Attraction to men with vaginas: Androgynomorphophilia (AGMP)

Straight men's attraction to women with penises is a well-known phenomenon, but gay men's analogous attraction to men with vaginas is relatively obscure. I describe it and discuss the parallels.

➤ Introduction

Heterosexual men’s attraction to the idea of a woman with breasts and a penis—a shemale—is a well-known phenomenon in science. These erotic targets are known as gynandromorphs in sex research. Attraction to them is called gynandromorphophilia, abbreviated as GAMP.¹

Current scientific understanding of GAMP suggests it is an unusual variant of heterosexuality, as the men who have it exhibit the same genital arousal patterns as typical heterosexual men. The only difference is that the former group has an additional attraction to gynandromorphs.

The earliest description of GAMP goes back to psychologists John Money and Margaret Lamacz, who coined the word gynemimetic to describe male-to-female (MtF) transgender individuals who may feminize their bodies but retain the penis. Attraction to gynemimetics was called gynemimetophilia—a lexical precursor to GAMP.

Money and Lamacz also defined a counterpart attraction, andromimetophilia, as the attraction to andromimetics—that is, female-to-male (FtM) transgender individuals who may masculinize their bodies but retain the vagina.² On the relationship between gynemimetophilia and andromimetophilia, Money later speculated the following:

Money: It would seem logical if the attachments of andromimesis were the counterpart of gynemimesis. In fact, there seems to be a difference. There is an absence, or at least a very great scarcity, of evidence that there are andromimetophilic women whose specific attraction to an andromimetic partner is that the latter is a man without a penis.³

In his speculation, Money was mistaken on two counts: the counterpart attraction is not so much to a man without a penis as it is to a man with a vagina, and it is not in women that this attraction is to be found but primarily in homosexual men. Indeed, it appears that the attraction to the idea of a woman with breasts and a penis that is found in some straight men (GAMP) has an exact analogue in some gay men’s attraction to the idea of a man with a vagina and without breasts.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, I set out to investigate this erotic interest by interviewing men who have it and exploring the pornography that caters to it. I have come away with some anecdotal observations that I present in this essay as tentative findings that can orient future systematic research.

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💡 Definitions

If andromorph refers to the typical male morphology, gynomorph to the typical female one, and gynandromorph to the mixed morphology of a woman with breasts and a penis, then, by reversing the Greek roots in the latter lexical construction to prioritize the masculine root, the word androgynomorph could describe the mixed morphology of a man with a vagina and without breasts.⁴ The attraction to androgynomorphs would then be androgynomorphophilia, a word that has already been used on the internet in this sense and has been abbreviated as AGMP.⁵

The mixed morphologies of gynandromorphs (woman with breasts and a penis) and androgynomorphs (man with a vagina and without breasts) could be collectively called mixomorphs. The respective attractions to mixomorphs—GAMP and AGMP—could be collectively called the mixomorphophilias, since they appear to be strongly related.

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👨 Erotic targets

The morphology that AGMP men are attracted to finds real-life instantiations in some FtM transgender individuals who masculinize their bodies with testosterone, get mastectomy to remove breasts, but do not undergo genital reassignment surgery. Some of these individuals are happy to retain the vagina because they have no interest in genital reassignment, while others retain it solely due to dissatisfaction with the current outcomes of phalloplasty.

The morphology of these masculinized FtMs is the exact analogue of the one that GAMP men are attracted to. That morphology finds real-life instantiations in MtF transgender individuals who feminize their bodies with hormones and cosmetic surgeries like breast augmentation, but retain the penis.

Among gay men, “pre-op” FtMs appear to find success in sex work—be it in professional pornography, on online adult content subscription platforms, or in prostitution—in much the same way that “pre-op” MtFs find success in the same industries in the straight male consumer segment. These FtMs are sometimes crudely called cuntboys in adult media, much like their MtF counterparts have been called shemales. Among gay men who consume professional FtM pornography, Buck Angel—the self-styled “man with a pussy”—is a well-known actor who pioneered the genre.⁶

Gay men who have AGMP place a high premium on masculinity in FtMs, and any signs in body or behavior that take away from the manhood of these erotic targets can turn AGMP men off. When it comes to the presence of female genitals, some of these men appear to think of it as “just an extra hole to penetrate”—a “front hole” or “bonus hole”, as some crudely call it. Others, however, seem to find a unique erotic appeal in the vagina on the body of a man.

The opposite pattern has been observed in GAMP men: they place a high premium on femininity in MtFs and they are susceptible to being turned off by signs of masculinity that take away from the womanhood of their erotic targets. Some GAMP men also appear to disregard the presence of male genitals on the body of a woman while others find themselves intrigued by it.

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🙅 Societal stigma

Gay men who confess to AGMP face stigma in the gay community from those who are turned off by the idea of a vagina, even if it happens to be on a very masculine body. On the internet, AGMP men are often accused of being in denial of a suspected bisexuality, owing to their attraction to a morphology that has a vagina or to individuals who were born female.

In this regard, the stigma that AGMP men face is in much the same vein as the one that GAMP men face. The latter are also sometimes accused of being in denial of a suspected bisexuality—or even homosexuality—because of the presence of a penis in the morphology they find attractive or the fact that the shemales they like were born male.

There is one caveat: the vitriol directed at AGMP men can be particularly vicious in comparison with GAMP men, because some gay men perceive AGMP as a threat to the gay identity. These men see AGMP as an infiltration of the gay community by men suspected to be bisexual and presumed to be in denial of their suspected bisexuality. Gay men who feel threatened in this way accuse AGMP men of unduly appropriating the gay label and identity. These considerations obviously do not hold in the case of GAMP among straight men, as straight men are not a sexual minority.

AGMP, much like GAMP, makes some men who have it confused about their sexual orientation identity. Some identify as bisexual, even though they are not interested in women. Others like the new label androsexual, which describes an attraction to masculinity that is agnostic to genitalia, much like how some GAMP men have used the label gynosexual to describe an analogous widened attraction to femininity.

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📌 Conclusion

All in all, it appears that, among gay men, there exists an attraction to the idea of a man with a vagina and without breasts—an attraction called AGMP—that is strikingly analogous to some straight men’s attraction to the idea of a woman with breasts and a penis—an attraction called GAMP. The picture that emerges is that AGMP, as an erotic interest, appears to be the perfect equivalent of GAMP, with everything flipped in terms of the sex binary.

GAMP and AGMP are therefore probably two halves of the same puzzle: the puzzle of mixomorphophilias. Studying AGMP in gay men has the potential to provide unique insight into the nature of GAMP in straight men. It should be kept in mind, however, that while GAMP and AGMP may share some analogous underlying motivations, they may uniquely differ in others. Future research will hopefully elucidate any such differences if they exist.

GAMP men’s genital arousal patterns have recently been studied and those men were found to be equally aroused by women and by shemales, but not by men.⁷ If a similar study is carried out on AGMP men, I predict that the findings will be analogous: AGMP men will be found to be equally aroused by men with penises and men with vaginas, but not by women.

While the tentative observations I presented paint AGMP as the exact analogue of GAMP, there is one other, even more fascinating parallel. Just as some GAMP men experience the phenomenon of internalized attraction and become aroused by the idea of being the shemales they are attracted to, some AGMP men likewise experience arousal by the idea of being the men with vaginas they are attracted to.

To my knowledge, a natal man’s arousal by the idea of being a man with a vagina has not been reported in the academic literature. I shall explore this phenomenon and present vivid case reports of it in the next part of this series.

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1. For more on GAMP, see my comprehensive review:

Attraction to women with penises: Gynandromorphophilia (GAMP)

2. Money, John & Lamacz, Margaret (1984). Gynemimesis and Gynemimetophilia: Individual and Cross-Cultural Manifestations of a Gender-Coping Strategy Hitherto Unnamed. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 25(4), 392–403.

3. Money, John. (1986). Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition in Childhood, Adolescence, and Maturity. Irvington Publishers, Inc., p. 104.

4. I propose this be seamlessly pronounced an-DRAH-juh-no-morf, similar to how one would pronounce “androgynous”.

5. It seems that the only mention of AGMP in the literature is in Illy, Phil. (2023). Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex. Houndstooth Press. In the glossary, androgynemorphophilia—note the alternative spelling—is defined as “attraction to masculinized females with intact vulva; attraction to FTMs with intact vulva”.

6. See for example:

• Lynn, Logan. (2013, June 3). Pornographic Activism: The Rebranding of Buck Angel. HuffPost.

• Nichols, James M. (2016, January 17). Buck Angel, 'The Man With A Vagina,' On The Role Sex Plays In Living Authentically. HuffPost.

7. Hsu, Kevin J., et al. (2016). Who are gynandromorphophilic men? Characterizing men with sexual interest in transgender women. Psychological Medicine, 46(4), 819–827.