To quote Austin Powers…”Allow myself to introduce… myself!”


I’m Autumn Sandeen, the newest contributing author to the Ex-Gay Watch. It looks like I’m going to be “unique” to the XGW in a few ways, it appears. Probably the most significant “uniqueness” is in how I identify — my primary identity is as an M2F transsexual — a transgender woman (or transwoman). I’m fairly well known in transgender activism circles as a transgender new archivist, a GLBT news archivist, and as the Secretary of the Transgender American Veterans Association (TAVA).

And hey, I’ve been forwarding articles to the editors/contributors of XGW for awhile now, and as many know I’ve been a frequent commenter on the XGW posts.

My personal history includes being raised as a Pentecostal. In the late seventies, I saw Christian psychologist Galen B. Larson, Ph.D. (though his affiliation with the Foursquare church my family attended) about my cross-dressing and gender identity issues. These days, the kind of therapy I received would be called reparative therapy, although we didn’t call it reparative therapy back then. (It appears from Dr. Larson’s website that reparative therapy isn’t currently a primary focus of his practice.)

Why do I care about ex-gay issues, besides my own experience with reparative therapy? Well, Exodus International a sees gender identity as a relevant issue to them:

Homosexuality is not the only issue facing youth today. Riding on the coattails of the gay movement, a challenge is being made against the very concept of male and female.

The TVC sees transgender people as part of the homosexual agenda, and the NARTH authors have been recently been commenting on gender variant youth and genderqueers. Ex-gay issues are now very much transgender issues too.

For those interested in some online background info on me, I have a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell profile on the Documenting Courage: Veterans Speak Out project — a combined project of the HRC, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), and the American Veterans for Equal Rights (AVER). Also, syndicated columnist Jacob Anderson-Minshall recently wrote an article about me entitled Everybody Loves a Whiner.

So, allow myself to welcome… myself! 😛

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