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Anne A. Lawrence Biography

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“We autogynephilic transsexuals strive to become womanly in our bodies, but we can also strive to become womanly in our personalities. The feminine personas we create in the process of sex reassignment function as integral elements of the extended works of performance art that are our lives. We create our feminine personas by trying to express and embody the feminine virtues, whatever we think these are. For me, they include gentleness, nurturance, empathy, agreeableness, cooperation, friendliness, and grace. These qualities do not describe how I am naturally, but they describe the way I want to be and try to be; as such, they de fi ne a spiritual path that I attempt to follow. To try to express and embody these feminine virtues in our everyday lives makes us better people—especially if we have spent most of our lives expressing the kind of nerdy masculinity that values things over people, emphasizes competition over cooperation, and sometimes alienates us from our emotions and from other people. The transsexual journey is, in this case, less about finding our “true selves” than our best selves. Autogynephilia is a paraphilic sexual orientation, but it is possible to build a satisfying, passionate, spiritually fulfilling life around it—a life very much worth living.”

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“It seemed evident to me that this client was not genuinely androphilic: He was clearly an autogynephilic man whose most intense source of erotic arousal involved the most common type of behavioral autogynephilia, autogynephilic interpersonal fantasy involving a male partner. But what was evident to me was not at all evident to this client, even though he was probably more intelligent than 99.9% of the population and had read more about autogynephilia than most psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in the treatment of gender dysphoria. The most intense and rewarding sexual experiences of this man’s life had involved sex with male partners. How could he not wonder whether his real sexual attraction was toward men? His uncertainty about an issue that seemed so straightforward to me was a reminder of how profoundly confusing this type of behavioral autogynephilia can be, even to highly intelligent, well-informed people. Eventually, this client recognized that he was not genuinely androphilic, but this realization occurred only gradually.”

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“Interestingly, forced feminization fantasies are also symbolic representations of our actual life experiences. Because we fi nd the prospect of becoming women so shameful and humiliating, we really do have to be forced into it. We are forced by our unremitting gender dysphoria, by our powerful erotic desires, by our love and admiration for women’s bodies and our wishes to turn our bodies into facsimiles of them, and by our need to honor our strongly held cross-gender identities in order to give meaning and vitality to our lives. If we are prudent, we autogynephilic transsexuals undergo sex reassignment only if we feel we have no other viable alternative: We transition because we feel forced to do so. Forced feminization is, in a very real sense, the story of our lives.”

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“In 2010, I published a study of the relative prevalence of nonhomosexual and homosexual MtF transsexualism across national cultures (Lawrence, 2010c ) that had implications for understanding the phenomenon of autogynephilic transsexualism. In this article, I attempted to explain the observation that nearly all MtF transsexuals in Asian cultures are homosexual, whereas most MtF transsexuals in the USA, Canada, and the UK are nonhomosexual. I demonstrated that differences in a measure of societal individualism —the degree to which a culture condones its members pursuing personal happiness and self-expression, regardless of the opinions of others—accounted for most of the differences in the relative prevalence of nonhomosexual MtF transsexualism. If one assumes that nonhomosexual MtF transsexualism is equivalent to autogynephilic transsexualism—a justi fi able assumption, in my opinion—these results suggest the hypothesis that the permissible expression of autogynephilia , rather than the prevalence or severity of autogynephilia, primarily accounts for these cross-cultural differences. Undergoing MtF sex reassignment probably feels far more permissible to autogynephilic men living in individualistic Western cultures than to their counterparts in cultures in which individual self-expression is discouraged.”

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“Autogynephilia has long been conceptualized as a sexual orientation...but its advocates, myself among them, have not sufficiently emphasized this point. We should arguably use every opportunity to do so. Autogynephilia, we should explain, is another variety of sexual orientation: It is an unusual variant form of heterosexuality. Like other sexual orientations, it is something we autogynephilic transsexuals did not choose and something we cannot change. It certainly determines what we lust after, but it also determines what we love and want to unite with. And we autogynephilic transsexuals understandably feel strong pressure to express and act on our autogynephilic sexual orientations.”

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“First, we autogynephilic transsexuals often observe that autogynephilia seems to exert its motive force indirectly, by giving rise to our strongly held, highly valued cross-gender identities. Second, our lives often do feel as though they lack vitality and purpose if we fail to express our cross-gender identities. Finally, we often pay a heavy price for expressing our cross-gender identities, because we are not naturally feminine and because the female personas we create sometimes appear unusual or inauthentic—to ourselves as well as to others.”

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