beyond the looking glass - 'autogynephilia', cultural narcissism and the fear of gender & sexual diversity

Want to mess with the heads of closeted trans females?  Try something like the use of the term 'autogynephilia'.  I should know.  It bound me up, albeit very briefly, as I struggled in the past to come to terms with myself. It is a crude and toxic theory invented in the late 1980s by American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard (and promoted by others such as J.Michael Bailey and Anne Lawrence).  It is defined 'as a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman", whereby types of male to female transvestism and transsexualism are understood as  'erotic target identity inversions'.  As such, it is roundly rejected both by transgender people and by authoritative research and transgender health expertise (see further, for example, Julia Serrano here).  It does not cohere with the sheer complexity and texture of gender and sexually diverse people's experience.  Indeed, whilst purporting to offer a basis for care and compassion, it invalidates our knowledge of ourselves and prevents wholeness.  It thus does nothing for a healthy wider sexual ethic or positive gender relationships today.  Yet, as a simplistic and sex-obsessive approach, it has become one weapon in the armoury of people on the religious right. Frightened perhaps by their own, actual but unacknowledged, sexual and gender fears and compulsions, they seek to portray sexual and gender diverse people as willingly, or unconsciously, perverse (in the destructive sense of that word).  Indeed, the accusation of narcissism thrown at transgender people from such quarters, is in fact a better description of that approach itself  Hypnotised, it seems, by an exceedingly narrow desired image of humanity, they cannot see beyond the mirror of their own imagined selves.  In doing so, not only are the realities of those who are 'different' denied, but, in 'othering' us, they distance themselves from the divine Other which is the source and pathway of their own authentic identities.  For no wonder they are consumed with outrage about so-called 'political correctness' and 'identity politics'.  What gender and sexually diverse people do is to threaten the brittle identities some seek so hard to insist upon as wholly defined and exclusive.  In doing so, we offer an invitation to greater authenticity for everyone...

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