Say No to the Dress: It's Fetish Gear

A few years ago, I drove my then 7-year-old daughter to the local library to print out a homework assignment on one of the community computers.

As we approached the computer bay, I was horrified to discover a grown man watching a screenful of violent porn. Even worse than his choice to consume this crap in public was his choice to continue watching it as we approached. It was abundantly clear to me that part of his arousal mechanism was his ability to require our unwitting participation in it. He derived sexual satisfaction from our discomfort and, more specifically, from his control over it.

I still experience an extreme amount of fury even thinking about it.

As you can imagine, I read him the riot act and complained loudly to the librarians on staff who looked flatly at me, shrugged their shoulders, pointed to another section of the library, and said, “He’s within his first amendment rights to watch whatever he wants. There’s a kids’ computer section over there.”

A few months later, I worked with a local legislator to try to pass a bill to protect people from these public displays of fetish, but, in progressive Washington State, we didn’t get very far.

In the few years since, I’ve had a lot of time to think about the mainstreaming of adults’ sexual activities. To me it’s pretty simple: Adults can do whatever they want (within the legal limits) in their bedrooms. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it. It doesn’t mean I think it’s healthy for individuals or societies, but these are their choices to make and their consequences to shoulder. The key factor here is the “within the privacy of their homes” part. Sex is private. There are important reasons to keep it that way.

But it increasingly seems that the women with the audacity to say this are roundly dismissed as pearl clutching bigot prudes, and I’m kind of over it.

There’s been some recent uproar within gender critical communities, and I’m fully aware that the overwhelming majority of people in the world will have no idea about any of the insider baseball I’m about to dissect, but bear with me because the implications are much broader than the limited topic of transgender ideology:

Basically what happened is this. There’s this organization called Genspect that exists as a resource for people working to resist the various horrors of transgender dogma. For example, if you were the parent of a kid getting sucked into the gender cult, I might refer you to Genspect for resources, therapists, literature, etc that could help you rescue your kid without putting her on cross sex hormones or puberty blockers. Or if you were someone who got sucked into the gender cult and regretted your decision, I might refer you to Genspect for assistance figuring out how to reclaim your true identity.

Genspect does good work, and there’s hardly anyone else in this space, so they’re really important as an organization. In order be as effective as they are, they have to cast a pretty wide net and build bridges to people I might not otherwise be inclined to work with, including men who identify as transgender. I understand this to a certain degree. You can’t start a conversation by saying, “I hate your ideology. You’re gross. Get away from me.” From a therapeutic sense, you have to at least try to understand the thinking of the person in front of you, if only to ultimately untether the knots in it somewhere down the road.

Well Genspect recently held a conference, and one of the individuals who attended the conference was a man named Phil who is a self-described autoheterosexual/autogynephile (AGP). What that means is that Phil is sexually aroused by the fantasy of himself as a woman. He wears women’s clothing as a vehicle to orgasm. In short, it’s a fetish.

Now Phil’s voice is useful in the broader conversation because he’s willing to acknowledge what the scientific community wants to deny: A lot of the men who identify as women are men who, like Phil, are doing so as a manifestation of a paraphilia. As long as this reality is quashed, the people in these circumstances will continue to be invited to mutilate their bodies en route to a fantasy that will never fully come to fruition. So it’s important that people like Phil are speaking up and saying, “Hold the phone. This treatment model isn’t going to help because it’s not tackling the actual root of the problem.”

So yay Phil. Bravo. Way to tell the truth about that. I salute you.

Here’s the problem. Phil’s proposed solution is to embrace autogynephilia as a legitimate sexual orientation. His publicly expressed goal is to mainstream, normalize, and destigmatize autogynephilia in the public conscious.

Do you see the problem? Autogynephilia dehumanizes women by objectifying our bodies and reducing our existence to costumes to be worn for sexual arousal. At its extreme form, it’s Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. It’s not healthy. It’s perverse. It’s public sexual fetish. It shouldn’t be normalized. It should be treated and resisted like any other maladaptive psychological dilemma. And those of us who have been harmed by its existence (men in our locker rooms, etc) are right to be pissed off about this type of thinking inserting itself into the very spaces we worked to create for the express purpose of resisting it.

So Phil shows up at the Genspect conference knowing full well that his presence is going to agitate a lot of the people doing the work. It would be kind of like inviting Donald Trump to the Democratic Convention. If he had decided to attend without making himself conspicuous, I think a lot of people would have tolerated it well enough. But as most narcissists do, he had to draw attention to himself, and the way he did this was through wearing a prop for his fetish: a royal blue dress.

Hear me when I say this: When men know darn well that their behavior is harmful and offensive to the women around them and they proceed to do this anyway, they are no longer allies; they’re liabilities. The dress may as well have been a gimp suit. He was loudly declaring to all in attendance, “I’m going to involve you in my public sexual fetish because I’m a man and I can. Screw you.” It reminds me of the creep at the library; part of the thrill is the control over making everyone else squirm.

To be clear: It wasn’t the dress that was the problem. If Harry Stiles had shown up in a similar number, we probably would have rolled our eyes, said cest la vie, and moved on. Fashion is ever evolving. A hundred years ago, I would have been arrested for the indecency of wearing pants. No one cared about the dress; we all cared infinitely more about why he was wearing it and the fact that everyone in attendance was an unwitting participant in his public sexual activity.

I’ve been in this particular fight for eight years. I’m keenly familiar with the behavior of autogynephiles, and I’m not at all surprised by Phil’s behavior. It’s par for the course in my experience. But I am terribly surprised and, quite frankly, dismayed by the behavior of some of the conservative academic men defending him and gaslighting women for opposing him.

These are men who’ve made names for themselves by resisting woke culture and saying that transgenderism is a Marxist trap. They’ve grown rich from asserting themselves as the bold intellects who aren’t afraid to tell the truth about the gender cult. So it makes zero sense to me that they would cede this ground or fail to recognize the danger in embracing a man whose publicly expressed aim is to NORMALIZE the very ideology they war against. Phil has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that, despite his deepest longings, he is, in fact, still a man. And maybe that’s enough for these guys. As long as he accepts the material reality of his sex, they’re okay with mainstreaming the nature of his kink? Is this what’s going in? They actually can’t see the problem with this? It’s like plucking the head off a dandelion and saying you weeded the garden. It makes no rational sense. They would rather keep this AGP as an ally than contend with the legitimacy of our resistance to him. Bros before hoes or something like that?

I’m not going to waste my breath listing these men’s names here. Suffice to say that they’re regurgitating the same tired crap women have been hearing since the dawn of time whenever we draw boundaries or raise concerns about our own movements: They’re calling us feminazis, harpies, pearl clutchers, prudes. They’re creating strawmen and insisting that our actual issue is that we secretly just want to return to rigid gender norms and are just being dishonest about our innate recoil response from the dress. They’ve made it all about the dress and not about the fetish.

One man even threatened the legendary Kellie-Jay Keen and said, “It would be a mistake to pick this fight with me” as though he were somehow God’s gift to gender critical activism who had done even a fraction of the work this woman has done on behalf of reality. They’ve launched mass blocking campaigns on social media, with one egomaniacal influencer even using his public platform to encourage his followers to block the women on the frontlines of this movement who’ve done the lion’s share of the labor.

These guys simply cannot fathom a world in which women are allowed to defy them. Which is the exact same game we’ve been fighting with transactivists from the start. Men’s wants matter infinitely more than women’s safety. It takes us right back to the drawing board.

Down, sisters. These guys have a right to do whatever they want. There’s a kids’ computer section over there.