Is being trans a fetish? - by Ari Drennen

The idea that some trans people are acting on fetishes was promoted by Ray Blanchard and later by Michael Bailey in his book “the man who would be queen,” which divided trans women into so-called “Homosexual transsexuals” (HSTS), who were attracted to men, and “Autogynephiles,” (AGP) who were supposedly attracted to the concept of themselves as a woman, which Blanchard said was merely an “erotic target location error.” Blanchard created a scale to measure AGP, and the idea has been extraordinarily successful in right wing media where it has been advanced as justification for denying medical care to trans people. 

There’s a major problem with this typology: Blanchard never tested his scale in cisgender women, and when another researcher did, he found that 93 percent would have been classified as “autogynephiles” if they were transgender.

Blanchard is still out there peddling his theory, comparing trans women’s sexuality to child abuse and violence against women, and fueling the idea that trans people all have some kind of fetish that spiralled out of control both through his platform as a ‘scientist’ and by retweeting memes about it. It’s an idea still popular among anti trans trolls. 

But even if it were true, Fetishes are extremely common, both in the world and on social media. Look at all the right wing influencers cosplaying as alpha males and tradwives, for instance. A 2017 study found that half of all respondents engaged in or fantasized about something that the researchers considered a fetish. It’s time to stop wasting energy stigmatizing normal human behavior.

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