"White Lotus" dares to go there

Mike White's fine HBO Max streaming series exposes the long-covered up reality of autogynephilia that has covertly driven so much transmania over the last 12 years.

Now finishing its third season, Mike White’s ensemble TV series The White Lotus has been a rightful succès d'estime: a high quality, not very woke black comedy about rich people at lovely seaside resorts.

Not surprisingly, it gets blanket coverage in the prestige press. For instance, today, following the weekend’s season finale, the front page of NYTimes.com links to articles about The White Lotus ten times.

But, the NYT refuses to mention a certain forbidden word to characterize Season 3’s most famous monolog. A few weeks ago, the outstanding actor Sam Rockwell (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Moon, Three Billboards, George W. Bush in Vice) makes a surprise appearance as an old friend of resort guest Walton Goggins, who is in need of a gun for some no doubt nefarious purpose.

Rockwell has retired to Thailand, presumably from one of those jobs that exist far more in movies than in real life, such as High-Priced Hitman.

In a definitely not safe for work monolog (and you may well wish to avoid watching it altogether), Rockwell explains to his old friend, the increasingly goggle-eyed Goggins, that after awhile Thailand’s abundance of cheap whores began to lead his sexual fetishes in new directions:

Mike White has constructed for Rockwell an over-the-top portrayal of a stereotypical autogynephilic ex-man — intelligent, self-centered, sex-crazed, and ruthless — which is fairly novel in America media during the ongoing World War T. In other words, a lot of ex-men tend to be exemplars of Toxic Masculinity at its nastiest, but nobody who is anybody has dared mention that to you since the Trans push got going in 2013.

After all, the Trans are, as we all know, the Good People, and skeptics about them are therefore the Bad People.

Even though a large fraction of the most aggressive trans activists suffer from the autogynephilia fetish, the media over the last dozen years of transmania has kept hidden the entire concept of AGP from moody teenage girls, the main victims of trans social contagion.

Paywall here.

The New York Times, for instance, which traditionally determines what News Is Fit to Print for the rest of the prestige press, has still not mentioned the word “autogynephilia” in the 2020s:

Few in the prestige press dare tell impressionable girls what they ought to have heard:

You know, much of this trans stuff we’ve been promoting so heavily is just a weird male sex fetish that has absolutely no application to you. Don’t assume that just because Bruce Jenner announces he’s a woman that the cause of your pubescent unhappiness is that you might really be a boy. Jenner is just playing out a creepy male-only fetish. Same with a lot of the other famous men who announce they are really women. It’s a guy thing that you can’t come down with, so stop fretting over it.

So, despite the New York Times running 403 articles mentioning White Lotus since 2021, White’s landmark decision to break the embargo on realistic discussion of ex-men’s motivations, rather than Starting a Needed Conversation, still got obfuscated in the NYT. Here’s their recap of the scene:

Rockwell is not this episode’s main character. But he does deliver a knockout monologue that is one of the season’s standout scenes. …

Frank’s story is too raunchy to repeat in fine detail. It involves him interrogating the nature of desire and the role gender identity plays in lust — all of which led to him experimenting with cross-dressing and gay orgies before coming to the conclusion that “sex is a poetic act; it’s a metaphor.” But for what? That remained frustratingly unclear to Frank, which is why he became a Buddhist, detaching himself from the wheel of lust and suffering.

Okaaaaaay … Well, that clears that up.

Why is the New York Times so scared of reporting the science behind much of transgenderism?

One reason: because AGP ex-men can be pretty scary. Ex-men tend to be the Seal Team Six of Cancel Culture.

I first tangled with them a couple of decades ago when a few very high IQ academics teamed up with the money-crazed Southern Poverty Law Center and tried to cancel anybody who’d interviewed Northwestern psychology professor J. Michael Bailey on his tour promoting his book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which made accessible to the general audience for the first time discoveries about transgenderism made by U. of Toronto professor Ray Blanchard.

Newsweek used to be a main pillar of the zeitgeist, but the rise of the Internet hammered its economic model hard. So now it tries to survive, in part, by going where the NYT won’t go.

Thus, Newsweek writes, in a fine piece of reporting by Jesus Mesa:

What Is Autogynephilia? 'White Lotus' Goes Where Few Have Dared

Published Mar 19, 2025 at 4:47 PM EDT

By Jesus Mesa

Politics Reporter

A four-minute scene from Sunday's episode of HBO's buzzy series "The White Lotus" has gone so viral that viewers are now simply calling it "that scene" as they discuss its meaning online.

… But episode five of season three, which takes place in an idyllic Thai vacation setting, contained a scene described as both an "acting masterclass" and a brave — or ignorant, depending on one's view — illustration of a previously verboten topic that has roiled the conversation surrounding transgender identity and trans rights for years. …

Frank delves into a monologue revealing his struggles with alcoholism and sex addiction that morphs into a revelation about his arousal and fascination with being thought of as an "Asian girl," engaging in a series of sexual encounters with men in order to embody that fantasy, while women he hires look on….

The monologue was quickly linked to autogynephilia (AGP) by none other than Dr. Ray Blanchard, the Canadian psychologist who coined the term in the 1980s during his studies of patients seeking what were then known as sex changes.

Blanchard theorized that some trans women — those assigned male at birth — experience sexual arousal at the idea of themselves as female, positing that gender transition in these cases is driven by an erotic fixation rather than an innate gender identity or sense of being "born in the wrong body."

The term itself is Greek, meaning "love of oneself as a woman."

Discussions about AGP ignited across social media following the episode, with heated conversations still taking place, three days later, on X, TikTok and Reddit.

Search interest in the term surged on Google shortly after the scene first aired, while transgender forums overwhelmingly dismissed the concept, arguing it was a bigoted misrepresentation of their lived experiences.

… Serano, a trans woman and author of the book Whipping Girl, argues that AGP is often used to delegitimize trans identities, reducing gender transition to an erotic impulse rather than a deeply felt need.

"Blanchard's model is built upon a number of incorrect and unfounded assumptions, and the data he offers to support it is deeply flawed due to methodological errors and biases," Serano writes in “The Case Against Autogynephilia,” published in the International Journal of Transgenderism in 2010.

In the article, she further contends that the persistence of AGP theory has contributed to the pathologization of trans women, portraying them as sexual deviants.

When instead, all these brutally self-centered high IQ guys are instead, as we all know, Victims of Society.

Blanchard, for his part, maintains that opposition to AGP is largely ideological rather than scientific. In a 2019 interview, he argued that transgenderism has been "reframed as a political problem rather than a clinical problem," leading to a "flat denial that autogynephilia exists."

His theory has been supported by other clinicians, including Dr. Anne Lawrence, a transgender woman who argues that AGP is its own distinct sexual orientation that differs from transgenderism —characterized by one's "erotic and romantic attraction to the idea of themselves as female."

Lawrence said she agrees with Blanchard's classification of two primary types of trans women: those who are exclusively attracted to men and transition early in life

These are the extremely effeminate little boys who only want to play with girl toys. Almost all Nice White Ladies imagine that all the Navy SEAL-type ex-men must have been really badly bullied little sissy boys who then pretended for decades to be ferociously masculine 24x7 to cover up who they really are on the inside.

It’s a ridiculous assumption, but nobody is allowed to challenge it in the New York Times, not even Mike White.

In reality, I knew a truly effeminate little boy and the notion of him pulling off some lifelong butch impersonation is absurd. He was always who he was, which was extremely feminine.

The transmania promoters try to get adolescents to worry that they might be the opposite sex because they aren’t quite as masculine as LeBron James or as feminine as Marilyn Monroe. But, if you ever met a ladyboy, you’d stop worrying.

, and those who experience AGP and typically transition later.

One issue in the ongoing debate — coming at a time when the very concept of transgender identity has been under attack from President Trump and his allies— is whether AGP applies universally or describes only a subset of trans women.

There are highly effeminate ladyboys who are extreme male homosexuals. I’m more sympathetic toward them — they tend to not have the high IQs and ruthless masculine personalities seen among the AGP ex-men. In contrast, I’m not terribly sympathetic to, say, 160 IQ academic economists who used to play quarterback for Harvard before announcing they are a woman and then trying to destroy the careers of anybody who attempts to inform the public about the scientific reality of their type.

… Defenders of AGP as a legitimate medical condition argue that much of the backlash stems from a cultural resistance to openly discussing sexual motivations behind gender transition. Blanchard has said the denial of autogynephilia has "become a canon of modern trans activism," intertwined with broader culture-war politics.

The controversy surrounding AGP reflects the broader struggle between academic theories and lived experiences. Lawrence, the clinician, says that for some trans women, AGP provides a meaningful framework for their lives:

"Changing one's body and living as a woman offers an identity, a program of action, and a sense of purpose. Being able to fully express one's sexual orientation, without apology or shame, gives one's life greater meaning and authenticity, perhaps especially when that sexual orientation is atypical," she wrote in 2023.

"Autogynephilic transsexuals want to change their bodies to resemble the females to whom they are sexually oriented. Their gender dysphoria reflects their inability to do so."

Yet critics like Serano and Wynn insist AGP is an outdated and harmful oversimplification of a complex and deeply personal topic.

As opposed to the incredibly intellectually sophisticated conventional wisdom of Assigned Wrongly at Birth?