Saturday 19 January 2013

Autogynephilia and Crossdreaming

What do these theories do?

Autogynephilia (translated as "love of oneself as a woman") is a theory which initially seemed to aim to account for what was recognised to be a small fraction of transvestic/feminzation fetishists who claim to have gender-dysphoria and desire to have SRS. Among proponents of autogynephilia are those who recognise that that fraction predominantly differ from the rest in that their sexual arousal is more focused on the idea of the female body itself (which I refer to as "bodily-centric" or "bodily-niched"), and that it "predicts gender dysphoria".

The theory comes short in it's recognition of the condition as a faulty inversion of "innate" human sexuality. Positing a distinction of "normal" sexuality in terms of a desired female, whereas the autogynephiliac's faulty sexuality projects oneself in the role of the desired female. This hopeless representation of the experience of "body-centric" transvestic fetishists and the conflation of a transsexual typology, misleadingly obscured the majority and wide variation of non-bodily-centric fetishists from their place in the discourse.

Crossdreaming, created by a dysphoric, is a dysphoric-positive reaction to autogynephilia. It sets off from the point of discourse propagated by autogynephilia, dealing with the appearance of a sexually arousing "body-centric" phenomenology and the dysphoric equivalent. The existence of non-body-centric transvestic fetishists are barely recognised, otherwise compartmentalized, or crudely subsumed. It's definition is obscure as it proposes itself as pretty indistinguishable from transgenderism, as a dysphoria(or desire) which may be expressed through sexuality, of which we must conclude that if "crossdreaming" isn't essentially sexual then it is superfluous.

Throughout the crossdreaming discourse, the presence of dysphoria has fierce, if not unquestionable privilege, as there is a political motivation to ground and legitimize itself as a transgender condition among society and the medical community, thus to distance itself from what it unnecessarily sees as illegitimating sexual components(s). Falsely presupposing that dysphoria only has legitimacy if constituted or rooted innately, or beyond psychological influence. As expected the proponents are open to notions of dysphoria as a form of psychological mediation, but seemingly compartmentalize notions of sexuality of being as such. Autogynephiliac sexual fantasies are identified as natural, whereas the notion of those very fantasies as a form of psychological mediation are curiously identified as perverse. The fallacy that sexuality is isolated from one's general psyche and can not have any real or legitimate influence in these matters.          


At it's core, crossdreaming is adjunct to an essentially psychosexual or fetishistic account of autogyenphilia. Where it is generally understood that the sexual experience simply infers a pre-existing event of imprinted childhood emasculation trauma, crossdreaming extends this by postulating that the antagonizing object manifests sexually because it has been desired all along.

Putting aside these theories for the moment, if we can assume that there is a distinct form of sexual experience for which these theories try to account for, it is paramount that any sort of basis of understanding will begin with an analysis of the very experience itself. In this format I will present works from a few sources, including popular works of fiction, popular captioners, and works from self-identified gender-dysphoric persons.

What is the experience for which "love of oneself as a woman" represents? A phenomenology of autogynephilia.

A Sex-Positive Take on Autogynephilia

Hello, I am wxhluyp. This blog aims to address autogynephilia in a new way. A sex-positive liberation if you will.