I just got really obsessed with reading about it because it surprised me that if there was this thing that was the most common cause of male-to-female transsexualism, I was so surprised. Like, why hadn't I heard of it? I live in Portland where trans people are very normal and accepted, and it's not a big deal. And it's like, Why didn't I hear about this? Why didn't anyone tell me? Welcome to Awake at the Wheel. On today's episode, we have a special guest, Phil Illy, and

Attracted to Being the Other Sex. So this is a really interesting and exciting topic for both Oren and I. As you know, we did do a series regarding gender, but specifically in reading Phil's book, I found and learned that there were in fact quite a few gaps that I, even as a clinician, have with respect to this topic and with respect to the way in which it should be approached from our practice and as clinicians. So, Phil, welcome. Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us. To begin, I'm wondering if you can introduce yourself. Let us know a little bit about yourself professionally, personally, and what inspired you to write this great book. I start my name. My name's Phil Illy. I’m autogynephilic and professionally, in the past, I worked as a mechanical engineer, but I didn't really care for it. So I'm trying to switch out of that and I like how I ended up here on this podcast is like four years ago I found out I had a sexual orientation. I'd never heard of and it's kind of mind blowing. I've realized this at like age 31 when I read Alice Dreger’s Galileo's Middle Finger and Bailey's The Man Who Would be Queen. I was introduced to the typology, and it was pretty obvious to me that I wasn't the homosexual type. And therefore, by process of elimination, I had to be the autogynephilic type of like male with, with gender issues. And so I just got really obsessed with reading about it because it surprised me that if there was this thing that was the most common cause of male-to-female transsexualism, I was so surprised. Like, why hadn't I heard of it? I live in Portland where trans people are very normal and accepted, and it's not a big deal. And it's like, Why didn't I hear about this? Why didn't anyone tell me? And so I just I just kept reading after like a year of intense reading of papers and such, I started writing the book. And then after about three years of that, it's finally out now. And so, yeah, the book I wrote, although heterosexual attracted to being the other sex, it's it's a product of about three or four years of full time work. And it there's a lot in there. Yeah. Did you find writing the book kind of helped you through that journey of self-exploration or had you established where you were at with that? And the book was kind of a bookend to it, no pun intended. I had already become comfortable with like accepting of myself as autogynephilic by the time I even started writing it. But I just started writing it because I knew that the vast majority of people with gender issues weren't going to be reading academic papers from the seventies and eighties to try to figure out what was up with the situation. And so I wanted to translate what was found in academic papers into a form that, like regular people could read and get meaning from. And also importantly at the end of it, if they do have this orientation like that, they not feel icky at the end of it. That was important to me. Okay. I'm just going to jump in for a second because, yeah, I can't recommend this book enough. And Phil knows this. I think it was back in maybe November or December of last year. Phil sent me a pre public, a published copy and I read it. I started reading it. And I've got to say, I said this to Phil, I said it actually changed my own book because it reads so smoothly. There's aside from the all the new terms that people are going have to learn, aside from that, we'll talk about them just it was so smooth. And as Phil saying, people aren't going to read scientific journals necessarily, but even, you know, nonscientific books sometimes can be clunky. They can be you can take a lot of effort to get through it. And I just I found myself just flowing through it, no effort whatsoever. And it was high level, you know, difficult, let's say controversial issues, but presented in such a digestible way. So I feel after I read the whole book, I believe my own publishing by about six months because I went back from the beginning and just changed my approach because I saw how it can be presented. And again, I say in such a digestible way. So I just want to praise the book for that is again, it's just a great read. It's got so much information. If you look at the references, it's it's backed by science. It's not just Phil's anecdotal experiences, not Phil talking to a couple of people. It's a review of the literature out there. Now, people are going to complain and say it's a selective view Oh, sorry, it's a selective review of the literature and we'll talk more about the controversies. But I am going to say, I'm going to throw this out there. Phil, if you don't mind. I just want to do before you get to your questions. To me, Phil, this could be a paradigm shift. All right. Changing, How That’s my intent Okay. And so I know it. Maybe your first question might lead into that. This whole shift in paradigm, I think, is the first question. So I'll let you take it away, but I'll step back for a second. Yeah. So first I'll echo it. Or instead that you've made a complex topic very digestible and readable. So I think that's that's fantastic. Again, for the general population and clinicians alike. But my first question is, I'm wondering if you can define for our audience what the difference is between autogynephilia and autoheterosexuality. Well, I use so autogynephilia is a sexual attraction of being a woman. And I use the term auto heterosexual to include female autoandrophilia, which is love of self as man and male autogynephilia with love of self as woman to include. I use auto heterosexual to include both of these under a shared heading that places them as not literally the same phenomenon, but analogous counterparts where you know one will be more male, typical one will be more female, typical in its expression. But that should be expected. Just as homosexuality and heterosexuality differ between the sexes in sex typical ways. So the goal was to have a more neutral term. The goal of incorporating that term was I pretty early on decided I needed to talk about autoandrophilia and I thought like there must be a term for describing both of these as equivalent phenomenon. Like what is the term to describe this inverted heterosexuality? And I got to say like it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that auto heterosexual was the right term. And yeah, I use that term just because I want to simplifies the typology, like stating the typology for both sexes. It makes it much quicker to communicate. And then both of the labels are about sexual attractions with respect to birth sex. So like there's something like homosexual and although heterosexual are similar in that way too, and it basically lets it plug in to existing nomenclature in a pretty smooth way. So you mentioned that it took an embarrassingly long time for you to arrive at that term. So without maybe getting into probably the 100 steps it took, can you can you share with us a little bit about like what that entailed? Well, if from about a couple of months into learning about autogynephilia, I kept trying to think of like there's this term is poisoned in terms of just the discourse around it is awful. And I want to I want a new term that that doesn't sound so scary. And as I was working on my book, I felt like it would be a big injustice to leave out autoandrophilia. And so I decided to include that as important, and I just knew I needed a term for that. And the something that led me to thinking of that term. I mean, I had seen it used occasionally here and there. I'd seen it used a few times, like in passing by people trying to think of a term for autoandrophilia, autogynephilia at the same time. But it was there's Blanchard has this one paper about the non monotonic relation between male heterosexual quality and autogynephilia I think came out in 92. And in the margins of this paper just at the top, it said something like heterosexual male heterosexuality and autogynephilia or something like that. That was just in the margin, like the subject. And I kept wondering why is why is one of these called heterosexual and why is one of them referred to as a type of gynephilia? Like because male heterosexuality is gynephilia. Like, why aren't why are we using differently structured words to talk about attraction to the same sort of erotic target? You know? Yeah. So, Oren, I know that you mentioned earlier in one of our chats that and I want to kind of segway what you're saying here, Phil, was I know that in your journey to finding out more about yourself, some of Oren's previous content was inspirational to you in just kind of observing discussions from from others, perhaps in similar situations. So do you want to talk a bit about that? Yeah, yeah. His his YouTube channel, the docamitay YouTube channel. He has interviews with Bailey Blanchard, Dreger You know, of all the top dogs and it was just so rare to find interviews with such people about that sort of thing. And he also had that interview with that, that the trans AGP male. And so it's just there's such a dearth of material out there that's accessible to people. And his channel had some of the a little bit that was, you know, pretty accessible to people. And so that helped a lot. In the first month or two, I came across that. And if I can say so, I know without any, you know, breaking any confidentiality, even though we don't have a patient client or their sorry patient therapist relationship. No, I've mentioned to my students that I'm in contact with a number of people who I don't even know. We don't have a professional relationship. It's just they've reached out to me, including yourself, who are pretty much saying, you know, that what you're talking about, it should be talked about more. It's not being talked about in a hateful or insulting manner. It's just saying this is a phenomenon. It describes a certain proportion of people or percent percentage of people. And let's A) not deny it. Let's not, B) let's not deride people who experience it and see let's better understand it. That's, you know, because it will help people understand what they're going through. It's all about education. So I want to be clear here, because I know some people who either watch the podcast or have followed me, they think that when I speak out about protecting young people from bad practices, they think that makes me anti-trans in some way. So they get sometimes discouraged. When I say I'm not anti-trans at all, I'm anti bad science, I'm anti bad practice, anti ideology. Right. But, you know, if somebody whether it's you know, whether it's an orientation, which we'll talk about that the reason you calling auto heterosexuality whether we're talking about gender confusion, gender identity, gender roles, etc.. The point is that there's no discrimination, there's no denigration on my part. It's just trying to help people better understand themselves. And by having people talk about it in a compassionate, comprehensive and I think balanced and accurate way, I really hope other people will resonate. Go, Oh, that makes sense. Either it helps explain their own experience or if it's not their experience, they say when other people are talking about certain things, this is what they're talking about. I'm trying to take away the stigma, the shame, the mystery. So having you on, Phil, I think it's a boon. I think it will really help us and the fact that you're calling it auto heterosexuality. So there's the I'm going to ask you, you can say, Phil, because and these these are not Phil's terms. These are used in the scientific community, but auto and alo heterosexual. And so so you want to just kind of break down the, you know, the language that people understand. Yeah, there's this dimension of sexuality, location. You know, usually with sexuality, people think of gender or sex, you know, and there's also age. But the location dimension of sexuality, which is about whether you're attracted to are attracted to being. That's something that a lot of people don't know about. And so with since that is a dimension that's between self and other, there's terms for prefixes, for self and other, you know, alo- is for other, auto- is for self. And you if you prefix a sexual orientation with one of these, it tells you which direction it's pointing, whether it's towards others or yourself. So then can you just again then say how that came into auto heterosexuality as you know, so people understand because let's assume that people are hearing this. They've never. Seen it. First. Yeah. So like regular letters with regular when people talk about sexuality there. But the alo- part is assumed to be the case and left unstated most of the time. So people would just say homosexual or heterosexual, and they're talking about sexual attraction to other people. But if you by introducing the allo prefix, it makes visible the fact that these orientations are pointed outwards and it also implies it's opposite of which is attraction to being. And this Yeah, this is important because it seems that for as far as I can tell, for any target based sexual orientation in terms of, you know, desiring a particular a sort of like love object, so to speak, with particular aspects to it, the direction inversion can happen with pretty much any type of orientation. And so it's really useful to have this distinction because it's a whole new dimension of sexuality that people are that are new to and it has new considerations. It's not exactly the same thing as when society was trying to figure out how to integrate homosexuality. You know, this is a new type of consideration. And so it'll take, you know, slightly new thinking to figure out the right way of incorporating it. So that's a good point that you made, that there's a distinction between, you know, this current distinction of verbiage versus previous phenomenon. So can you help us to understand that a little bit more? So what is the difference? do you mean the difference in terms of old terms like transvestite ism or transsexual ism or. Well, more so you're saying, you know, in the past society had to kind of figure out homosexuality. So you're saying that this is this is different, though. It's not the same type of understanding that society has to develop. Right? Yeah. The with the thing is, with the same sex attraction, all that society had to do to accept it was pretty much just not discriminate against the people that have it. But when there's this attraction to being this this cross-gender attraction, it makes some people decide to transition because of it or experience gender dysphoria for being called certain pronouns because of it. And so there's this this issue of people would like to be seen and treated a certain way. That is maybe not what you'd expect based on their physical appearance. And to accommodate this requires other people changing how they interact with the person. And so in a way, this trans movement is making a bigger ask than the same sex attraction movement did. And it's a slightly different ask, especially because there's, you know, the prospect of transsexual as a man and all that. But yeah, it's just a new consideration because as far as I could tell, there's with the mainstream gender based portion of the LGBTQ coalition, there's there's same sex attraction which are the first three letters and then there's also Cross-gender Attraction, which is what my book is about. And that's when you're attracted to being the other gender. And that one seems to be that one's part of the T, you know, that's most of the T to be honest, and it's a lot of the Q as well. And also same sex attraction is also falls under T and Q. And so it seems that the Alphabet Coalition is the mainstream gender based portion of it can be inclusion in that coalition is based on one of these two sexual predispositions, and it's simpler than it seems like at first glance. So similarly in your book, you mentioned that there's a huge cultural component to all of this. So you you cited the statistics. I want to just pull up my notes here so I make sure that I get the numbers correct. Let me see here. So you noted that in the United States, about three out of four trans people are autoheterosexual. So with respect to culture, you also you indicated that this inhibits many individuals ability to be their true auto heterosexual self. Can you talk a bit more about that? Yeah, about like how based on how a society is set up, there would be different proportions of the different. Yeah. So like what are some of the cultural factors that maybe you can identify? Anne Lawrence has a couple of good studies on this about societal individualism and the relative proportion of homosexual and non homosexual transsexual ism. And she found that in eastern collectivist countries, almost all the male to female transsexuals were of the homosexual type. And in Western individualist countries, almost all of them were, most of them were the non homosexual type and she found a strong correlation there. And if I remember in her analysis that that accounted for like 75% of the variance. I'm remembering correctly. And there's also there's a study that Brock 2011 where they they replicated Blanchard's findings about vastly different rates of past cross-dressing cross-dressing arousal among male female transsexuals based on whether they were homosexual or not homosexual. And in that study, they they collected race statistics. And so I also found that looking at those 90%, like the black trans women and Hispanic trans women in that study, 90% of them were classified as homosexual, whereas the white ones were 80% of them were classified as non homosexual and thus presumably autogynephilic. And so it seems like not only are there these big this big influence of culture between, you know, the East and the West, there's also within the West, there's a big difference between black and Hispanic and white in terms of the different rates. And perhaps you came across as maybe not, but as you're saying that I'm wondering if similar to those sexual expectations norms and so on across cultures, I wonder if that aligns with the same percentage or degree of acceptance with the trans communities. So, for example, I mean, with, you know, Eastern cultures who are typically more closed off sexually versus Western. Um, yeah, I'm, yeah, I'm not really sure. Yeah, it was more of just a thought. Yeah. Something I wanted to bring up is you brought up this statistic I know in the book of that like three out of four trans americans are autoheterosexual, and I just want to mention how I came to that calculation so people can decide whether to take it seriously. I basically, I used the homosexual and non homosexual sorting and took the sexual orientations that were reported in the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey and the 2015 US Transgender Survey. And so these are very similar surveys held by the same organization asking the same types of questions, but they were collect. The data was collected on eight years apart and I just mushed those two together. I'm sure there's some people that are in both of them. But I did that because it's it's a a lot of researchers use that data so presumably researchers think it's acceptable to use that data and I see them use it all the time. So I used it too. And I did that sorting based on, you know, what the reported attractions. And I found that eight out of ten trans women in those surveys reported non homosexual orientations and seven out of ten trans men reported non homosexual orientation. So, you know, this is with respect to their sex of course. And so that's how I came out at that figure. And this calculation also is not accounting for any rapid onset that may or may not exist or any other ideologies. That's just assuming that there's only two, you know, and that's likely the case, that there's at least a few percent of trans people that are neither of the two. But it's such a small unless the rapid onset thing turns out to be very huge. In reality, it seems like almost all trans people fall under one of these two categories. And so I just assumed there was only two. Okay. And just for language, as you just mentioned a minute ago, Phil, and I wanted to say that. So whenever Bill talks about homosexual or non homosexual, he's referring to the birth sex, okay? And that's why we talked in the previous episode about that's why they use androphilic and gynephilic it's what is your target of your sexual attraction independent of what your own gender or sex or biology is. So yeah so just so everyone's clear a homosexual again when, when Phil's talked about any type of homosexual or a non homosexual attraction, it's based on your biological sex. What you were born as. Okay, right? Yeah. And the same for autoeterosexual too. Like any of those labels that are anchored to your identity or your birth sex, I always interpret them as with respect to birth sex, because if you interpret them with respect to gender identity, they become incoherent. Right? Especially when there's an ever increasing number of genders. So how do you make like what you say? All right. So, okay. And as I said earlier, I really do think this could lead to a paradigm shift because as I talked about in a previous episode, I understand and I think this is why you took the philia out of it. Maybe I don't want to. And I think you may talk about the book, this idea of not not not allowing any of these concepts to be reduced to a simple, let's say, like a paraphilia or a fetish or a kink, which might have some stigma associated. You know, you're focusing more as a sexual orientation. And I know there's a lot of pushback, so I'm going to ask you, Phil, about that as I see my lectures. And I guess in the podcast I say it, I say autogynephilia to me is as close from what I know, to a sexual orientation as one can get, if not an actual sexual orientation. Right? I can't declare it. I don't have the power to declare it as such, but I say everything I know about it, the development, how you know, how people feel about it. And it's its role in one sense itself, I say it really does seem truly like a sexual orientation. Okay, so tell a skeptical, skeptical audience why they should consider this as a sexual orientation auto, heterosexuality? Well, because it's you know, it's like you said, like it's something that really affects how someone sees themselves and lives their life. And it the reason I talk about this in terms of sexual orientation instead of fetish or paraphilia, is that it treats it as a serious thing that's basically worthy of consideration. Whereas if you talk about something in sort of in terms of a fetish or kink, it downplays its importance and it makes it seem like it's not absolutely central to someone's emotional well-being, whereas people understand that fulfilling the dictates of their sexual orientation has a huge impact on their mental well-being and I think it can help sort of humanize the experience and also make sense of gender dysphoria in that it's can be thought of as kind of like an unrequited love, you know, or a sort of heartbreak. And that just it makes clear that it tugs on your heart strings. And it's not about simply about eroticism. Right. And you've mentioned Anne Lawrence, at least once today, I've mentioned her as well. She wrote, I think, the greatest paper at the time on the topic, you know, becoming what we love, which is describing all these. Yeah. I can't recommend the essay enough. Yes, I think we have it linked, pretty sure we have it linked to one of our episodes, right? Yeah. And then she did in 2017, a later version, including that and she talked about the typology, you know, the homosexual, transsexual and the autogynephilic transsexual. So again, great resource, but again, the book is well alludes to our site. It describes it really gets into it. So one of the controversies and I'm going to ask you, Phil, because you were talking about in the book, you have sections on autoandrophilia. So that would be the female to male type of trans person and I know that I think Bailey wrote either a foreword or a recommendation for the book. He wrote a blurb, yeah. Blurb. Thank you so because Bailey and Blanchard unless they've changed their position, say that this is in theory it can happen. But it's rare if anything. And you're saying it's actually quite common among women. So what have you received any feedback from them? Have they changed their opinions on. Oh yeah. I haven't seen any sign that they've shifted their opinion. I know Bailey ran a I think he's he ran a study looking for autogynephilia in women and it's it'll come out some time later this year but I don't know what he found and yeah they haven't I don't think they've come around to that the the generalized two type model that I'm proposing here but there's definitely cases in the sexology literature that describe females who have gotten aroused by cross-dressing or who fantasize about being a gay man or yeah, like the same sort of phenomena that you can see with autogynephilia. this paper is on it for autoandrophilia as well and grant this way fewer it's been female sexuality in general has been studied far less so and that this is you know a consequence of that and another consideration I think I want to bring up has to like when I wonder, when I've wondered why Bailey and Blanchard don't seem to think that auto androphilia is a major player in female and male transgenderism. I do consider also that, you know, Blanchard was a clinician and he was is going based on what the people that came into his clinic when he used to work at the Clark and back then, you know, he worked there from 80 to 95. And back then clincians thought there was only one type of female to male transsexual ism and most of the people coming to the clinic also were reporting, you know, like the trans man there were reporting that their only attracted to women. And so it's it's hard to say how much of those client reports were based on them reading the literature ahead of time because that was a thing that sexologists charged notice in the seventies and eighties that patients were coming in with suspiciously similar stories that fit the textbook example of what transsexual ism was. But yeah, after Lou Sullivan reached out to Sexologists and got his story told more, it became apparent that there was a type of female, the male transsexual, that was attracted to men and could identify as a gay man and I think Bailey and Blanchard also have some I know, maybe more Bailey, He has some strong priors around, like what a paraphilia is and what that entails and whether or not that will occur in females. And I think that plays a big role in his thinking process. My approach towards it was just I in researching this, I came across, you know, in the online spaces online where the AGPs who are into the sexology stuff gather. There was also some autoandrophilic females that were there and what they said seemed credible. And when I looked in their literature and found that there was cases of that sort of cross-gender arousal described in the literature and also in any study that has asked males and females about whether they've been aroused by cross-dressing or about fantasizing about being the other sex never is. If there's a big enough sample, you know, at least like 100 or so each sex, at no point is it ever 0% of either of the sexes. You know, there's always someone that says, yeah, that's hot. And so it seems to exist in both sexes, but maybe about half as often are females. If I were to just guess based on my intuition, after looking at all the numbers. Okay. And a follow up can said it now and it was in the book as well. I think you said 70% of the sample that you looked at when you look at the studies I think came out of that include the check sample. But you said that 70%, you would infer among biological women are auto heterosexuals, so they would be into men? I think the 70% thing is among transsexuals, what percent of them would be of this ideology for women? Yes, sorry. But among transsexual saying but among transsexual. So trans men, the women who transition to men. Right. You're saying that the majority are not If I reading right, the majority would have a sexual interest in men as opposed to being like butch or both. You know, or both. Yeah, right. Or asexual, You know. The “not homosexual”. Just adds up asexual, bisexual and heterosexual altogether. Okay. So just because the reason I'm saying that is if most people think I'm just going through, I think people's anecdotal experiences, whether it's real life or on TV or whatever, I believe that most people, if they're thinking of a woman who transitions to a man that in that male form, that they would be with a woman, so that would be the homosexual transsexual. Okay. And I would say that while I think the sex all sexology research is pretty clear, that and people might be surprised by this, I say this all the time according to plethysmograph studies. So basically when you look at not self-report but your physiological reaction to stimuli, it shows that women, all women essentially seem to be bisexual sexually. Physiologically speaking, they have that ability. It's much easier for them to get sexually aroused to either male or female or male female, female, female, male, male sex. That that that's the turn-on so perhaps that makes it easier for them to be the non homosexual type because by definition, all women potentially have that orientation. Yes. Something about that I want to mention is that there's also, you know, the prepper the preparatory hypothesis that, you know, that sort of that response to a greater array of stimuli or rather like a nondiscriminatory response stimuli, That response is just the standard that there's also that explanation for why females seem to respond to all that stimuli just because evolutionarily it would have protected them in the case of coerced sex, they would have reduced injuries and risk of infection and such if they were lubricated properly ahead of time. Right. So again, that's why I say physiologically and I say that to my students psychologically, emotionally. So a woman might feel only attracted, sexually attracted to men, but physiologically, that's all I'm saying. Physiologically. So when your body rejected way, it might make it easier for people to adapt to whatever is going on inside or around them. So just want to put it out there to people to understand that. Again, we're talking about the physiology of the sexual reaction and sexual attraction. And I know Bailey and Blanchard and others, especially Bailey, though, as Britain has done studies, has written about them. And he basically says the science is settled, females are, physiologically speaking, bisexual, just putting out there for everyone, physiologically. That's all I'm saying. Right. In terms of when they hooked up in a lab like this way of measuring it, they seem to be that way. And they also show a lower concordance between their self-report and their genital arousal. Right? Yeah. Historically, 50%, half in old studies by Julia Hyman show that half of the women who are physiologically aroused didn't report it. And people thought, oh, that's because they're too shy. So social desirability. And she wrote in her paper, she said, Well, think of what these people volunteer to sign up for. They volunteer to sign up to stick something up their vagina, to watch a porn film knowing that they're being aroused or being observed, so to speak, that their reaction being observed, she says, I don't think they're the shy type. They're not the ones who are going to suddenly deny being aroused. So the reason I'm bringing this up, right is this is the complexity of sexuality, whether it's our own inhibitions, whether it's our own confusion, our lack of understanding, whether it's not wanting to be seen as as aberrant, as abnormal, as sinful, or whatever. All these factors, if anyone denies that they can have an influence on a person's understanding of or expression of their sexuality, their personal identity, their gender identity, whatever you want to call it, these are all factors that have some influence on how these things play out. So I think is important is that for, you know, for the audience, recognize that this is not a settled science by any means. Anyone who says it is, even that even sexual orientation is not a settled science. We have hypotheses. We have a lot of studies to support these hypotheses, but nothing is proven. Nothing is carved in stone. We're still trying to understand how these phenomena play out. So, you know, again, your your book is one extra layer to the literature helping people understand. It's not that simple. It's sometimes maybe simple, but there's a lot of complexities to it. And we only benefit by speaking about this. And if someone disagrees, if someone provides alternative explanations or contradictory data, great, all the power to you. But we can't have progress unless we're able to talk about these things. And so sorry about that. I'm going to shoehorn this question in because of that. So, Phil, I've got the book's only been out for a while, but have you been receiving any blowback yet from the people who are saying, How dare you? Uh. No. I think they're still in the phase of like, I don't want to talk about this, make it go away. I just just have a go. I don't think they're in the phase where they're like, Oh, shit, we really have to. We have to push back against this. I think the waiting to see if it gets picked up enough to where they have to address it. So by that you mean the scientific community, the general population. I mean, like the more of like the transgender activists that would be doing pushback. But yeah, that and granted, my my advertising probably wasn't the best because when I was writing the book, I was just writing the book. I mostly stayed off Twitter because I just wanted to be completely I didn't want all the the frivolous distractions of social media. And so that I mean, that's not as great as when I'm trying to launch. And then I don't have a huge following yet. But I was mostly care about making the book good, and now I just figure it out after I make a good book. It was my plan. But yeah, it got pushed back. Yet not that intensely, at least. And what about reception? Not by people who already understand and agree with, you know, autogynephilia, but let's say from people either on the fence who may be opposed from the scientific community. I know you're on sex net, which is the listserv with the aforementioned names as part of it. What is their reaction to again, this I'm calling it a paradigm shift. Um, there's not too much of a reaction so far. I've gotten some like back channel messages saying that, you know, the book is good or like it's important that you're doing this, but I kind of suspect that a lot of the sexologists, they're just they're not sure either way, you know, And so they're just kind of waiting for one of the the leaders to, like, make an opinion either way and then we'll sort of follow them. That's my guess. I mean, people seem to do that. So, yeah, I think only once the book gets once auto, heterosexuality and, you know, female autoandrophilia get talked about more seriously will itstart picking up in terms of the sexologists talking about it. You know, I've posted a couple of messages on there before just showing that any of the studies that ask about cross-gender arousal, they find that some amount of females report it too that basically autoandrophilia seemingly does exist, even though that's not currently the consensus among sexologists that if you look at the things that sexologists have measured, the signs indicate that it seems to exist. Right. And if the thing is, you're going to get some blowback from one unexpected group, I think potentially, which is and I said this from the beginning when rapid onset gender dysphoria started happening or sort of when there was a name put to it, when Lisa Littman original study and now Bailey and Diaz did a follow up study, which is being retracted, this is all about political politics. Okay. I hope people will look into that. It's that was definitely political. 100% political, it’s a sham Completely. Right. It's the field. Okay. But as soon as you know, one of the things I thought was, first of all, I have no doubt and you discuss in the book as well the role of social contagion, especially affecting young females. They're the most susceptible to that, whether we're talking about about eating disorders, body dysmorphia, any of that. Young females are more susceptible to this type of social contagion. But at the same time, I was saying I and I can remember I said it, too, I spoke to some experts I might have done in a podcast where I said maybe it's also reflecting autoandrophilia, maybe some of these, you know, because we know that it manifests around puberty when they're sexual. Exactly the same signs. It's like, oh, and it comes as a surprise. And it's like, yes. So does autogynephilia, showing the similar profile? Yeah. So I'm just wondering, I think you might get some blowback by, you know, some of the proponents of rapid onset gender dysphoria who are saying, hey, hey, hey, leave our children alone. My daughter's simply a tomboy or she's lesbian or she's confused or she has autism and so on, which I still believe is going to account for a large proportion of the people who suddenly are trans quote unquote. But some of those parents are going to have to accept, I think, you know, I don't know yet. But yeah, you know what? My child has auto heterosexuality. And that's what I'm hoping again, by shifting the language from paraphilias, paraphilias, the nicest language, because it's about a love of love outside big or beside the norm. But by going in further and saying it's a sexual orientation just like people have to learn to accept homosexuality, maybe this will help more people, whether the person, him or herself, the family, society, understand that, whether male or female, that some people do have this autoheterosexuality, this self directed, you know, attraction, so to speak. It's not self sorry if I say it that way. I was going to say this to you earlier. Some people call it very narcissistic. What are you in love with your self? That's not what it is, though, for someone. When I said earlier, ideally you'd be in love with yourself. But like a narcissist. Did you read this? Hope it has. Okay, so but if I can ask you first, if someone says, then okay, is that what this is, Phil? It's just simply, you know, narcissistic attraction or manifestation of narcissism? What would you say to that? How would you explain the difference? Tune in next week for the conclusion to the interview with Phil Everly on A Week at the Wheel. Until next time, keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel. As much as we love listening to ourselves speak, especially me, we would love to hear from you as well. So our emails are in the description below. If you would, please write to us with your questions, feedback, comments, topics that you'd like us to cover. We can do this together. The two of us, but it's much better if we do it together. So we look forward to hearing from you. And we are going to have a segment called Roundtable where we're going to discuss the the feedback and the questions and so on from our audience. And we will we will take it to the next level. 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