Gay men are trans women.

I Will Never Be A Woman

When Joe Rogan name-dropped autogynephilia on Halloween 2024, I knew y’all were finally ready. Class is in session for LGBT 201; throw out your Genderbread Person. From Caitlyn Jenner to Ted Kaczynski, everyone has already seen the type who sparks panic in women’s restrooms - but these autogynephiles (AGP) aren’t the story J. Michael Bailey was really telling in his 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen.

They’re not even half the story! These high-IQ, aggressive AGPs tried a cancel campaign over their brief mention in a book about gay men and feminine trans women. Really, they’re two sides of the same coin, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I want to talk about the transsexual you'll find working the men's truck stop showers, serving fish and getting those coins. Think Blaire White or Jazz Jennings.

The language here can get confusing very quickly, so I will state my idea here simply. There is zero difference between a ‘gay man’ and a ‘trans woman’ before transition.¹ The only measurable differences you will find are in body image; i.e., ‘dysphoria.’ But in terms of distribution of masculine vs. feminine traits, it is the same population. The distinction persists primarily to facilitate trans women’s access to straight dick.

Ray Blanchard’s typology names the second type of MtF the ‘homosexual transsexual’ (HSTS). The two terms are unified; there is no fake separation. In 1868, Karl Ulrichs invented the idea of ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ (eine weibliche Seele in einem männlichen Körper) to describe gay men like himself. The lie that became later entrenched is that gay men are just like straight men except for our bedroom habits.

Sissy boys and gay male amnesia

Before this very recent idea of ‘trans kids’, some kids were called ‘prehomosexual’. Another synonym comes from Richard Green’s longitudinal study on ‘sissy boys,’ published in 1987. Compared to the control group of masculine boys, large majorities engaged in feminine behavior like wearing girls’ clothes (70% vs 0%), playing with dolls (50% vs 5%), and taking female roles in games like playing house (60% vs 0%).

This behavior started very young: half the boys in the experimental group displayed feminine behavior before the age of three. Fifteen years later, 75% identified as gay men, while only one transitioned.² Green started his study intending to find the origins of MtF transsexuality, but stumbled into a roadmap to predicting homosexuality. This trvth nuke destroyed many lies gay men tell about their childhoods.

Fake spectrum. Real: straight men → masc gays → fem gays → dragqueens → HSTS

As a boy, my father forbade me from going to faggy dance classes, but signed me up to play soccer and football. I complied, but after moving out, took dance classes on my own dime.³ Looking back, would I report that I was a gender-nonconforming child? That’s the problem with memory: subjects often lie or self-deceive in sexological research, creating gaps between self-reports and externally measurable data.

Bailey surveyed such gay-stereotyped measurable markers, from speech patterns to motor behavior like limp wrists. These traits aren’t unified by any single ‘femininity factor’: each characteristic varied independently.⁴ His studies found that while straight men clustered tightly at the masculine end of these traits, gay men showed much more variation, spanning the range between straight men and straight women.

Drag queens and the tipping point

At the far end of gay male femininity we find drag queens. The international TV franchise RuPaul’s Drag Race is about this group of gay men who cross-dress on occasion.⁵ Half the amusement of the show is how it exposes the shape-shifting. One moment, a buxom diva dressed in Pucci struts down the runway; then, cut to the ‘boy mode’ confessional of a catty man with a buzzcut, as if to say, You Are Jewish!

But not all gay men have the desire to do drag. Studying male homosexuality across different societies, the sociologist Fred Whitam documented a persistent divide between what I will call masc gays and fem gays. Fem gays used female names and pronouns; preferred singing, dancing and acting over sports; and clustered in niches like prostitution, sewing, housekeeping, and manicuring. And they are just boy-crazy.

Some Drag Race contestants who competed as men and now live as women.

These gay men who become HSTS perform a more traditional, cross-culturally valid form of homosexuality. From Latino travesti to Amerindian berdache, Indian hijra to classic Thai ladyboys: everywhere we look, today and yesterday, we find this pattern. There is no modern egalitarian pair-bonding. In the Philippines, straight young men treat bayot like a free trial for sex, saving the good girls’ virginity for marriage.

That’s just one way to tell the story, though. From the HSTS or fem gay perspective, these ‘straight’ male partners become trade. The term refers to streetlight negotiations, where cash or gifts change hands. A darker variant, rough trade, acknowledges the risk of a particularly vibrant, thuggish partner having a post-climax identity crisis, and choosing to resolve it with fists, firearms, or other creative means.

Calculation or circumstance?

Some sissy boys grow up to be gay men with gonads intact, while others schedule appointments at the gender clinic to become ‘girls with something extra.’ The clinician Ken Zucker identified reliable predictors for which path a gender non-conforming male might take: ‘Gender identity disorder’ persists for those with low IQ, low social class, immigrant status, divorced parents, and childhood behavior problems.

Bailey's research uncovered another significant predictor: Latino or black ethnicity. Among his Chicago subjects, these groups made up 60% of homosexual transsexuals but only 20% of the general homosexual sample from the same recruiting pool. The subjects themselves recognized this pattern, offering explanations ranging from genes to machismo to… gay men's jealousy over transsexuals’ ability to attract straight men?

Which Way, Sissy Boy?

The haughty attitude of the trans street walker toward the gay male burgher mirrors the attitude of the ghetto black toward the suburban white almost exactly. ‘They Hate Us Cuz Our Dicks Is Bigger’, translated to English, means: these squares don’t know what living is about. While they’re playing house and going to therapy, we’re out here getting money, getting laid, and doing whatever the hell we want. Live fast, die young.

When Whitam concluded his decades-long research in 1986, he found that straight men's desire for fem gays varied dramatically across cultures. America stood out for the quality of the straight men's resolve. Two generations later, this resistance has crumbled, tempting more sissy boys to transition into a fast life history strategy. The pendulum awaits only our will to swing it back. Will you resist the allure of girldick?

1. I could also make this argument with brain scan data. If you’d like that, drop a comment.

2. Only one of the 56 boys in the typically-masculine group ended up identifying as gay.

3. This agrees with a 1995 study from one of Bailey’s students.

We also asked participants how and when they got interested in dancing. The gay men actually got started a couple of years later than straight men (age 13 compared to 11). When asked what initially motivated them, about 60 percent of heterosexual dancers said that their parents had encouraged them. (Heterosexual men and women gave similar responses.) In contrast, only 13 percent of gay men said they got into dance this way. Instead, half the gay men said they got interested in dance by themselves, compared with only 19 percent of the straight dancers.

Basically, childhood gender nonconformity persists into adulthood, despite discouragement.

4. A gay man who acts feminine in one way doesn't necessarily display other feminine traits.

5. Medical transition was treated like Olympic doping until RuPaul caved in Season 10.