Trans women: Jenner is not their only face

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Originally posted 2015-10-26 13:01:28.

This article on the two types of trans woman is from 2015 but I’ve updated and refreshed it. The points it makes are still germane.

If you’ve been anywhere near a media outlet over the last few years you won’t ave been able to avoid noticing that trans women are getting a lot of attention. If you have seen images of Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner, and then Paris Lees, Janet Mock, Laverne Cox or Jai Dara Latto, who was  crowned Miss Transgender UK 2015, you might be forgiven for being a bit confused. You might be struggling to figure out what the connection is between an ageing sports jock who looks like a man in a dress, and a glamorous woman who looks like — a glamorous woman. If you’re at all liberal or PC, you might have just accepted that these are the same, but, you know, because time and stuff.

But you’d be dead wrong. There are two completely distinct types of transgender woman and there is no connection between them at all. The conflation that is going on is wrong and potentially lethal.

This is important because one type is the  subject of deadly and repeated violence, while the other colludes in it. Perhaps even worse, a vicious form of feminism rooted in the writing of the odious Janice Raymond, has for decades also been colluding in this persecution. Those who follow this are called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist or TERFs.

Now I will show my cards here: my girlfriend is trans. But she’s not like Jenner. And because she is — being of the other type — a potential victim of violence, I have to stand to the wire. Political Correctness is all very well until people start dying because of it; and that is what is happening. So let me explain.

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Keisha Jenkins, 22, an HSTS who was murdered just before this article was written.  Why would anyone want to kill such a lovely young woman? Because she was trans, that’s why.

Two Types of Trans Woman

The two types of MtF transgender are called, using the terminology of the man who first described them, ending nearly a hundred years of unsuccessful attempts, ‘homosexual transsexual, or ‘HSTS’ and ‘autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. The scientist who established this is called Dr Ray Blanchard. Prior to his work, these types were called, respectively, ‘True transsexual’ or ‘Type One’ and ‘Pseudo transsexual’ or ‘Type Two.’ In many ways, these are better, but the convention today is to use either homosexual/nonhomosexual or HSTS/AGP.

For examples, Janet Mock, Kevin Balot, Laverne Cox and Blaire White  are all HSTS and Caitlyn Jenner is AGP. It is important to understand that HSTS are not homosexual men; as women they are heterosexual, attracted to men. But although they are woman, they were born male and are sexually and romantically attracted to straight men, which makes Blanchard’s term intelligible at least.

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HSTS  feel and act irrepressibly girly as children and are often remarked and bullied for being ‘sissy’ (read Laverne Cox’s comments on this for an illustration.) Most will wear girl’s clothes as children if they can, play with feminine-gendered toys and socialise better with girls than boys. By no means all boy children who do this are trans; gender exploration is a normal part of growing up and most will switch back after a while. Some, however, will not. These are HSTS. 

In the genuine pre-transsexual child, cross-gender identification will be accompanied by ‘crushing’ on the same sex, typically adult males. This is exactly in line with what cis-girls of the same age. Usually this begins around 7 years but may vary widely. The combination of attraction to men and older boys and persistent cross-gender identification is a reliable indicator of a trans child.

In clinical terms they tend to present younger than AGPs, with onset of nonconforming behaviours beginning at 30 months and usually being well established by 60.  Janet Mock’s book ‘Redefining Realness’ is a good recent personal history of an HSTS growing up.

HSTS see their femininity in terms of their sexuality, romantic objectives and socialisation. They act like girls, they sound like girls and they look like girls. Put bluntly, they are girls. Sexually and romantically they desire a straight relationship with a straight man. Although they almost always have gay male friends and indeed, many will have self-identified as gay at some stage, they are not interested in gay relationships at all. They are girls and completely hetero-normative girls at that, so they are in direct competition with cis women for men. They present as beautiful women because they know that is how to get the kind of man they want.

Wherever there is a social space that these individuals can be themselves in, they will exploit it and transition. Life is just easier for an HSTS as a woman. Nobody takes them seriously as men anyway and they are useless at it. They have no hope of succeeding in the status rat-race as men, but as women, their beauty is their ally. A good-looking HSTS like transpinay Kevin Balot (a Philippine celebrity) will have no difficulty attracting male partners and for a young woman like her, the dream may indeed come true — to find a straight man who really loves her.

Kevin Balot

For Kevin, being a woman is just who she is. She doesn’t have to learn it; she just is. When she was little she was a little girl and when she grew up she became a woman. That’s it. Kevin suffered a great deal as a child, like many HSTS, but she could not change herself. She is what she is. It’s not really a matter of feeling, just of being.  She was always Kevin and there is only one Kevin Balot; she describes her name as the most precious thing her parents gave to her and she wears it with obvious pride. Being a woman is not an act for her, nor is she conflicted in her personality.

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AGPs — non-homosexual transitioners

AGPs could not be more different. They show no femininity as children, though they may be detached and sensitive boys. Their awareness of themselves as women always appears later and never in childhood.  In the West, they usually marry and have children.  They almost always succeed in masculine areas — sport (Caitlyn Jenner) academia (Julia Serrano and Lynn Conway); many join the armed forces. Their personal ‘recalled histories’ may assert childhood feelings of transgender but these are rarely independently verifiable and are usually a product of their condition.

In southeast Asia, where there are also many AGPs, the profile is quite different from the classic Blanchard above. Here they will transition in the age range 16-21 and begin HRT immediately. This pattern is now becoming more prevalent in the West.

Autogynephilia is a far more complicated profile than HSTS, in which the subject becomes consumed with the idea of self as a woman, and consequently a desire to be a woman, along with the adoption of female characteristics and the removal of male ones. AGP, like all biological conditions, is a scale of variation, so some individuals feel the dysphoria it causes much more intensely than others. For some, covertly dressing as women is enough; for others, surgical removal of the offending parts is the only relief. However, a majority of AGPs remain attracted to women.

Not all AGPs cross-dress, however. Many are non-trans. Their personal profle depends very much on the specific variant of AGP. There are five types, anatomical, physiological, behavioural, transvestic and interpersonal and there are also four sexual profiles, gynephilic, analloerotic, pseudo-bisexual and a variant, androphilic, where the individuals suppress entirely their gynephilia, usually for social reasons, and only pursue sex with men, in which the play the female role. (But note: these remain AGP.)

The reason I mentioned Kevin Balot earlier is that names are a useful guide in distinguishing the types. For an HSTS, she is who she’s always been and most will just feminise their given names. Chris will become Crissy, Alan becomes Alana, Peter Petra and so on. Some, like Kevin, refuse to change at all, seeing no need. They are who they are and always have been. There is only one personality inside an HSTS’ head and that is feminine, from early childhood. (There is an exception, where HSTS working in the sex business adopt fancy names appropriate to that; but they do not usually use those names in private life, and in any case, cis men and women do this too.)

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However, within the AGP profile, a second, pseudo-feminine personality develops around the fixation with self as a woman. This is called an Erotic Target Location Error or ETLE and is fundamental to the diagnosis. If there is no ETLE, the subject is not AGP. This appears at puberty or soon after and appears to derive from a miswiring of the normal male sexual target location and masturbatory gratification systems, such that the ideal sexual partner literally becomes the self — but as a woman.

The ETLE is quite distinct from the masculine personality that originally conceives it.  It may not even like the host, or it might consider his behaviour disgusting, which may lead to an emasculation fetish, for more unfortunate individuals. As this second personality develops, it acquires a name. This is usually very  different from the given name of the host — ‘Bruce’ becomes ‘Caitlyn’ for example. (For inexplicable reasons, there appears to be a tendency towards using exotic or foreign names — often misspelled.)

This second personality may become so dominant and aggressive that it overwhelms the masculine host personality and at this point — usually after years of cross-dressing, first in private, then with forays in public, to ‘cross-dressing clubs’ etc — the subject is fully consumed. Then all the masculine physical characteristics of the subject’s body have to be re-aligned in concordance with it.

At the same time, the new personality has to have a history, which will be an adaptation of the truth in which feelings of ‘femininity’ were suppressed in childhood and so on. AGPs are not lying when they relate these, but they are still invented: they are a part of the second ‘feminine’ personality, which is destroying all remnant of the original masculine one. The subject is unable to know which memories are true (part of their masculine personality) and which are not.

It is at this point that a masculine (paradoxically) aggression response kicks in to counter any suggestion that the AGP’s ‘recalled history’ or feminine identity might not be real. This is frequently expressed as a narcissistic rage attack, such as has been directed at scientists and academics like J Michael Bailey, Anne Lawrence, Ray Blanchard himself, Alice Dreger (famed for her fairness and academic integrity) and anyone else who dares to challenge the assertions of AGPs.

These attacks are a defence response by the pseudo-feminine personality that has overtaken the host. In addition to personal insult and character assassination, these attacks also include the routine falsification and distortion of statistics and other evidence, and the insistence that AGPs are the only ‘true women’. This leads directly to the blatant attempt to erase HSTS trans women, who, just by existing, prove the illusory nature of the AGP personality.

AGPs, through this attempt to erase or devalue HSTS identities, in order to colonise them, are one component of the social problem that sees HSTS abused, harmed and killed. They deliberately present HSTS as incapable of speaking for themselves, which is about as offensive as it gets. For an AGP, only his own personality matters; everything about him is only about him and he is focussed exclusively on the parasitic ‘feminine’ personality that is consuming him. It is narcissism gone mad, with the subject totally obsessed with himself to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.

books by rod fleming

Gender Dysphoria

Gender dysphoria for an AGP is, therefore, about detestation of actual physical body parts, since these symbolise the remnants of the masculine personality that has been destroyed.  Its social aspect is the relentless aggression of AGPs against anyone who questions their ‘narratives’, demands to be allowed to use women’s safe spaces and access to their bodies as well as, of course, the incessant attempt to harm HSTS.

(Incredibly, I recently saw, on an AGP’s site, the exhortation that cis women should just ‘stay out of spaces that [AGP MtFs] frequent.’ It is rare that I am rendered speechless, but I was that day.)

On the other hand, dysphoria for an HSTS — who does not have this internal conflict and is really a girl — is simply about social roles: a horror of having to socialise as a man and being more comfortable socialising as a woman since, in fact, that is what she is. Genital surgery for AGP is like the removal of a malignant tumour, the second personality’s final moment of triumph; for HSTS it’s more like having a boob job — it makes a more convincing woman, who can then socialise more easily as one. This is why so many AGPs do not use their neo-vaginas for sex, whereas HSTS always do: I mean what would be the point otherwise?

AGPs have no notion of what being a woman is, of course; theirs is a fantasy. Unlike HSTS, who are in no doubt whatsoever about their feminine identity from their early lives and indeed are quite unable to prevent themselves from being girls, AGPs have to learn and, frequently, fail.

The AGP awareness of self as feminine is rather like a ‘negative shape’: once you remove all the masculine parts, what is left is taken to be feminine. That this assumption could not be further from the truth is just ignored by AGPs, though it is the source of much of the conflict between them and cis women feminists.

books by rod fleming

8 Replies to “Trans women: Jenner is not their only face”

  1. Hi Rod,

    I have been looking into this issue and i have to say you have gathered a fantastic amount of material and remained far more objective on the issue than a lot of the other places i have been.

    Have you been watching the Canadian C-16 bill and the opposition to it by people like Jordan Peterson and do you have any thoughts on the matter?

    1. Hi Ian and sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your positive comment and support.

      Regarding C-16; well in the first place I believe in free speech and that is unqualified. I believe there should be adequate civil sanction against defamation, but that that should not be an element of criminal law. I think free speech means you are free to say anything you like about anyone you like anywhere you like and I would like to see those educational establishments. for example, which have delineated areas where free speech is not allowed, being prosecuted and certainly losing all taxpayer funding — and that applies to the bursaries awarded to their students also. C-16 extends ‘protection against hate propaganda’; in other words, it disallows free speech. That alone makes it unacceptable.

      C-16 also, however, extends ‘protection against discrimination’ and again I have a problem here. While the State must treat every single citizen impartially and without reference to skin colour, sex, sexuality, whatever, the State has NO RIGHT AT ALL to oblige privately-run organisations or individuals to do the same. If I as an employer (I’m not now but I used to be) don’t want to employ Muslims, that is my right. I was and remain a photographer: if I refused to photograph a ‘gay’ wedding (I probably wouldn’t but for example) because I held strong beliefs opposing homosexuality, the State has NO RIGHT to coerce me to do so. That is simple slavery.

      Finally the Bill proposes that ‘an offence (that) was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance’. What is meant is that if you kill someone because you feel like killing someone, that is somehow less serious than killing a person because you don’t like his or her gender. Bullshit. They are equally serious offences.

      I pretty much wholly support Jordan Peterson.

  2. Hey, just wanted to say “thanks”

    I’m a natal woman with a growing suspicion of trans women. Jenner still doesn’t seem like a woman to me at all: he seems like an entitled and possibly pervy old guy. Ditto for the friend of a friend who bailed on his wife and young children to “become a lesbian” and apparently also lecture everyone within hearing distance about feminism and womanhood. When did that gross old joke about “being a lesbian in a man’s body” stop being a joke? I was starting to feel like a real TERF.

    Then I remember the gay boy I met while working at a group home for teens. He had no access to hormones or women’s clothes at the group home… but I often playfully referred to him as one of the girls, to his utter delight. But he really did seem quite like one of the girls. Not sure how to define that: a more relationship oriented view of the world, a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve, a total lack of interest in the boy dominance hierarchy. When he had a beef with one of the girls, he expressed it like a girl. Threw shade, not punches. If I ran into him tomorrow as an adult and he said he was a woman, I’d accept it as quite natural, no further questions required.

    Jenner and the deadbeat dad?! … nah

    Anyway, just glad I don’t have to be a TERF OR a doormat on this one.

    1. Hi and thank you for your support.

      I know exactly what you mean. The first TS I ever met were transsexuals (Blanchard HSTS) who had been uncomfortable as gay boys. They turned into girls and were completely natural. No fakery.

      When I began to encounter autogynephiles — the Jenner type — I was shocked. They bore no resemblance, on any level, to the young TS I’d known.

      After a while I began to research and that was when I discovered that the two different types are well known and have been scientifically documented and investigated.

      Today, the autogynephiles have succeeded in shouting almost everyone down. They claim to be the only ‘true women’ — meaning that to be a woman you have to be born with a penis, I don’t think so — and predate sexually on women. As regards transsexuals, they are just horrible. Last night I watched YouTube vlog by Blaire White in which she was defending herself from an autogynephile who claimed Blaire couldn’t be trans because she used to be a gay boy. Well duuh, excuse me but ALL transsexuals used to be gay boys!

      Anyway, thanks again for your comment and please do enjoy the site!

      1. I’ll have to watch Blaire White. I’d definitely like to encourage the more easygoing type to be widely heard instead of letting the AGPs suck all the air out of the room. (Something REALLY damned male about that in my book. oof)

        That Riley Dennis video where he hectors people at a rapid fire clip about how “cis” people (ok, ok… mostly women) need to interrogate themselves about their transphobic “genital preferences” pissed me right off, and I’m not even a lesbian. Every woman has endured some variation of this used-dick salesman schtick at some point lmao. Putting winged eyeliner on it doesn’t make it more progressive

        1. Although I do think Justin ‘Riley’ Dennis is autogynephilic, he seems to conform to a new profile. This seems to be a product of Snowflake Culture. I think he has been conditioned that if he emasculates himself and looks like a woman (kinda), then he can have greater sexual access to women than if he were to appear as a man. This is still autogynephilia since he is still seeking sexual gratification while appearing to be a woman; women — specifically lesbins — become, in this instance, his masturbatory fucktoys. Then he loses the plot completely when women point out that he isn’t really a woman at all, and still has a penis, which they have no intention of letting near them. You can’t make this up.

          Autogynephilia is heavily influenced by culture and the appearance of this variant was predictable.

          I agree, there is nothing ‘progressive’ about this at all. I note that the HRC, in its safe sex guide for ‘trans’ people, states ‘Using force, guilt, blackmail or fear to make a partner do something sexually are examples of intimate partner violence.’ \of course, according to HRC, these are blackguardly acts of intolerance when perpetrated on ‘trans’ people; but when jerks like Dennis do it to women, it’s quite all right. After all, intersectional identity politics says ‘trans folk’ can’t be discriminatory. Bullshit.

          We all need to begin telling these people the party is OVER and shut them down.

          BTW I’m not transphobic; I like transsexuals and have dated several. Western autogynephiles..ugh.

  3. Why are HSTS more likely to be victims of violence and if it is because they work in the sex trade why do they? Are they not telling their clients that they have penises and the client finds out while they are having or after having sex or even before? Do they simply prefer working in the sex trade?

    1. Hi Donna. That is a nuanced question, but basically, ‘yes’. Most TS sex workers see that as a lucrative and rewarding career and they like it.

      Some killings have happened after the girl concealed her status and was discovered. Gwen Araujo and Jennifer Laude are two examples but these are not alone. However, it’s a myth that most men do not know their trans partners are trans. Usually they do; in fact, most men who have sex with trans women are fully aware and that is what they wanted. There are many reasons, including a desire for anal sex and the visual appeal of the penis, but these are perhaps not relevant here.

      Why do trans women choose sex work? Well, especially in Asian context, it can be fantastically well paid. A successful sex worker in Thailand can make ten times what an elementary school teacher might. In fact, for many, sex work is the natural work. It gets them plenty of sex as well as money. Often these girls either did not finish High School, because of discrimination, or they never went in the first place. Sex work is the only avenue open to them where they can make real money. Today, the big earners are on sites like OnlyFans and IsMyGirl, where they can make really serious money. But it lacks the visceral hit of affirmation that live-action sex gives. Remember that for an HSTS, motherhood is impossible, but whenever a man slides inside her, she is completed as a woman. That’s a serious affirmation. So, great sex (and don’t kid yourself, these girls love it) and lots of money…what’s not to like?

      In se Asia, where there is plenty of TS sex work, there is almost no violence and what there is comes not from clients, but from muggers keen to relieve the girl of her earnings. (Pemberton, who murdered Jennifer Laude, was an exception, in exceptional circumstances.)

      Keisha Jennings’ slay, in the US, was a hate-aggravated robbery — her killers set out to rob her then killed her because she was trans. ‘She was a known prostitute… area and widely believed to be carrying plenty of cash. Our information is Pedro Redding (the accused) and his associates live in the area and they know what goes on in that area. There are a lot of transgender individuals that frequent that area, so yes, they did know,’ (https://dec17philly.com/2016/12/03/remembering-keisha-jenkins/)

      The cause of the killings elsewhere is the bigoted attitude still prevalent in much of the world and contributed to, especially in the West, by TERFs, wherever they are allowed to raise their heads. They absolutely do not care if trans women get beaten or killed, because they viscerally hate trans women. On the broader scale, radical feminists encourage male sexual insecurity, through weaponising sex. They’ve been doing this for ever, witness the WW1 ‘white feather’ campaign. Now they encourage men to harm trans women by asserting that relationships between men and trans women are ‘gay’ and the men must be ‘gay’. This is a blatant lie specifically designed to cause harm and it sure does.

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