The Trans Sexuality Blog [Part One]

A number of months ago, on another blog site, I posted an informative essay on a variety of people's sexual attraction to trans people, plus a follow-up that is a more elaborate analysis of the data I provide in the first. This is usually focused on trans women specifically, for reasons that become clear in the second essay. This post on SimilarWorlds is my attempt at taking those essays and turning them into a two-part post here. This is the first of the two essays.

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Some Unnecessary Context:
I woke up at 4AM today with some sort of sudden anxiety/panic attack, which have been happening recently for some reason. That isn't the topic of this blog though. More importantly, after eventually calming down, I started looking through Instagram passively (probably not a good thing to do after an attack like that, but still), and stumbled upon a post about trans-chasers (cis people who fetishize trans people).
This got me thinking and it futher lead me to a Wikipedia page about attraction to trans people (1).
And like any reasonable person, at 6AM~, I started looking through the wiki's page sources and finding the research/studies listed, and I found some rather interesting stuff in the process, which I'll be sharing here!


Cis People & Trans People:
One of the more interesting statistics, which is listed in the wiki above, from this study/book (2), is about how many people have actually fantasized about trans people previously; roughly one in three men and one in four women. This was interesting to me, considering that those numbers differ quite a bit compared to the amount of people who are actually interested and open to being romantically involved with trans people, as seen here (3). A thought occurred to me as I read that statistic... which is "does that number include those who are solely crossdressers?" and surprisingly, but luckily, it does not.

As the book reads: "When looking at my participants’ favorite fantasies of all time, gender-bending was relatively low on the list; however, when I asked whether people had ever fantasized about it, it turned out that a surprisingly large number had. For instance, about one-quarter of men and women had fantasized about cross-dressing, and nearly a third had fantasized about trading bodies with someone of the other sex. In addition, about one in four men and one in six women had fantasized about sex with a cross-dresser, and even more (about one in three men and one in four women) had fantasized about sex with a transsexual partner." (Chapter Two in the "Homoeroticism and Gender-bending" section) I really wouldn't have expected that people were less sexually attracted to crossdressers than trans people, and yet, at the same time, part of me was kind of unsuprised. This fact reminds me a lot of how many homophobes have been found to have attraction (often unconscious) to homosexuality (4).


The Cis-Straight People Who Are Trans-Attracted:
Heterosexual cis people are least inclined to engage and date trans people, so it seems (5), with only about 1.8% of cis heterosexual women and 3.3% of cis heterosexual men in the study suggesting that they would date trans people. What is interesting is when you look at the cis straight men who will date trans-women (there is unfortunately not much data on other demographics attraction to any subsets)... many of them are uncertain about whether they should consider themselves bisexual or not (6), but despite that, they've been found to (usually) have the same reactions to trans-woman that they would to cis-women, as opposed to any "gay signals", implying that they do indeed see them as women (7).

This being said, cis women seem to react more favorably to advances from trans people than cis men do (8), though there is a fair chance this has both to do with women fearing the possibly-violent advances of cis-men and being less overall transphobic than cis-men.


The Cis-Queer People Who Are Trans-Attracted:
In relatively drastic contrast to those previous numbers, about 11.5% of cis gay men and 28.8% of cis lesbian women report being open to dating trans-people. This is in juxtaposition to the idea often touted that lesbian women in particular hate trans people, since they seem the most romantically-open of the non-bisexual cis populations, though of course theat number is still not a majority. The Blair-Hoskin study then groups together bi or more generally queer men, women, and NBs into another whole group, with 51.7% of that population suggesting that they would date trans people.

(For any of the above stats about the 2018 Blair-Hoskin Study, you can reference it and see how it breaks down among certain trans subsets in this diagram)


Social Standards & Those Attracted To Trans-People:
In the previously linked book, "Tell Me What You Want", the author suggests that it seems those who are more likely to be attracted or open to trans individuals and or to be homoflexible, etc, are also more likely to have other sexual deviations from what is expected. One can probably interpret this in a number of ways, but the author interprets this as showing that in reality its a sign of how much people are willing to contradict with what the world / society tells them they should desire, i.e. to deviate from whats is socially expected.
The book reads: "However, sexual flexibility is also, to some extent, a general willingness to try to new sexual things—especially things that might be socially or culturally forbidden. This idea—that sexual flexibility isn’t limited to the gender of your partner—is not something that many other scientists have previously argued, but it’s something that’s strongly supported by my survey data. When I looked at participants who said that they were either exclusively gay or straight, I found that those who had fantasies about same-sex contact were more likely to have a whole host of other sexual fantasies that deviate from what many people consider “normal.” For instance, they were more likely to fantasize about being with partners of different races, engaging in BDSM sex, having group sex, and being consensually nonmonogamous, among other things. In other words, we’re talking about a very general erotic flexibility here that goes well beyond being flexible about the gender of one’s partner. It includes flexibility with respect to other partner characteristics, such as race, as well as flexibility in terms of trying new sex acts, such as BDSM." (Chapter Three in the "A Quick Sexual Vocabulary Lesson")





(1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attraction_to_transgender_people
(2). https://www.sexandpsychology.com/books/
(3). https://www.them.us/story/cis-trans-dating
(4). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8772014/
(5). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0265407518779139?domain=p2p_domain&token=IRCZMYD8J53DPY6XP2UM
(6). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17705095/
(7). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283261392_Who_are_gynandromorphophilic_men_Characterizing_men_with_sexual_interest_in_transgender_women