The Trans Agenda for Women & The Science That Brought Him Back

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Ruth Institute Ray Alexander Williams, welcome to the Dr. J Show.
Ray Alex Williams Thank you, I'm very happy to be here. ⁓ I've been a recently discovered your institute and been a big fan and I think you guys are doing really important work so.
Ruth Institute Well, thank you very much. I recently discovered you on your Substack page. Okay, so it's kind of mutual that we stumbled over each other in cyberspace. One of the things that I'm very interested in about your story is your self-identity and your history. Because after my colleague told me about you, I went and looked at some of your videos on your channel. And you describe yourself as an AGP, which stands for autogynephile. A lot of our followers will not know what that term means, so tell us what does the term autogynephilia mean?

(00:49):
Ray Alex Williams Right. So straightforwardly, it means love of oneself as a woman. And this was a term created by the academic researcher and clinician, Dr. Ray Blanchard, back in the late eighties, who worked at the Toronto Gender Clinic. And he was doing intake on patients who were seeking, ⁓ sex reassignment surgery in Canada. And he was like screening them out and he started making these observations. And one of his observations was that these male to female transsexuals came in two broad categories where he distinguished between the homosexual transsexuals, which are essentially, you know, very effeminate, ⁓ same sex attracted men who transitioned or sought out transition ⁓ largely for wanting to fit in with their natural effeminacy. Like they're just kind of effeminate as young boys. And the other class of male to female transsexuals is what he called the autogonophiles, where these are heterosexual men. So men who are attracted to women and have always been attracted to women or bisexual. ⁓ He discovered for those people, they kind of like... They transition later, they're less effeminate, they're more masculine in their behavior. They have more stereotypical like computer programmer. They have like, you know, these masculine histories and life histories, like being in the military and stuff. And so he thought, so he came up with this model called the two type typology of male to female transsexualism, where there's two major categories of what motivates the transition. And in the case of the men who are attracted to women who want to go on and develop a trans identity, the idea is essentially that it's an inversion of heterosexuality. So you are attracted to women, but you're also attracted to the idea of yourself being a woman. so this is a, and he just characterized this as a paraphilia or a... fetish, which is why the vast majority of trans women, trans identified males, before they come into their identification as being transgender, they often go through this exploration of am I trans or is it just a fetish and they report a history of things like fetishistic cross dressing, watching like transgender pornography, and other such things. And so there's this kind of a sexual component that drives this, and in both cases. So ⁓ the idea that it's the homosexuality that drives it in the one case, and then it's this paraphilia that drives it in the second case that obviously goes contrary to the mainstream narrative, which is that ⁓ transgender identity, you're born with it, and it's a root cause. Whereas Dr. Blanchard's theory is that the transgender identity and the cross-sex ideation and the desire to transition and the gender dysphoria is a downstream byproduct of essentially your underlying sexual drives. So it's obviously been incredibly controversial theory because it runs against the kind of born this way, innate gender identity theory. ⁓ And it's been a lightning rod for controversy in the academic community.

(04:12):
Ruth Institute Yes. And what I've noticed about that, and this is not something I know very much about, and that's one reason I wanted to talk to you, because I think you can inform me and make me better educated about it. But one of the things that I've noticed is that some of the men become angry at the thought that they have a paraphilia. It's like an insult to them, or they take it like that. Is that fair to say?

(04:37):
Ray Alex Williams Yes. So there's a famous researcher who wrote about autogynephilia named Ann Lawrence, and he himself was a trans identified male who had self identified as an autogynephile. What Ann Lawrence discovered was that he, wrote a paper called like, about narcissistic rage, which is common in this population where essentially because the paraphilia develops and evolves into a psychological autobiographical self concept, while they idealize themselves as a woman and they internalize this model of themselves as a woman. When society doesn't validate that conception of womanhood, it creates ego dystonia or it basically conflicts with their self image and their understanding themselves. Because essentially to say that your womanhood is caused by a a distorted form of male sexuality, it conflicts with their self image, which triggers the narcissistic wound and that narcissistic wound triggers rage, which is why they get so animated about this topic because it basically conflicts with the story they're trying to tell to society, which is that, hey, we're just like any other woman. You know, just a regular woman, but I just happen to be trapped in this male body. But otherwise, in all respects, in my internal psychology, in my mind and my soul, I'm a woman just like any other woman. But when you say that, actually you're a male with male typical sexuality that's been distorted in some way that counters their own self-concept.

(05:57):
Ruth Institute Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right, right, and it's offensive to them. It's not nearly as flattering a portrait as the portrait they've painted for themselves.
Ray Alex Williams Yes. And correct. And it makes sense because, ⁓ you know, if you're in a job and you you want to transition on the job, you know, male to female, you know, it's so much easier socially to give a story like, Hey, why are you doing this? Well, it's because I'm a woman on the inside because I, cause I have, you know, a, because my gender identity and so that doesn't much more social except for when they're Whereas if you're just saying like, oh, I'm doing this because I have a pair of philia that's going to people comfortable, you're not going to be as accepted. So, um, and so this is the fear that a lot of people have, even people who, um, you know, acknowledge that there's broad, um, know, truth to the two type topology, because almost everyone who's familiar with the transgender community, like recognizes intuitively that there is these different types. There's like, you're kind of highly effeminate, you know, type who's going to be like a croc, like a, um,

(07:10):
Ruth Institute Mm-hmm.
Ray Alex Williams like a cosmetologist or a hairdresser or like industry and fashion versus like you're really geeky, autistic, nerdy trans woman who is super masculine in all appearances. ⁓
Ruth Institute Right, Ray, are there any prominent examples of this that people might recognize who they are? I mean, I have theories, but maybe you do as well, you know. ⁓

(07:37):
Ray Alex Williams So the most, ⁓ you know, so one of the things is like, you know, you can't definitively, you know, diagnose someone with this, but you know, once you, it's of the things is like, once you know it, you just know it. Like once you see it, you just know it. And it's like, probably the most common example is, ⁓ is Caitlyn Jenner. ⁓ Bruce, yes. ⁓ Yeah, yeah.
Ruth Institute Right. Bruce Jenner, you mean Bruce. Bruce, right? I remember when he won the decathlon, the Olympic gold medal in the decathlon, which is a very manly thing to do, could I point out? And that we're all supposed to believe he was really a woman all along, that's a little much. But anyway, yeah, Bruce Jenner, and it has always occurred to me. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

(08:05):
Ray Alex Williams Yes. So a lot of people don't. Yes. Yes. So, and I'll give you a story, which is that prior to his big reveal on the Vanity Fair cover where he came out, you all made up and done, he had all the surgeries and done and like over like a period of a few months. Prior to that, he did this big interview with Diane Sawyer on 60 Minutes where he talked about his life story. This is, know, he was still kind of in like presenting as a man. And he told us his life story. He shared this story of like how he had a lifelong history of secretive cross dressing where he'd go off on a trip in a hotel and dress up, you know. ⁓ And also turns out ⁓ Kim Kardashian or someone in that family like ⁓ said that he had been stealing like his daughter's clothes, which is kind of indicative of the periphery. But but it was clear evidence that he had a lifelong history of fetishistic cross dressing. ⁓ And so that is obviously like, you know, a paradigmatic of the autogynophilic experience, particularly for that older generation. Um, and this ties into my own story because, um, when I was, um, you know, prior to my transition, prior to, uh, identifying as trans, I was identifying as the cross dresser and I was seeing a therapist at the time for unrelated issues. But we started talking about my cross dressing and this is like right in 2015, the trans tipping point, you know, ⁓ you Bruce Jenner's in the news, you Laverne Cox was like, all this, you know, a trans tipping point on the, on the New York times. It was like a big thing culturally. And, I, ⁓ and my therapist at the time said, you should watch this interview with, with, with, with, with Bruce Jenner. And so, I realized like, wait, like, My story sounds a lot like him. I've also had a lifelong history of fetishistic crossdressing and this is supposed to be a trans woman. So like I, at that moment, I realized that my history of being just a, just a crossdresser was not incompatible with being a, you know, trans woman. and then I went on Reddit and I started asking these questions like, Hey, is having this history of fetishistic crossdressing like Does that incompatible with having a valid identity as a transgender woman? And pretty much everyone online in these communities told me, no, that's not only, ⁓ doesn't invalidate you, that is normal. So I realized that my story of having a history of fetishism or, know, paraphilic, you know, desire underlying my motivations, ⁓ that is the, that is normal. in the community. so it was actually Bruce Jenner was like an instrumental to my own like identification process.

(10:59):
Ruth Institute And so for a while then, just to be clear, you identified yourself as an autogynephil.
Ray Alex Williams No. So, ⁓ I, so like when I first transitioned and identifies trans and got into the trans community, like if you get into the community right away, you'll all, all these trans identified males that they're familiar with the concept, but they've written a lot of their own responses to this research, trying to debunk it. And they push this narrative that this research is pseudoscientific.
Ruth Institute Okay.

(11:31):
Ray Alex Williams It's debunked, it's unfossifiable. There's no evidence for it. This is just like bigotry. And they're trying to really paint the researchers who came up with this as like, know, bigoted and evil. it's like pseudoscience, it's junk, it's junk science. It's been disproven. And so I read all that literature from within the community, debunking it. even, and I was a hardcore trans activist. So I actually published a book as a trans activist. a philosophical ⁓ feminist ⁓ pushing of transgender ideology. In my book, I talked about autogun affiliate as a concept. And while I recognized it sort of applied to my life history, I repudiated the conceptual implications of the theory. ⁓ so I kind of knew I like if I had to pick between whether I was in the homosexual transsexual type or the AGP type, I knew I was more closely the HB type, but I rejected or I attempted to reject like the theoretical implications, which is that like, you know, that that is like the sole motivation or something or that is like, it was like, it was just like, it's like one of many motivations, I can add all these different ways to spin it around. And ⁓ but I was probably more self aware about I'm more willing to talk about my history than a lot of trans women who completely just like, suppress that for social approve acceptability reasons.

(12:58):
Ruth Institute So in other words, you self-identified as transgender and you were more open to the autogynephilia idea conceptually, but that was not what you... You didn't pin that label on yourself at that time. Okay.
Ray Alex Williams Correct. Yeah. It wasn't until eight years later, back in 2023, when I de-transitioned, that I actually got acquainted with ⁓ the literature more with a more open mind. And I realized that like, hey, actually, this is the explanation for what, why, why I transitioned, like where all this comes from. It explained my life so well. Um, and then I started like getting really familiar with like the research and I was like, no, this has not been debunked. This is not pseudoscience. This is like well established, um, theoretical concept that, know, and there's an active research literature, um, being done on this concept, but also it's, it's controversial and, it's hard. It's hard. I'd probably get hard to get funding and a lot of, research institutions for this. Um, so. Cause you'll get, you'll get canceled.

(13:50):
Ruth Institute Right. Right. Right. Tell me about it. Tell me about it. I mean, it's comparable. Yeah, it's comparable. I mean, really what we're dealing with is that the establishment position is that homosexuality is an inborn immutable trait. Being born in the wrong body is an inborn immutable trait. And the idea that there could be some kind of psychological precursor to either of those conditions is like, they don't want to deal with that. They don't want to think about that. And that's what makes your story interesting to me because you

(14:33):
Ray Alex Williams Right, exactly.
Ruth Institute you say you transitioned and then you de-transitioned, in order to do that, you had to be willing to re-examine and reinterpret your own past and look at what you did and why you did it and say, wait, I tried this, it's not working and here's why and so on and so forth. I want to ask you about the concept of transition though, as it applies to your particular case. So you say you transitioned in 2015, that, am I getting the timeline? Okay, so.

(15:03):
Ray Alex Williams Yes, that's correct.
Ruth Institute What did, in your case, what did transition mean? Did it mean medical procedures and interventions? Did it mean social stuff? Did you move to someplace new where nobody knew the old person? And how did that work for you, Ray?
Ray Alex Williams ⁓ So I was in grad school at the time I was getting my PhD which I didn't finish the degree program, but I was in the program ⁓ and ⁓ So first off it just started off, you know clothing I was just I wanted to cross dress all the time and it's funny ⁓ that was like my initial motivation is like I wanted to sort of bring my cross dressing out of the bedroom like into the public world into my social life and I initially did not want to go down the full blown medical pathway, I wanted to live this kind of like dual life and the very first transgender identity I latched onto is called a bi gender where he identifies both male and female because I was kind of like, I didn't really have a lot of like strong hatred of my masculinity or like my male social role like growing up.

(16:03):
Ruth Institute ⁓
Ray Alex Williams but then I quickly realized as I started like, you know, cross-dressing out in the public that like, Hey, you get a lot of weird stares, you know, this is not comfortable. And this is like, you know, and so I realized that like, if I'm to pull this off, like, ⁓ you know, I need to blend in better. then, so I basically very quickly realized that like, no, like I need to modify my goal. want to make the goal to pass better. And so I, then the first thing I got is I got laser hair removal on my beard. I know it doesn't look like it, but, ⁓ my beard was much thicker. And I actually got like about 11 rounds of laser hair removal on my entire beard. ⁓ I just have a thick beard hair, but people will say like, like you never got your hair removed. But no, like before I got it done, when I shaved clean, I had a very strong shadow, whereas now I shaved clean. There's no shadow. So it definitely did permanent, ⁓ you know, hair removal on my beard. That was the first medical and permanent medical decision I did. ⁓ but

(16:45):
Ruth Institute What? Wow.

(17:09):
Ray Alex Williams What's interesting about ⁓ gender dysphoria and autogynephilia is that as you make it a conscious goal for yourself to pass yourself off as the opposite sex, that conscious goal can induce a novel new gender dysphoria that didn't previously exist because I never grew up, for example, hating my apples up. I know I never like was staring in the mirror like, I hate this. hate this. But when I made it my goal to pass as a female to blend in better, so I don't get discriminated against because I'm cross-dressing. Now, I realized that my Adam's apple was an obstacle to my goal to pass myself off as female. And so that created a new sense of discomfort or dysphoria. it was, rather than the dysphoria being the cause of the transition, the transition, the, the, the going down that transition pathway caused, um, the development of more dysphoria. So the transition worsened my dysphoria. It actually created most of my dysphoria. ⁓ And then after that, ⁓ I got very quickly after that, I got on cross-sex hormones. that was, you know, thank God that was the only intervention I did was on the hormones. I never got any surgeries or anything. ⁓ And so when I got off the hormones eight years later, ⁓

(18:13):
Ruth Institute Wow.
Ray Alex Williams You know, most of my bodily function have returned back to normal. ⁓ now I haven't had my fertility tested. ⁓ and now that I'm Catholic, ⁓ the ethics involved in that are complicated to say the least from a Catholic, a sexual ethics perspective, ⁓ doing fertility testing, but nevertheless, ⁓ there could be permanent effects to my, you know, my fertility from that. And, ⁓ so yeah, it's. And also, you know, it caused severe health problems. You know, in 2020, I had a pulmonary embolism and I had pancreatitis due to elevated triglycerides, which almost could have killed me. Partly that was due to like a history of smoking, but the combination of smoking and estradiol and males deeply or greatly increases your risk of deep vein thrombosis and blood clots, which led to a pulmonary embolism. So it was very serious.

(19:30):
Ruth Institute So this is very interesting to me, the process you're describing. My sense is that among autogynephiles, it's not unusual for them to not have surgery, to not have the bottom surgery type of thing.
Ray Alex Williams Yes, I think in the statistics I've seen, it's like, it's about 5 % actually go through with the full blown bottom surgery, which I hate that term bottom surgery because it's a, it's a euphemism for flaying open your penis and inverting it, which it makes it sound so innocent, but it's a brutal, gruesome process that has massive complications. And they'll try and spin it saying that like, Oh, the regret rate is 1%, but

(20:02):
Ruth Institute Yo! Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I've heard about that. Yeah.
Ray Alex Williams You can't trust those statistics at all.
Ruth Institute Right, right. Yeah, yeah, we know about that. Can't trust the statistic. I'm interested though in the feelings that you had around this as you're going through this. When you say to me that you become aroused imagining yourself as a woman, okay, that that's the hallmark of autogynephilia. And you wanted to be, and before you transitioned, you would sometimes cross-dress and you would, and... And this was stimulating to do that? that?

(20:48):
Ray Alex Williams Yes, very much. I mean, it started in childhood. So the very first manifestation in terms of my paraphilia was an intense ⁓ erotic fixation on, ⁓ nylons and hosiery. ⁓ so, ⁓ I, know, my, my mom would like throw away stockings in the trash can and I would like kind of steal them. I would like, and I was like, was like that, that it was that the sense, the sensation that the tactile sensation was very appealing to me for whatever reason. was very sensation seeking and I'm very, and I've actually talked to a friend of mine who's like a very smart researcher studying this topic. And she has speculated that there's a connection between ADHD, sensation seeking, novelty seeking, and developing of escalation of paraphilia due to, you know, a really desire to go down, you know, novelty seeking and sensation seeking. That was very true in my case. So it started off as an intense, you know, erotic fixation on

(21:35):
Ruth Institute Hmm.
Ray Alex Williams like pantyhose and nylons and stuff, which is actually a very common fetish object among ⁓ autogynophiles. But then over time, as I got into my teenage years, I discovered transgender pornography. And then when I got my car, my own car around freedom, I could go buy my own things. then it just sort of... escalated and escalated and escalated and escalated until eventually, you know, it wasn't just the pantyhose. It was like, you know, buying other, you know, items of feminine clothing. Um, but it was mostly focused on like, you know, clothing and it'd be these, you know, ritualistic masturbation sessions where, know, kind of dress up and, you know, watch pornography and kind of get, you know, into these. You know, all leads up to the climax and then very typical among autogunnerfiles is what's called the Benz purge cycle. It's the Benz purge cycle of shame where you basically, you you, you build up to that point over these long sessions or whatever, and then you hit the, you reach climax and then immediately you feel a sense of guilt and shame. And then you throw away like your whole stash of like, you know, items or whatever that you've collected and this, you know, kind of fit of urge. So. And then, but then, know, and then you suppress it for, you know, a few months and then like the desires come back and that's called the binge purge cycle. And this has been well, um, highly common, uh, thing in the, um, in this community.

(23:25):
Ruth Institute And so when you decided that you wanted to be dressed as a woman all the time, what did that mean for your arousal pattern? Would you be, if you're out in public in a dress, were you aroused doing that? Okay.
Ray Alex Williams No, not really. Because the thing is, you get habituated to the stimulus very quickly. let's say like, you know, previously, you know, you might like, put on a pair of panties or something, and then you get aroused. But if you wear them every single day for 30 days, then you get habituated to the stimulus, it doesn't really do anything for you. So at that point, I've been, you know, cross dressing like inside my home, like all the time. And so it kind of became desexualized and ⁓ which is a very common narrative. And this is actually one of the arguments that the, that the trans identified males will make to sort of try and deny that they are autogynephile. Cause they say, you know, once I transition all that stuff in a way, and it just felt comfortable. just felt normal. I just felt like myself and like, and also when you go into hormones, suppresses your, ⁓ your libido. ⁓ and so a combination of habituation to the stimulus and getting it normalized, and then the reduction of the libido due to the, the cross-sex hormones is sort of de sexualizes it. And, Lawrence that researchers are talking about has this paper where he describes this process, ⁓ or basically like there's an erotic component to autogynephilia and a romantic component. So you can basically have a very like. erotic fetishistic component prior to the transition, but then after transition, it becomes more of a emotional attachment to the idea of oneself as a woman. and that, and, and, and this population comes in a wide variety of, ⁓ cases. So I'm kind of generalizing to my own case, but there there's different subtypes within this, depending on, you know, other factors. ⁓ some, for some people, autogun affiliate only manifest and like, completely fetishistic behavior, but there actually are some within Ray Blanchard's original cohort, there's actually a cohort of asexual who had very low libido and they're often very autistic. And there are sort of, um, idealizations of womanhood are more on a imaginative and emotional basis. Um, so it's not necessarily always erotic or fetishistic in nature. can be more in the idea of like, and like, and also in a weird way, the sexuality can make you dislike male sexuality because it's called what's called auto-endrophobia, is hatred of oneself as a man. So these heterosexual men, I think due to attachment wounds and insecurity due to not fitting in with the other boys, because it's very common for the AGPs to say things like, you know, I'm not like the other boys, I'm more sensitive. the sensitive young autistic boys are very commonly known to be autogonophiles. And so for that particular group, the AGP manifest in terms of a intense dislike of their male sexuality, because they realize that having male typical sexuality ⁓ makes them like the boys they're they're disidentifying with, you know, because it's like, you know, that's like the macho guys, they don't want to be like that. And so

(26:51):
Ray Alex Williams And these are the ones who are more likely to get the bottom surgery because they've grown up with an intense dislike of their genitals.
Ruth Institute And so that in a way, it's a similar wound to what you hear from men who left the homosexual identity behind. They'll often say that they had a masculinity wound, but in their cases, they were drawn to other men to fill that wound, to fill that gap that they felt. But there's still the wound in each case, but it's manifesting differently. I'm struck, earlier in our conversation, you used the term narcissism and...

(27:15):
Ray Alex Williams Right, right.
Ruth Institute That word keeps coming into my mind as you're talking because what I'm hearing you say is that there's a disordered relation to yourself. It's not just your relation to the opposite sex or to manhood in general. It's a disordered relationship to yourself because you become the object of your own ⁓ erotic longing. ⁓ Is that true? Am I reading too much into that?

(27:42):
Ray Alex Williams Yes. Yes, that's correct. That's correct. Yes, there is a theoretical model to explain autogun affiliate that's been developed by various researchers called the erotic target location eroth model. Essentially, you know, normal sexuality, you know, we have an erotic target, which for normal, normal, sexuality, the erotic target is not only the opposite sex, but it's someone who's not self. So it's it's another person. It's relational. So somewhere in the wiring, the sort of ⁓ logic that says your erotic target must be not self gets broken such that the erotic target is now you're still attracted to femininity, but your target becomes self. So you have a location error. So you're locating the object of your sexual attraction in the wrong place rather than locating it in. the properly ordered place, which is in another person of the opposite sex, you're locating it inside yourself. And interestingly, this concept of a ⁓ erotic target location area is generalizable across ⁓ different paraphernalia. So this is not the only case, I'll give an example. So for men who are attracted to obese women, there's a subset of them who are attracted to the idea of themselves being obese. ⁓ of the men who are attracted to amputees, a subset of them are attracted to the idea of themselves being amputees. Of the men who are attracted to children, there's a subset of them who are attracted to the idea of themselves being children. So this is called a, it's like a auto sexual component that is generalizable and seen across various different paraphilias in men. So this is not a, so the, So the transgenerism is only one manifestation of this general pattern of a raw target location there.

(29:51):
Ruth Institute That's really interesting because some of the, another generalization of transgender ⁓ ideation is body dysmorphia generally. So instead of being gender dysmorphic, you think you're too fat. know, anorexia would be the analog to that in that case. this is, ⁓ say it again, erotic target, erotic target location error.

(30:15):
Ray Alex Williams Erotic target location error.
Ruth Institute Do you know some of the therapists that I've talked to, because I've now talked with a number of different therapists who ⁓ try to help people deal with unwanted same-sex attraction, and they have noticed that ⁓ sex addiction and same-sex attraction, there are a lot of commonalities amongst where these things come from and so on and so forth. But the term that I've heard, the term I've heard them use though, is they talk about the arousal template, ⁓ which is similar, but I think not quite the same.

(30:38):
Ray Alex Williams All right, so.
Ruth Institute ⁓ And yes, and I found that, and they think that that's a more robust, helpful concept than the concept of sexual orientation, for example, because we have the idea of sexual orientation is inborn, it can't be changed, and so on and so forth. ⁓ And if you think of it in terms of an arousal template, you go, well, now that doesn't sound nearly so plausible, you know, that as a baby, you would have a preloaded arousal template into your head, you know, that it would always be this or that or the other. ⁓ that we have nothing to do with the environment, with what you encounter in your life outside yourself, that becomes much less plausible. I'm going to have to think about this concept because I've never heard this before.

(31:28):
Ray Alex Williams Right. The other, it's also called erotic, erotic target identity inversion. So that's another, so if you look up either erotic target location, erotic target identity inversion, but I want to come back to the idea of same-sex attraction because there's a, there's sort of, an interesting, ⁓ development of the theory that Ray Blanchard notice, which is this concept of called pseudo bisexuality. So
Ruth Institute yes please.

(31:55):
Ray Alex Williams Even though the model postulates that autogonophilia is an inversion of heterosexuality, so it's an inversion of the attraction to womanhood, many autogonophiles report ⁓ same sex attraction, which sounds counterintuitive. how could, so you're attracted to women, but you end up having sex with men. Well, how does that work? And so there's this model called pseudo bisexuality where essentially you You're not so for a true, you know, same sex attracted or typical, like, ⁓ like, like, like of the homosexual transsexuals, their attraction is more like they're, they're, they're attracted to like the masculine, ⁓ you know, the, the mush, the testosterone, the beards, whereas for the autogynophiles who have pseudo bisexuality, they're not attracted to men. They're attracted to how men validate their own sense of femininity. So they're, they're, they're attracted to men because often. that men are able to ⁓ play the dominant role in this submissive fantasy, for example. Or they'll just like to be with men only because they're interested in being penetrated and that's something a man can do. So they're not actually really attracted to men. They usually don't get into a relationship with men. But in my own case, I've had sex with men when I was, and I'm not gonna fail, even though I don't find men attractive, I find... I'm really only attracted to women, but I've had sex with men because the men validated my submissive fantasies, which is very common. And there's some speculation that there can be autogynophiles with like a more complete form of suited bisexuality that manifests in more or less exclusive patterns of ⁓ dating men so that on the surface they look like, you know, gay men, but in reality they're actually autogynophiles. But that's more a theoretical speculation. It hasn't really been born out, but it's an interesting theory that accounts for some of the weird things we see in the phenomenon where you have, for example, this is why people who have, ⁓ know, sissy fetish, cross-dressing fetish, they often will go on Grindr and seek out relationships with men, even though at the point of orgasm, they feel shame and disgust. And they're like, this is disgusting. I'm not attracted to you. How could I do this? Well, it's because the paraphilia drives same-sex attraction.

(34:21):
Ruth Institute Okay, let me, we're gonna have to stop talking about this because it's getting, we're getting into a weird area in the immortal words of Bill Murray. ⁓ But the one thing I would do want to kind of clarify here though, is that if I understand this correctly, this particular type of man that you're talking about, the value in being with a man is that the man is responding to you as if you're a woman and you're getting, it's, In normal sexuality, it's man for woman and woman for man. And I become more aware and involved and appreciative of my own femininity in response to my husband's masculinity and vice versa. That our differences highlight who we are and we come to understand ourselves in relation to the other. And so for the person with this particular kind of ⁓ disorder, and it is, you can see now the way you're spelling it out, couple layers of disorder. it's the fact that the person is validating, the man, the male sex partner is validating their female identity. That's how they're experiencing it. Okay, okay. is really, know, Ruthie's, if you've listened this far, God bless you a thousand times, because this is pretty weird stuff. I mean, it's interesting in a way, but I think it's important.

(35:20):
Ray Alex Williams Anyway.

(35:46):
Ruth Institute to talk about it. And I appreciate you being willing to talk to me about this, Ray. And I appreciate how candid you've been on Substack and how candid you're being now. I want to go now, if we could, to just talk to us, if you don't mind. What do you think is the origin of this type of fetish? I mean, you've talked about your mom's stockings, but your mom's stockings didn't appeal to you out of nowhere. mean, something, there must have been some, I don't know, if you have a theory about your own. ⁓ causes of this, I'd gather that you don't think you were, quote, born this way. And so if you think you're not born this way, then that suggests there's some other explanation. ⁓ And do you have a theory about what that would be?

(36:27):
Ray Alex Williams I don't have a particular theory. ⁓ and you know, when, when I actually did an interview with the Dr Ray Blanchard on my, on my, on on my YouTube channel and I asked him about this and he didn't say that like, no one's born AGP, but some people might be born with a concupiscence or a, a more, ⁓ predisposition towards developing paraphilia. So in that case, depending on the environmental, ⁓ development pathway in terms of what, what you get exposed to that could, lock in certain, you know, paraphilic. so for example, if you happen to, you know, be a young boy and, know, you're crawling around the ground and you touch your mother's stocking or something, and then you incidentally have a, you know, some emotional or arousal component that could kind of like, you know, wire together. So that's one hypothesis. I don't really know, but I mean, but also I've been reflecting a lot kind of more because it's one thing to explain like having this kind of like incidental, like, you weird inversions, but it's another thing to say, like, how does it escalate to a full blown identity where you're going down the full blown pathway? And definitely the pornography was a big factor. ⁓ and the other thing is like, I'm doing some reflecting and I think I definitely had a masculinity wound because My father was very much like a, he was very mechanical, he was a handyman, he was very much good with cars, fixing things, typical guy stuff, and I was not good at that at all. I didn't really relate to that aspect with my father, and I was homeschooled by my mother, so I spent most of my life, I was very close to my mother. And so I kind of think that there was like a sense of insecurity where, know, um, you know, I wasn't, and I think that that failure, um, and partly I've developed this theory from watching some of your content, reading some of your content about, um, about how there's these masculinity wounds. Um, I was sort of thinking like, well, cause you, you, you explained a lot of like same sets of attraction comes to like attachment wounds. And it's like, you know, not having, you know, feeling insecure and not, not feeling like the other boys.

(38:34):
Ruth Institute Oh really? Oh wow, okay. Yeah, yeah.
Ray Alex Williams And so I think that was definitely true in my case, but I think there's a confluence of factors. Now I know, there's not a lot of evidence for this, but people have commented anecdotally that male to female transsexualism seems to run in families. So if there is a, if there is a autogynephilic,
Ruth Institute Right.

(39:16):
Ray Alex Williams teenage boy, it's very common for the father to often have some signs of autogynophilia as well. Now that doesn't necessarily mean you're born like that because that could just mean a ⁓ predisposing factor to developing paraphilia that needs a environmental trigger to unlock the latent disposition or the behavior. then particularly

(39:40):
Ruth Institute Right. Right.
Ray Alex Williams It's really critical. You know, for example, if you get exposed to pornography at a young age, like that can have a real cost. Cause there's one thing to like have a proto version of this, but it's entirely different thing to have a version of it that fully escalates into full blown paraphilia that is incredibly disordered and takes over your life and like causes you to blow up your family, ruin your life and like go down this pathway and medicalize and do all that stuff. like
Ruth Institute Yes.

(40:12):
Ray Alex Williams There's a lot of people who have very mild forms of this and there's some people who have very extreme forms of this. so, you know, I don't think it's necessarily completely unscientific to suppose that there may be some predisposing factor. ⁓ But I don't, but there hasn't been enough research on this. This is all speculation.
Ruth Institute Alright. Yes, yes. And the problem with the born that way theory is that it cuts off the research and the speculation into other alternative explanations, you know. And I do think that there are some medical conditions and, you know, the LGBT community hates it when you say this, but there are some medical, complicated behavioral psychological conditions that have, definitely have a genetic component. but then are triggered by things in the environment. And I think schizophrenia, for example, is like that. There seems to be some genetic component to it. And then you put a couple of big stressors into a person's life and boom, it doesn't manifest until that happens. And so that it's plausible to me. What you're saying is plausible to me, but it sounds like the honest answer is that we don't really know. Yeah, yeah, okay.

(41:21):
Ray Alex Williams Yes, that is the honest answer. But you mentioned like a major life stressors locking that latent potential like schizophrenia. I think that happens in autogon affiliate as well because it's very common for there's this concept in the community called your egg cracking where you suddenly realize you're trans and ⁓ it's called, it's called egg cracking. Like when your egg gets, gets cracked, it's when you suddenly realize that you're trans. That's the, that's the concept in the community and this egg cracking
Ruth Institute Egg? What is it again? Say it again. ⁓ okay.

(41:51):
Ray Alex Williams frequently happens during major life crises like divorce and ⁓ or you know, just your wife just got pregnant. You just had a baby. You just got fired or your career is stagnating or some of these major life events. And so there's been this connection that I've made between ⁓ this sort of egg cracking. ⁓
Ruth Institute Yeah, yes.

(42:14):
Ray Alex Williams and a midlife crisis in men, because midlife crisis is very common in men, it's a common phenomenon. And that process involves a breakdown of autobiographical self-narrative identity due to these major life stressors. And so part of autogonophilia is connected to ⁓ your narrative self-construct, like the stories you tell about yourself. so there's a ⁓ con...

(42:36):
Ruth Institute Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because you're about to scramble it. If you step from normal across the line into full on AGP, you're about to scramble your narrative, you yourself. The story you tell yourself about yourself is about to just get blown up. Yeah, yeah. ⁓
Ray Alex Williams Right, yeah. Right. Particularly when there's an ideology out there pushing this narrative that like you're born a woman, you're born on the inside, you've always been this way. Like the mainstream trans narrative has a ready stock of these narratives to take up and internalize that will completely mess you up and like give you a false conception of who you are. And that false narrative

(42:59):
Ruth Institute Right. Yeah.
Ray Alex Williams is part of the environmental stew that is very toxic and is leading to the explosion of this in our society in combination with the pornography, in combination with gender ideologies.

(43:30):
Ruth Institute Yes, yes, I was just thinking that, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah, the combination of the ideology and the ready availability of pornography and the kind of active promotion of it, especially for small kids, ⁓ that the normal developmental process is, has a lot of stressors in it, let's put it that way. I want to pause for just a moment though before we go any further because... ⁓

(43:51):
Ray Alex Williams Right.
Ruth Institute I want to be sure that people understand we're talking about when Ray Alex is talking about himself, he's talking about an autogynophilia transgender person. There are other forms of transgenderism, okay? And I wrote an article, I think I sent you this article that I wrote in the National Catholic Register about the different people who pin the label transgender on themselves. Because the fact is you can call yourself transgender for any reason you want to. So I'm thinking... that the story that Ray is telling us about his experience, I don't want you to think that I think that's the same thing as what happened to Chloe Cole or the same thing that happened to some of the female rapid onset gender dysphoria kids or that is happening to or that Leah Thomas did, Will Thomas did who's a man who wants to win swimming championships. These people are not the same, but if we're not careful and we use the same word for all of those people, we're gonna...

(44:51):
Ray Alex Williams Right, so.
Ruth Institute we're going to create confusion. I just want to put that out there. I'm not saying, and Ray's not saying, that every single transgender person has the characteristics he's talking about. It's a very specific subset, I would say, of the trans experience. Is that fair to say, Ray?
Ray Alex Williams Yes, that is correct. And Leah Thomas, almost certainly on a gunna file, no doubt. ⁓ yes, for sure. mean, ⁓ he, on one of his private Instagram accounts, he liked a post about AGPs, so it's obvious. ⁓

(45:19):
Ruth Institute ⁓ you think so? ⁓ okay. well. Proof, proof, proof in a court of law. There you are. I'm messing with you now. Yeah. Right.
Ray Alex Williams But also, yes, you're correct. I'm talking about the male case. So in females, it's totally different. ⁓ And ⁓ also I should point out that people want to know, okay, well, you say these AGPs exist. Well, how many trans women are AGP? That's a common question. The research that I've done shows that the vast, vast majority of trans identified males in the Western. world in the modern age are of the autogynophilic ideology that is, ⁓ in my opinion, can be established because the Blanchardian typology derives itself from a question ⁓ of heterosexuality. So it says that, from your sexuality. you can sort of ⁓ extrapolate the numbers if you have survey data that tells you the sexual orientation of the transgender population. And the vast majority of transgender males are attracted to women. So therefore, because the leading hypothesis in regards to what causes gender confusion in males is an inversion of heterosexuality, we can assume that the vast majority ⁓ of trans identified males, because they are vastly heterosexual, ⁓

(46:30):
Ruth Institute I

(46:53):
Ray Alex Williams They are of the autogonophilic ideology, which matches the actual anecdotal experience in the community. you just, I've been in the community for 10 years. is like, this is, this is like, know, stereotypes have, you know, they come from truth to some extent.
Ruth Institute Mm-hmm. Right, right, right, right. But my sense is though that the young people who are saying they're trans, some of them are quite different from what you're describing. I the girls who are on TikTok too long or whatever it is, and maybe some of the boys are ⁓ of the homosexual type maybe, they work out in their minds that it'd be easier to be a girl than to be a gay boy. ⁓ or maybe that's not the right way to put it, but it does fit with the Blanchard ⁓ typology in a way. Okay. And you had a guy on your channel, that guy Seth.

(47:39):
Ray Alex Williams Right, right. Yes, I love that interview. He's such a brave, brave young man.
Ruth Institute who was... ⁓ I do too. I loved him. I loved him a lot. Yeah, I just thought he was a very precious soul. ⁓ But anyway, you've mentioned a little bit about your family. ⁓ How close were you to your family growing up? And when you decided to transition, what impact did that have on the rest of your family?
Ray Alex Williams Yeah, yeah. I was, I've always been close with my parents. Like I've been very blessed to have a great mom and dad who grew up in a stable home. You they've been married for like 40 something years now. So it's, you know, it's, it was a wonderful environment, a great childhood. and, ⁓ so I had a good relationship with them now, you know, I kind of moved, you know, to the Midwest. grew up in Florida, so I wasn't as close to them, you know, as if I, know, It's not like I was going over to dinner every week, but you know, we talked on the phone, we had good relationships. ⁓ and when I transitioned, ⁓ it definitely caused strain because the ideology taught me that if my parents did not immediately take out my pronouns, take on my name, then they are transphobic bigots. And, ⁓ I, know, Luckily, I never really fully severed the relationship and they never severed it with me. Um, so we main, we maintain good terms. Um, and you know, they, because they are loving parents, they wanted what's best for me and they, and they loved me through that whole process. And I know it was killing them though. I know it was killing them, but you know, they, they, they didn't like kick me out. They didn't disown me. They didn't do anything like that. They, just kept loving me. I'm sure they were praying for me.

(49:24):
Ruth Institute Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ray Alex Williams And, ⁓ you know, but it caused a lot of strain because, know, your, your parents, you know, they raised you, they're not going to think you're the opposite. ⁓ you know, yeah. Right.
Ruth Institute Right, right, right. And they picked out your name. They picked your name and they picked it for a reason. you know, that's just so, and they, you, this is a thing that has come up with some of the people that I've interviewed, that when you transition, you have to rewrite your whole past. You can't look at the photos of you before you were transitioned. You can't let other people see those photos because that interrupts the narrative. And so for your parents who are trying to manage that, it's,

(49:48):
Ray Alex Williams Right. Right. All

(50:13):
Ruth Institute It's really hard. So probably the fact that you were, you know, a thousand miles away from each other, that maybe helped. I don't know. In some respect, I don't know.
Ray Alex Williams Yeah. But it was always like, you know, it was always like, it is put a strain. then when I de-transitioned, like my relations with my parents got so much better. It's just like, you know, from like my mom's perspective, was like her baby boy. She got her baby boy back. And that was very important because, three years ago, ⁓ my older brother passed. So she, she, she, so she lost a boy and then she gained a boy back.

(50:37):
Ruth Institute I'm sure. ⁓ Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ray Alex Williams So it's been kind of bittersweet for her. yeah, and my relationship with my father is a million times better. so yeah, it's just because the thing is, when you ground your identity on a lie, your happiness is dependent on other people supporting the lie. Because when I went home, every time that they'd like, they try their best to, quote unquote, respect my pronouns and use my name, but they'd slip up, of course.
Ruth Institute Well. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

(51:21):
Ray Alex Williams And so every time they did that, that was like emotional pain, painful for me. And so I was always on edge all the time waiting for those moments when I'd feel that emotional pain of like the slip up because it was violating my ego concept, my self image. Um, and so it was, it was, I was always like, I always had this background anxiety and this was true, like in all walks of my life, because the vast majority of trans women, 99 % don't pass as female. And so, you know, you're always like, kind of, but you're sort of like, you know, you pass a little bit, maybe from like 50 yards off, you pass and get closer. And then it's, and then it's like, okay, well, how close do I have to get before they, you know, realize that I'm male or like, you know, maybe I passed upon first glance, but then when I opened my mouth and it's like, people do a double take a lot that happened a lot. So I was always in this like ambiguous world of like anxiety and self consciousness and neuroticism, like

(51:55):
Ruth Institute Yeah Right.
Ray Alex Williams how are people thinking about me? How are people judging me? know, I just like meeting new people was weird. it's just like, was very, it was a very, that was one of the primary drivers for me to de-transition. But that played into my family life because I was never, I always was self-conscious. I never just rested in my own identity. I never just rested in reality. And when you rest in reality,

(52:34):
Ray Alex Williams you don't have self-consciousness because you don't have to think about how are people judging me, how are people looking at me and my passing is male or female right now. And that just creates, it induces neuroticism in otherwise normally healthy people.
Ruth Institute Right. Yeah, that's really interesting. So once again, the transition itself generated the anxiety, you know, it didn't solve the problem, didn't solve a single problem really. ⁓ So let's stop on this point. Let's point out, you know, let's not end. We're still on a roll, so I'm not gonna end, but I mean, I wanna focus in on this point. What prompted you to transition or to de-transition or to, you know, you've been like 10 years, 10 years or eight years, you said you were living as a woman.

(52:59):
Ray Alex Williams Yes. Yes, exactly. So to do transition. Yeah, was like eight years. Part of it was my initial motivation was ⁓ I had an epiphany one day that ⁓ natural is better. Because I had had those health problems I mentioned ⁓ earlier. And as part of being on this regimen, had to like. I obviously I was on prescription medication to maintain my hormonal supplementation. ⁓ I had to go to the doctor's office all the time to get labs drawn and get blood. So basically it was like, I was going to be a lifelong medical patient for life. and I just like, I was just sort of, had an epiphany. I was like, you know, like in like other respects, I was trying to get off my prescription medication unrelated to like, ⁓ gender stuff. And I was like, well, why am I doing that? Because like natural is better. Well, It's the same case for all these gender drugs. I realized like, you know, I want to be whole in myself. So like I'm running on my own natural endocrine system. I'm not dependent on, you know, exogenous medical interventions. I'm not a lifelong medical patient. And also I was getting to the point where like I've been on testosterone supplementation or testosterone suppression medication, and that has severe side effects. I've been on it for like eight years. And so my doctors are pressuring me to get an orthoactomy where you remove the testicles so you don't produce testosterone. So you don't have to taste, take the testosterone blockers. And I was at this decision point of basically having to decide where to do that. And I was like, well, you know, what do want to do? And essentially I just had this epiphany. was like, no, I'm just going to like, get off the hormones. We're going to just like, you know, and at that exact point of when I had that epiphany, I wasn't like immediately deciding to like socially de-transition. I just wanted to medically de-transition. But the social de-transition soon followed after it. And also at the time, my then ex-wife, or my wife at the time, now ex-wife, ⁓ she ⁓ had started getting into gender critical ⁓ stuff, like basically like reading and researching people who were like critical of mainstream gender identity ideology. And, she started watching this like YouTube channel that interviewed a bunch of detransitioners that enter the channels, as Benjamin voices channel. He, he interviews tons of these dishes. I started watching out of curiosity. ⁓ and I just like having the concept of detransition made available to me, like. It in a way provided a possible, a possibility model that I didn't previously think was a thing because.

(56:00):
Ruth Institute right.
Ray Alex Williams ⁓ and once I realized that, no, you can actually de-transition and like be happy on the other side, like it provided this, this idea. And then I started getting into like the actual criticisms of the ideology and just like my whole world, we flipped upside down. ⁓ and it's been a whirlwind ever since then, in terms of like shifting ideological views, went from like super progressive, you know, very, you know, liberal, ⁓ you know, a two. Yeah. like Democrat and blue voter and just like, so, I was, was very woke. so part of like my D transition process was, ⁓ a D woke, a D woke vacation, if you could call it that, because all these ideologies are connected in some ways. And like, ⁓ the, the idea that trans women are women is a central dogma and, then the progressive woke ideology. And so it's connected to.

(56:48):
Ruth Institute Yes, that's true.
Ray Alex Williams You know, these other ideologies about race, gender, and sex and all this stuff. so, ⁓ yes.
Ruth Institute And ideas about reality, ideas about reality, ideas about the human person. What does it mean to be a person? What's going to really make you happy? know, and with a radical autonomy at the center of that. And you had gone through enough pursuing of the radical autonomy that you were like, this isn't doing it for me. So all of this is happening at the same time. I want to take a step back though. You mentioned that you were married. Okay, so.

(57:16):
Ray Alex Williams Right. Yeah.
Ruth Institute Here's Ray living as a woman. What was your woman's name?

(57:37):
Ray Alex Williams Rachel.
Ruth Institute Rachel, okay, so here's Ray, living as Rachel, and you were married to a woman?
Ray Alex Williams Yes, we met when I was trans identified.
Ruth Institute Okay, and how did that work? How did you present yourself to the outside world? And how did you think of, how did you, wait, what was your internal narrative between the two of you? Did you think of yourself as a pair of lesbians or something? How did that work?
Ray Alex Williams ⁓ like, well, we. more like queer, I guess, which is just like a more fist vague term that kind of captures a bunch of like, but yeah, we kind of conceptualize. I mean, I never really like truly identify like as a woman. I kind of was more like identified as more like, ⁓ trans feminine or non-binary or something like this. never like full blown, like I'm a woman, you know, like, I, I acknowledge that I'm like, you know,

(58:06):
Ruth Institute Hmm. Yeah, yeah.
Ray Alex Williams I essentially identify as trans. I'm a trans woman. Some trans women are like, no, I'm a woman and my transness is just incidental. I was like, no, I'm just a full blown trans woman and that's kind of how I identify. Because I was smart enough to know that there's philosophical problems of identifying as a woman, what is a woman, getting into all these philosophical debates. So I realized there's a philosophical dead end to try and defend the idea that I was really a woman. Because then you have to like, you know, it doesn't make sense philosophically. Because then it's like a woman is anyone identifies as a woman. It's like that doesn't make sense philosophically. I knew that. Right. So.

(58:53):
Ruth Institute huh, okay. And that's where we are as a culture. That's exactly where we are, yeah. But how did this work for your wife? How did this work for her? What did she tell herself about who she was married to and who she was?
Ray Alex Williams I mean, it, when I transition, I, I had no problems finding women today. ⁓ but mostly bisexuals it's very common. and, ⁓ yeah, I dated lots of women, like, you know, so it's, it was not unusual. and, ⁓ and, and within the LGBT queer, you know, women.

(59:22):
Ruth Institute Wow. Interesting.
Ray Alex Williams Yeah, it's very common for trans women to date within like the bisexual queer women community. So yeah, and she conceptualized herself as more or less being in like a, what's called like a sapphic relationship, where like, know, women love a woman or, you know, queer or something like this. that's how we kind of conceptualized it. And, you know,

(01:00:01):
Ray Alex Williams I mean, she was happy in the relationship. When I initiated the divorce, she did not want to get divorced. So yeah, it's like, ⁓ and probably it's because, you know, there was financial entanglements as well. And that's complicated. I don't want to say I get into that, but. ⁓

(01:00:22):
Ruth Institute No, no, no, no, you don't need to get into that. That's none of our business really. But the two of you separated. Was this at the same time that you were detransitioning? Were these things related?
Ray Alex Williams Um, the de-transition was like back in 2023 and then, um, the divorce was initiated last year. Um, so it didn't happen simultaneously, but it was part of the downfall of the relationship because when I. De-transitioned and started identifying as a man, like it just caused a lot of problems, like, um, in the relationship, like she told me, uh, she wasn't attracted to me. Like she wasn't,

(01:00:58):
Ray Alex Williams Like she didn't like the way I smelled anymore. Cause I was now, I had testosterone in my body. She's like, I don't like the way you smell anymore. So it's like, we basically like, didn't have any chemistry and their relationship devolved in kind of like a platonic thing. and, ⁓ yeah, it's, it was weird in a way, but,

(01:01:21):
Ruth Institute Well, I can imagine, I can imagine all kind of that there wouldn't be many templates for processing what you guys were doing in the first place. Yeah.
Ray Alex Williams Yeah. Well, the, the, right. mean, the fundamental basis of the marriage at the time I got married, I was so confused in so many ways on so many dimensions that I, and it was, it was not, you know, it was not a valid marriage. ⁓ it was also at the time I, know, when we got married, I was Paul, we were polyamorous as well. So it was like, it was just, you know, every kind of, you know,

(01:01:49):
Ruth Institute Mm.
Ray Alex Williams alternative lifestyle we were living in to some extent or another. I was very into alternative relationship models, polyamory, relationship anarchy, all these different radical ways to structure relationships.
Ruth Institute Yeah. Right, right, right, right. Right, when you take down the guardrails, you can go off the cliff in a lot of different directions, actually. So you felt a desire to detransition because of the reasons that you've talked about. And as you transitioned, you ended up transitioning all the way into a very conservative traditional form of Catholicism. But it sounds like the detransition happened before the faith experience happened, that?

(01:02:15):
Ray Alex Williams Yes. Yes, that's correct. That's correct.

(01:02:38):
Ruth Institute Is that right? Okay. And was therapy part of your journey at any point, Ray?
Ray Alex Williams No, I never really, I've never really been much of a therapy person.
Ruth Institute Okay. Okay. So you didn't have like, you didn't, you didn't, I mean, because for some of the people I've talked to, they had unexplored trauma, an unprocessed trauma that they needed help processing, you know, so some people went, needed therapeutic help with that kind of thing. Others didn't do therapy so much, but they had powerful religious experiences that was part of the whole process of leaving the pride identity behind, whatever it was for that particular person.
Ray Alex Williams for whatever reason.

(01:03:17):
Ruth Institute But your story isn't like either of those. Yours is your own unique thing, it sounds like.
Ray Alex Williams Yes. ⁓ but I've always been a seeker after, after the truth. I've always been, you know, ⁓ and you know, some of my critics online will say that like, I'm flighty. I'm flighty, like, ⁓ sort of, sort of like, ⁓ you know, jump around from different ideologies to like, I, I, I, so I have a lot of people predicting that like this catholicism thing is just like a temporary phase and.
Ruth Institute You what?

(01:03:49):
Ray Alex Williams I'll jump to the next thing next month or something. ⁓ That's not how I feel about it at all. I feel like I finally come home to reality, to groundedness, truth. I'm like a changed man, I'm a new person. ⁓ I'm, ⁓ you know, it's like, Jesus says, you it's like you're a new, or St. Paul, you're like a new person in Christ. ⁓ And I really do feel like a transformed man. And I also want to get, ⁓ you know, relate.

(01:04:11):
Ray Alex Williams to the viewers, a critical part of my faith journey, which is that after I de-transitioned, ⁓ the testosterone came back and subsequently my libido came back and subsequently all the paraphilic desires that led me down the transition pathway came back. And so suddenly I was having to deal with these autogonophilic urges again. I had all these urges to cross-dress, to gauge and fetishist behavior. So that all came flooding back and I came to like, how do I manage this? How do I deal with it? And with, and. I discovered a community and how I learned about autogonophilia within start researching it. ⁓ there's a community of people who were like, you know, self-identify as autogonophiles and like, rather than saying this is pseudoscience, this is debunked. It's like, no, I am autogonophiles. It's a small community, but within that community, like the standard advice of how to manage this is that you need to somehow integrate it into your life. Otherwise, if you try and repress it, you're going to get into these, these binge purge cycles. You're going to. ⁓ you know, by repressing these desires, you're going to, ⁓ lead to psychological ⁓ damage or something and you're to torture yourself. so, and, know, initially I tried to suppress it and I was like, you know, just, then eventually like, like, yeah, I started like cross-dressing and stuff. I started getting all this fetishistic stuff and like, you know, started watching, you know, transgender pornography again. And like, it just really started escalating. But the common advice in the community is that, that's perfectly okay because the problem previously when you're trans identified was that I brought my kink out to the public world. But as long as I keep the kink in the bedroom, I'm not hurting anyone. So it's no big deal. It's just like, it's just an outlet. It's sort of outlet to prevent me from retransitioning. Cause actually with, there's differences between males and females and detransitioners. Male detransitioners are more likely to retransition. And so, partly because the autogynephilic urges are stronger, whereas in females, it's more of a social contagion thing. So like there's less of a motivation to retransition. Whereas in males, they're dealing with these strong underlying sexual desires that motivate them. And unless you learn to manage them in a healthy way, you're going to like deal with these urges and start, you know, doing it the same, going down the same pathway that drove you down in the first place. And so I tried for a while to integrate it to, you know, I was like, you know, doing cross-dressing here and there, like around the house and, know, and, but that was eventually, you know, it's, it was so unhealthy. It's so degenerate that, know, and in a moment of, you know, conscience and one of these, you know, know, fetishistic sessions, like God convicted me pierced my heart. And I had a crisis of consciousness or crisis of conscience where God was like, You need to get, stop all this. Like, and I was also like a heavily addicted to marijuana as well, which fed into the, the, the sort of sensation seeking the novel seeking the fetishism, because it's, I consider it like an aphrodisiac and it was like, know, dopamine seeking and, um, and it's all, it was all connected and it was like a trigger for the fetishist accessions as well. And, um, and so, yeah, in that moment of crisis, you know, God was like, you know, give it all up, you know, stop.

(01:07:20):
Ruth Institute Alright.
Ray Alex Williams Right away. I threw it all away. I had this crisis of conscious, like, it like, it was like an instant, it was like my Damascus road experience. I really, I really, or like, you know, St. Augustine having that, that moment of like, you know, that, like that conversion, it was a true conversion experience.

(01:07:46):
Ruth Institute Take and read, take and read, right? Out of the confessions, right? Right, right, right. So you threw away all of your garments and you threw away your marijuana.
Ray Alex Williams Yes, exactly. Yeah, I got rid of all the paraphilia, got rid of all the stuff. I just immediately got drawn to the Catholic Church. this is in February of this year, this happened.
Ruth Institute the drugs and the pornography. And so, wait, you were not a religious person whatsoever before February of this year?

(01:08:15):
Ray Alex Williams No, that's not true. was, I was like, ⁓ I was spiritual, but not religious. Cause after I left my, my, my faith, my, my faith of my youth, which is Southern baptism, I was, went through this long phase of atheism, but then I got into like, ⁓ that I sort of stopped becoming a materialist and an atheist, but I was into like spiritual. So I believe in like a spiritual reality.
Ruth Institute okay.

(01:08:41):
Ray Alex Williams like, you know, that there's some universal consciousness of some kind or that, you know, I believe that, you know, miracles are possible or the supernatural realm exists, but it's all framed in terms of like the esoteric, the new age, the cult, you know, paganism, occult. I tried, know, Eastern philosophies. I tried every different spiritual system in the world. I've always been a spiritual seeker. I did like psychedelics when I was in college. I've always like, you know, exploring, exploring, exploring, but it never satisfied me. Like Saint Augustine said, you know,

(01:09:10):
Ray Alex Williams the heart is restless until it rests in you. I was very restless, incredibly restless person spiritually. And so initially, when I was, you know, after I did transition, I briefly flirted with going back to the evangelicalism of like my youth. And because I had the same sort of like a crisis of consciousness in regards to my sexual behavior, but I struggled because that my intellectual ⁓ coherence demanded that I take conservative theology seriously, which had the conservative traditional ethic on homosexuality. And so I liked it because it clearly rejected the trans stuff, which is helpful to my own personal case, but also rejected the homosexual case. But my wife at the time, I'm now ex-wife, was a hardcore gay rights activist her whole life. So when I say, now I'm evangelical, like, she threatened divorce. blew up, it caused so much animosity. like, kind of like, I backed down and I kind of like had, I kind of like, I wasn't firm in my faith because I was, I was causing too much tension in the marriage. So I kind of reverted back to this sort of like progressive Christianity or like, where I was like going to like the Episcopal church, was like, you know, they're, they're pro LGBT in the church. And so I kind of like had this like really watered down form of liberal theology where, you know, It's like, it's like, I didn't really take it seriously. And then, and then I lost, you know, seriously my faith and I kind of got back into the new age stuff. Then when I had my most recent correct, true conversion experience, yeah. And I found the Catholic faith. And then now I'm like, I have confidence and a strong faith and the Orthodox traditional perspective. And, and I'm not like, ⁓ I'm going to back down and cause part of it was like, Realizing that to accept this I have to be comfortable with the idea that people are gonna think I'm a homophobe people are gonna think I'm a bigot like people are gonna like You know, I'm gonna be ostracized from the LGBT community and stuff and and people are gonna, you know have all these judgments on me and I just came to accept that and So that was a big hurdle for me was like getting over at the issue of the gay the gay stuff because I had been a liberal and Democrat pro-gay my entire life, you know, ⁓ because I had a liberal sexual ethics where basically, know, as long as two adults are loving and consenting, that's all that matters. Yeah.

(01:11:34):
Ruth Institute Right, right. That's right. That's right. So at this point, so this is in February of this year that this happened. And where were you guys in your marriage at that point?
Ray Alex Williams ⁓ The divorce was not finalized, but ⁓ we were not living together. ⁓

(01:11:55):
Ruth Institute I see. okay. So that, so a lot's going on, a lot's going on. And then I remember you saying on Substack that you came into the church just this Easter, isn't that right? So, so this was a real quick, a quick journey. A lot of times they'll have a whole year's worth of preparation and education and so on and so forth. But you mentioned that you had a priest that thought it was important that you.
Ray Alex Williams Right. Yes, that's correct. I was confirmed just this this just this Easter. Yeah. Yes.

(01:12:23):
Ruth Institute come in right away. Do you mind telling us a little bit about that?
Ray Alex Williams Yes. So typically you're right. The OCA process, which is like the educational catechesis process, you know, prior to getting confirmed, it usually starts in the fall and it goes in later. But I talked to the priest and he was like, well, the purpose of that is to make sure that you agree with the church teachings. But part of my conversion experience was grappling with the fact that whether or not I'm going to accept the church teachings. And I had no problems with all the orthodoxy except the gay issues. But once I got to the gay issue, all the rest of the orthodoxy, the doctrines, the Catholic church, the full acceptance of the magisterium, all that came naturally to me because like I had already been studying theology and Christianity for quite some time. just hadn't really like allowed myself to fully assent to the full, you know, magisterium and because like of the gay issue. Once, once I got over that hurdle, like the rest of it came easy. So from my pre perspective, like, you know, I mean, he could probably tell I'm like,

(01:12:53):

(01:13:20):
Ray Alex Williams more of like intellectual type of guy. so like, ⁓ and it said that if I caught up on all the past, cause all the, ⁓ the OCA, ⁓ lectures were recorded. I just like, binge watched like the entire year's worth of like catechesis. ⁓ he said, long as I did that before the Easter vigil, I can be confirmed, which, know, it's such a blessing because, know, after, you know, doing this, I still struggle with temptation and like, you know, having like, ⁓ the, the sacraments of the church, the, the, church life, you know, having, being a full member of the church, like that's been important to like, you know, my, my ability to manage this in a healthy way and to, ⁓ to, to, overcome these desires and to conquer them and to live out a life of like, you know, chastity and like purity and like, without the church, it'd be impossible. And now I think that it is actually impossible without a sort of transcendental morality. You're not going to beat this. Like a lot of. guys who struggle with these AGP and cross dressing and paraphernalia and pornography and all this stuff, like they try and beat it on their own. like that's, and a lot of people say like, I'm just repressing and that I'm doomed to retransition. I'm doomed to relapse. I'm doomed to do this, do this. It's like, like, cause without God, this is not possible because like, the tools of secular psychology that they recommend to try and like, ⁓ you, you just need to engage in your kinky moderation. You just need to like, you know, it's like, no, it doesn't work.

(01:14:52):
Ruth Institute Right, right. Right. what you discovered on your own is that that theory is incorrect. You know, it's simply not correct to say that you can be a moderate, you can indulge in pornography moderately or that you can indulge in a kink moderately, you know, and that thought process has led a lot of people into full on sexual addiction of one kind or another, because the fact is, if you don't confront the temptation and deal with it, It won't go away. It won't go away by itself. And it does require grace to do it. Were you baptized before you came into the Catholic Church? Were you baptized as a... Okay. Okay, yeah. And so that's what I was just getting ready to say. The baptism was valid. They baptized you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So you didn't have to be rebaptized, right? You didn't have to have a conditional baptism, but that means that was a graced event in your life.

(01:15:24):
Ray Alex Williams Yes. Yeah. It just, it just. I was baptized as a Southern Baptist when I was six years old. yeah, which is a grace of its own, right? Yes, yes, that's correct. Yes, yes.

(01:15:51):
Ruth Institute And we have no way of knowing how all the different channels of grace are working. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Ray Alex Williams I mean, I relate to St. Augustine because it was the graces of his mother, St. Monica, praying for him for all those years. So I'm sure my parents, how many prayers did they say? Please, please Lord, bring Gary back. I'm sure they prayed thousands of prayers. All those graces probably flowed ⁓ to me. I really...
Ruth Institute His mom, my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And how do they feel? How do your old Southern Baptist parents feel about you becoming a papist? Is this a problem? Yeah, yeah.

(01:16:24):
Ray Alex Williams ⁓ so I was a little worried at first time, my dad, because, you know, he, you know, he, you know, had sent me some things from some fiery Calvinists, know, certain preachers like John MacArthur, who really are anti, ⁓ Catholic, but, but my dad and my mom has seen the transformation in my life. They've seen that I'm a different person. They've seen that I'm on fire for Jesus and the, and, know, I'm, and what's, what's interesting is like, ⁓ I go to this. beautiful cathedral here in St. Louis and it's the most gorgeous building ever. And you know, I sent pictures to my dad and he's going around to his church, his little Southern Baptist church and look at how beautiful this is. You know, like, isn't it wonderful that they are constructing this place to worship God? And you know, and my dad is a very faithful man. He reads the Bible every day. He's, I've been so

(01:16:58):
Ruth Institute ⁓ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(01:17:20):
Ray Alex Williams I never appreciated the fact that he was a good Christian man ⁓ my whole life. now we send each other Bible verses, we pray for each other. He sends me his daily devotionals and Bible verses. I think he may not have realized that you can be on fire for Jesus as a Catholic. so yeah, now he never says anything bad about.
Ruth Institute ⁓ Right, right, yeah.

(01:17:48):
Ray Alex Williams to me. mean I'm sure he has his theological differences but like he sees the transition, the transformation.
Ruth Institute Well, you're okay. Right, right. Yeah, well, compared to you being a woman, know, I'm sure they're relieved. We have our son back. He's a papist, but we have our son back. yeah, I have long thought that the pressure that the Christian community as a whole feels from the sexual revolution, one of the things that it's doing is it's driving the Christians together.
Ray Alex Williams Yeah. Yes. ⁓

(01:18:24):
Ruth Institute Right. A lot of the old divisions are just breaking down. know, just we all see that we have to get closer to Jesus or we're to be swept away by the by the cultural forces and the close. If we all get closer to Jesus, we're going to end up being closer to each other. know, ⁓ and I have felt that since 2008 when I worked on the Prop 8 campaign in California. I mean, it was it was amazing. know, if you had been in San Diego.

(01:18:52):
Ruth Institute in 2008. Well, in 2008, I don't even know how old you were. But in that period of time, in that moment, the spirit was moving in that city. was an amazing experience, you know, that people are, you know, our auxiliary bishop in San Diego, Bishop Corleone, who's now the Archbishop of San Francisco, ⁓ he was one of the big ring-lingers of, you know, getting the money together and getting all the Catholic community on board and so on and so forth. And there he is at this big mega church, this big

(01:19:22):
Ruth Institute Protestant evangelical church that looks like an entertainment venue kind ⁓ of church. ⁓ And then we went across the street to the San Diego Mission that was built by Father Junipero Serra. It was not grand like your cathedral in St. Louis, but unbelievably beautiful, tiny but beautiful. Every single square inch is covered with something ⁓ amazing to look at.
Ray Alex Williams Alright. Right.

(01:19:51):
Ruth Institute But there we all were together. That was the point. We were all there together ⁓ working on something that we... Yeah, we got these problems. We got these theological problems. But this has to be pleasing to God that we're working on this issue of common concern. This has to be what he wants.
Ray Alex Williams Right. Right. Yeah, I mean, I mean, when Our Lady of Fatima appeared to those children, she said the final battle with Satan is gonna be between marriage and family. And that impacts all Christians. like, our society hates Jesus' message more than ever. And so like, the Jesus followers are...

(01:20:18):
Ruth Institute Yeah. Yep. Yep.
Ray Alex Williams It doesn't matter who you are. If you follow a traditional ethic, it doesn't matter if you're solo scripturo, whatever. Like if you're following the biblical ethic on sexuality, you're going to be hated by modern society. And so that brings us all together. think that's a really nice point to emphasize is our commonalities and our common enemies. ⁓

(01:20:40):
Ruth Institute Right. Right. Yeah, that helps. Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Which are sometimes easier to see, but, you know, and I do my best to call attention to the commonalities, you know, because I really believe that Catholic teaching on marriage and family and human sexuality is coherent. All the moving parts fit together, which you cannot say that about the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution just spins off one contradiction after another.
Ray Alex Williams Right. Right.

(01:21:15):
Ruth Institute And the Catholic position is coherent. And I try to say to people, look, this is the common heritage of the whole Christian tradition. And it will bless anyone who embraces it. I don't care who you are. If you embrace it, it will bless you in some way. So that's the way I try to put it out there. I'll let somebody else do the full-on conversion refuting Sola Scriptura or whatever else has to happen. ⁓ I'm not worried about that part. ⁓

(01:21:39):
Ray Alex Williams Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ruth Institute One thing I always like to ask people who have made this type of journey that you've made, ⁓ is there anything that you would like to say to the family members of people who are struggling with this kind of thing? Thinking about your whole journey, you're looking back on it, you can see that you were the source of problems and tension in the family. And you have the perspective of going into it and coming out of it. Is there anything that you can say to the family members to give them hope to persevere and to know it's helpful?

(01:22:16):
Ray Alex Williams Yeah, yeah, don't, don't give up hope. Don't give up hope. Keep praying because you know, the average age of de-transition is like eight, it takes, ⁓ it's like eight years. So it's like, you know, yes. So w w w which is why the data, ⁓ is misleading because they don't do follow-ups for eight years. so the, so the, the, the, de-transition, they say, they see the de-transition rate is low. Well, you're not following up after eight years.
Ruth Institute Really? ⁓ I see what you mean. Right.

(01:22:45):
Ray Alex Williams So don't give up
Ruth Institute Right.
Ray Alex Williams hope. Just keep praying and ⁓ yeah, mean, that's, that's a key, keep, keep loving and keep, ⁓ you know, don't, don't push them away and like, yeah, and that's all, that's all you can do. ⁓ really. ⁓ but hope, hope is out there. ⁓ and anything is possible with, with, know, Jesus.

(01:23:10):
Ruth Institute Now, do you know sometimes people want to try to talk their relatives or their loved ones into the correct position? ⁓ You know, that, ⁓ have information for you, Wouldn't you like to read this book that I found just for you? ⁓ My sense is that that's not usually welcome while the person is still in the throes of the ideology. Can you speak about that a little bit with the benefit of hindsight? I don't know if anybody tried that with you. ⁓

(01:23:37):
Ray Alex Williams Yes. Yeah. mean, yeah, I was very stubborn. think most trans-divine people are stubborn in their ideology because there's sort of like, there's a moral, you know, I'm on the right side of history. You're just an ignorant bigot and like, you I have all the answers. And so, you you're giving me this literature that must be something wrong with it because I already know a priority that I'm on the right side of history and you're wrong. Um, so it really does. Yeah. think it requires grace. Um, and which is why prayer is so important because, know, we can petition for graces. Um, and. But yeah, I don't know. It's, one of those things where like, um, the ideology is so rigid and there's a lot of like people out there within these communities because, um, particularly within the, the, the trans identified male population in which, know, the often, you know, high IQ, very smart, very artistic. And so they're very well researched on this topic. so, ⁓ but researched in a way that like, you know, they're wrong, but they have a lot of rhetorical sophistry and clever arguments and it's sort of, it really requires a lot of expertise to like cut through the ideology. Because if you just look in the sciences on our side and they have all these, they kind of. is a veneer of plausibility and a veneer of scientific, know, means this, oh, yeah, all the mainstream, know, medical establishments, APA, the AMA, everything's on our side, you know, and so yeah, requires it's really hard to directly challenge on the intellectual side, which is why I think the more like emotional side is more important, like the spiritual side, because Yeah, they're going to dig in their heels. They're going to resist. It requires that internal conversion experience. I think in order to, cause it really is like, it's almost like a gestalt shift. It's like a paradigm shift. have to really like, you know, but also ⁓ one thing that's effective, I think that I've seen that's effective is like sharing stories of de-transitioners. So if you see a powerful testimony from a de-transitioner, you can just share it and like, Maybe they won't watch it, but maybe they will watch it. like I said before, having a possibility model is important. If you don't think that detransition is a possibility, then you're never going to consider it as an option. so,

(01:26:09):
Ruth Institute Mm-hmm. ⁓
Ray Alex Williams Yeah, that's kind of what I would say. ⁓ But yeah, don't don't give up hope and keep praying.
Ruth Institute Yeah, the correcting the intellectual errors can come further down the road. So once you became convicted that this was the wrong path and that there was a possible alternative, you became more open at that point to hearing contradictions to the talking points that you'd been hearing for eight years. ⁓ But you had to get to that point first before you were even willing to listen to it. All that stuff was bouncing off.

(01:26:50):
Ray Alex Williams Right. Right. ⁓
Ruth Institute would have bounced off if somebody had presented to you sooner. Yeah. Because we have people reach out to us all the time with these questions. You can imagine the letters that we get, know, the people are heartbroken over their family members and so on. What should we do and what should we not do? And it's really, it's not easy to figure out when's the right time to open your mouth and so on and so forth.
Ray Alex Williams Rain. Rain. All right. All right. I will give a recommendation. ⁓ One of my good friends ⁓ is a detransitioner herself named Maya Poet. ⁓ She's on Substack and ⁓ she's very, very, very smart. And she ⁓ has a lot of great advice for parents, particularly... for parents of ROGD girls who are that kind of like autistic etiology. She is the best advice. And she actually has a consulting business where she, I don't know if it's a football business, but she consults with parents all the time. And she understands autogynephilia as well. So she is, can help with the boys. I would recommend her work. Read some of her sub-sect articles. Her work is directly reaching out to parents and how

(01:28:02):
Ray Alex Williams help parents. So Maya Poet on Substack. I would look her up.
Ruth Institute Okay, okay. So you send me that link and we'll put it in the show notes, Maya Poet. And that brings me to my final question for you. Where can people learn more about Ray Alexander Williams? Where can they read your writing? Where can they see your videos?
Ray Alex Williams Okay. So my sub stack is easy, Rayaxwilhelms.com. YouTube also easy, Rayaxwilhelms is the channel. I have a bunch now for caution on my YouTube channel. I've kept up my old videos and I have some videos of there where I'm cross-dressed and where I had a totally different perspective of my management of auto gun. I feel like, so not all the videos on there reflect my current opinion on the the Catholic sexual ethic or the proper way to manage this. so, you know, I'm leaving them there for educational purposes to realize that you can't change your mind on these things. But for someone where that would be like a trigger or like, you know, upsetting, like, yeah, like watch my more recent content on my channel. Just a fair warning. And then, and then yeah, I'm also on Twitter too, where you can see me getting into some feisty conversations with people about these topics.

(01:29:05):
Ruth Institute Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Right, right. Well, Ray, it has been a real pleasure getting to know you. I appreciate your candor. I appreciate your learning in this matter. I mean, you have obviously educated yourself quite a bit on these topics in a way that I'm not familiar with. And I think a lot of other people will find it very enlightening. So I want to thank you so very much for being my guest on today's episode of the Dr. J Show.

(01:29:48):
Ray Alex Williams Well, thank you so much. was my great honor to be here.
Ruth Institute Okay, that's a

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Cardiac Cowboys

The Joe Rogan Experience

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Trans Agenda for Women & The Science That Brought Him Back

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Stuff You Should Know

Cardiac Cowboys

The Joe Rogan Experience

All Episodes

The Trans Agenda for Women & The Science That Brought Him Back

Stuff You Should Know