In 1995, consumer activist Andrea James (the author of this summary) began documenting how to make a gender transition on a site called TS Roadmap (tsroadmap.com), the predecessor to this site. At the time there were no robust search engines like Google, and I was getting as many as 200 emailed inquiries a day about practical aspects of transition. I answered them all.
As part of that work, I corresponded with many people in the community, including “autogynephilia” activist Anne Lawrence. Lawrence maintained an important site called Transsexual Women’s Resources (annelwarence.com), which focused on issues related to medical transition and sexuality. At the time, I had not thought deeply about theoretical issues surrounding disease models of gender identity and expression.
Lawrence and I corresponded on many topics, including gender diverse sexuality, since Lawrence had been promoting the controversial transsexual taxonomy of Ray Blanchard online and at gender conventions. Lawrence released some of our private correspondence in 2003, after I began openly criticizing Blanchard’s taxonomy as popularized by Lawrence and anti-trans activist J. Michael Bailey.
Background
In 1997, the State of Washington opened an investigation into transgender anesthesiologist Anne Lawrence for digitally examining an unconscious Ethiopian patient’s genitals while the gynecologic surgeon was out of the surgical suite. Lawrence resigned prior to the full investigation.
This was not public knowledge until trans journalist Roberta Angela Dee published an exposé in 2002. Before the exposé, Lawrence and I discussed collaborating on a book about how to make a gender transition. That discussion ended after Lawrence was sexually inappropriate with me during one meeting at Lawrence’s home, something that was revealed later had also happened to New York Times journalist Donna Cartwright.
In 2003. after I began criticizing the transphobic book The Man Who Would Be Queen by J. Michael Bailey, Lawrence released some of our private correspondence, including a 1998 email excerpted from a conversation about theory and terminology. Lawrence had just posted a paper online called “Man Trapped in Men’s Bodies” that laid out Lawrence’s views. I was in the final stages of gender transition and was just starting to think about theoretical issues.
Full text of private 1998 email
From: <jokestress@aol.com>
To: <alawrence@mindspring.com>
Sent: Monday, November 09, 1998 6:26 PM
Subject: Excellent paper!
Hi Anne–
I have a couple of more weeks to recover at home from my 10/28 labiaplasty and implant repositioning, and my 11/2 chin revision. It’s given me some time to look at sites I haven’t seen in a while, and to work on my own.
I just read your autogynephilia paper and found it to be excellent, as expected. I’m sure you’ve gotten quite an array of responses, since TSs are extremely reluctant to be categorized and defined by others. A definition is inherently inclusive or exclusive, and there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t feel they belong in or out of a definition.
I got body slammed by the usual suspects in 1996 for recommending a Blanchard book. Sure, he’s pretty much the Antichrist to the surgery-on-demand folks, and I’ve heard some horror stories about the institute he runs that justify the nickname “Jurassic Clarke.” However, I found many of his observations to be quite valid, even brilliant, especially in distinguishing early- and late- transitioning TS patterns of thought and behavior. I don’t buy into all of Freud, either, but that certainly doesn’t invalidate his many brilliant insights.
Now that I have received a lot of letters from TSs, I have found that your paper backs up my own experiences. One correspondent used a phrase I found most interesting. She had been lamenting her inability to pass in public and asked for advice. When I gave her a number of tips, she had excuses for why none would work. Normally, I write these people off as a waste of my time, but in this case I pressed her about what would really make her happy, and what she meant by passing.
Her response was “I want to be able to pass in the nude after surgery.” I wrote, “Passing in the nude is great and everything– I certainly want that, too. But the opportunities for nudity in my life are extremely rare– about .1% of the time.”
I pressed further and realized what she seemed to mean. She did not really care about passing in public as much as she did passing in private. She seemed to want to admire herself in the mirror as female. This was her definition of passing. To her, she could look past all the other unpassable parts and zero in on her notion of what true passing meant– having a vagina. She could stare at her vagina and the rest wouldn’t matter. Classic anatomic autogynephilia, no?
She knew that her masculinity would be a barrier to standard intimate nude situations– say, a locker room or a sexual relationship. That wasn’t what it was about to her. It was about admiring herself, the way crossdressers masturbate while looking at themselves in a mirror.
You might say she desired passing in the pubic sphere instead of the public one… 😉
Now, I’d like to throw out a thought for you to ponder. I am obsessed with my appearance, and I characterized it to you as similar to the way an anorexic sees herself as fat. I still am horrified and dismayed to see traces of masculinity when I look at images of myself.
I have noticed in most TSs, and in “surgery addicts” especially, a certain sort of self-loathing, a drive to efface every shred of masculinity. While I readily admit to my own autogynephilia, I would contend that my own drives toward feminization seem to have a component pushing me from the opposite direction as well.
Would this be “autoandrophobia,” perhaps?
Now, if you think you’ve caught a lot of shit about autogynephilia, just imagine what would happen if I used “TS” and “self-loathing” in the same sentence! Nonetheless, I see my own transsexual feelings paralleled in the words of people with other body dysphorias. Obviously, I’d need to think this through pretty seriously before I’d say anything for all to read, but your paper helped me form a word for that part of my own drive toward feminization.
Finally, I have decided that my true contribution to the collected body of TG knowledge is to concentrate on the oft-neglected topic of consumer issues. To that end, I will be putting up what I believe will be the definitive resource on financing transition in a week or two. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
Again, excellent thinking, and I look forward to reading more.
Take care,
Andrea
Alice Dreger distortions (2007–2015)
Historian and anti-trans activist Alice Dreger was enraged in 2006 after failing to stop a speech I gave at Northwestern University, where Bailey and Dreger both worked at the time. Dreger spent the next year trying to get payback against me, manufacturing a narrative where I teamed up with Deirdre McCloskey (whom I have never met) and Lynn Conway to “ruin” Bailey.
Dreger tried to use this 1998 email as a “gotcha” in a 2007 Archives of Sexual Behavior paper defending Bailey. Dreger used every trick in the book to distort and obfuscate and take things out of context:
And still a third member of the ‘‘investigation’’ team apparently for years had accepted the label of autogynephilia for herself and
others. This was none other than Andrea James.The evidence for this is unmistakable. In 1998, James had written to Anne Lawrence to congratulate her on her latest paper on autogynephilia and to talk about her own first- and second-hand experiences with autogynephilia. And it wasn’t for lack of understanding the theory of autogynephilia that James wrote so favorably of it in 1998. I quote from that message at some length here, because I think it is important to see how radically James’s attitude changed towards Blanchard, Lawrence, and autogynephilia from 1998 to the time in 2003 when she teamed up with Conway to devote enormous resources to discrediting Bailey, Blanchard, and Lawrence, and anyone else who spoke favorably of autogynephilia as an explanation.
[long passage from my 1998 email]
James went on to tell Lawrence that, ‘‘Now that I have received a lot of letters fromTSs, I have found that your paper backs up my own experiences.’’ She gave some specific examples from MTFs she had known before moving on to talk about herself:
I have noticed in most TSs, and in ‘‘surgery addicts’’ specially, a certain sort of self-loathing, a drive to efface every shred of masculinity. While I readily admit to my own autogynephilia, I would contend that my drives towards feminization seem to have a component pushing me from the opposite direction as well [i.e., away from masculinity].
It’s pretty clear in context that I was discussing my experiences of corresponding with people, and that I was saying the antonym “autoandrophobia” better described my own motivations. In Greek, -philia and -phobia are antonyms, which is why Dreger deliberately left out my proposed antonym “autoandrophobia.”
Dreger later repeated these distortions in the 2015 book Galileo’s Middle Finger.