It's Not [Just] About the Blue Dress

What we can learn from AGPgate

In April of this year, I contacted a man who goes by the name Phil Illy. (I am assuming his adopted name has something to do with philia, the Greek word for love.) I had requested a copy of his book AUTOHETEROSEXUAL: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, and after he sent it to me, he asked if I would interview him for my Heterodox Trans People series. I said I would, but had to finish the book first.

I figured that would take me a week, but it is so so so so so so long that it took me closer to six. Illy had self-published, and the book was very repetitive and really could have benefitted from an editor. (I had to cut at least 20,000 words from my last two books, and I think they still should have been shorter.) I believe that some of the controversy that occurred online over a picture of Illy at Genspect’s Bigger Picture conference outside of Denver last week, with the suggestion that people read his book—what many of us are calling AGPgate—is because so few people actually made it to the end of it.

It’s really important to raise awareness about the reality of autogynephilia, or AGP. Men’s insistence that they are women—rather than that they are attracted to the idea of themselves as what they conceive women to be, and are often aroused by forcing women to participate in that fantasy—has had devastating real-world consequences. They range from men competing against women in sports to men raping women in prison. (Kara Dansky and Reduxx are really good sources for more on these issues.) Admitting that the urges to dress or identify “as a woman” are linked to a paraphilia—an unusual or abnormal sexual attraction—can help men manage those urges. If we can move beyond the masking notion of gender identity, we can understand what’s really going on.

Thus, I support and share Illy’s mission. But that doesn’t mean that I support his ideas, his book, or his behavior at the conference. Though in some ways I don’t want to give him or this controversy any more oxygen, I still think it’s important to reckon with the questions and the anguish that arose from it, and thus I must briefly rehash.

Genspect held a conference, which platformed a wide variety of people all working on or dealing with, on some level, the fallout of gender ideology being institutionalized in law, medicine, psychology, education and journalism—and the effects on families. Speakers were conservative, super lefty, and everywhere in between, and included both feminists and the men who hate them. Audience members ran the gamut from people who have transitioned to hard core TERFs.

Among the crowd was Illy, a towering figure in a tacky blue velvet dress with sheer blue sleeve-length fingerless gloves, handing out copies of his book. During one panel discussion, he asked therapists who work with ROGD kids, “How do you determine which of the two types of trans your clients are?” [That’s a paraphrase.]

I was taken aback by his lack of sensitivity. Did he know that some families have been destroyed by retrofitting the definition of child abuse to include non-affirmation? One father had wept because he hadn’t seen his young child for years, his parental rights yanked away via a custody battle because he wouldn’t affirm. Many of us wept with him. Did Illy know that most ROGD kids have other mental health problems that are being ignored—and are likely far outside Dr. Ray Blanchard’s typology of MtF transsexualism? This categorization divides those who transition into AGPs and “homosexual transsexuals”—feminine men (and, perhaps, masculine women) who are same-sex attracted.

Illy’s promotional and self-promotional mission was, to me, distasteful in this environment of vulnerable parents, and people who have been harmed by gender ideology. But I was also kind of like: Meh, whatever.

When Genspect tweeted a picture of Illy with artist and detransitioned woman Laura Becker, lots of people went bananas. Many of us who work very hard to behave ourselves on social media (myself included) lost our sense of decorum. People who were very comfortable disagreeing with each other in other ways found themselves in vehement conflict, dismissing one other’s reactions, seemingly losing respect for one another. It has been ugly all around.

I want to examine the objections, and the objections to the objections, because I think that’s where the useful information lies: the questions we need to ask.

So, to the objections. Those aghast at the picture felt that way for many reasons. Whether or not Illy himself was aroused at the time by what he was wearing, he has admitted—no, promoted—that he is a member of a group that draws sexual satisfaction from being perceived as female or wearing clothes marketed to women (not that any woman or trans woman there wore anything like Illy’s outfit). It’s not unreasonable for women to object to that—especially when this person made himself impossible to ignore (his height isn’t his fault, but the outfit and the insensitive questions: yes).

As my friend wrote to me, “By identifying himself as AGP, he has coded his interest in women’s clothing as explicitly sexual in the minds of many observers, and they have a right to be put off by that.” They may understand that, as James Cantor recently testified under oath, AGPs are more likely to repeat “‘paraphilic sexual patterns, such as sadism,’ that make them more likely to commit sexual offenses.”

When I interviewed Blanchard, he told me that when AGPs first “come out,” many dress inappropriately and in clothes marketed to much younger women. They are dressing as sex objects—not women. Or: they are dressing as the kind of women they’d find arousing.

Meanwhile, women are disproportionately affected by gender ideology, and by replacing “sex” with “gender identity” in policy, law, and culture. So if this set them off, I get it. In addition, Illy devotes many chapters to other paraphilias, including adult baby diaper wearers and furries and therians. He flattens them all to equal variations of sexual orientations—not deviations. In associating AGP with a smorgasbord of paraphilias, and in placing AGPs and, say, furries, on the same level, he’s admitting that “woman” is as much a costume as kitty cat.

He also seems to think that the entire population identifying as trans or suffering from gender dysphoria fits into the old school two-type model, and thus assumes these thousands of ROGD kids are autoandrophilic (the girls) and autogynephilic. I’m skeptical that the young girls getting their breasts removed or taking T are attracted to themselves as males; many haven’t had sexual feelings yet.

Blanchard’s research is useful, but it’s old. It’s on a discrete population. It’s difficult to conduct research on a group that denies its membership in that group. There is an exponential increase in the population called trans, and it is more heterogeneous than ever before. We need new, better, and more research. Illy’s interpretation of old research and attempt to map his own peculiarities onto the mainstream population isn’t particularly helpful.

Illy wrote that though he was wary of youth transition, for some it was beneficial, so in such cases we should skip puberty blockers, which are so bad for the body, and go straight to hormones. (Since we have no way of telling persisters from desisters, how would we decide which kids should transition? And if males don’t have their testicles removed, how can they medically transition without puberty blockers? Also, um, cross-sex hormones are very serious interventions with health risks of their own. But anyway…)

He thinks we should teach about what he calls “autoheterosexuality” in school. You can hear in my interview with him how skeptical I am of the salience of his ideas. It’s as if he has no idea that there is an enormous culture war around what, if anything, to teach about gender and sexuality in school. Children can access all the information in the world from a device in their pocket, but many of us are still concerned about what is sanctioned and normalized via school curricula. We’d like the chance to discuss it without being labeled bigots.

As usual, I thought if I could momsplain to people they’d see it my way. I thought Illy didn’t deserve the knee-jerk defense he was getting from some of the finest gender criminals out there. I wanted them to understand who and what they were siding with. It’s a nifty trick to write a book too long for anyone to finish. (Usually this is something that happens to novelists after they publish a slim, taut volume of fiction to critical acclaim—think Rick Moody and Richard Ford—and then go on to write very lengthy works after, because they’ve earned the right, or wrong, not to be edited—or because editors don’t feel they can edit after that.) We can support the mission without supporting the person or the ideas, I was trying to say. But in doing so, I stepped into the boiling stew of nastiness.

Lots of people I admire dismissed the objectors as haters who can’t handle a man in a dress or aren’t comfortable with gender nonconformity (even though some of the objectors were butch lesbians). Worst of all, they were, as James Lindsay (“the Donald Trump of intellectuals”) said, stupid feminists.

Hating feminists is the world’s second oldest profession, and one of the silliest. There are so many different kinds of feminists, from those who believe sex-based rights are valid to rad fems with a specific agenda. (And then there are the people living feminism but rejecting the word, like Dolly Parton.) Flattening them all into one category is like flattening all people with gender dysphoria into one category: it makes them manageable, and easier to hate or defend.

Meanwhile, many objectors were just as dismissive and hateful, spewing digital invective at Genspect, Illy, and other transitioned people—real online abuse that they simply did not deserve. Julia Mallott, a transitioned person at the conference who speaks out against gender ideology, whom I’ve also interviewed and who does not identify within the Blanchard taxonomy, used the word “dehumanizing.” Indeed. The objectors overreacted, they melted down, they got sucked into a purity spiral, they lost their minds, they were nasty.

The objectors to the objectors (let’s call them OOs) noted that Illy uses the men’s restroom and makes no pretense about not being male. He has no desire to encroach on women’s-only spaces—and the conference was a mixed-sex gathering, anyway, not just a place for women to feel comfortable and safe. Illy wasn’t pretending to be or asserting that he was a woman. Thus, he shares at least some of the reality of most people at the conference. And I think that’s why a lot of people were there: to share reality, to be in a place where we felt free to express our ideas and beliefs, which many of us don’t in everyday life.

Some OOs noted that he was not the only wildly-dressed person there; the gay man who transitioned and regrets it—and just launched a lawsuit—known as Shapeshifter certainly had an attention-grabbing bright dress and a long platinum blonde weave. Laura Becker, who appears in the picture, also had some colorful outfits. No one complained about those, they noted.

Others placed Illy’s outfit in the larger context of sex signaling, which most humans engage in on some level. The dude in the muscle car with the cigarettes rolled up in his white t-shirt (somehow I leapt to James Dean) is performing a version of the New Guinean Vogelkop’s mating dance, but in everyday life. Mating dances aren’t just for mating, in other words, and there’s little difference between the blue velvet getup and a woman in a miniskirt, leaning over the bar with her cleavage poking out. (Except, well, she’s at the bar.) Blanchard discussed this with me when I interviewed him: AGPs don’t just wear these clothes to have sex in. Our sexualities aren’t just expressed during erotic acts.

But mostly, OOs clung to: these feminists can’t stand a man in a dress.

Though I find this insultingly simplistic, there is something here we need to examine, and it’s about stigma and shame and, yeah, men in dresses. I admit I haven’t quite worked through these ideas yet, and I really want to interview an expert on the societally organizing effects of stigma (know any?). But let me try to walk through this.

Part of what made Illy’s presence objectionable to some was precisely that he wasn’t identifying as a woman, but that he had a paraphilia which he wishes to be recast as normophilic. The argument that AGP needs to be destigmatized so that people can admit it, figure out how to manage it, and stop lying to themselves about gender identity is an important one, but it’s also complex. Can something be destigmatized without being normalized or approved of? Some people want porn to remain stigmatized—not so you hate yourself for partaking of it and slather yourself in shame, but to keep it in the Adults Only section of the video store, out of the mainstream (it’s 1993, apparently). Stigma, I think, is part of how we keep things ordered and safe, and many people will react strongly to pushing on the boundaries of stigma—sometimes because they’re conservative and sometimes because they see genuine problems with mainstreaming ideas that might be best kept along the margins.

Illy might have wanted us to accept the way he expressed his sexuality, despite what many in that audience know about AGP, and assumed that the etiquette was settled. But it’s no more settled than the science of gender-affirming care. Many people who embrace gender diversity felt violated in some way by this dude; I think we’d have felt better if he’d admitted he was an AGP and wore slacks, in part because of the population he was joining. But it’s worth examining why so many of us were unnerved.

In my own conflict-laden heterodox circles, people asked if we were only going to accept the “good” kind of trans person—not only those who deny gender ideology but those who are gay—not “dirty AGPs” as Debbie Hayton, confessed AGP, described how he (or she) thought of them before admitting to being one.

Indeed, if we ban or phase out childhood medical transition, most males will never pass. That’s why I’ve pressed on those of us who purport to embrace gender diversity to ponder just how we’re going to reckon with men in dresses. AGPs have seen the sunshine and they’re not going back in the dark.

How much space to we want to carve out in the mainstream for variance—and how do we decide what’s variance versus deviance?

Can we make room for men in dresses without sanctioning the forcing of women to participate in their larger fantasies?

Whose comfort matters more?

Is Illy allowed to be insensitive and narrowly informed? Sure. Are others allowed to find his attention-seeking outfit and insensitive questions ill-conceived? Absolutely.

After one day of participation in this madness, I took all my tweets down. I had been battling new ideas and information like the ship in (dated reference warning) Space Invaders, rather than considering them. I tried to remember to be interested and less defensive.

Perhaps what I learned, about myself and about those whom I like and/or admire but disagreed with in this case, was how difficult it is to shake free of our biases. I am still a feminist. I believe that women deserve specific and sex-based rights and that they matter, and that they are now and always have been vulnerable. I prioritize those rights and risks over those of some smaller and more marginal groups, despite the incredible strides women have made in the last 100 years since they have been recognized by the law as human.

Maybe that’s what one definition of bias: a feeling that one group deserves more pity and power, empathy and leniency, understanding and compassion, than another.

Because I was mostly bedridden last week, and not writing, I devoted far too much of my time to this madness. Occasionally I’d look up from my computer and try to explain to my husband what was happening, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Twitter is not life, he reminded me. Outside, it’s fall. The most delicious golden light is filtering through maple leaves. Those people who upset you are still your friends and colleagues. Shut the computer. Go outside.

Further reading (in no particular order):

The Split by Stella O’Malley

A Civil Dialogue About Autogynephilia, by Leslie Elliot with Shannon Thrace and Phil Illy

The Public Fetish by Heather Heying

AGPgate by Aaron Terrell

Genspect and AGPgate by Shannon Thrace

Sympathy for the Devil with the Blue Dress On by Matt Osborne

When is a Call for an Apology a Demand for Capitulation? by Eva Kurilova

Any other pieces you recommend?