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The White Lotus, TERFs, and “Autogynephilia” as a Floating Signifier
plus their “grand unified theory” of transness
Last week, the popular HBO series The White Lotus set off my Google Alerts, the reason being I have written extensively about Ray Blanchard’s theory of “autogynephilia” — links to those writings (in both scientific journals and online essays) are compiled in Autogynephilia, Junk Science, and Pseudoscience. And the latest episode of White Lotus . . . [checks notes] didn’t even mention “autogynephilia.”
But some people saw “autogynephilia” in it. Mey Rude wrote the following summary of the scene in question for OUT — her article also includes varied audience reactions and interpretations of the scene:
Rick is surprised to see that the formerly wild Frank is now a sober Buddhist, and over the next several minutes, Frank goes into deep detail explaining how he got there. Frank explains that he moved to Thailand because he “always had a thing for Asian girls,” and that when he got there, he acted “like a kid in a candy store.” However, no amount of partying and meaningless sex satisfied him, so he started wondering where his life was going. “Why do I feel the need to f*ck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have this grip on me? Because she’s the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way? I realized I could f — — a million women and I’d still never be satisfied. Maybe, maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls. You know?” After taking home a ladyboy one night and letting her top, Frank says “it got in my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting f*cked by me.” So, naturally, he started dressing up in lingerie and perfume, and finding men that look like him to have sex with him. “Are we our forms? Am I a middle aged white guy on the inside too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” he asked. “I don’t know. Guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer. Then I realized I gotta stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl, I got into Buddhism which is all about spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the never ending carousel of lust and suffering.” It was a powerful and mesmerizing speech on the danger of indulging your wildest desires and the cyclical futility of trying…
