Sorry, worried19, the response I've written to you - below - is way too long. To put it mildly. But you made some points that got me thinking back and reflecting... as your posts often do. Before reading on, please be aware that whilst I am disagreeing with you on a few particulars, I really appreciate and value all your posts and enjoy the exchanges we have. Your intelligence and knowledge is very impressive. I wish I knew as much as you when I was your age. Now to my points:

True, there have always been autogynephiles, but there used to be stricter gatekeeping. They had to at least convince psychiatrists that hormones and surgery were necessary.

But that sort of gatekeeping only went on at the "gender clinics" affiliated with major teaching hospitals like Johns Hopkins and UCLA. None of that sort of gatekeeping was done at all by the doctors who did the vast majority of "sex change surgeries" in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, who were maverick independent operators in private practice unaffiliated with big-name establishment medical institutions. Like Georges Burou in Casablanca, Morocco and Stanley Biber in Trinidad, Colorado, USA, each of whom did thousands of "male to female sex change" surgeries.

Many other surgeons in private practice did these operations in other places like Denmark, the Netherlands and Harley Street, London, too. In 1951, for example, "the first modern sex reassignment surgery from male to female using a flap technique" was done by London-based physician Sir Harold Delf Gillies, a private practitioner known as the "father of modern plastic surgery." The patient was Robert/Roberta Cowell, an engineer, professional race car driver and World War II fighter pilot who had been married to a woman and fathered two children before deciding he was a woman himself. Here's some of Cowell's background from Wikipedia, with the pronouns changed to be accurate and so the story makes sense:

Cowell attended Whitgift School, a boys' public school in Croydon and was an enthusiastic member of the school's Motor Club, along with John Cunningham, who would later be famous as an RAF night fighter ace and test pilot. Towards the end of his school days, he visited Belgium, Germany, and Austria with a school friend. At the time, one of his hobbies was photography and film making, and he was briefly arrested in Germany for shooting a cine film of a group of Nazis drilling. He secured his release by agreeing to destroy the film, but was able to substitute unused film stock, and keep the original footage.

Cowell left school at the age of 16 to join General Aircraft Limited as an apprentice aircraft engineer, but soon left to join the Royal Air Force, becoming an acting pilot officer on probation on 4 August 1936 ;Cowell began pilot-training, but was discharged because of air-sickness.

In 1936, Cowell began studying engineering at University College London. Also in that year, he began motor-racing, winning her class at the Land's End Speed Trial in a Riley. He gained initial experience of the sport by sneaking into the area where cars were serviced at the Brooklands racing circuit, wearing mechanic's overalls, and offering help to any driver or mechanic who wanted it. By 1939, he owned three cars and had competed in the 1939 Antwerp Grand Prix.

On 28 December 1940, Cowell was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as second lieutenant, and in June 1941, married Diana Margaret Zelma Carpenter (1917–2006),[12] who also had been an engineering student at UCL with an interest in motor racing.Cowell served in Iceland before transferring from the Army to the RAF on 24 January 1942 with the rank of pilot officer (temporary).He had obtained a private pilot's licence before the war and completed RAF flying training at RAF Ansty.

In 1944, the Hawker Typhoon fighter-bomber Cowell was piloting whilst on a bombing mission of Nazi Germany was badly hit by enemy fire, and Cowell made a crash landing. Soon Cowell was captured by Nazi troops.

Cowell made two escape attempts, reasoning that the chances of success were greatest if the attempt was made quickly, while still close to the front–line. However, the attempts failed and he was taken further into Germany, spending several weeks in solitary confinement at an interrogation centre for captured Allied aircrew, before being moved to the prisoner–of–war camp Stalag Luft I.

Cowell remained a prisoner for around five months, occupying the time by teaching classes in automotive-engineering to fellow inmates. In Cowell's biography, he describes the situational sexual behaviour shown by some of the camp's Allied prisoners, and his discomfort at being propositioned by prisoners who assumed he also wanted to take part in this. He was offered the part of a woman in a camp theatrical production but turned it down, as she thought this would make her appear homosexual in the eyes of other prisoners. Towards the end of the war, food became short at the camp; Cowell lost 50 pounds (23 kg) in weight, and later described killing the camp's cats and eating them raw because of hunger.

After demobilization, Cowell was engaged in a number of business ventures until, in 1946, he founded a motor-racing team and competed in events across Europe, including the Brighton Speed Trials and the Grand Prix at Rouen-Les-Essarts.

However Cowell's autobiography describes this as a time of great distress. Cowell experienced a traumatic flashback when watching the film Mine Own Executioner, in which the hero is shot-down by anti-aircraft fire while flying a Spitfire.

In 1948, Cowell separated from his wife and, suffering from depression, he sought out a leading Freudian psychiatrist of the time, but was unsatisfied by the help he offered. Sessions with a second Freudian psychiatrist... gradually revealed, in Cowell's own words, that his "unconscious mind was predominantly female" and the "feminine side of my nature, which all my life I had known of and severely repressed, was very much more fundamental and deep-rooted than I had supposed."

Sorry, the contention that "there used to be stricter gatekeeping" to weed out the het AGPs is not true. Nor is the claim that "the demographic has shifted" in recent years so that AGPs now predominate amongst trans-identified males, whereas in the past males who became "transsexuals" were "primarily extremely effeminate homosexuals" who had "severe, debilitating sex and genital dysphoria" all their lives from early childhood that caused them "too much physical and social distress to live as male in society." AGPs have always predominated.

As for the contention that

Heterosexual men who loved their penises and wanted to keep them became transvestites, not transsexuals.

I don't think this is true either, at least it wasn't in the USA in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. In the past just as today, the vast majority of men who wish they were women and dress and "present as" women did not get the genital surgeries called "sex change operations" that today we associate with the term "transsexual." Like today, most kept their dicks and balls and focused on altering their appearance by use of clothing, wigs, makeup etc. Some did this FT and in public; others did it PT and in private.

In many places, such as the areas of the US I lived and spent time in (NYC, SF, Boston, DC) and circles I traveled in during the 60s, 70s and 80s, heterosexual men who dressed as women and liked to LARP as women, usually for erotic purposes, were called cross-dressers, and the gay guys who cross-dressed were called transvestites. However, this wasn't true across all of the US; the terminology, and meanings behind it, varied from region to region, and amongst different groups. Moreover, by the end of the 1990s, these two terms and two groups of men were being increasingly lumped together under the new nomenclature "transgender" and just plain "trans," as this convo from 1999 shows:

https://groups.google.com/g/soc.support.transgendered/c/Xt1NaSXosjQ?pli=1

But the larger issue is that neither "gender dysphoria" nor autogynephilia in either homosexual males or het ones are as static as you seem to think. Whatever the age of onset, in both groups of boys and men, "gender dysphoria" and AGP alike tend to change over time in intensity and the ways these conditions manifest.

Moreover, I believe you are vastly overestimating the number/proportion of homosexual males who wish they were women whose "gender dysphoria" is mainly characterized by, or involves, severe dislike of, and distress over, their genitals. Even for gay males who experienced disgust and shame over their dicks and balls in and from early childhood, such negative feelings do not represent all their feelings about their genitals; their feelings often are a mixture that run the gamut from revulsion to "don't mind" to viewing their dicks and balls as pretty terrific. Once puberty begins and gay boys with "genital dysphoria" start masturbating to orgasm like mad as all boys do, the positive feelings very often outweigh the negative ones, and/or the genital shame and disgust they felt previously become more complicated.

Also, according to Blanchard and Michael Bailey, the men most likely to seek to have "sex change surgeries" in order to obtain facsimile female genitals are the heterosexual AGPs, not the homosexual ones. The fact that het AGPs wanted to, and today want to, have their dicks and balls refashioned into vulvas and vaginas doesn't mean they didn't and don't "love their penises." It simply means they want a vulva and vagina more. These men are trying to "become what they love" - and what they love are female bodies and genitals. But loving and obsessing over the genitals of the opposite sex, and having a deep-seated fantasy-fed desire to possess/obtain/own the genitals of the opposite sex, doesn't mean not loving your own genitals.