I’ve recently had some interactions on Twitter which got me thinking about the subject of ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) in boys. While most people on the “gender critical” side of the trans debate agree that gender dysphoria spreads among teen girls as a social contagion, a lot of those same people deny that something similar could be happening to teenage boys. No, they say: those boys are just autogynephiles.
Autogynephilia is a paraphilia—a sexual fetish—some men experience, where they get turned on by and get sexual gratification from the idea of being, or becoming, a woman. (Or becoming a feminized male—or being forced into a submissive position during sex—or dressing in women’s clothes—or having sex with a man—it’s not really just one thing, and it overlaps with repressed gay feelings a lot more than people who maintain that there’s a firm split between AGPs and HSTS “homosexual transsexuals” would have you believe.)
There’s no question that a lot of the teenagers identifying as trans women are getting something out of it sexually. Spend five minutes scrolling through r/egg_irl if you need convincing. But that doesn’t mean there’s no social contagion happening.
Here’s what I said on Twitter in response to someone advancing the “all MtF teens are AGP” theory:
Male paraphilias ARE contagious, actually. Desire is a social phenomenon; men desire what their culture tells them is desirable, teen boys even moreso. No guy is born with the desire to become an anime girl. It spreads via online subcultures and is encouraged by adult perverts.
Someone responded to my tweet with this image:
I proposed a slightly modified version:
>be 14
>go to forum for your favorite video game
>everyone is talking about how great it is to fuck toasters
>adults telling you how they finally belong now that they fuck toasters
>be repeatedly nonconsensually exposed to toaster porn
>"maybe i want to fuck toasters"
For many teenagers, autogynephilia itself is a social contagion. What ROGD looks like for teen boys is heavily tinged by the fact that their bodies are getting flooded with brand new hormones and their sex drives are raging out of control. When they’re immersed in an online community where gender-swapping, forced feminization, and “traps” are common subjects of discussion, and displaying interest in these things is seen as normal, they’re more likely to develop an interest in those things themselves—especially when the adults in the community who they look up to encourage it.
I talked in my last piece about how transition is sold to autistic boys as something that’ll finally make them normal, that’ll finally let them fit in. The attractiveness of this idea, and the fact autists are often easier to manipulate than neurotypicals who are more likely to have strong bonds with other people in real life and a meaningful place in the social fabric of their community, is why trans ideology finds such fertile ground in online nerd communities around niche interests like video games and anime. The (lonely) boys who find these communities are naturally going to look up to their elders, and when those elders are all trans, and openly express autogynephilic interests, the kids will mimic the behaviors of adults. Positive responses encourage the kids to do more of that, which creates a feedback loop, and before long fifteen-year-old boys are sending thirty-year-old men pictures of their legs in striped thigh highs and begging their parents to let them take estrogen. And for all the reasons I detailed here, once you’re in the gender cult it’s really hard to get out.
The idea that AGP is something you’re born with, something that sticks with you forever once you have it, that if you’re a teenage boy who has one way or another developed a sexual interest in transforming into a woman your only choices are to repress it and live in misery forever or embrace your innate perversion and transition—that’s not an idea which actually does anything to challenge trans ideology. In fact, it’s an idea a lot of people adopt to justify their transitions once they’ve realized gender ideology is a sham. “Well, maybe I didn’t really have a gender identity that didn’t match my physical sex; but I do have this medical condition which is resistant to all other forms of treatment; and that means I don’t need to confront the grief I would otherwise feel over the loss of my former identity and healthy body—because I did need to transition, actually!”
If you’re a teenage boy experiencing autogynephilia, the first thing you need to hear is that it doesn’t mean you have to transition; and the second thing you need to hear is that you aren’t doomed to feel like this forever. You can get over it. I have no desire to be a woman anymore, and neither do most of the detrans guys I know, including the ones a gender critical observer would have identified as autogynephiles. It is possible to love and accept yourself as man. It doesn’t mean a lifetime of unhappiness.
The absolute last thing you need to hear is that you’re a born degenerate whose sick mind will inevitably cause you to invade women’s spaces and destroy your mind and body. That narrative isn’t true, and it doesn’t help anyone.
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Interesting. I’ve been arguing for a while now from a Feminist perspective that the “poor little fragile ROGD girls/women” and the “sick sexual fetish obsessed boys/men”perspective is yet another sexist gender stereotype stemming from the misogynistic notion that girls are passive and sexless and that boys are active and sexual. The reality is that there are A LOT of girls and women for whom their identity as a trans man is anywhere from a little to hugely sexual/romantic aka erotic. Part of the issue is that we are so completely blind to female sexuality. The gay men fan fiction and drawings and k-pop and anime- HELLO that’s about SEX. Girls are fantasizing and MASTURBATING over it. Girls have sex drives and sexual needs, even if we never speak about it to the extent that some (especially the neurodivergent kind) might not even know that they do. And there are a lot of ROGD boys (the true predator cross dressers- and they exist- are a different matter) who yes have some messed up psychosexual issues going on...bc they are neurodivergent people struggling socially and mentally and emotionally and yes, with sexuality too, just like ROGD girls. The reality is that chemically and surgically altering the sexual parts of your body obviously has a lot to do with sex. I don’t think that is acknowledged enough. And sex is about WAY more than just orgasms. It’s about deep emotional needs and fears, etc. And that’s genderless.
How do I encourage my rigid-thinking high functioning spectrum 17yr old son to adopt this thinking? He won’t talk about it but he is intent on transitioning. How do we influence him??!