Can I be a woman?

I have a friend who describes me as an ‘uptight boring old straight heterosexual’ – simply because I don’t use porn or prostitutes, don’t swing both ways and have no interest in orgies and dogging, or any desire to be tied up and flogged by some fat dominatrix in a ‘torture den’ in Pimlico.

He is always on the lookout for a new kink or a fresh fetish to try, and one of his latest passions is autogynephilia – that is, experiencing sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. This means he can find a woman sexually attractive only when he thinks not of her but of himself as that woman. He used to call himself a transvestite; now he calls himself an autogynephile.

Autogynephilia (or AGP for short) is a medical term coined by the psychologist Ray Blanchard in 1989. But it has recently become both a fashionable practice and politically controversial. I think its current appeal – at least for my friend, who loves to provoke – is that you can shock heterosexual males and offend the trans-activist community at the same time. The latter believe that the very idea of autogynephilia is intrinsically transphobic.

I confess that it’s hard for us straight males to understand the appeal of AGP. One self-confessed autogynephile has said on YouTube that he couldn’t have sex with a woman ‘unless I imagined myself as that woman’. This sounds like a form of erotic narcissism to me.

Of course I’ve often thought about what it must be like to think, act and experience the world as a woman. Most men, I suspect, have. But getting aroused by thinking of oneself as a woman? I don’t get it.

I said to my friend: ‘Where’s the thrill in that?’

‘Well, why don’t you try it?’ he replied.