The Secret Agenda Of Mesmer's Bauble

Autogynephilia as a TV horror trope in 1989

Howard Moore was AGP before it was cool.

When “The Secret Agenda of Mesmer’s Bauble” first aired in May 1989, “sex change” was still a fringe topic in America. No one had heard of autogynephilia.

Sexologist Ray Blanchard was still putting together his typology of autogynephilia. The political project to replace transvestitism and transsexualism with “transgender” was two decades away, and its harassment campaign against scientists studying autogynephilia would not be acknowledged in the literature until 2015 in Alice Dreger’s book Galileo’s Middle Finger.

Autogynephilia, or AGP — the self-love of a man, for the image of himself as a woman — would rather we did not speak its name.

Despite its protests against any ackowledgement of its own existence, however, AGP is ancient, so it was analyzed in story form before we even knew what it was. Here is one example.

What Is A Woman: Wrong Answers Only

Written by Joe Gannon and directed by Arman Mastriani, who both went on to long careers in television, “Mesmer’s Bauble” only got a…