Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 34, No. 4, August 2005, pp. 439–446 ( C  2005) DOI: 10.1007/s10508-005-4343-8 Early History of the Concept of Autogynephilia Ray Blanchard, Ph.D. 1,2,3 Received August 4, 2004; revision received November 27, 2004; accepted November 27, 2004 Since the beginning of the last century, clinical observers have described the propensity of certain males to be erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women. Because there was no specific term to denote this phenomenon, clinicians’ references to it were generally oblique or periphrastic. The closest available word was transvestism. The definition of transvestism accepted by the end of the twentieth century, however, did not just fail to capture the wide range of erotically arousing cross-gender behaviors and fantasies in which women’s garments per se play a small role or none at all; it actually directed attention away from them. The absence of an adequate terminology became acute in the writer’s research on the taxonomy of gender identity disorders in biological males. This had suggested that heterosexual, asexual, and bisexual transsexuals are more similar to each other—and to transvestites—than any of them is to the homosexual type, and that the common feature in transvestites and the three types of non-homosexual transsexuals is a history of erotic arousal in association with the thought or image of themselves as women. At the same time, the writer was becoming aware of male patients who are sexually aroused only by the idea of having a woman’s body and not at all by the idea of wearing women’s clothes. To fill this terminological and conceptual gap, the writer introduced the term autogynephilia (love of oneself as a woman). KEY WORDS: autogynephilia; DSM; gender dysphoria; gender identity disorder; transsexualism; transvestism. INTRODUCTION Fifteen years ago, I coined the term autogynephilia from Greek roots meaning “love of oneself as a woman” and defined it as a male’s propensity to be erotically aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman (Blanchard, 1989a). My identification of this erotic orientation was not the result of any advance in imaging technologies, laboratory assays, or computationally inten- sive statistical procedures. It was the result of a perceptual shift—a shift in the way I saw, heard, and understood statements that patients had been making to clinicians for decades. In this essay, I review the perceptions of earlier 1 Law and Mental Health Program, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health—College Street Site, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 2 Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 3 To whom correspondence should be addressed at Law and Mental Health Program, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health—College Street Site, 250 College Street, Toronto Ontario M5T 1R8, Canada; e-mail: Ray Blanchard@camh.net. clinicians and attempt to show how these led to my own formulation. The study of autogynephilia is, more than anything else, the study of what people say about their experiences. The reader who has never heard or read autogynephiles describe their own feelings in their own words can consult the self-reports of 59 individuals compiled by Lawrence. These are accessible in two electronic documents, “28 Narratives About Autogynephilia” (Lawrence, 1999a) and “31 New Narratives About Autogynephilia” (Lawrence, 1999b). The following quotes from these documents give something of the flavor of autogynephiles’ accounts. Nar- ratives numbered 1–28 are from the “28 Narratives” and those numbered 29–59 are from the “31 New Narratives.” The defining feature of autogynephilia is reported quite simply in many of Lawrence’s collected narratives, for example: “The very earliest of my masturbation fantasies at around 12 years of age were of being somehow turned into a girl. They have always been the primary theme for me all through my life” (Narrative #8). “It is very much the idea and fantasy of having a woman’s body 439 0004-0002/05/0800-0439/0 C  2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.