How much of our crossdressing desire is related to having been rejected by girls when we were younger? I don’t know the answer for sure, but it seems rejection could have some part to play in developing autogynephilia. If real girls rejected you, why not create your own alternative girl? See these posts – Autogynephilia versus Heterosexuality and Autogynephilia is Self-Defeating. I’d love to see some real research and studies done on this to find out if there is any truth to my hypothesis.
So many men that I’ve talked to have similar stories to me in that when we were younger, we were either directly rejected by girls if we had the courage to talk to them, or we were indirectly rejected by girls through our shyness and lack of interaction with them. I can’t prove it, but it seems to make sense psychologically that this sense of rejection and frustration from real girls could have driven us to developing autogynephilia (probably there are other biological factors necessary as well to give us the predisposition to developing AGP). It might have started with a harmless crossdressing episode for Halloween or another childish game, but when the boy sees his reflection, something clicks within and he realizes that he enjoys seeing the close up feminine image of himself. He doesn’t even understand yet that he is viewing himself as a girl in order to have the feminine companionship and love that he longs for. He craves connection with femininity, and doesn’t realize yet that he is meeting this need through himself rather than through being with a real girl. This may not be worked out on a conscious level. I certainly didn’t have any clue as to why I was doing what I was doing back when I was a boy.
As the boy continues to go to crossdressing to enjoy being with this pseudo-girl, the sexual excitement eventually begins. Once he begins to have sexual pleasure from crossdressing and thinking of himself as a girl, the behavior and sexual pattern are continually reinforced, getting strong and stronger over time. The crossdressed self eventually becomes an easy substitute to real girls. Approaching real women is frightening, he could be rejected again. With crossdressing, there is much less pressure and much less anxiety. He doesn’t have to know how to act, he doesn’t have to fumble with what to say, he just dresses up and wow, there is a woman there with him, dressed in whatever sexy clothes he wants. He begins to love being with this woman all the time, eventually even without sexual pleasure. The only way he can be with this woman all of the time is by embracing being that woman himself. His dysphoria increases. His disassociation with his real body and real identity increases. His feminine alter identity is reinforced and strengthened. He enjoys being with that woman more than he enjoys being without her, so he’d rather be crossdressed all the time if he could. Eventually he considers transitioning.
Does this accurately describe your experience? Were you rejected a lot by girls in your youth? Please comment and share.
Beyond this possible shared phenomenon in our youth, I have also reflected about the role that rejection still plays in some of our marriages today. If we grew up being rejected by girls, and developing autogynephilia, some of us may have carried that fear and trauma of rejection into our marriages. How many of you out there experience a sudden strong desire to engage in crossdressing or autogynephilic behaviors whenever your wife is out of town, or whenever your wife rejects one of your sexual advances on occasion (however gently and lovingly and reasonably she may do so)? Your learned pattern is still there, and not fully broken even though you are married. You still have this feeling of running to the false woman whenever you experience rejection or whenever you are afraid of upcoming rejection.
If you feel unloved or rejected by your wife, you may turn to crossdressing instead. I’ve written about this before – Becoming the woman my wife is not. But doing this is really retreating further into pain and rejection. It’s retreating further away from what God wants for you and your wife. It’s retreating further away from yourself and your real body and your real identity. It’s adding pain to pain. It’s adding shame to pain. And after crossdressing, even if your wife does not know about it, you will feel even less confident before her as a man. You will feel much less like a real man. Women are attracted to confidence and strength, not men who are insecure, traumatized by rejection, and men who have been feminizing their bodies. So unfortunately, each time you retreat into crossdressing after a feeling of rejection, you might only be making her less drawn to you and less attracted to you. You might be setting yourself up for further feelings of rejection. It becomes a viscous cycle. You become more of a weak emasculated man, and she desires you even less. Rather than learning to be a confident man who learns how to love, lead, and romance his wife better and better, he retreats into femininity and becomes even less confident as a man. Rather than being a strong man who does not get completely broken down by an occasional rejection by his wife to one of his advances, he quickly gets traumatized or bitter and runs to self-pleasuring.
(I’ve talked to some men in our community who experience complete rejection from their wives, pretty much having sexless marriages. To these men, I am very sorry for what you are going through. This is truly painful rejection. But the solution is still not to retreat into femininity and autogynephilia. Instead, be the strong man you are meant to be, the man who confidently works super hard and finds real solutions to his life’s problems. That may mean insisting on getting marriage counseling, and insisting to your wife that you will not be okay with a sexless marriage, and are ready to do whatever it takes to get help and healing for your marriage. Don’t passively accept such a miserable situation).
In my own journey, I’ve left that trauma of rejection in my childhood behind. I’ve healed from it. I’ve learned to be a more confident and strong man, and this has helped my marriage. If I do experience anything that stirs up those old feelings of rejection, I don’t allow it to make me retreat into crossdressing. I am stronger than that. I am going to be myself. Even if I have to face rejection in the future, I will endure it, rather than plunging myself back into a confused addiction. If you face rejection and pain, whether you are married or not, don’t retreat into immorality. Go to God. In Christ, he amazingly loves and accepts you. He is with you and will never leave you. He is the one who gives you strength to resist sin, and the one who gives you perseverance to make it through hard times and suffering. Jesus will never ever reject you or me. We are accepted once and forever.
Hebrews 13:5 – “God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”
I agree here. A LOT of my issues with cross dressing came from me having very lustful feelings, but unable to attract a good woman. Most of my VERY FEW relationships were terrible. I chose cross dressing as an outlet to feed my sexual desires. However, in time, it led be to almost go down some roads I DID NOT want to venture down……
It’s quite a revelation to realize that we took a short cut, that we really desire women, but found it much easier to create a fake woman. But knowing the truth, one can make some progress killing the addiction and focusing on your wife instead, or pursuing a woman in real life.
I mean, I’ve been rejected by relatable ( or so i thought) lasses, had a complicated relationship 😅 with a family friend’s daughter and yeah dk it’s logical to say ‘ I’m x because y events’ but life’s a slippery slope imo
This aligns with my past as well. I think you are right in that your hypothesis would prove significant with more data points. We as boys can suffer rejection and maybe turn to 100 different things, but we turned inward to these AGP fantasies and really muddied the waters. Made it a lot tougher to realize what we wanted all along in healthy relationship. Thank God for His grace! For helping us get honest about this rejection and trust Him for healing.
Your comment made me think how some of us also had feelings of rejection from boys, in terms of friendships and playing together, not fitting in. Wonder if all of it could play a role……
Thank you for that, Barnabas. I agree with that outlook, but for me I believe it was based on a different desire. I actually had good relationships, plutonic and romantic, with girls/women. I never really felt rejected by them or that I could not associate with them at any age.
Now that you have pointed this out, mine seemed to be more on the medical side.
My parents had a rental unit of apartments, when I was very young, that we’d often visit to do maintenance and collect rent. I would usually play out on the front sidewalk while they took care of the business.
In the more recent past several years, while escaping this autogynophilia, my intr0-spection included trying to discover where it started for me. I couldn’t connect a specific time where my desire started to want to dress or be like a girl. In fact, my sister did dress me up on occasion, but that never truly stood out as a memory that captured my interest.
One day, in one of my relapses while I was dressed as a women with all the “medical” appliances on and in place, I had a sudden flashback to a girl at the apartment complex who had polio. She was in a wheelchair, had obvious medical issues with her legs and leg braces, but was normal otherwise. I remember her being very cute and liked talking with her. I don’t remember our discussions but I don’t think we ever talked about her situation. She spent most of her time in the wheelchair, but would have to get out to ascend or descend the three stairs to her neighboring apartment complex. She struggled with grace.
If I had to guess, I was around four to six years old. I was eight when I first got caught “doing something I shouldn’t be doing” as a boy, but my parents had no idea what it was related to. Like most of us, though, as time went on, things got deeper and more elaborate. For me, dressing up had to be to a “T”. The medical side was no different. Likened to when we dress, we want to feel like a woman feels. For me, that included being a disabled woman who had needs and who was dependent on medical devices. I dove into everything that women could experience medically only as women or a complex variety of issues all at the same time.
This thought occurred to me in that relapse, “I felt sorry for that little girl, and I wanted others who might see me, feel sorry for my medical issues as a girl, too”. Man! lightbulbs, fireworks, everything in my head knew God had revealed the source.
In my recovery, God has led me to pray for that little girl. Thoughts of that sinful side of myself, not having joy of being content for the man God me to be, shows my sinful nature. But, that discovery helps me on my tougher days to immediately start praying that I don’t allow my flesh to separate me from the love of God while I dip into a moment of self-indulgence.
Matt thank you for sharing this comment. I have always known that paraphilias tend to be comorbid, that is, it is more common for a person who already has a paraphilia to have more than one, than for a random person to have a paraphilia.
Paraphilias are so broken and messed up, a part of us that needs God’s grace and transformation. But there are fascinating to think through, wondering how they develop, and how they work. Phil Illy in his book autoheterosexual really opened my eyes to see the difference between paraphilias, and autosexual paraphilias. Some guys are attracted to women, some guys are attracted to themselves as women. Some guys are attracted to women with disabilities, and some guys are attracted therefore to themselves having a disability. Or with race, or something else.
If you are interested in reading more about that – https://healingfromcrossdressing.org/book-recommendation-autoheterosexual-attracted-to-being-the-other-sex/
Figuring out the origin of our issues does not necessarily help us to overcome them, and it’s a lot of speculation as well. However, in your case I would think you for sure have solved part of the mystery. And in your case, I imagine that can help take away the mystical and magical part of the pleasure of the experience of delving into that fantasy, and help you to try to move away from that towards a more holy and healthy sexuality.
It’s amazing how Satan and our own sinful flesh can distort something so good – your love and admiration for this other girl – and twist into something so perverse, that you were not content with admiring her and loving her from a distance. No, you had to possess what she had, envy it, become it. Of course, I’m speaking for myself too with the autogynephilia aspect.
Thanks be to God for his grace in Christ! We are not only forgiven, but Jesus is working in us and transforming our desires day by day