"They Don’t Want Anybody to Hear Our Stories" Intro

An introduction to this week's series on trans widows and autogynephilia

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Dear Readers:

As many of you know, I’ve just completed a book called HOUSEWIFE: Myths of Women’s Work and the Modern Family. It’s part social history of the housewife archetype and part exploration of how the archetype affects private families and public families today—everything from why the First Lady doesn’t get paid to the Tradwife phenomenon.

For the book, I wrote a chapter that wasn’t in my original proposal. But I’d been talking to various men who identify as autogynephiles—males who get an erotic charge out of imagining themselves as women, or believing that they are women—and the wives they were once married to, who often called themselves transwidows. I saw a pattern emerge. Many of those men who transitioned to live as women had almost nothing to do with the actual female gender role. Living as a woman in reality means taking on undue burdens, more emotional labor and housewifery and childcare and still working full time, for the vast majority of us. That’s not what was happening in these relationships. And so I wrote a chapter about transwidows and AGP, knowing it was deeply controversial (even if it shouldn’t be), and knowing that it was a bit different from the rest of the book.

Unsurprisingly, my editors strongly suggested that I remove the chapter. On the one hand, I felt like it was the most unique and interesting part of the book, and did fit in thematically. On the other, I knew that it could distract from the book’s mission, which is to help us recalculate our approach to families and women’s work in this country, to value community and interdependence, and think of the project of raising healthy children as a collective endeavor. (That’s right, I am still a hippie and a feminist, and I believe that the research I’ve done backs up this vision, but you can see for yourself when the book comes out.) I grappled with what to do, but in the end I knew that I didn’t have the final say, and I didn’t want to pick this particular battle.

As many of you also know, I have a proposal for a book about the trans kid issue—an anatomy of the gender culture war—but there are a lot of complex reasons that I haven’t sent it out, the vagaries of the publishing biz that have kept me from being able to truly say what I want to say, to explain, to dig in, to expose. I am working on a possible collaboration that may allow me to be able to explore the larger issues. I’ll keep you all posted.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to publish my chapter here. Because it’s over 6,000 words, I’ll publish it serially. And I hope to have some accompanying audio with transwidows, who’ve been largely ignored in this discourse, if we can call it that, around trans issues. The pieces will be behind a paywall for now, but as always, if you can’t afford a subscription, just reach out to me and I’ll comp you.

There’s a lot of disagreement about autogynephilia, as you’ll see. There are plenty of trans women who don’t fit the AGP/homosexual transexual binary (which you can read more about in the chapter). And the term was coined in another era, based on those desperate enough to show up at a clinic for treatment. Today there are all kinds of people locating themselves beneath the umbrella of transgender. That’s part of what’s interesting, complicated and difficult about the subject.

But there are also males, however they identify, who firmly believe that they are autogynephiles, and who are glad for the designation, for the chance to understand themselves and their urges in this way. And there are many women who’ve been coerced into participating in their fantasies, their ideologies, their visions, and who have been ignored, shamed, blamed, abused and dismissed. And that’s what makes their stories important to tell.

I’ll publish part one later today for paid subscribers. Here’s a little discount offer if you want to hitch a ride on the paid train.

Thanks,

Lisa