#it isn't inaccurate (i *do* identify that way) but my gender is a lot more complex than that lets on

[lickthatbattery]

gender is fucked up. it's like. i'm a trans man. i'm multigender. femaleness or whatever is definitely part of my gender identity and experience, an important part at that, but to refer to me in 99.9% of ways that would be indicative of such would be misgendering. i don't even self-refer that way. but it's still relevant and important to my gender experience even if it's not verbalized and as a result, largely internal

[fuckin-sick-bih]

i hate the days when i desperately want to write but nothing i like comes out of my attempts at writing :( (side note i do make the "just bex talkin" tag so you guys can block it and ignore my rambling in tags if you want my writing but not my bitching lmao)

[cypionate60mg]

Hi! I love your work. It's really thrilling to find art at the intersection of philosophy, gender, and the erotic. You seem to be really thoughtful and intentional about your presentation of these pieces, so I'm curious about why you tag everything with "autoandrophilia" which IME is a pretty loaded word with a complex etymology. Would love to understand more!

Thanks, and good question. My answer is very long.

Before we go any futher, Blanchard's typology is transmisogynist bullshit. It's oversimplified, misinformed, and unimaginative. He actually abandoned the term 'autoandrophile' and has since switched to 'autohomoerotic'. More controversial online circles of trans people half-ironically identify with Blanchardian typology. For some, it's like MBTI, and for others, it's their self-diagnosis. Depends on the person.

When contemporary Western psychology began to take shape in the Wednesday Psychological Society's weekly meetings, one of the 'defects' they discussed was homosexuality. According to E. James Lieberman's biography of Otto Rank, he said in an informal setting that homosexuality is "love for one's self as seen in the persona of another like oneself whom one admires...strongly built up on narcissism. It is an ego symptom and not a sex symptom." Sound familiar? I don't think Blanchard's typology is all that different from that of early European psychoanalysis.

We see this same critique levied against trans people. That we're confusing attraction for identity, our self-love is fetishistic, and we're narcissistic neurotic perverts. But we can't just dismiss and ignore it, because we do indeed see trans people say things like "I can't tell if I want to be him or fuck him" or "become the person you'd want to date." 'Autoandrophile' starts to sound a lot like 'gender envy'. So what is actually happening here?

To even approach answering that, let's ask more questions. What does it mean to love people who look like you? If you are estranged from your own body, or if your body changes over time, is it morally objectionable to love a specific version of youself? Even a future one? It it also morally objectionable for that self-love to have a sexual dimension?

Trans people are expected to have the clarity of mind to separate who they are from who they're attracted to. (It's one of the demands society makes to ensure you are 'of sound mind' while still being suitably pathological to deserve hormonal/surgical treatment.) But if you don't necessarily identify with your body, then you already exist outside of that distinction. Like an open window, the barrier between inside (self) and outside (everything else) becomes troublesome.

Do you see now why I like the mirror metaphor so much? When you look in a reflection, that's not technically you. But it only exists because you are there to cast an image. The room's mirror image, too, is not necessarily real, but you gain insight into the room, maybe even see it in a new way, precisely because it's reflected back inaccurately. Your conception of yourself is filled out with detail when you cross-reference it with another version of yourself, one that doesn't exist in the same way you currently do.

It's some ontological quantum gender shit. And it's not unique to trans people. Cis people can experience it too, but they rely on the assumption that it's natural to have an oppositional 'counterpart', a 'complementary' partner. Somebody who completes them. Why, then, can't I complete myself?

We find ourselves back at your question. If Blanchard isn't going to use 'autoandrophile', then I will. One man's trash is another man's treasure. I'll use it to:

disrupt its definition.

challenge trans assimilationists.

discomfort cis men with my desire to be like them, or worse—to encourage them to define their masculinity.

provoke people into thoughtful discussions.

make people feel less alone.

But mostly, I use it so that when people look for the term, this blog will come up, and they'll see my porn. Or art. Or whatever they'll want to call it. And they'll start asking themselves the distinctions between any of these things.

There's so much more I could say about all this. Autoandrophilia's relationship to beauty standards, its usefulness (or lack thereof) as a coping mechanism for the limitation of transition, etcetera. But I'll stop here for now.

Much love, CYP60MG

[scriptlgbt]

Trying to figure out a character, and not sure if they would be/identify with being nonbinary. They were afab, and usually prefer dressing in feminine clothes, but don't particularly feel "like a girl" most of the time. (Doesn't vibe with "boy" ever, though, so pretty sure not genderfluid or trans?)

Would they be nb? Something else? Would it be inaccurate/ tokenish/ confusing if they continued using she/her pronouns? Does it change things if the disconnect with their gender is tangled up with medical issues (like PCOS)? Any other potential problems I haven't even considered?

Thanks in advance!

PCOS is sometimes considered to be an intersex condition* so this person may identify with the label intersex. (They also might not!) People who are intersex have all sorts of different gender identities.

I would say that it is totally fine to have a feminine-coded AFAB nonbinary character with she/her pronouns. I think you would just need to make sure that your character is treated with respect for her identity, because there are a lot of nonbinary characters who are seen as somehow less nonbinary because they don't transition in some way. (My wording here is weird but I'm not implying nonbinary people don't transition, just that it isn't actually essential to being trans at all, and I think more people need to see that legitimized.)

That said, I always think adding more nonbinary characters can't hurt if you want to make it clear to the reader that there are multiple ways of being nonbinary.

I also have known some people who felt hesitant about asking for different pronouns than the ones assigned to them, because they felt like it wasn't as big of a deal to them to sometimes be called by their assigned pronouns. That's a complicated thing, because it comes from a place of not feeling like they had a good enough reason to use different pronouns. But you don't actually need a good enough reason to want any given pronouns. There should never feel like there's a capacity limit on people using whatever pronouns they want. I think in your story it may be something to either depict as having happened in the past or a conversation that happens onscreen. Maybe something like a friend asking, "hey, let me know if you ever want me to use different pronouns," and your character responding saying that the sound of she and her feel like home, even if the label of woman doesn't.

There are unlimited ways of being nonbinary, and it's also okay for characters to identify like something between nonbinary and binary too. Everyone is different and we need more variety of nonbinary experiences represented in general.

mod nat

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*Not all ways of being intersex are conditions. Do not refer to being intersex as a condition as a whole. That said, some ways of being intersex are medical conditions that can affect other medical things. PCOS is one, though not for everyone who has PCOS.