Fetish or Orientation? The Case of Men Wearing Female Masks

This week in his ever-pleasurable Savage Love iPhone app, the internationally-syndicated sex advice columnist Dan Savage reprinted a question from a woman whose boyfriend "enjoys wearing women's clothing and acting like a submissive woman when we have sex." The woman told Dan, "Nothing gets him off more. We have only just started exploring his fetish in the past year because he has been ashamed of it all his life. I have encouraged him so far and now we have a couple hundred dollars' worth of sexy women's clothing that fits him. Last night he asked me if he could wear a latex mask of a woman's face during sex."

As one can see, Dan’s reader termed her boyfriend’s proclivities “his fetish,” but as Dan implied in his response, the boyfriend’s interests may be more like a sexual orientation. What’s the difference? In sex research and in clinical psychology, “fetish” usually refers to an object (like a particular article of clothing) or substance (like latex) that an individual finds particularly sexually arousing. By contrast, a sexual orientation is more about how we are wired to interact (or not) sexually with others.

Out of curiosity, I asked Ray Blanchard, a sex researcher, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, his thoughts on this reader’s boyfriend. Ray and I actually met over the sexual orientation possibly at issue here, namely autogynephilia, when I wrote a history of a controversy over autogynephilia.

Pink Boys with Puppy Dog Tails

What to do with a "pink boy"?

In my e-mail in-box a few weeks ago, I received a polite message from a woman named Sarah Hoffman who was writing to ask why I was being such a gender conservative. Sarah didn't quite put it that way, but that was the gist of her message, and given that I'm usually accused of being a gender radical, I sat up and listened. And as I read the whole of Sarah's message, I realized she was absolutely right.

Sarah identifies herself as a mother of a "pink boy" - a boy whose manner of play and dress has often tended toward what's common in girls. Sarah was writing to me specifically in response to a piece I'd written for the Hastings Center Report called "Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood: Inconclusive Advice to Parents." There I had outlined the two basic clinical approaches taken to children labeled as having "gender identity disorder," and had mentioned my sympathies for and reservations about each.

How and Why to Take "Gender Identity Disorder" Out of the DSM

As a wizened gender rights advocate, I know better than to assume the activists making the most noise are actually representative of “the community” they insist they represent. So, while American transgender activists have lately been fairly unified and very vocal about the need to remove “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID) from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), I know that not all trans people agree.

Really Changing Sex

What would it take to get the government to worry less about our genders?

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that New York City “is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificates even if they have not had sex-change surgery.” Under the new plan “being considered by the city’s Board of Health… people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.” No more need to get surgery or even hormone treatments to get the legal gender you feel is right for you.

Quite a progressive move, this. And nicely in keeping with the long history of liberal democracy, wherein social and political identities have been increasingly decoupled from anatomy. Think about it: your social identity and legal rights depend a lot less on your body type now than they did fifty years ago, and much less than they did a hundred or five hundred years ago. Most of the major civil rights movements have been about just this: arguing against body-based discrimination, whether it be race-based, sex-based, or ability-based.

Why should a person have to go through expensive and dangerous transsexual surgeries – many of which she might not want or be able to afford – to get people to recognize her as the gender she says she is?

But even for a gender progressive, the New York city approach raises a host of questions.