TURNING VICTIMS INTO FOLK DEVILS
JENNIFER KIMMEL DIDN’T WANT TO think ever again about what had happened to her — she certainly had no plans to tell her story to a journalist. The abuse she suffered was severe; Jennifer was imprisoned for two years and sexually tortured by her ex-husband. After fleeing the relationship, all the mother of three wanted was to settle down in her adopted home of Ireland and recover in peace. But when she turned to a domestic abuse group for support, Jennifer was told that it was she who needed to change her behaviour.
Now, Jennifer wants to speak out to help other women and to expose a dangerous community of men who hide behind a myth of victimhood. “When I’ve told my story before it’s been dismissed as being about ‘a classic abusive man.’ And in some ways that’s true, but he wasn’t just an abusive man. He was an autogynephile — that’s to say a man who gets sexually aroused at the thought of himself as a woman.”
Meaning literally “love of oneself as a woman”, autogynephilia (AGP) is a fetish that can manifest as everything from occasionally wearing women’s underwear to seeking full cosmetic “sex reassignment” surgery. It is estimated that around 3 per cent of men in Western countries may experience autogynephilia, though the numbers seem to be rising.
Julia Serano, author of , is one of many transgender activists who deny the existence of AGP, arguing that the condition has been concocted to reduce “trans women to their presumed sexual behaviours and motivations”. Summarising the controversy over AGP, medical historian Alice Dreger wrote in her 2015 book that, “the ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of really becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman.” This, she posits, is why AGP is “a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name”.
