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 to satisfy unquenchable urges on your own.
So a lot is going on in that scene! There is partying, drug use, and sex addiction. Sex tourism and the objectification and exoticization of Asian and trans women (colloquially called “chasing”). Seeking out sexual partners who resemble you, along with sexual fantasies of being someone else entirely — in this specific case, an Asian girl.
It is this “wanting to be a girl” element within this flurry of exposition that has some people — especially those in “gender critical” (GC) and TERF circles — calling this “autogynephilia.”
Now in reality, these sorts of “cross-sex” fantasies (sexual fantasies that involve imagining oneself as a member of the other sex) are fairly common. In his 2018 study of 4,175 Americans’ sexual fantasies, Justin Lehmiller found that “about one-quarter of men and women had fantasized about cross-dressing, and nearly a third had fantasized about trading bodies with someone of the other sex” (p. 66). Lehmiller points out that this isn’t just men fantasizing about being women: “11 percent of the women I surveyed reported sexual fantasies about becoming men and that 20 percent had fantasized about dressing up as men” (pp. 97–98). As Lehmiller puts it, “We often become different people in our sexual fantasies. Most of my participants reported that, when they appear in their own fantasies, they change themselves in some way, whether it’s having a different body, genital appearance, or personality” (p. xviii).
I should point out that trans people only comprise about 0.6% of the U.S. population. So when Lehmiller reports that roughly 33% of people experience these cross-sex fantasies, he is primarily talking about cisgender people here. These are, by and large, cisgender fantasies.
Outside of cross-sex fantasies, some people have used the term “autogynephilia” to refer to sexual fantasies that women often have centered on their own female body and/or feminine gender expression (e.g., dressing up in lingerie). Veale et al. (2008) found that 52% of their cisgender female subjects experienced “autogynephilia” (see Moser, 2010 for further elaboration). In a separate study of cisgender women, Moser (2009) found that 93% of his subjects experienced “autogynephilia” to some extent, with 28% experiencing it at high levels. Other researchers (e.g., Leitenberg & Henning, 1995; Dubberley, 2013) have also described these sorts of sexual fantasies in women, albeit without framing such fantasies in terms of “autogynephilia.”
In my 2020 scientific review on the subject, I argued that we should ditch the term “autogynephilia” because Blanchard’s conceptualization of these fantasies — that is, his theory of “autogynephilia” — has been disproven (more on that in a moment). Instead, we should collectively call these embodiment fantasies (as they are focused on one’s own real or imagined body) and recognize that they come in various forms and individuals may experience them to varying degrees (frequently for some people, on occasional for others, and never for some).
Given all this, why did GC/TERFs make such a big deal out of this one particular aspect of last week’s White Lotus scene? Well, because they are strongly opposed to trans people. And in their minds, “autogynephilia” (which they often abbreviate as “AGP”) equals “trans women” (who they often describe as “male” or “men”). Here are a few of the GC/TERF comments about the episode that Mey Rude quoted in her aforementioned article: “The depiction of transsexual and AGP in #TheWhiteLotus #WhiteLotus Season 3 is brilliant”; “AGP trans identified male thing in all its fetishy addict glory”; “‘transgenderism is a fetish’ is mainstream now.”
To be clear, Frank (the White Lotus character in question) never describes himself as trans. If he were a real person (rather than a fictitious character), he’d likely be one of the 33-ish percent of cisgender men who experience female/feminine embodiment fantasies (FEFs). And while it’s true that some trans women report having FEFs (just as many cisgender women do), I have never once in my entire life heard of a trans woman who fantasized about having sex with someone who resembled her “male self.” Nor have I ever met a trans woman who strived to become another race or ethnicity — we transition to be ourselves, not to become someone else.
It is ludicrous that I even need to say this, but The White Lotus isn’t a reality show or documentary. It’s a satire that is routinely described as “scandalous.” I highly doubt the show writers were trying to do an “exposé of AGP,” as many GC/TERFs seem to believe. It’s far more likely that the writers were simply concocting an intentionally over-the-top storyline (sex tourism! sex addiction! embodiment fantasies! oh my!) to make the scene as salacious as possible. [Note added 4–5–25: evidence has since surfaced that the creator of White Lotus may hold GC/TERF beliefs about gender and “autogynephilia” too. If true, that would render this paragraph about the show writers’ intent incorrect, but it wouldn’t change the overall case I am making here about GC/TERF misconceptions about FEFs and delusions about “AGP.”]
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Lots of TV shows have gender-bendy storylines written by cisgender writers that have little to nothing to do with actual trans people. I usually don’t bother writing a response to every single one of these shows — if I did, we’d be here all day. But this particular incident highlighted something that’s been on my mind lately regarding GC/TERF rhetoric more generally (e.g., in their go-to phrases like “erasing women,” “biological sex,” “gender ideology”), and is especially true with regards to “AGP/autogynephilia.” Whenever they invoke the latter term, we tend to get bogged down in questions of what exactly “autogynephilia” is or who supposedly experiences it, when what we really need to discuss how the word functions, because that’s the real story here.
Frankly (no pun intended), “autogynephilia” does not function like most other words. Here’s what I mean: When I say or write the word “tree,” you are likely to conjure up an image of a tree in your mind. Sure, I might be thinking of an oak tree and you a pine tree — which is why language is sometimes messy — but at least we both have a general sense of what we’re talking about. In the parlance of linguists, the combination of letters that spell “T-R-E-E” is called the signifier and the object itself (whether oak, pine, or other) is called the referent.
“Autogynephilia” primarily functions as a floating signifier, meaning that the referent (the object the word refers to) is not fixed. It’s as if the word “tree” referred to trees some of the time, but other times people used and/or interpreted it to mean bagels or shopping carts. Of course, many words have multiple meanings, but these are often fairly easy to discern based on the context of how the word is being used. But floating signifiers function more like moving targets, where the word can mean practically anything the person using or interpreting it wants it to mean, context be damned. Which is why debunking false or misleading claims about “autogynephilia” is like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole.
Much of the problem here can be traced directly back to Blanchard’s original work, which was conducted in the mid-to-late 1980s (yes, it was that long ago) when he was a gatekeeper in an old-timey gender clinic. I won’t get into the weeds here — please consult my 2020 review and other writings if you’re interested in the minutia. But basically, Blanchard coined the word “autogynephilia” to refer to female/feminine embodiment fantasies (FEFs), which he presumed were a trans-specific phenomenon (because he didn’t bother to use controls in his studies to determine if cis people experienced them too) as well as a paraphilia (colloquially, a “fetish”) that supposedly drives all lesbian, bisexual, and asexual trans women (but not heterosexual trans women, whom he labeled as “homosexual”) to transition, while simultaneously being a misdirected sexual orientation that competes with sexual attraction to other people. Whew!
So by my count, that’s at least six distinct meanings (FEFs, trans-specific, a paraphilia/fetish, two fundamentally different types of trans women, the cause of gender dysphoria and desire to transition in non-heterosexual trans women, and a sexual orientation unto itself) all packed into the term “autogynephilia.” And over the years, once other researchers began publishing their own studies and critical reviews of Blanchard’s theory — demonstrating that there aren’t two types of trans women, nor are FEFs trans-specific, nor do FEFs cause gender dysphoria/desire to transition, etc. — proponents of the theory resorted to vacillating between “autogynephilia’s” various referents.
So nowadays, when people (such as me) argue that Blanchard’s theory has been disproven (because it has been, see previous links), they accuse us of “denying” the existence of “autogynephilia” (by which they mean FEFs, even though nobody is denying that such fantasies exist). But then, if we point out that significant numbers of cisgender women and men also experience FEFs, they will argue that those don’t “count” as “autogynephilia” because . . . [checks notes] well, those people are not trans, so they cannot possibly “have it.” In other words, they have shifted back to “autogynephilia” signifying an imagined “cause” of transgender identities or “subtype” of trans women, which definitionally cannot be applied to cisgender people.
Endlessly frustrating. Like I said, it’s like playing Whac-A-Mole.
GC/TERFs have further expanded autogynephilia’s floating signifier repertoire. For starters, they simply call all trans women “AGPs” nowadays regardless of sexual orientation — that is, they couldn’t care less about Blanchard’s “two subtypes of trans women” even though this was originally a central aspect of his theory.
They also tend to stretch Blanchard’s claim that FEFs constitute a “paraphilia” — which btw is a confused concept of its own, as I detail in Chapter 10 of my book Sexed Up — to insinuate that all trans women are “fetishists,” and that all “fetishists” are trans women. This is why they are so confident that fictional Frank from White Lotus is “trans,” even though he never describes himself that way. Because in GC/TERFs’ minds: “AGP” = “trans” = “fetish” = “sex addiction” = “sexual predation.” It’s the perfect floating signifier.
It must be noted that this association of “AGP” with “sexual predation” is purely a GC/TERF invention, one which actually contradicts Blanchard’s original formulation. If you actually read his original articles circa 1989–1993 (as I unfortunately have), you’ll find that Blanchard believed the purest form of “autogynephilia” involved “static fantasies . . . consisting of little more than the idea of having a woman’s body” (Blanchard, 1991), and that the more intense an individual’s “autogynephilia” the more it interfered with or competed against attraction to other people — this doesn’t really sound conducive with “sexual predation,” does it?
If fact, Blanchard struggled to explain his and other researchers’ findings that, for most trans women, FEFs tend to diminish greatly or even completely disappear over time, especially after transition. So he argued that these trans women must have formed a “pair-bond” with their female selves, and the reduction in FEFs they experienced was akin to how long-term couples tend to become less sexually active with one another over time (you can read all about this in Serano, 2010, p. 182). Now whatever you think about this hypothesis (I personally think Blanchard’s entire theory strains credulity), the phenomenon he’s describing has virtually nothing to do with “preying” on other people. For Christ’s sake, the term has the prefix “auto” in it! In his own words, “autogynephilia” means “love of oneself as a woman,” not “preying on unsuspecting women in restrooms.”
But the truth is that GC/TERFs couldn’t care less about Blanchard’s theory. Rather, what they really really want to do is to equate trans women with “sexual predators” — despite all the evidence to the contrary, plus the blatant way this trope has been deployed to demonize other marginalized groups in the past (all of which is detailed in my Transgender People, Bathrooms, and Sexual Predators: What the Data Say essay, now in video) — because this makes it easier for them to push their preferred policies (which generally involve eliminating trans people from the public sphere). And because “AGP/autogynephilia” primarily functions as a floating signifier, it can readily accommodate this additional (false) meaning.
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Which brings me to the main reason why I decided to pen this essay. About six years ago, I began seeing the first instances of what I’ve come to call GC/TERFs’ Grand Unified Theory of transness. The first example of it I saw came from prominent GC/TERF author and activist Kathleen Stock. I learned about it from Christa Peterson’s article Kathleen Stock, OBE, specifically this passage:
When one woman pointed out that she had been able to develop breasts at 40 with HRT in response to claims that puberty suppression might make young people miss a key window, Stock called her a “a male who gets aroused at the thought of having breasts.” “Poorly understood, life-changing medical interventions, on mostly female children, are being shielded from public scrutiny in order to serve the political interests of autogynephilic adult males,” she announced. “The autogynephilia tail is wagging the puberty-blocking dog.” When someone challenged her on this, she said “I stand by my diagnosis,” adding that “many of the loudest (partly because male) voices policing critical discussion of the treatment of ‘trans’ kids barely disguise their autogynephilia.”
Essentially, Stock is claiming that the existence of trans children is being orchestrated by trans adults with “autogynephilia.” I cannot adequately express how inane this claim is. For one thing, trans kids have always existed — we inexplicably spring up in families and communities regardless of how accepting, disaffirming, or derisive they are toward us. Not to mention the fact that most of the trans women who GC/TERFs disparage as “AGPs” were once trans kids ourselves.
Furthermore, gender-affirming care for trans youth was neither pioneered nor pushed by trans adults. Rather, these kids were coming out on their own as trans, their parents sought to support (rather than disaffirm) them, and trans health practitioners worked with said parents and children to provide them with the best possible options. If you don’t believe me, this history is chronicled in sociologist Tey Meadow’s 2018 book Trans Kids, which at one point states: “Older transgender adults initially resisted the efforts of the parent activists and advocates who first began agitating for support from schools and doctors in the late 1990s and early 2000s, fearing political repercussions from the public endorsement of social transition for young children” (p.140). So much for Stock’s “tail wagging the dog” quip.
In subsequent years, as anti-trans activists brazenly stooped to baseless accusations that trans people are “grooming” or “sexualizing” children (also addressed in my “Transgender People, Bathrooms, and Sexual Predators” essay and video), they took a page from Anita Bryant and created yet another referent for “autogynephilia,” namely, “child molester.” Here is prominent GC/TERF author and activist Helen Joyce from a 2024 podcast interview:
I think one of the reasons that this movement has had so many successes is that it’s got many motive forces. We have to look at these autogynophilic men and see them as, I think, the single biggest reason that this movement has succeeded to such an extent. There just are these very powerful men whose entire aim in life is to transgress women’s boundaries and to force everyone else to pretend that they’re women because they get an erotic thrill out of it. And those men think about nothing else, like men and their boners, excuse me, that is the greatest force in human history, as far as I can see. There’s nothing else that comes close to it. And then there’s the capture of institutions. There’s the vulnerability of teenage girls. There’s these weird predatory guys convincing kids that they should transition because that’s what they get a kick out of.
This is honestly one of the most batshit passages I have ever read. Describing trans women as “very powerful men” and “the greatest force in human history” is unhinged. While most trans women hormonally and/or surgically transition (which significantly reduces libido btw), we remain proverbial and perpetual “men with boners” in Joyce’s transphobia-addled mind. And looky here, Joyce has given “autogynephilia” yet another referent — suddenly it’s a sexual kink for convincing children to transition now.
Notice how both Stock and Joyce depict trans kids as “mostly female,” even though the evidence to support this is weak. Their purpose in doing so is to connect “autogynephilia” to their other pet pseudoscientific theory (which GC/TERFs literally invented): “transgender social contagion” (also called “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” or “ROGD”). As with “autogynephilia,” numerous research studies have been published that are inconsistent with or outright contradict “social contagion/ROGD” (detailed here). But this doesn’t faze them, as these concepts aren’t intended to be scientific — they are merely floating signifiers that (like the red string on a conspiracy theorist’s evidence board) seemingly connect everything they are concerned about with one another.
Perhaps the quintessential example of GC/TERFs’ Grand Unified Theory of transness can be found in Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Here’s how I described the book in the new Afterword I wrote (about the current anti-trans backlash) for the third edition of Whipping Girl.
The book is focused squarely on protecting “our girls” from “ROGD/social contagion,” relying heavily on the aforementioned traditionally sexist and ableist sentiments. Trans female/feminine people are largely absent from the book, with the exception of one chapter (featuring interviews with Ray Blanchard and J. Michael Bailey) that depicts us as sexually obsessed “autogynephiles.” Given that chapter, in concert with the book’s provocative subtitle, readers may be left with the impression that it’s trans female/feminine people who are responsible for this “transgender craze *seducing* our daughters” (emphasis mine; other anti-trans activists have argued this more explicitly). While Shrier’s book never mentions “grooming,” its subtext conveys deep connections between “social contagion,” the “cisgender people turned transgender” trope, and imagined sexual predation.
Oh, did I mention that the book’s cover image is a cartoon of a young girl with a hole cut out where her reproductive parts would be? (read: she has been “defiled”).
GC/TERFs’ Grand Unified Theory of transness has everything they obsess about all crammed into a single all-encompassing narrative: imagined “grooming” and child sexual abuse, fears about infertility and “mutilation,” the supposed “erasing” of women, “social contagion,” and of course, sexually deviant “men” driven by “autogynephilia” conducting the whole operation behind the scenes.
There once was a time when relatively few people used the word “autogynephilia,” and when they did, it was to specifically refer to Blanchard’s proposed taxonomy and etiology. By the 2000s, a number of scientists and trans people began applying the term to describe FEFs more generally, independent of Blanchard’s theory — that was confusing enough. But today in 2025, the overwhelming number of people who invoke “autogynephilia” are committed GC/TERFs, and they wield the word in a ridiculously broad way to imply that “AGP” = “trans” = “fetish” = “porn” = “sex addict” = “sexual predator” = “child molester” = “a kink for ‘transing’ children” = “the shadowy cabal orchestrating Big Trans.”
“Autogynephilia” has long been a floating signifier. But it has since graduated to full-blown conspiracy theory. It has outlived its usefulness as a scientific label or neutral descriptor for a certain type of sexual fantasy. We should move on from the word, as I’ve argued previously. At a bare minimum, those who continue to use the term should at least address and grapple with the way it has been taken up by anti-trans conspiracy theorists, lest they be perceived as harboring similar sentiments themselves.
For more on why marginalized groups tend to be sexualized, and why sexualization often has a delegitimizing or degrading effect on people, please check out my book Sexed Up. This essay was made possible by my Patreon supporters — if you appreciate it, please consider supporting me there! A non-paywalled version of the same essay can also be found on Substack.
