“I didn’t know about autogynephilia and thought that the only outcomes of dysphoria were transitioning or suicide.“

I’m confident I once dated an autogynephile (bisexual, but favored women). In the interest of other girls not repeating my mistakes, I’m sharing this story. Full disclosure, I do not have training in diagnosing psychological conditions and did not formally assess my ex-boyfriend. Still, it’s not like someone needs a degree in fashion to see when a shoe fits.

I enthusiastically chose to start dating him. It was nice to feel wanted. I missed being hugged, and it turned out kissing was fun. He had decently shaped hips, and TRA media promised estrogen would soon transform him into a beautiful lesbian. Best of all were the times we hung out with just his male friends. Slap jack. Roughhousing. Male banter. It was nostalgic – puberty had meant a sudden loss of male buddies, and being with him eased the lingering grief I still felt even as a college student.

My enthusiasm dropped after the second date… we’d planned an afternoon stroll around campus, but it started with me walking in on him watching porn because he’d forgotten about our date. We still had a nice walk. That night he cheated on me. The next morning I learned that “cheating” meant “inviting a female friend to study, asking her for sex while she was studying, and then forcefully french kissing her as she tried to push away.”

I should have dumped him then, but I didn’t. He was crying because he didn’t want to be the type of person who commits sexual abuse. I felt this weird obligation to teach him how to be a woman. Besides, it was safer for me because I was stronger than other girls, and let’s just say I already had enough experience to know I was strong enough to push away his unwanted advances.

It’s not like I was wearing Wanda Pierce’s rose-colored glasses that make red flags look just like the other flags. I saw the red flags as red flags and just kept going anyway. His actions were inappropriate, but I do take accountability for choosing to stay in a situation I knew was bad.

The next bit of drama came from me fitting in so well with his male buddies that the group kept forgetting I was of the female sex. My ex-boyfriend began suggesting that I might be a boy brain in a girl body. He wasn’t the first to make this suggestion, but even back in my TRA days, I knew I’d be better off sticking with my sex.

Suggesting that I was really a male because I fit in with males raised a question: why did he consider himself a woman when he acted pervy towards women and easily socialized with other men? His answer was that he began identifying as a woman after an eventful Tinder date led to the realization that he got off on being called “slut” and “bitch.”

I had no idea what to make of this. I’d been given the narrative that “transwomen” were innocent beacons of femininity who immediately knew that they were born in the wrong body, but here was a masculine man who had started claiming to be a woman after kinky sex.

His mask had slipped off and wasn’t going back on. On a good day, he might have forgotten about sex once every seven seconds. He’d get boners when trying on women’s clothing – even modest, boxy skirts. He hoped that estrogen would give him “massive titties” so he could make a living by selling nudes and show a scandalous amount of cleavage at family gatherings. He would brag that his penis was longer than average and then wish it would grow an additional three inches (this was really out of place with the trans narratives I’d been fed, and he also expressed confusion at how this desire fit with his identity as a woman). He watched even more porn. If we watched normal TV, he wouldn’t shut up about which characters he wanted to screw even if they were high school freshmen or looked like they were 12. He was envious that young women seemed to have unlimited access to sex – he couldn’t empathize with the poor mental health of his “sexually liberated” female friends. When I met friends for breakfast without him, I was accused of cheating. The same thing happened when I attended office hours, except then he’d say that he wanted to be a woman so he could sleep with his professors instead of studying. He liked female friendships because female friends could just casually touch each other in sexual ways (his female friends eventually distanced themselves, but with his ability to cry “transphobia” and imply suicidal feelings, it took them longer than it should have). His mind seemed to revolve around sex, especially the part of him that wanted to be a woman.

He saw a therapist and was immediately referred to a doctor known to quickly prescribe cross-sex hormones. He said he didn’t talk to the therapist about any of his sexual motives to become a woman or his pattern of sexual misconduct with women.

Shortly before he began taking estrogen, he had a lucid moment. He was crying again because he hated being the type of person who commits sexual abuse. He knew he hadn’t always wanted to be a woman – he’d been satisfied being a typical male for most of his life. Instead of wishing that estrogen would give him big boobs, he wished that it would mute his sexual urges so his overly lustful thoughts and pattern of sexual misconduct would end.

I didn’t know what to tell him. I was a TRA – I didn’t know about autogynephilia and thought that the only outcomes of dysphoria were transitioning or suicide. What do you tell a man whose sexuality is so intrusive that he wants to turn it all off? I wish I knew, but I quietly listened and stuck with affirming his use of estrogen as a miracle drug that could bring happiness by changing his sex. Maybe if he’d had a better therapist or I’d learned about autogynephilia sooner he could have gotten real help for his very real and destructive problems. I know he did awful things, but I cared enough about him to feel bad for him too — it must have been terrifying to go from an ordinary boy to a man whose sexual urges blend fetish with mental illness.

He went on estrogen, and I don’t know where he went from there. I dumped him after he cheated on me again – it was either I finally sleep with him or he’d keep cheating, but then I realized he couldn’t cheat if we weren’t dating. Despite all the pressures from my TRA background, I accepted that I was never going to sleep with him – I was homosexual, not homogenderal. We fell out of contact.

A couple of years later, I read Soh’s The End of Gender and saw the word “autogynephilia” for the first time. If she had done no research outside of stalking my ex-boyfriend, she would have written the same book. My ex-boyfriend wasn’t an isolated incident – he was part of a well-documented pattern. After looking through the data in Wild’s Lesbians at Ground Zero, my body became a trembling mess – his female friends and I were not isolated incidents either.

I lost my TRA friends and my ability to speak freely about trans issues after learning about autogynephilia and the other, darker sides of the trans community. Some of my feminist peers (mostly women) act like rape is something unique to “cis white straight Christian men” and like the act of talking about a minority committing rape is worse than the original rape. (They do this for more than just trans-identified rapists. Some college feminists seem to care more about being labeled a “feminist” than actually improving the lives of women). Most TRA peers I’ve spoken to have never even heard of autogynephilia, and those who have insist it is just a fictional idea made up by TERFs, nevermind the fact that the term was coined by a man who believes some people are truly trans, used by women like Soh who aren’t feminists, and consistent with real statements made by men like my ex-boyfriend. Some tell me I’d stop believing in autogynephilia if I just got to know trans-identifying people better… they don’t seem to comprehend that I believe in the dark side of the trans movement because I got to know trans-identifying people better. (My ex-boyfriend is not the only trans-identifying person I got to know a little too well). I do at least agree with their claims that if you listen to a trans-identified person long enough, they’ll tell you exactly who they are; we just disagree over whether a person’s stated identity or the context surrounding their claimed identity is more indicative of who they really are. Debates where I bring up the points made in this paragraph are cut short.

High school and college had me memorize distinctions between pan/bi and at least five variations of non-binary, but information that would have helped me and my ex-boyfriend’s female friends protect ourselves is ignored and censored if remembered. I’m not even convinced suppressing information about autogynephilia helped my ex-boyfriend either – considering his unanswered cries for help, I don’t think his short-term pleasure from easy access to vulnerable women translated to long-term life satisfaction. Even if we didn’t have a word yet for what we were observing, my ex-boyfriend, his female friends, and I learned about autogynephilia through awful personal experiences. Hopefully, with the free sharing of stories like mine, more will get to learn in an easier way.

- Marcia

Letters From the Front is a series from WoLF curating stories from women about how “gender identity” ideology has impacted them. We’ll share new letters, submitted anonymously, each week. Write in to share your own story!

WoLF does not necessarily endorse the content of Letters.

READ MORE LETTERS FROM THE FRONT: