March 17 2025 - 10:50pm
On Sunday night, viewers of the latest White Lotus episode were treated to a soulful guest performance from Sam Rockwell as Frank, an old pal of series regular Rick (played by Walter Goggins). Frank meets Rick at a Bangkok hotel bar with a duffel bag of weapons, and orders chamomile tea as Rick sips Dewar’s.
Why the sobriety, Rick wants to know. And so, Frank tells him.
“I got it in my head that what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked by me, and to feel that,” he explains. Frank donned lingerie and perfume and advertised for his middle-aged white guy doppelganger, and hired an Asian girl to watch them have sex. “I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me and think, I am her, and I’m fucking me.”
Frank waxes philosophical about sex and identity, asking the befuddled Rick: “Am I a middle aged white guy on the inside too, or inside, could I be an Asian girl?”
In that brief but compelling monologue, Frank has introduced viewers to one of the most controversial ideas in the cultural battle over all things trans: autogynephilia.
The term was coined by Dr. Ray Blanchard, a Canadian psychologist and sexologist who worked in the 1980s with patients seeking sex changes. A subset of the men had always been feminine, and grew to be attracted to men — those he dubbed “homosexual transsexuals.” But the majority were masculine men with gender-typical childhoods. They were “erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women,” which could mean wearing women’s clothes or masturbating to the idea of themselves lactating or menstruating, or wanting men to have sex with them — not because they were gay, but because they wanted to “feel like a woman.”
Blanchard coined the term “autogynephilia” — Greek for “love of oneself as a woman,” sometimes shortened to AGP. He estimated that the majority of transwomen were autogynephiles, or AGPs — though the truth is, we have no way to tell.
That’s because no one is allowed to talk about AGP. Transwomen insist it’s not real, even as they describe their own propensities that line up with it. As Caitlin Jenner put it: “Sometimes I wonder if dressing up like this is the equivalent of having sex with myself, male and female at the same time.” But that didn’t stop some trans activists transforming Blanchard’s name into an insult: this “Blanchardian” idea was “alleging that most trans and transsexual women are psychosexually disordered ‘paraphilic’ ‘men’.”
The truth is that Blanchard, and other sexologists who’ve studied and written about AGP, don’t judge it. It’s but a clinical description of a cohort seeking sex-change surgery. It might not have seemed heretical at the time to ask why they wanted it. But indeed, to name AGP — to ask why someone might want to transition, rather than accept a simple gender identity/body mismatch — is so heretical that some sexologists who recognize it have had their livelihoods and reputations threatened. Any of us who write seriously about it find our dossiers on a website — a kind of “Wanted” poster for thought criminals.
And that’s where censorship really gets dangerous. Young men struggling with these erotic urges will have heard that gender identity and sexuality are separate, but for many people, they’re deeply intertwined. Maybe some AGPs will find more peace in physical transition, but maybe not. Maybe, like Frank, they’ll find that indulging the fantasy of being a woman only increases the obsession, only intensifies the need — because it can never truly be fulfilled. “I was trying to fuck my way to the answer,” Frank confesses.
Frank gives up sex altogether — along with booze, hence the chamomile tea, and the commitment to Buddhism over the “never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.” But maybe, if he’d grown up in a world that admitted autogynephilia existed, he wouldn’t have had to stop being sexual. Maybe he would have found a way to navigate AGP, or manage it.
Will a one-off scene in an HBO series open up that space for others struggling with those desires? I doubt it. Mike White, the series creator, hasn’t shied away from poking fun at the gender-elite classes. In season two, a young woman laments about how hard it is to find a nice boy who’s not non-binary. But just because he’s willing to portray a man aroused by the thought of himself as a woman doesn’t mean the cultural screaming matches around gender identity will calm down enough to tell the truth about it.
We don’t even know if White understands Frank as autogynephilic. What’s more important is that the rest of us watching do.
