“Once I accepted that my sexuality was OK and that it could be expressed in a healthy & romantic way, I felt years of shame and stress melt away. It has been one of the most powerful and freeing experiences of my life.”
I love it when a guy realizes he doesn’t have to live in the shadows of shame, misery and stress. Last week the following email, from a man who found our blog, landed in my inbox:
First of all, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your positive energy, your bravery and your passion in putting together this website. I’ve come out to family and friends in the past 6 months as trans-amorous, as a result of self-reflection and digesting articles and videos that affirmed my experience. I am grateful for internet resources such as yours, because although I had talked to certain friends and therapists for many years about this attraction, people had given me well-meaning, but ultimately damaging advice, essentially fetishizing and marginalizing the attraction.
One article in particular (I wish I could remember what it was!) highlighted that when we treat attracted to trans people as a paraphilia, it implies that men who are attracted to trans women are either 1) closeted gay (which made no sense to me) or 2) have something wrong with them, which means that trans women are implicitly unloveable! That hit me really hard and made me realize that these views are extremely destructive both to cis people like myself and to trans people.
Once I accepted that my sexuality was OK and that it could be expressed in a healthy & romantic way, I felt years of shame and stress melt away. It has been one of the most powerful and freeing experiences of my life. I’ve started to connect to the trans and queer communities and have befriended a couple of trans people, and been on a few normal dates with trans women, although online dating hasn’t really been ideal so far. I just purchased the your book, and am really excited to gain some insights… Perhaps I’ll learn something by looking at it as well. Anyways, I really appreciate what you’re doing and hope to connect at some point. I’ve considered putting myself out there more online/ perhaps creating some videos or similar content, and your website is inspiring me in such a way. Perhaps I can help others avoid the years of suffering I went through.
More men realize their attraction to transgender women is normal, healthy and natural. I suspect we’re going to get more of these kinds of emails in the future.
I talked with “John” about online dating and how sucky it is. We agreed there has to be a better way. And there is. The first step is getting happy. You get happy by telling stories that make you feel good. From there, the Universe takes care of the rest. I’m eager to keep talking with “John” as we all continue down this road of transition.
You heard of autogynophile?
Yes.