Being trans is not a fetish

I remember vividly the moment I knew I was me, that my sense of gender was not aligned to the body I was born with. I was eight, walking to school, just passed a red post box, and I simply accepted that I was going to become a woman when I was old enough. For all exclusionary feminists who claim that autogynaphilia (AGP) is at the root of trans identities then answer me this: what part of being an eight-year-old child involved a sexual identity? I am not alone in understanding an innate gender identity at a young age, and for all those who hawk AGP as the totality of trans experiences I say you are the ones sexualising our bodies and making trans kids objects of your baseless assumptions.

AGP is the invention of Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence, a mode of thinking rooting all trans identities in men’s fetishization of the female experience. From clothes to shoes to the very act of walking down the street en femme it is all rooted in the sexualisation of womanhood. None of their work has been systematically peer reviewed. While some trans women buy into this personal narrative, the truth is that unless any (cis or trans) woman is able to complete switch off her sexuality she will always find some aspects of her existence as a woman sexual. This is a normal part of womanhood, yet for those who back AGP as a diagnosis they reject these notions of female sexuality.

One of the common retorts to trans activists is to show pictures of purported trans women dressed in next to nothing walking down the street in daylight or wearing a tight dress revealing a bulge. Spend any time on X defending trans rights and AGP is weaponised against you. My response is always that I cannot gender someone from an image alone, and without personal context it is impossible to pass comment. They seek to goad me into denouncing people for their clothing, much like they denounce cis female sex workers for plying their trade on the socials. I have none of it, because bullying is bullying regardless of whether the victim is present or not.

As someone who found it hard to fully tuck pre-op to demonise trans women if a slip happens is both cruel and victimises someone who might not even realise it has happened. I am not naive to think that everything within the trans community is kid safe and a bed of roses. There a plenty of crossdressers and trans women who might benefit from a degree of increased self-awareness about posting images online, but it is no-one else’s place to shame them for what they wear. My personal opinions are just that, personal, and those exclusionary feminists who weaponise AGP against anyone fail to see the plank in their own eyes.

Human sexuality is as complex as each person alive. There are no two ways of understanding what makes you tick, and each of us has our own kinks, desires, attractions, and ways of actioning them. When a woman wears lingerie, posts a picture of herself online, and enjoys the thrill of being a sexy woman she is not treated as mentally ill. A person assigned male at birth does the same and it is suddenly a scandal. Female sexuality is treated as this precious flower in need of constant guarding, forgetting that it is a patriarchal construct often build to keep women submissive and breedable. Women can be whores, sluts, doms, bitches, fuck buddies, and absolutely stone cold asexual; there is no one way to be a woman inhabiting a sexualised world.

Calling trans people a fetish forgets all of that. Trans women taking ownership of their sexuality are not a transsexual empire invading women’s spaces, they are women washing up on the shore attempting to make sense of whole new archipelago of experiences. As someone who slept around in my late teens and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, then ended up dating a series of more-or-less asexual partners for over 15 years I can safely say sex and intimacy as a trans woman are much more complex than feeling sexy in lingerie.

Yes, some people do develop fetishes and kinks towards certain items of clothing, but that is not a universal for the trans experience. Wearing women’s underwear does not a fetishist make, otherwise half the planet would be labelled fetishists. Being a woman walking through the world does not a fetishist make, again as this would mean half the world are walking kinksters. In pathologizing the trans feminine experience Blanchard took his own biases and assumptions and tried to turn them into medical science, forgetting that his small window on the world is just precisely that.

For all the trans women who take ownership of AGP I say label yourself as you like it is your life. To everyone else who seeks to tar the trans community with the fetishist brush look in the mirror and take account for your own desires, kinks, and sexual predilections before you attack trans folk who may have the same sexual experiences as you. Gender identity is not a fetish, expressing that identity potentially is, but that does not inherently mean that being a trans woman has anything to do with AGP.