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Notes -
FYI, some of my comments (Including the OP and a reply to @07mk) have taken / are taking many hours to appear for me when I'm not logged in. Possibly it's a new account thing. Edit: all my earlier comments have now appeared.
I wanted to add a few notes that didn't really fit in with the original essay, or that occurred to me afterwards.
I'm not sure how much "autogynephilia" is supposed to overlap with what I've described. Certainly in the "it's a fetish" sense (which seems is the plain meaning, since as far as I'm aware that's how "-philia" is used in this context) it is much more narrow, to the point of being wrong. I suspect some of its proponents might claim that it covers all of the feelings I described, but I disagree, for exactly the same reason that I disagree that affection and "being in love" are the same thing as lust; they are related, but not identical. And at any rate the "it's a fetish" sense seems to be how it is present in popular consciousness.
I hope I did not imply that my analysis is exhaustive. The same end result can have disparate causes, and I can't read others' minds. I do suspect it accounts for a lot, though, and in a better way than the dominant narratives.
I think our culture has a terrible narrative around desires, which seems to be something like, "Desires are good! They are also a fundamental part of you, so if you have especially strong desires, you should build your identity around them! Unless your desires are just obviously evil, in which case you are a bad person for even having them." I find the approach found in ancient Christian thought (and elsewhere) to be much better: "You can have rightly or wrongly ordered desires. You can desire something good, but in a bad way; you can desire something that is good, but less important, more than something that is better and more important; you can desire something that is in fact bad, because you erroneously feel it is good. Having disordered desires is bad, but it's bad in the way that being sick is bad; it's not morally equivalent to acting on those desires. You should strive to rightly order your desires, and in the meantime to not act wrongly on account of them; this will make you better off in the long run."
Rereading, I may have created the false impression that my experience was of this as an all-consuming thing. In reality, though it was a big part of my inner life (I wouldn't have gone out of my way to engage in fantasizing if it wasn't) for a number of years, it was not the biggest or most important part.
Based on a couple of the comments, apparently I was miscalibrated about how obvious my twist at the beginning was. If I'd known, I would have written the reveal differently! For whatever it's worth (and at the risk of overexplaining the joke), here's why I thought people would guess it: (a) the tone of the "stories" was that these were archetypes or composites, created for the sake of illustration, but (b) there were too many incongruous or unique details (at least in the first one), suggestive that these stories were of real people, and that the tone was for the sake of producing a twist; then (c) the details that were included or left out were somewhat complementary, but not technically contradictory, suggesting the "it's the same person" reveal over other twists, (d) the details, at least for the first, are rather intimate and indicate that the author knows the subject really well, so probably it's autobiographical.
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