Demons

Ray Blanchard's designation of androphilic transgender women as HSTS (homosexual transsexuals) wasn't derogatory by accident. When you want to deny the idea of a feminine essence and sell pathology, you want to make your language as direct and blunt as possible. Therefore if your premise is that his patients were deluded males, the sexual dysfunction model (no doubt inspired in part by his CAMH predecessor Kurt Freund) would do just fine.

Both his typologies were in fact driven by aberrant sexuality and, in the late 1980's, transgender men need not exist which was pretty convenient.

His HSTS taxonomy was one of effeminate homosexuals, completely ineffective as men in society and desperately seeking the attention of straight males which is about as dismissive as one could be. If you don't believe you can decouple sex and gender it was the only likely explanation for someone whose own orientation didn't exactly meet societal approval.

Gay and lesbians of that generation did not grow up with a ton of self love and in fact many married according to expectation and did their best to fulfill a role only to sometimes come out later in life. My first boss's wife came out well into their marriage because she could no longer keep up the facade.

I can certainly relate to the feelings one goes through when you aren't properly self accepting because my writing originally was driven by a certain degree of internalized transphobia. It wasn't until the fog was finally lifted that I could look around and see properly through a cleaner lens.

We are often motivated by our own demons and until they are properly exorcised we won't be fully at peace with ourselves or with others.