u/cat-consumed-chicken

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like do heterosexual men and women like seeing their own bodies in the mirror?

does it depend on whether they are conventionally attractive or not?

also, if someone's heterosexual how do they even instincually feel their bodies as "attractive"/"repulsive"? for me this is has always been a mental process of observation of how ppl rate male bodies, but instinctually i feel as repulsed by a conventually attractive male body as much as by an unattractive one.

transitioning helped at first, because for the first time i had an internal compass of how i want my body to look because im attracted to women. it helped me love myself a little.

but i quickly hit the major issue, faces are the most gendered thing for me, and my face was always going to be a man's face. so its not really possible for me to consider my face "attractive", not because of self esteem, but because its male, and male faces just can never look attractive to me.

detransitioning works as long as i dont think about my looks that much. (which was wat ive been doing all my life before transitioning). but then i want to be attractive to the category of ppl (or even a single person from that category) im attracted to. my brain just short circuits.

it feels very frustrating because i feel like the only true heterosexual person ive known. i cant imagine knowing wat is an attractive man without being slightly bi myself, and im just not. like at all.

a lot of AGPs view it as an integral part of their orientation.

ive spend years trying to shoehorn in either "AGP as a sexuality" or "innate gender identity" as reasons for the pull ive had towards feminization (very late onset). but neither really fit.

here's what i think is my case:

- i grew up very heteroromantic and heterosexual, but more accurately i'd say "exclusively attracted to women". my "identity" was never initially part of my sexuality.

i say this because i do think many heterosexual men (e.g. red pill) are very auto-androphillic. they really enjoy the idea of being a man having sex with a woman or in a relationship with a woman. this seems so obvious to me, because i have no autoandrophila at all (and esp. not when it comes to my body). the concept is alien to me and always has been. even some AGPs (like the recently retransitioning youtuber Rae/Ray) seem to have some degree of autoandrophilia in some settings.

- women generally dont find me attractive. and the few times they have, i cant really figure out if its real or if they are mistaken about how they feel (even the sex i had i dont really know why it happened [from the woman's POV]).

- my autoandrophobia resulted clearly from this feeling of undesirability. not from some latent sexual orientation hidden for decades.

- transitioning (to relieve it) didnt really help. body feels better and softer, yes, but that doesnt feel like AGP to me. just the way a heterosexual (non-autoandrophilic) brain would react to having softer skin.

- i detransitioned, not because of "gender", but because i identify strongly with a non-autoandrophilic version of heterosexuality (im attracted to women as "me", not as "a man" or a "woman"). also trans lesbianism & agp pseudo-bisexuslity sound incredibly depressing to me because they are hugely autosexual.

- going through a lot of therapy id say im more neutral now about my body (which is how i started anyway). however, the neutrality feels dangerous because women dont find my natural body attractive and "masculinizing" doesnt even make sense to me because i dont even have the right mental map for it (because i have zero androphilia and zero auto-androphilia).

TLDR; i think the complete lack of androphila and autoandrophilia + lack of perceived visceral desire from women can cause gender dysphoria and agp. but they remain as symptoms (or sexual subconscious "strategies"), not real causes (for me anyway).

thoughts?