1 Title: The Psychology of Autogynephilia-Inspired Self-Expression Is Subtle
7 Genspect, an organization opposing gender identity ideology and the medicalization of gender-nonconforming youth, held a conference in Denver the other week. It probably went fine? It's hard to tell, because [all anyone wants to talk about on social media is a photograph of Phil Illy wearing a dress](https://genspect.org/the-split/) that was Tweeted by Genspect with a nod to [Illy's recent book _Autoheterosexual_](/2023/Jun/book-endorsement-autoheterosexual/).
9 The objection is that a self-confessed autogynephile wearing feminine attire in public is nonconsensually involving others in his fetish. Illy should be ashamed, say the objectors, and Genspect certainly shouldn't be platforming such behavior. (A [discussion on Ovarit](https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/511150/what-happened-at-the-genspect-conference-with-the-agp) features representative examples of this line of thinking.) Heather Heying [articulates a subtler variant of the objection](https://naturalselections.bio/p/the-public-fetish): even if Illy himself isn't a creep, his behavior is [undermining a Schelling point](/2019/Dec/more-schelling/) that protects women from male predation.
11 The counter-objection is that one would have expected the gender-critical movement to be OK with gender-nonconforming clothing. Illy doesn't claim to be a woman, and doesn't try to enter female-only spaces. J. K. Rowling wrote, ["Dress however you please"](https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1207646162813100033)—do we not believe that anymore?
13 I think the objections are suffering from a lack of understanding about what autogynephilia really is—which is understable. It makes sense that people want to keep sexuality private. At this point, I've [written in a lot of detail](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) about my experience of autogynephilia—but the reason it seemed important to write it down was as a counterpoint to the absurd situation in our Society where guys like me are encouraged to claim to be women, and everyone else is supposed to just believe them. Before that situation became clear to me in 2016, I [mostly](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd) just didn't talk about the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought. As a child of the twentieth century and keeper of the propriety of the 'aughts, I knew that [my kink is not interesting](https://shannonthrace.substack.com/p/your-kink-is-not-interesting).
15 But the reason it's even possible for our Society to be in this absurd situation where autogynephiles are [at the core of a political machine remaking the basic rules of decency](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) without being aware of their own nature is because people [apparently don't know themselves by default](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—which suggests our perceptions of others are going to be even more wrong. The flip side of most trans-identified males needing to be more open-minded about the hypothesis that their gender identity is causally related to their male sexuality is that some of their critics could stand to be more open-minded about the hypothesis that the TIMs aren't _just_ lying when they claim that it isn't—something more complicated is going on.
17 Let me make this concrete.
19 I'm a man. I have long hair. (It doesn't grow out very long for some reason, but it's long enough for me to keep it in my beautiful–beautiful ponytail.) When I decided to grow it out in 2007, that was definitely, consciously a gender-related decision. I wanted to signal that I wasn't one of those guys who are proud of being guys. (Even though I wasn't in denial about the objective fact of being a guy, because everyone and her dog in 2007 could have told you that _that would be crazy_.)
21 I also have a bit of gynecomastia (breast tissue) from [a five-month experiment with feminizing hormone replacement therapy in 2017](/tag/hrt-diary/). I don't think it's very noticeable, but maybe it's a little bit noticeable.
23 I'm glad I grew my hair out in 2007, and I'm glad that I tried HRT in 2017. I've developed an æsthetic which suits me. If someone were to suggest that my hair and my chest constitute practicing my fetish in public, that I need to get a haircut and bind or [get surgery](https://www.plasticsurgery.org/cosmetic-procedures/gynecomastia-surgery) in order to be presentable in public, I would not be sympathetic. This is just my body; this is just my style.
25 At the same time, the conjunction of the fact that I wanted to signal that I'm not one of those guys who are proud of being guys, and the separate fact that I'm autogynephilic, [doesn't seem like a coincidence](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity)? And the fact that I wanted to try a gender-themed drug experiment whose side effects included breast tissue growth is not unrelated to fantasies I've [written about elsewhere](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories), even while the reality of having slight gynecomastia is mundane.
27 Feminine clothing is not my style, so I would not wear a dress to a Genspect conference. But I did wear makeup to [RustConf](https://rustconf.com/) once. I think that was an æsthetic choice (that a lot of Rust programmers think is cool), not a public sex act. I'm concerned that the people scandalized by the Illy photograph are failing to grasp the idea that style choices and sexuality can be correlated without the style choice itself being a sex act?
29 [TODO: if you think of AGPs as alien monsters, it's easy attribute all sorts of terrible things to them, but they're just men]
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