Transition

Gender transition generally involves using medication, clothing, and surgery to live as the opposite gender. If you are considering transition, there are a number of pieces of advice that can be given:

  • It's not useful to think about whether you are "truly trans" or not. Transition is something you do, and trans is something you become by transitioning. Instead, you should think about whether it would be an improvement if you transitioned. This decision is likely to be heavily based on your gender dysphoria and cross-gender ideation. Some feel that they are not "truly trans" because they are autogynephilic, but autogynephilia is the most common and strongest cause of gender issues that is known, and indeed most trans women are autogynephilic, so treating autogynephilia as implying "not trans" does not make much sense. Some feel that in order to be "truly trans", they must be naturally feminine. This is not so; femininity is not very strongly associated with gender dysphoria, and many trans women seem to have benefitted from transition without being feminine.

  • For deciding whether to transition, it is most productive to think about what changes transition will directly have, on you, your body, and your way of life, and deciding whether the benefits of these changes outweigh the costs. Some people emphasize that they have experienced near-magical improvement just psychologically from HRT, independent of any social or physical changes, but such experiences do not have much evidence behind them and should be treated with skepticism. Instead, focusing on actual effects is more likely to be a good idea.

  • Gender transition is the most popular treatment for gender dysphoria; it has low regret rates and high satisfaction rates, and this is known to hold for autogynephilic as well as non-autogynephilic transsexuals. However, this is mostly the extent of the evidence in favor of it. It has not been shown to lead to improvement in dysphoria or mood using randomized controlled trials. It hasn't been shown that it doesn't lead to improvement either; there's a lack of scientific evidence either way.

Support group

We have a support group (access has currently been shut down) for AGP trans-spectrum people, including trans women, trans NBs, and questioning people. This group is not primarily for non-dysphoric autogynephiles or dysphoric repressors, as it is our experience that mixing these groups often leads to trouble; however, if you are AGP and nondysphoric or dysphoric but repressing, you are still welcome to join the group as long as you accept its purpose. Members of the group will be assumed to be autogynephilic.

Ethics of transition

Some people raise the question of whether AGP transition is ethical. Does it entail including other people in one's kinks? Should autogynephilia be kept in the bedroom, out of public view?

Our answer to this is no. Consider, as an analogy, that we have many rituals linked to ordinary sexuality. People frequently marry their sexual partners, bring them to places such as parties, and choose to spend their life with them. This is not seen as inappropriate because while it is clearly linked to sexuality (you don't often see straight men having a gay marriage), they are not sexually explicit acts. Similarly, AGP transition itself is not sexually explicit; of course, one should not go wandering around in lingerie in public, as that would be inappropriate, but you don't need this website to realize that.