Bisexualism in males has a chequered history. Beloved by its proponents, it lacks convincing support, at least in the West, where it is taken to mean, more or less, ‘equal attraction to both masculinity and femininity’. Actual studies are conflicting and the consensus must be that more depends on the way the question is put than reality. Look at the following pictures. Can it really be possible to be sexually attracted as much to the one as the other?
I don’t think so. Yet there is one form of bisexualism in males that is well-supported and documented. It is a function of Autogynephilia, a common fetish of straight men.
I’m uploading this here because i have been asked by a follower to elaborate on the various types of Trans expression found here. I have covered this ground before but not in this form. So these are the types of ladyboys found in the Philippines.
Classifying the types of ladyboys in the Philippines is complicated because they are in part influenced by individual sexuality but also by the culture they appear in. The Philippines is similar to but not the same as other south-east Asian countries and markedly different, in significant ways, from the Anglo-West. It has a good deal in common with cultures found in both Latin America and Southern Europe but is not identical to either.
The Philippines itself does not have a homogeneous culture. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the country is a huge archipelago of over seven thousand islands. In fact, new islands are being discovered all the time. Although many are not populated by humans, most are and this has led to significant cultural diversity between them. It has a population of approximately 120 million souls.
Although she works in Thailand, Yuki is Filipina. Pic courtesy of Cine de Rose Ladyboys
The second cause is the location, on two major navigation routes: east-west and north-south. For hundreds if not thousands of years, visitors have been coming to the islands and implanting both their genes and their cultures. But these implantations have not been uniform; they have varied in effect greatly, say from Mindanao in the south to Luzon in the north.
The cover picture shows me with two ladyboys, just so you know its all real; one of them is Homosexual, the other Autogynephilic, but can you tell which is which?
A unique culture
Today, Filipino culture remains essentially Malay, which is part of the Austronesian language family, but on top of that are European/Christian influences, especially through Spain, as well as Arabic/Muslim, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and of course, US American ones. All of these have had an effect on the overall culture of the Philippines and the precise flavour of the mix is unique. There is no other country in the world quite like it.
Gays in Manila
Ladyboys and gays
In Asian Culture, the terms ladyboy and gay are the standard English translations for a plethora of local terms such as bakla, kathoey, waria, nuhafu and many others, which all describe the same thing: an unmasculine male. Not all of these present as girls by any means but all consider themselves to be ‘girls inside.’ The dichotomy of gender identity here is not man and woman, but man and not-man. (Professor Don Kulick explains this well.) One is either a man or a not-man; that’s it. All the ridiculous made-up ‘genders’ that are so fashionable in the West are subsumed into one: not-man. To be a man, one must be male, masculine and a penetrator, in sexual terms. Everyone else is a not-man. I belabour this point because in the first place it is crucial to understanding gender in Southeast Asia, indeed anywhere outside the West and also because so many Westerners seem incapable of understanding it.
Essentially, ladyboys and their equivalents are unmasculine males who either pursue sexual and romantic relations with masculine men (not others like themselves,) or make a show of doing so. Note again, the Platonic notion of ‘like goes with like’ is regarded as absurd here; opposites attract, as is logical. Although some ladyboys do have sex with each other, this is situational: they can’t find men to do the honours. Ladyboys in relationships like this will typically identify as Bisexuals, of which more below.
A scale of Sexual Inversion has been hinted at in several online conversations of late. So what would a scale of sexual inversion look like?
[kofi]
First, as a negative comparison, let’s look at Kinsey. He, an etymologist and a taxonomist, proposed a ‘scale of human sexuality’ from 0 (Fully Heterosexual) to 6 (Fully homosexual.) The wonder is that this was accepted anywhere, since it flew in the face of pretty much all previous understanding. Nobody proposed that male sexuality was a scale of variation, till Kinsey; they all suggested that homosexuality was an anomaly, most likely caused by factors in utero not then understood — which in fact it was, and remains: Sexual Inversion.
You know, if you really want to ruin your Saturday night, go hang around an Autogynephilic male message forum.
An Autogynephilic male is besotted by himself — as a woman. The condition is a form of autoeroticism. Dr Ray Blanchard’s coined the term the 1980s at the Clarke Institute in Toronto. It is safe to say that neither this institution nor Dr Blanchard have found favour with many an Autogynephilic male.
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Blanchard was trying to put some statistical flesh on the ‘two types’ theory of transition. In fact, the idea that there were two clearly differentiated types of male who might want to appear to be women had been known for many years, since the time of Magnus Hirschfeld. One type was easy to understand, the other so complex that some researchers thought there was a multiplicity.
Men and women select partners differently. Men are visual-target-oriented. They are the hunters. They see particular features and find them attractive, and so they tend to try to select mates that have them. Men are driven in this by female fertility. They are looking, in a long-term partner, for someone whom they think will be able to bear and rear children. This is the beginning of gender.
So who is the primary model for the ideal mother in a man’s mind? Easy; his own. So men tend to seek out women who in some way remind them of their own mothers, or rather, as their own mothers looked when they were young. There is evidence that men are most attracted to women of eighteen to twenty-two, which squares with this.
[kofi]
These traits were evolved over a long period of time, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, and during that time, women gave birth early, beginning at twelve to fourteen or so. So, again, the ideal ‘proto-mother’ that men seek is a young woman.
Much has made about the differences between autogynephilic transvestites (AGP) and homosexual transsexuals (HSTS). However, most of this work remains largely clinical and as such, it fails to connect to the sympathies of the public. An exception to this of course being J. Michael Bailey’s The Man who would be Queen, an almost pop-science interpretation of the data on transsexualism. Even this, despite being a nice read, is written from the perspective of a researcher. What I am getting at, if not already obvious, is that not much is written from the perspective of Homosexual Transsexual women.
I am a Homosexual Transsexual woman, and was invited by Rod to write a piece or two based on my experiences. I don’t usually get to share these with other people, and I thought this a good opportunity. I won’t get into much about my childhood — after you’ve heard a couple of Homosexual Transsexual’s childhood remembrances, you’ve pretty much heard them all — but I will give some basics.
It is often not realised that the male homosexual culture of the West is not homogeneous but instead a conglomeration of several personality types. One of these is the Sexual Invert, which we have discussed at length. Another, just as important but much less well-understood, is the Narcissistic Homosexual.
[kofi]
‘Sexual Inverts’ are either male with female sexuality or female with male sexuality. In other words, their sexuality is the inverse of what might be expected for their sex. They were described by Karl Ulrichs and Havelock Ellis amongst others. Since gender is the means by which we communicate our sexuality to others, male inverts desire to be feminine and females, masculine. The specific expression ranges from, in males, mildly camp to full social, hormonal and surgical transition, to True or homosexual transsexualism, HSTS. (It is a scale of variation.) All male sexual inverts are naturally more or less feminised and all female sexual inverts are naturally the opposite. They often have real difficulty living in the gender their sex would suggest.
Theirs is not, however, the only form that male homosexuality can take.
Homosexual transsexuals exactly fit the profile of ‘sexual inversion’ as defined over a hundred years ago by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895)
‘The truth of the invert was inside rather than on the surface; thus a male invert was “really” a woman, and should be allowed to express a female gender, and a female invert was “really” a man, and should be allowed to dress and live as one. Inversion also referred to the ways in which such bodies inverted the laws of nature, which supposedly decreed that male bodies should desire female sexual partners instead of male ones, and vice versa. The theory of sexual inversion maintained conventional categories of sexuality and gender and did not allow one to be divided from the other. Inversion meant that a man’s homosexual desires, effeminacy, or both did not challenge masculine gender or heterosexual sexual norms; rather, a perfectly normal heterosexual woman with a feminine gender was trapped inside him, yearning to come out.’ (Encyclopedia.com)
[kofi]
Later, the English sexology pioneer H Havelock Ellis wrote:
‘(Congenital sexual inversion) is sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality towards persons of the same sex.'(My emphasis).
(Ellis uses the term ‘congenital’ which remains unproven. It is clear that what he is talking about is innate and must result from biological factors occurring either in the womb or shortly after birth; but we do not know whether the trigger for whatever these might be is congenital, that is, a result of a specific gene mutation. However, the condition is innate and not acquired. I prefer to use the term ‘innate’.)
Ellis’ massive study of human sexuality, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which is downloadable via this page HERE, contains a whole volume on sexual inversion, and he defines this as above on the first page. Note that both Ulrichs and Ellis agreed that this sexual inversion was innate. It was inborn and not a matter of choice.
Observation in the Philippines casts light on an interesting group of Autogynephiles in the West. One of these, who is public, is called Candice ‘Kay Brown’ Elliott.
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Kay Brown maintains a website discussing the scientific consensus about trans and has even written a book about it. She has been claiming for decades that she is HSTS and loses no opportunity, in her writing, to support this claim. However even cursory examination of her body morphology and career indicates that this diagnosis would be unlikely.
A more plausible explanation would be that Kay Brown is Autogynephilic, but that within her family, middle-class and liberal, her feminisation was accepted because she explained it as a consequence of homosexuality. Ever since then, Brown has maintained this facade, marrying a man and becoming ‘mother’ to his children. In other words, while their motivations are definitely different, it is not always easy to tell between HSTS and AGP.
What is gender? Sabia Bia is one of my YouTube Channel commentators and this week she posted a number of interesting questions on the topic of gender as appropriate to trans women.
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More space than was reasonable to use on YT was required and further, Yt is now heavily censoring content. So I have put answers to her questions about gender here.
