Almost every night, for at least a year before I transitioned, I would wait till my girlfriend had fallen asleep and slip out of bed for the bathroom with my phone. I was going on Tumblr to look at something called sissy porn. I’d discovered it by accident one night, scrolling lazily down a pornographic rabbit hole. At first, I’d been into JOI videos—the acronym stands for “jerkoff instruction.” In a typical JOI, a solo female performer directs presumptively male viewers to masturbate, in detail. The whole thing is unusually meta, even for porn: many JOI actresses will explicitly shame viewers for wasting their time masturbating instead of fucking a real woman like herself. Humiliation is therefore a frequent theme. Orgasms are often ruined or withheld entirely; affectations of disgust or amusement at the thought of the viewer’s tiny penis are common.
But these videos pale in comparison to sissy porn. In the right corner of Reddit, you can find a whole genre of posts concerned that sissy porn has irreversibly altered the course of their lives. “Did sissy porn make me trans or was I trans all along?” a worried user asks in a post from 2014:
About 3 years ago, I discovered sissy hypno videos, which in a nutshell are flashing subjective images telling you to wear panties, be girly, suck cock, and even take hormones. I became completely obsessed with these videos. Nothing got me off like these. It got to the point where I started wearing panties and imagining myself as a girl when I would masturbate.
The poster, currently living as a gay man, is “95% percent sure” that she is a closeted transgender woman, noting her preference for female playmates as a child and extreme postpubescent social anxiety, her failure to become aroused during sex with men (no matter how studly), and her sometimes suicidal depression at the thought of continuing to live as a man. But the fear expressed by the title—namely, that the poster’s obsession with sissy porn has made her want to become a woman—hangs over the whole post. Posts like this one describe feelings of shame, anxiety, confusion, and alarm. They fear that real trans women just aren’t into this kind of thing. One user writes that despite her never having felt male and her hatred for erections, when she told her therapist that she was addicted to sissy erotica, her therapist told her she just had a kink. “Real MTFs don’t do that,” said her therapist. “Ever.”
In fact, transsexuality has a long history of being considered a paraphilia. Since the eighties, sexologist Ray Blanchard has defended the classification of transsexual women into two distinct erotic types. Trans people and their advocates have largely rejected this typology, not least because Blanchard—a truly loathsome man who on his own justifies the inclusion of “psychiatrists and clinical psychologists” on SCUM’s hit list—considers trans women to be male. “All gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented toward men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women,” he proposed in a 1989 paper. He named the latter tendency autogynephilia, coined to sound like the Greek for “love of oneself as a woman.” With this concept, Blanchard seems to have been interested in shifting sex researchers’ focus from the transvestite’s fetish objects—for instance, “the physical properties of clothing used for cross-dressing (silky textures, striking colors)”—towards a more fundamental erotic investment in the idea of the self as female.
Never uncontroversial in sexology circles, Blanchard’s work was introduced to a broader audience in 2003 by The Man Who Would Be Queen, a lurid little volume that billed itself as a popular book about unpopular truths. The book’s author, psychologist J. Michael Bailey, leans heavily on the theory of autogynephilia, which he presents as settled scientific fact. The theory has thus become a touchstone for trans-hating feminists looking to cast trans women as male perverts. “The term transgender was coined … to create a more acceptable face for a practice previously understood as a ‘paraphilia’—a form of sexual fetishism,” writes noted transphobe Sheila Jeffreys in a book that cites Blanchard’s work liberally. Jeffreys also happens to discuss sissy porn at length. “The use of the term ‘sissy’ is illuminating since it is very clearly a term of abuse based upon women’s subordinate status,” she claims, disgusted. “There is no positive association with women attached to this practice, only a degrading and demeaning one.”
What Blanchard hoped to describe with the term autogynephilia was, of course, exactly what the SCUM Manifesto had described twenty years earlier as the psychological disease shared by all men. Indeed, if everyone is female—and I’m hoping you’re starting to believe that they are—then autogynephilia describes not an obscure paraphilic affliction but rather the basic structure of all human sexuality. This is not just because everyone has an erotic image of themselves as female—they do—but the assimilation of any erotic image is, by nature, female. To be female is, in every case, to become what someone else wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy.