a product of partner abuse, with her objecting to her husband and trying to set boundaries against him in the house. With ‘misgendering’ seen as ‘an act of violence,’ and the use of male pronouns increasingly readable as ‘domestic violence,’ it makes the meaning of ‘abuse’ quite abstract. This abstraction involving male fantasies of untamable shrews poses a stark contrast to the reality of sexual violence to which primarily male partners subject their female partners behind closed doors.
3.See Ray Blanchard, Interviewed by Louise Perry in “What Is Autogynephilia? An Interview with Dr Ray Blanchard,” Quillette, November 6, 2019 for a brief introduction to the concept itself. See also Ray Blanchard, “The Classification and Labeling of Nonhomosexual Gender Dysphorias,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 18, no. 4, 1989, pp. 315-334; Ray Blanchard, “The Concept of Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male Gender Dysphoria,” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 177, no. 10, 1989, pp. 616-623; J. Michael Bailey, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism (Joseph Henry Press, 2003); Anne A. Lawrence, “Becoming What We Love: Autogynephilic Transsexualism Conceptualized as an Expression of Romantic Love,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 50, no. 4, 2007, pp. 506-520; J. Michael Bailey and Kiira Triea, “What Many Transgender Activists Don’t Want You to Know: And Why You Should Know It Anyway,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 50, no. 4, 2007, pp. 521-534; Alice Dreger, “The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 37, 2008, pp. 366-421; Ray Blanchard, “Deconstructing the Feminine Essence Narrative,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 37, 2008, pp. 434-438; Anne A. Lawrence, “Shame and Narcissistic Rage in Autogynephilic Transsexualism,” Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 37, pp. 457-461; Anne A. Lawrence, Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism (Springer, 2013); Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice (Penguin, 2015); Leonard Sax, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences (Harmony Books, 2017/2005); Ryan T. Anderson, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment (Encounter Books, 2018); (Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019); Andrea Long Chu, Females: A Concern (Verso, 2019); Debra Soh, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society (Threshold Editions, 2020); and Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby: A Novel (One World, 2021).
For criticisms of the concept of autogynephilia, see, generally, Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press, 2016/2007); Julia Serano, “The Case Against Autogynephilia,” International Journal of Transgenderism, vol. 12, no. 3, 2010, pp. 176-187; and Julia Serano, “Autogynephilia: A Scientific Review, Feminist Analysis, and Alternative ‘Embodiment Fantasies’ Model,” The Sociological Review, vol. 68, no. 4, 2020, pp. 763-778. See also Chu and Peters above.
Based on the narratives of women literally trapped with men figuratively trapped in men’s bodies, it merits us asking about the manifestations of autogynephilic behavior and its meaning to the conditions of women behind closed doors. With autogynephilia, we must remember that, while we might assume fantasies can be isolated to the individual psyche, they indeed do spill over into our social interactions. For heterosexual males, then, their primarily female partners—and even their children—become subjected to the patriarch’s fetishism of femaleness. Subordinate, they exist, even still, as mere appendages to the male-to-constructed-female. We might observe in cases of autogynephilia some combination of autoeroticism, fetishism, narcissism, and objectification—which can manifest in masochistic fantasies, with sadism under the skin. The feminized—even “sissified”—exterior, which appears to role-play scripts of female submission, serves as a mask for the ironically hypermasculine interior still doing the scripting of desire.
4.See Roy F. Baumeister, Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood (Basic Books, 1991), especially pp. 127-129. On masochism in relation to gender identity development, mainly in heterosexual males, Baumeister writes that many male masochists seem drawn to “some degree of symbolic feminization.” Baumeister continues:
Most common is dressing in women’s clothes, especially lingerie. A man might wear a woman’s brassiere, panties, and stockings. Some men add makeup and a dress, going out in public wearing feminine clothes, or engaging in sex acts as a woman. They may take female names or perform tasks connoting ‘women’s work,’ such as housework. There is little evidence that female masochists desire to be converted symbolically into males. One possible reason is that our culture associates maleness with higher status; to masculinize a female would not reduce her status. This argument suggests that the feminization of male masochists is one form of embarrassment and humiliation, which seems very likely to be the case. Another explanation is that the female role, as envisioned in our culture, is closer to some notions of masochism (that is, passivity, submissiveness, orientation toward pleasing others) than the male role. Another related factor may be that our culture allows women to wear pants more readily than it allows men to wear dresses. Regardless of why female masochists don’t seem to use gender change, the fact remains that gender change is a significant form of identity change in masochism. Being converted into a new person with a new gender, new role, and new name is a thorough alteration of one’s identity: One escapes from the self so thoroughly that one becomes someone else. (pp. 127-128)
More or less masochistic in nature, the male fantasy of femaleness tends to be explicitly bound up in man’s endeavor to escape the male self, but he merely eclipses woman, subsuming her within himself as herself, but, in the end, solely for him.
In one specific passage of Serano’s Whipping Girl, a section titled “Submissive Streak” (pp. 273-276), we see an expression of what Baumeister discusses in Escaping the Self. Serano writes:
Most of my fantasies began with my abduction: I’d turn to putty in the hands of some twisted man who would turn me into a woman as part of his evil plan. It’s called forced feminization, and it’s not really about sex. It is about turning the humiliation you feel into pleasure, transforming the loss of male privilege into the best fuck ever. While I never really believed the cliché about women being good for only one thing, I found that sentiment kept creeping into my fantasies. In my late teens, I would imagine myself being sold into sex slavery and having strange men take advantage of me. It wasn’t so much that I was attracted to men, but that movies and magazines made it seem that being feminine meant allowing yourself to be dominated by men. In my mind, I’ve been pinned down by bodies so large that they dwarfed me, felt the ghost pains that accompanied the unwanted groping of body parts that did not yet belong to me, experienced the helplessness of having some faceless john stick his cock into the cunt that I hated myself for wishing that I had. And with each make-believe thrust, I felt simultaneous ecstasy and shame. My rape fantasies were bastard Catholic sacraments, as I absolved myself of guilt by combining my desire to be female with self-inflicted penance and punishment.
–(pp. 274-275)
See also, generally, Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis (Eds. Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E.H. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star) (Frog in the Well, 1982) and bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press, 1992), pp. 21-39.
5.See Steve Kelly and Anna Riley, “Crossdressing Tesco Employee Astounded by Support After Wearing Skirt to Work,” Daily Star, March 4, 2021. Quoted in the piece, Jeremy Jeffrey tells us:
I often get asked if I’m gay. Well, no―I’m not. I’ve had girlfriends, and it’s great because we can share a wardrobe. I just merely feel more comfortable and relaxed in women’s clothes. I don’t want to be a woman, but I just like the more feminine way of dressing. I enjoy football, nights out with the lads, love my sports and all the blokey stuff like that. I do have wigs, but I don’t really wear them and just have my natural hair. I’m a guy who wears a skirt and I feel a lot happier now [that] I can just be myself and get on with life.
Jeffrey’s protestation to being perceived as gay, followed by his reiteration that he is not only heterosexual but also, beyond his crossdressing, masculine like other members of the male sex, echoes sentiments by heterosexual male crossdressers. The reiteration of one’s heterosexuality seems, at first, a defense against homosexuality, but really seems more a reassurance against scrutiny for one’s autogynephilia. The public tends to perceive most men who ‘come out’ as ‘women’ as primarily homosexual males with no sexual desire for the opposite sex whose services and spaces the men colonize and occupy, but most are, in fact, heterosexual. In recent decades, this number has likely only increased in the transition from transsexualism to transgenderism. Many otherwise heterosexual males, once crossdressers, now ‘come out’ as ‘transgender lesbians,’ still really holding onto male socialization, even as they give lip service to ‘lesbian feminism’ now subsumed by male sexual being in the name of being ‘inclusive.’ On sex and sexual orientation, the logical endpoint of framing ‘exclusion’ as always already bigoted is the loss of boundaries for women and homosexual people, especially lesbians. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs, vol. 5, no. 4, 1980, pp. 631-660.
6.Criticisms of Morris’s Conundrum, during the time of its publication, came from Nora Ephron, Germaine Greer, Rebecca West, and, of course, Janice G. Raymond, among others, who, in one way or another, saw in Morris simply a man who had made femaleness into his fetish. But, as we see when we look back, more publications than we might imagine chastised the female reviewers for their sharp tongues toward a male who, in their eyes, made his mockery of femaleness into a way of life. In Morris’s narrative, we additionally see a kind of disembodiment from the male body, not because of the distress itself with sex, but seemingly due to a simultaneous acceptance of sexuality paradoxically split by the rejection of it. Morris represents as spiritual what otherwise would be read as sexual. One could read the kind of religiosity in the text, which seems to be the shroud for male heterosexuality, through the lens provided by Susan Griffin in her 1981 book Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature.
7.See Natasha Chart, “Being a Powerful White Man Is Nothing Like Being an Undocumented Immigrant Girl,” Feminist Current, April 5, 2019.
8.See Amy Bloom, “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses: Heterosexual Crossdressers,” Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude (Vintage Books, 2003), pp. 57-111. See, especially, pp. 70-80.
9.See Heather Brunskell-Evans, “The Medico-Legal ‘Making’ of ‘The Transgender Child,’” Medical Law Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 2019, pp. 640-657.
4.See Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” 1927, in James Strachey (Ed.), 1961, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1986), pp. 152-157. On “the meaning of the fetish,” that which man must keep secret from others, especially women, at all costs, to manage his fantasy as such, Freud writes:
We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects. In later life, the fetishist feels that he enjoys yet another advantage from his substitute for a genital. The meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld from him: it is easily accessible and he can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all. -(p. 154)
We can now see some comparisons between the fetishist, as discussed by Freud above, and the queer repudiation of being gay made by autogynephilic heterosexual males, who, despite their transvestism, nevertheless affirm masculinity through heterosexuality. A more well-known case of the fetishist seeking to desexualize the fetish is Virginia Prince, a married heterosexual male and pioneer of modern transgenderism. Jeffreys points out in Gender Hurts that Prince objected to being seen in association to homosexuality for his crossdressing and, in addition, continuously seemed to shroud the role of sexuality at play for men specifically like himself (p. 15). Beyond just Prince, these attempts by crossdressing heterosexual males, Jeffreys argues, explain the transition from “transsexualism” to “transgenderism” to further remove “transness” from sexuality and represent it as identity somehow isolated from sexual being. In a piece, first published in Transvestia in 1978 titled “The ‘Transcendents’ or ‘Trans’ People,” Prince argues, quoting Theodore Roszak, that “[t]he woman most desperately in need of liberation is the ‘woman’ every man has locked up in the dungeons of his own psyche” (qtd. in Prince p. 46). See “The ‘Transcendents’ or ‘Trans’ People,” International Journal of Transgenderism, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 39-46. For a rather prescient remark on this Roszak quote, which first appeared in the 1969 anthology Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women (Edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak), see Annie Gottlieb, “Female Human Beings,” The New York Times, February 21, 1971.
