Autogynephilic and HomoSexual MtF in Asia

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Originally posted 2017-10-16 15:39:20.

All male-to-feminine (MtF) trans  are EITHER homosexual (exclusively attracted to men from childhood) or non-homosexual (not exclusively attracted to men from childhood.) The latter are commonly known as autogynephilic. This distinction is obvious and has been observed since the 19th century. It is recognised as fundamental by all serious scientists working in the field.

Homosexual Transsexuals (HSTS) exhibit a cluster of trait characteristics in addition to their sexual desire for men. They tend to be small, delicately built, light for their height, naturally feminine and neotenous. They have intense difficulty learning to be masculine, if they ever do. Non-homosexual trans exhibit no such clustering; in fact they conform to the averages for men of their ethnicity and are attracted to women.

The explanation for HSTS is easy and has never been disputed: they desire men and are feminine, so to attract men, whom they know to be attracted to femininity, they make themselves more feminine. Again none of this is true of non-homosexuals; so why on earth might it be that a man, who is not attracted to or seeking to attract men, would want to appear to be feminine?

 

 

 

The great discovery of Dr Ray Blanchard, which solved a mystery that had eluded scientists for a century, was in showing that the stimulus for all non-homosexual MtF trans is attraction to the idea of being a woman. He coined the term ‘autogynephilia’ to describe this: ‘a man’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.’

All expressions of non-homosexual MtF are driven by autogynephilia (AGP). However, since the use of the term ‘non-homosexual’ is often misunderstood by the public and routinely misrepresented by AGP activists, I use the Blanchard term, AGP.

Age of presentation

Many AGP activists make much of the fact that, in Blanchard’s sample, there was a marked difference in age of presentation between HSTS and AGP. His HSTS rarely transitioned after the age of 23, AGPs rarely before 30. This has allowed AGP activists, whose powers of equivocation are highly refined, to suggest that the differences are only in age of transition; but we are already seeing the lie of this as AGPs are appearing younger in the West.

Still, there is a marked preponderance towards elderly transition in the West; so is this a general rule or is it particular to the West? Answering that question is something I have spent a lot of time and effort attempting to do in my travels in Southeast Asia. The fact that here, HSTS and AGPs do not show the same differences in age of presentation, as we see in the West, made this at first difficult. This was compounded because MtF do not see the distinctions between groups in the same way that we do. However, when I was finally able to pick apart the social structure within which it was all happening, it became quite clear.

No distinction

In this region,  the local population does not generally distinguish between gay men, HSTS and AGP at all. They are all grouped together as ‘gays’. Being ‘gay’ (which there means Gender Non-Conforming, born male) is far more important than the subtle differences between the subgroups. Further, the people there always think ‘AGP’ means ‘middle-aged male cross-dresser’ but that is obviously simplistic, as young Western AGPs like Justin ‘Riley’ Dennis prove.

However, once I dug under the surface, I found that Blanchard’s Typology was as accurately descriptive there as in the West. This now makes me postulate that AGP does indeed occur at roughly similar prevalence everywhere. The crucial difference from the West is the age of presentation and the culture and society within which individuals develop. These have marked effects on how AGP, and to a lesser extent HSTS, appears.

Like HSTS, most SE Asian AGPs transition in youth, usually in their teens. This is the same in South America. This has confused some researchers, eg Lawrence, who does not work in Asia or S America, and places too high a value on age of transition; in fact, the late transition typical of the West appears to be a function of intense homophobia and social intolerance.

AGP (everywhere) sets on soon after puberty, although there are claims that subjects had diffuse AGP feelings prior to that. These appear to be analogous to the crushes other children have.

Philippines

In the Philippines, and across the region, the basic social unit is the village — this could be a hamlet or an urban or rural neighbourhood. This is a matriarchy; it is a collection of usually inter-related nuclear families, where the NCOs are first-born sisters, the officers are mothers and the generals are grandmothers. You would see the same in tribal or clan situations all over the world.

The women are in charge, there is absolutely no doubt about that. You never see the men. They are either away working or hanging out together at the basketball court, or one of the strategically placed benches on the periphery of the village.

The group that dominates this, the Home space, I call the Home group, for obvious reasons.

The other group I call the Away group. It comprises ONLY men and it is strictly policed by the members — non-conforming behaviour is not allowed. This rule is so well known and so strictly enforced that any young male who is somewhat ‘different’ is most unlikely to even try to join. Again, Filipinos and other SE Asians do not draw any distinction between gay men, HSTS or AGP. They are all ‘gays’, or ‘bekis’ in the local meaning; no such person can join the Away group.

Home and Away

The Home group is centred on women, led by grandmothers, with great-grandmothers as sort of venerated elders. But it also contains males who, for some reason, can’t make the cut in the Away group. They might be disabled or too old, or injured. It also contains all the young children but also GNC kids, who grow up to be gay and trans. These last are banned from ever being a part of the Away group, because they are considered to be a form of woman. So if you’re a gay boy, yes, you might just wear a dress and your hair long… it doesn’t matter, because as far as the culture is concerned, you’re a girl anyway.

It makes no difference whether you present as a male or a female. You’re still a girl, because you desire men. You can never be a part of the Away group and you probably don’t want to be anyway. Whether you present as a girl or a boy largely depends on social situations; if you get a job where they require you not to ‘crossdress’, you’ll cut your hair, if you get fired, you’ll grow it back. In fact the only distinction that Filipino homosexuals draw between the two types is long-hair and short-hair, and long-hairs have higher status, because, obviously, they are more beautiful and feminine — remember, this is happening inside a matriarchy, where the high-status individuals are all women.

This is not ‘gender fluidity’ in the sense that it is meant in the West; these girls’ gender never changes. They’re always girls. They just dress differently to suit the situation.

GNC behaviour

Back in the village, the real homosexual boys will probably have begun exhibiting GNC behaviour in childhood. It’s quite clear that effeminate homosexuality is innate, as it occurs in conjunction with other traits. These form a discrete group, easily recognisable to an outsider. Some of these will develop into HSTS.

The advantages of appearing to be masculine — even if one is not really — are often to do with career. If you’re bright and doing well at school, likely to go on to university and work in a ‘masculine’ career, then there is a pressure to remain masculine-appearing. An example might be if a boy wants to be a dentist or a doctor, he would do better not to transition; but if he wants to be a dental hygienist or a nurse, there’s far less reason to hold back.

Balance

Of course, there is a balance. An HSTS desires straight men. Only a straight man can satisfy her powerful need. As a gay boy, she can only have the attentions of gay men. Yet whereas HSTS nearly always find older straight men attractive, they find older gay men repulsive. While an HSTS in SE Asia might well have to pay a straight man for sex — that is, for him to penetrate her — she finds this preferable to relationships with gay men, which she regards as lesbian in nature.

One, perhaps surprising, to Western eyes, benefit of the burgeoning Ladyboy Sex Tourism scene in SE Asia is that this makes straight men available who not only want to penetrate our excited HSTS but will pay her handsomely to do it. It is almost too good to be true and is a rare example of how well an untrammelled free market can work. In addition, amongst this sea of passing faces, the men she attracts to her body, there might just be that one — ‘the one’, the ‘life partner’ who will make her simple, fervent dream come true: to be the woman at the centre of a decent man’s life. That so many of the men she encounters are hopelessly unable to provide this is a bitter pill sweetened by the status and beauty that their money can buy her.

Those in the AGP group are not initially attracted to men, but to women; they are gynephilic. But these are collectivist societies and, while women have lesbian relationships all the time, the idea of a person with a penis becoming a woman and still wanting to have sex with women is regarded as ridiculous. So an inversion of what we see in the West happens. Whereas, in the West, young AGPs are conditioned by homophobia and so suppress their pseudo-bisexual desire for sex ‘as a woman’, the very opposite happens in Asia. Young AGPs are encouraged to seek out boyfriends, because real girls have boyfriends…and AGPs want to be real girls.

The company of women

It’s consistently a part of AGP narratives in the West that they prefer the company of women.  AGPs in Asia will nearly always talk not of their early crushes on boys but of their preference for the company of girls and how they ‘want to be like girls’. (HSTS do not need confirmation; they know what they are. They just want to get on with it.)

AGPs are not usually able to have sex with girls but they develop a somewhat unique, protective relationship with them (some do indeed have gfs and have sex with them, but most don’t.)  Their preference for the company of girls means that they tend to remain in the female spaces. In Filipino villages, this is usually the volleyball court.

Well, if you prefer the company of girls in this culture, you will be assessed as ‘beki’. You don’t get into the Away group either, membership of which is competitive, because of your affinity with women. (This is probably why male rites of passage exits and are so widespread; they literally separate the girls from the boys.) So you’ll be hanging around the volleyball court with the other bekis and there you learn ‘how to be a girl’ — which includes, seeking and finding boyfriends. AGPs here are encouraged, indeed conditioned, to be pseudo-bisexual; but  only to act on their pursuit of men and to suppress their heteronormative desire for women.

Now this preference is noted by the members of the Away group, especially the young males who are grooming themselves for entry. They do not hang out at the volleyball court, they hang out at the basketball court; basketball is a masculine contact sport while volleyball is not. In cities, the courts might be in the same building or even be the same court, but the social division is just as rigid.

(Interestingly, in Brazil the difference is football and volleyball.)

So a young AGP finds herself attracted to the company of women and is accepted into that group as long as she behaves in a feminine manner; and she is rejected by the boys for the same reason. So she becomes more intensely feminine. At some stage, usually around 14 in Thailand, a little later in the Phils, she will begin to take hormones and dress, whenever she can, as a girl. Unlike her Western counterpart, she is under little compulsion to be masculine, since she is already known to her peers as beki, and she is most unlikely to ‘hyper-masculinise’, get married young or any of the things typical of the Western profile, since, if she is going to be a girl, she intends to be a beautiful one. And remember, the authority figure in her life is her mother, and usually, mothers are tolerant of beki children. Fathers are often not, but he’s hardly ever around and mum’s cool with it.

Autogynephilic and HSTS: A similar path

HSTS  follow a similar path, for totally different reasons. They physically want men (and how.) That immediately bars them from the Away group. (Most HSTS actually prefer the company of men; they are then surrounded by their own sexual targets.) Since they know themselves to be girls (because they want to be penetrated by big hairy men) and they are in competition with real girls, they do exactly what all the girls do; make themselves as beautiful as they can — something which they are surpassingly good at.

So HSTS and AGPs, along with the gay boys, are thrown together in the beki group, which is a subset of the matriarchal Home group. They learn about life from each other; hormones, how to make up, how to dress hair, sewing, etc — and also about boys and sex. AGPs’ natural tendency towards bisexualism — because ‘sex as a woman’ affirms them as women — is emphasised. (A good many remain analloerotic, however; they never actually have boyfriends, they just talk about having them.)

Glamorous creatures

If you take a boy, just any boy but especially one from an ethnicity where males are not very craggy-looking and tend to be small, isolate him from the company of other males, in a space where the authority figures are all women, teach him to dress and make up and stick him on hormones at age 14, you should not really be surprised if, by the time he is 21, he is a pretty glamorous creature. Set beside an HSTS the difference might be obvious, but still. The AGPs might not have the natural delicacy of features or the fine bones, the naturally feminine comportment or neoteny of an HSTS — but they are smart and they can learn tricks that minimise most disadvantages, except, of course, size. (They actually use height to advantage in the beauty pageants they’re forever competing in — the judges like tall girls and five-foot-zip HSTS tend to be somewhat overlooked.)

However, from AGP, HSTS and gay points of view, they are all bekis together and they do not draw distinctions. They have been friends together since childhood and have helped each other through the travails that exist for a GNC person, even in a society like those in SE Asia, where homosexuality is much better tolerated.

The Western mistake

Individuals conforming to the Western profile of AGP do  appear in the Philippines but they are rare. The social setup described above is very good at filtering them out and in fact, in the Phils anyway, most late-trans AGPs I know of are actually from ‘Phil-Am’ families; they did not grow up in  traditional environments. This tends to support the idea that late transition in the West is the cultural artefact, not the AGP itself.

The mistake American researchers often make is in thinking that white US culture is normal; it certainly is not. Most of the world lives by other rules. It is this assumption that causes them to make the mistake of thinking there were few AGPs in the rest of the world. And to be fair, until about four years ago I was with them. But when you see it all happening before your own eyes, you have to change your opinions to fit the facts.

6 Replies to “Autogynephilic and HomoSexual MtF in Asia”

  1. Hi Rod.

    Good day!

    I really enjoy reading your opinions and articles regarding the situations of “bekis” hsts or agp here in Philippines. kudos for that, keep going.

    But are you aware of the recent news of transwomen(agp perhaps, not sure) being inlove with “tomboys” or straight girls to the point of actually concieving with her? even theyre inlove, they didnt make themselves present “masculine” in any way tho. maybe some, those who are inlove with straight girls.

    the comments in social media range from being just ok, to far cringey ignorant stuff like “its not sinful beki and tomboy inlove with eachother bc of penis and vagina” and “tomboy beki inlove with one another better bc they can have children” (well, theres adoption, why be too ignorant to the point of making hsts transwomen who are inlove with natal men feel bad haha)

    also, i heard some news of transwomen in philippines “detransitioning” and some people even praising them omg.

    Better check social media, Rod. As an hsts filipino transgirl, lots of plain cringey stuff out there worth mentioning hehe.

    1. Hi geepeecutee

      Good day! Thank you for your support and for this information. I no longer have a FB account (long story) but I do have a presence on Twitter and various other media.

      Yes, I have come across these marriages to tomboys and straight girls before, although mainly from Thailand. Actually I was blissfully unaware that there even were AGP transwomen in the Phils till I met someone who, umm seemed a little odd — let’s say, uncommonly masculine for a TS (I thought). Then her friends told me that she serially dated women and usually had a different girlfriend every month, I was wasting my time with her hahaha…that explained a lot. So I began to look around more deeply and yup. Place is full of them.

      I absolutely do not judge at all. It’s not in my nature anyway. I do find that the aggressiveness characteristic of Western AGPs grates on me. I’m like, ‘You want me to treat you as a woman, and you’re being more rude and offensive than I’d permit a man to be. You what?’ But in the Phils it’s just all so much more gentle.

      I agree with you, adoption is definitely an option and I know transgirls there who have done just that — and are doing OK. And gosh, detransition. I remember a friend, well more than a friend, said to me once that she would introduce me to her friends, who were both former pageant queens (as she was). I was quite excited at the prospect, but what turned up was 2 guys in their mid thirties! One was HS the other AGP. I think my friend was winding me up. She said it was not that uncommon. The two detransitioned friends were managers in BPO and it was one of the conditions… they had to be guys. That was a few years ago and I think it’s better now … certainly I know girls now who are managing departments in BPO, who are TS, and there’s no way they’re cutting their hair or losing the pencil skirts!

      Please feel free to feed me info that you think I might find interesting and, if you’d like to write me an article, about 1000 words or so, on any relevant topic, I’d love to consider publication.

      I’ll be back in the Phils at the beginning of December, I can’t wait!

      Take Care

      Rod

      1. But….

        it’s just sad how people found this new way to make us, hsts transwomen feel BAD for being attracted to (born)men 🙁 I really don’t care if some of my trans-sisters are attracted to girls/tomboys or what, but it’s just those judgemental people making a big deal about how that penis-vagina thingy is better than same sex blahblahblah when I come around these stories in social media T___T

        About that BPO thing…well, I do really hope the Anti-Discrimination Bill here in the Philippines will go well, and this might mean, a better opportunity for us ^_^

        1. Hi Geepeecutie

          I agree. I have been coming to the Phils for many years now and I did think the situation was getting better; but maybe I was misreading it. As regards the sex…well, however two people who love each other satisfy each other is nobody else’s damn business in the first place, and in the second, isn’t love supposed to be the highest of all? I, with respect, find it somewhat contradictory when Christians — for whom ‘God is love’ — then put human limitations on what love is allowed to be. (If God is love, then I am aboard with that; it’s where the interpretations of men come in that I have a problem.)

          I personally think that a lot of the hostility shown by men towards HSTS (less so AGPs) is because they are afraid of their own attraction to them. The fact is that HSTS are often simply gorgeous, far more beautiful than the average for women in their population. That alone makes them stand out. These guys are weak at the knees with desire but suppressing it. Then the fact is that a lot of women — and I know, because I have discussed this — resent the fact that so many HSTS are as attractive as they are — like ‘they have no business being that gorgeous!’

          I hope for much better opportunities for you. I am not ashamed to say that transpinay HSTS are just lovely people; actually AGPs can be very agreeable too, though they are not the same. Such nice individuals should not be made to suffer for being who they are.

          Re the penis/vagina thingy … well, you and I both know that making love to an HSTS requires the man to have great sensitivity and awareness of the girl’s feelings, especially if she is inexperienced. But when it works, it’s certainly as lovely as any other sex. People should not knock what they have not tried.

          Take Care

          Rod

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