"They Don't Want Anybody to Hear Our Stories" Part 3
A love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name
Hello, and welcome to Part 3 of my series on trans widows and autogynephilia, which was supposed to be a chapter of my forthcoming book HOUSEWIFE: Myths of Women’s Work and the Modern Family. If you’d like to read the whole thing, please subscribe (discount button below). If you can’t afford a subscription, let me know and I’ll comp you. Thanks for reading.
Perhaps this common experience—men transitioning to live not as women commonly do but as the sex object version of them—is why some trans women and allies direct so much vitriol at lesbian feminists crusading to have female-only spaces. Many, like philosopher Kathleen Stock or journalist Julie Bindel, are somewhat traditionally masculine in appearance, with no makeup, no frilly clothes, short hair. They are not the kinds of women AGPs imagine when they picture their inner selves, thus AGPs may declare themselves “real women,” because of their embrace of the very traditional, stereotypical femininity those other women reject and fight against. And because those women are lesbians, AGPs may demand to be included in their list of potential mates; they demand to be folded into the category of woman, and many of these feminists want to deny them membership. And that rejection stings.
That, says Blanchard, may explain some of their anger. He has great sympathy for AGPs, who, until quite recently, lived soaked in shame for their proclivities. And he doesn’t believe that these AGPs all hid those proclivities from their wives deliberately—they didn’t intend to deceive. “I don’t think that these guys are necessarily acting in bad faith at the point at which they propose marriage,” he said. “Some of them met a woman. They love her. They’re not thinking anymore about cross-dressing or about wanting to be a woman.” They go into the marriage thinking that the compulsion has dissipated, that they’ve been cured by love. Wanting to wear women’s stockings or being jealous of women for having periods—they weren’t safe things to share. Why tell the wife when she’s likely not to understand anyway?
But some transwidows told me that the sexologists and psychologists who’ve been fascinated by autogynephilia have been utterly neglectful of the women so deeply affected by it, dismissing them, not listening to them, not caring about them.