A taxonomy of trains
In the 1980s and 1990s, Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard developed a taxonomy of transgender males. (Wikipedia article with coping; archive of same.) In his original taxonomy, he concluded that there were two types of transgender dudes:
HSTS (homosexual transsexuals): very feminine gay men, typically feel this way from early childhood. In clownworld, this is generally what people are encouraged to think of what they think of troons.
AGP (autogynephiles): conventionally masculine straight men with a fetish for themselves as a woman. They tend to transition late, frequently after serving in the military, getting married, and having a couple of kids. In clownworld, this is the megabulk of contemporary male troons and the driving force behind every single insane piece of bullshit you’ve encountered on this topic, from dudes in women’s sports to transing kids to males in women’s prison cells.
Having spent significant time marveling at our trans-facilitated descent into hell, I believe that Blanchard’s typology, while excellent, can be expanded to capture the full spread of today’s train population. Some of these people probably didn’t exist when he was analyzing this population, and some of them probably did but were so obscure that he never encountered them. (Lucky.) As the meme says, before the internet, every toaster-fucker lived a life of silence, now they congregate on r/toasterfuckers.
Here follows a modest attempt to make sense of the morass.
The AGP Train (MTF type 1)
An autogynephile is a straight man who is sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman. As a fetish it seems very powerful, it also crosses over with an interest in forced feminization and humiliation (being a woman is humiliating, am I right ladies). Any time you encounter a hulking male dressed like a frumpy hooker, AGP. Any man you see on twitter horrifyingly bragging that he’s going to breastfeed, AGP. Any man who transitioned after being in the Marines but now claims that he “always knew” he was a girl is both lying and an AGP. They are the driving force between the trans movement because apparently men with a weird fetish can generate nuclear reactor levels of power when focused on their one weird sex thing. The names they give themselves are usually what they think is sexy, and sometimes, horrifyingly, the name of a woman they fixated on in the past. Many of these guys are going to claim to be “lesbians”, in practice many of them will be forced to date each other because are you serious. When they claim to be attracted to men that’s fake, it’s what Blanchard called pseudobisexuality, the men are just imaginary props in their fantasies of themselves as the sexy women they definitely 100% are for sure.
AGP men are not innocuous. Whenever you are around an AGP, you are participating in his fetish. You may think you are innocently using the bathroom at Target, going to the copy room at work, or politely pretending that you can’t tell the guy serving you coffee is a hulking male, but sorry, no, you are involved in his sex thing. Canadian Shop Teacher is an AGP fetishist. Every time I saw someone coping about shop teacher “actually is probably just trolling the libs” I laughed and laughed. You aren’t ready for the depths of clownworld. I was born in it, molded by it. I have browsed Trans Reddit.
CONFUSED AND/OR AUTISM TRAIN (MTF TYPE 2)
I don’t think this cluster existed in Blanchard’s original research. Many of them are coomers who are AGP adjacent, but they are much more literal-minded, with bonus autism. Because of their autism, they tend to see things as collections of parts rather than holistically. Where you see that someone is a woman at a glance, these people think that “woman” is made up of individual parts, like “long hair”, “lipstick”, “programmer socks”, “gross BDSM collar inappropriately worn at work”. Some of them are young and confused (plus autism) and some come out after having gotten some poor lady pregnant. They are sex pests and probably get off on the cross dressing and (they imagine) the warm embrace of female spaces, but they aren’t classic AGP hons in the way the other guys are. Your neighbor’s weird son who “came out” during college is one of these. Pray for his mother, who doesn’t deserve this.
OPPORTUNISTIC PERV TRAINS (“MTF” TYPE 3)
Hey, you know what’s a crazy thing about this mania? The thing where on one topic, every right-thinking MSNBC viewer agrees that men are dangerously perverts who might inflict their sex stuff on you whenever - WHENEVER! like if you’re out in the woods, wouldn’t you rather encounter a BEAR than a MAN??? - and on another topic, those same people pretend that there is zero chance any man would ever pretend to be a woman in order to get into a Planet Fitness locker room. Has no one but me seen shitty sex comedies from the 80s? Am I the last cynic alive?
Anyway, surprise, turns out there are plenty of men who are willing to pretend to “actually be a woman on the inside” if that’s what it takes to get into the women’s half of the Korean spa, the locker room, the sporting event, the middle school bathroom, the summer camp. And no, trans women do not owe you femininity, so actually it isn’t kind of weird that the guy in the bathroom has a beard and is dressed like a plumber, he’s a butch transbian and you can go fuck yourself!
HSTS TRAINS (MTF TYPE 4)
These are very feminine gay men who want to be seen as attractive women by handsome straight guys. You have to sort of feel for these dudes but you also have to recognize that the entire modern TRA movement is coasting on women’s empathy for imaginary vulnerable megagays. Meanwhile, these men are now in the minority. Even Drag Queen Story Hour is now full of weird AGP pervs. SAD.
The Lil Dude Train (FTM)
Girls who claim they are boys but still write, talk, and emote like girls fall in this category. There are definitely creepy pervs who are female, and occasionally they are in this cluster. There is likely a female version of AGP, but women are just less committed to their fetishes than men are, on a population level. Some of these women are into this because they are insane. Others because they hate being a woman, have psychological problems around their sexed bodies, and/or are very afraid of men, sex, etc. Who can blame them, with these horrifying AGPs everywhere. Names they give themselves are cute and boyish: Oliver, Finn, Aiden. Some of this group are obsessed with being “gay” and go on apps like Grindr, where gay guys find them annoying and opportunistic straight guys hook up with them.
The Non-Binary Train
Where classic trains are men pretending to be women or women pretending to be men, non binary trains are people pretending that mammals are not sexed creatures. Many NB/enby trains are self-obsessed young women with mild autism who can’t handle the insane way clownworld chooses to depict women in the spectacle. It isn’t that you can’t live up to the porn standard, assholes, it’s that you aren’t a fucking woman at all, so fuck off! These girls give themselves cool new androgynous names like Ash or Cedar. There are also some male NBs who are mostly trying to get out of being seen as the huWHITE male OPPRESSOR.
PEOPLE OF GENDER
Any time you read anything about contemporary radical politics, you will encounter People of Gender. They have special identities like “he/she/they” or “genderqueer”, “two spirit” or maybe they are “a queer woman” but they are married to a man and you don’t know what’s happening but you aren’t about to ask any questions and get yourself into a struggle session.
We all sense that in today’s crowded marketplace of oppression, being a plain old white woman isn’t very good. If you’re doomed to be a white woman, you can partially escape into something like “a nonbinary femme”. Being a man, even if non-white, can also be dicey! But if you are a man of color or perversion who uses “he/she/they” pronouns, the white nonbinary femmes in a straight-passing queer relationship in your tent camp will cape for you.
These people all have low-grade personality disorders. They are pointless. At least the AGPs are driven by a bizarre fetish. Nothing about the people of gender is interesting or even gross. They are self-obsessed ultranormies with extra steps.
MAN-MADE HORRORS BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION
Some small number of humans turn out to be eager to mutilate in their bodies in ways incomprehensible to the non-insane, and some of them have successfully made this happen under the umbrella of the TRA movement. “Top surgery” (double mastectomy) without nipples? Penis-preserving vaginoplasty? Eunuchs with a castration fetish? Nullification surgery that removes all external genitalia? There are people out there walking around with these things enabled by actual doctors with medical degrees from this country.
Haha, remember when things weren’t so disgusting and you still thought the slippery slope fallacy was a fallacy?