A few dozen people around the world openly lend their names to the idea of a sex-fueled mental illness called “autogynephilia.” Even fewer people use “autogynephilic” as their public identity. Many key “autogynephilia” activists were involved in a Yahoo Group started in 2003 and banned by Yahoo in 2004.
Background
Ray Blanchard invented this disease. He says making a gender transition is the expression of a paraphilia for most transgender women. Blanchard’s disease is promoted by Anne Lawrence, a transgender woman who uses it as her identity. It was also promoted by J. Michael Bailey in his book The Man Who Would Be Queen.
Most experts and transgender people believe this disease is a harmful way to describe and think about transgender women.
Supporters of the disease often try to make it sound as if a lot of people agree with them. It’s easy to show this is not true. Christine Burns made a global petition to protest Bailey’s book and its support of “autogynephilia.”
Her petition got over 1,400 signatures in a few weeks. That is about ten times the number of people subscribed to the “autogynephilia” support group.
By 24 March 2004, there were 34 unique posters on the “autogynephilia” support group in 2004, half of whom posted six or fewer times. During that time, ten contributors were responsible for nine out of ten posts. In other words, that tiny band of dark blue represents the people who wrote 87% of the “autogynephilia” content.
Between March 1 and May 10, the number of unique contributors dropped further to just 26, and the top ten contributors now wrote 95% of all the “autogynephilia” content. This “movement” is led by a handful of well-known internet kooks and crackpots. The top three contributors went from making over half the posts to making over two-thirds of them.
| Contributor | 1 March to 10 May | 1 Jan to 24 Mar |
| Willow Arune | 215 (44%) | 287 (29%) |
| Lisanne Anderson | 70 (14%) | 116 (12%) |
| Jennifer Ann Lemon * | 54 (11%) | 126 (13%) |
| Stacey Harris | 42 (9%) | 0 |
| Fran Koether | 18 (4%) | 50 ( 5%) |
| J. Michael Bailey | 16 (3%) | 13 (1%) |
| S. Alejandra Velasquez | 16 (3%) | 4 (>1%) |
| Jamie Faye Fenton * | 15 (3%) | 42 (4%) |
| picard1965 | 10 (2%) | 13 (1%) |
| weirdoid_x2 | 8 (2%) | 33 ( 3%) |
| Kendra Blewitt | 2 (>1%) | 23 (2%) |
| BernadetteTS | 0 | 22 (2%) |
| Margaret McGhee | 0 | 103 (10%) |
| janeblanche ** | 0 | 73 (7%) |
* have made up their own definitions that claim “autogynephilia” is not a paraphilia.
** expressed skepticism/concern about the term. Others listed do not necessarily agree it is a legitimate diagnosis.
As examples of people who have made up their own definitions of “autogynephilia”:
Jennifer Ann Lemon from California said: “I apparently use it differently from James as I use it solely to mean ‘love of oneself as a woman’, and not with any paraphilic connotation.” Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/autogynephiliasupport/message/2166
BernadetteTS on alt.support.srs sees it as people who want a physical transition versus a social transition, writing in 2001: “We accept that there are non-op TS who want a complete female lifestyle without a complete physical change. I think there is an equally valid group of TS’s who would be content with a complete physical change but an incomplete lifestyle change.”
The small number of people who support the disease “autogynephilia” would be even smaller if they used Blanchard’s clinical definition of “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.”