The Trans Sexuality Blog [Part Two]

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 this part of the essay. This post on SimilarWorlds is my attempt at taking those essays and turning them into a two-part post here. This is the second of the two essays.

First Part Found Here: https://similarworlds.com/lgbtq/5475053-The-Trans-Sexuality-Blog-Part-One

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Social-Normality & Sexual-Flexibility:
I discussed it only towards the end of the previous blog, but one very fascinating finding (its all fascinating) is that some people have more sexual-flexibility, and this affects not only their personal capacity for gender-bending and queer-experiences, but also their tendency for expression of socially abnormal sexual tastes.

A quick note on “abnormal sexual preferences”. As the author of “Tell Me What You Want” describes; “As a scientist, saying that something is normal is basically the same as saying that something is statistically common. In other words, a normal fantasy is one that a lot of other people have.” It will be similarly defined here… That is to say that normality and abnormality are not value judgements (1).

Learning this was rather unsurprising to me, since BDSM-Positive spaces have tended to be more trans-friendly from my personal experience, and to me, just one of many kinky tgirls, part of trans-living is living authentically as yourself regardless of the external social pressures that exist. Frankly, I sometimes get the sensation that this alone, this freedom and authenticity, makes some cis people uncomfortable. BDSM practitioners and queer peoples both tend to be more socially open and nonjudgmental from my own anecdotal experience, and more over, they're often the very same people. There is also a lot of important overlap between BDSM history and queer history (2).

Something else that's interesting is the statistical sex-differences found between men and women in regards to sexual-flexibility in orientation. Whilst the idea that all women are bisexual is clearly a myth, they do seem to have a higher degree of sexual-flexibility than men, since women, and particularly cis heterosexual women, are more likely to react with arousal to any form of porn (gay, lesbian, straight) than other demographics (3). There are many theories as to *why* these differences are. Though, personally, I am prone to believe its likely a culturally / socially conditioned difference… slowly but surely, many differences are shown to be just this, or largely influenced by this at least (4) (5).

Furthermore, on another spectrum of sexual-flexibility, men are more likely to enjoy gender-bending fantasies (6. “Why Men Have More Gender-Bending Fantasies Than Women” Section of Chapter Three of “Tell Me What You Want” by Justin Lehmiller). This comes in both the form of fantasies about sexual relations with cross-dressers / genderbending peoples, as well as fantasies about cross-dressing or autogynophilia (a). I absolutely did not and do not want to talk about autogynophilia, but here we go… it is a theory that may accurately apply to some trans people, but which does not apply to a majority of us. Most transsexuals are not autogynephiles, and many autogynephiles are actually not, nor do they desire to be, transsexual. Plus, definitionally, many cis women are actually autogynephilic (7). The original theory doesn’t even have a good account of trans men, even though autoandrophilia is also a recorded phenomena, though not much research on it exists..... apologies to all of the transmascs that I know are reading, the world just hates us trans-women like no other, so we get all their attention… but I’ll discuss that more later. Now, as to why men seem to be more likely to be attracted to these things? Well, once again, there are many theories already existing, though I agree with Justin Lehmiller that it is most likely a result of taboo, not the least of which is because those men are often more attracted to other taboos (6).


Repression & Fetishization:
Leading neatly from the previous topic of taboo, I am going to discuss repression and fetishization as it relates to trans people. I suspect that the phenomenon of chasers (b) in some way relates to repression and the taboo surrounding us trans people. This part is mostly anecdotal, but a large portion of the fetishizers and chasers I’ve personally encountered have been Republican men *and women*, almost never the types of people that those unfamiliar with chasers would expect them to be… and for context, I live in a very liberal, urban part of Missouri. Based on my discussions with other trans people this seems to be a common trend. This makes sense in context to the aforementioned evidence that a lot of those men who are in one way or another attracted to gender-bending are more generally attracted to taboos, but also because as I also mentioned in the previous blog, many homophobes are (perhaps unconsciously) attracted to homosexuality (8). I take it much the same applies here.

The question of why all of this taboo leads to fetishization and attraction is another interesting path of discussion. It has been found that suppressing thoughts actually makes one more likely to think about that thing later (9), so theoretically there may be a similar mechanism at play here regarding suppression and attraction. My guess, based off of the previous anecdotes, is that there is.


Trans People & Cis Lesbians:
I mentioned in the last blog how the evidence provided by the Blair-Hoskin study suggests that cis lesbians are actually quite open to dating trans people relative to most other demographics, even if it was still not a majority within that study (10). Though, this has interesting connections / implications when taken in correspondence to another survey. A 2023 survey undertaken by the Just Like Us LGBT+ Youth Charity found that, besides non-binary people, the most supportive of trans people were lesbians, with 95% saying they were supportive or very supportive and only 3% saying they were not (11) (12). Whilst dating and supporting are not the same criteria, nor the same thing, it is intriguing that so many cis lesbians might support trans people, but then not be open to dating them when they assumedly would be if they were some other intersection of person. However… I think this massive discrepancy is probably mostly the result of two things; firstly, that the Positive Futures survey only targeted people aged 18-25, with more than half of those participants being 18-21, whereas the other study had a participant age range from 18-81, and younger peoples are simply known to be more likely to be supportive of trans people (12) (13); secondly, that the methods of acquiring participants for the studies may have affected the difference in results… It was difficult for me to find out exactly what the Positive Futures survey’s methods were though, so I am admittedly unsure about this.

There are some other possible factors that may have contributed, such as the locations of the studies, but I take it the latter two reasons were defining. It's also probable that there *are* some cis lesbians who are “supportive”, but do not wish to date trans people. However, I will not get into the topic of whether you can be “supportive”, but not see those same people as possible romantic partners of your appropriate sexual-romantic orientation, since it's a pretty contentious topic, even within the trans community. Regardless, I think it's pretty clear that lesbians are overwhelmingly one of the most supportive groups for trans people no matter your thoughts and metrics may be, which very deeply contradicts a lot of TERF rhetoric out there.


Trans & or 4 Trans:
It has only been passively mentioned up until now, but before I conclude, I do want to talk about the very beautiful topic of trans attraction for other trans people, as well as the partnerships that form between trans people, also known as T4T (c). T4T has mostly evolved as a kind of support movement among us trans people, since we often find a lot of mental understanding, meaningful connection, and deep support from each other, which we don’t always get from cis people, rather than that we are (at least in the high majority of cases) only attracted to other trans people.

T4T, both the term itself and the practice, is pretty old now, with the term’s origin in Craigslist personals from the early 2000s (14). It is hard to say how long in reality that trans people have been seeking out and or participating in relationships with other trans people though, not the least of which is because one would have to get into the weeds of when exactly “trans people started”. Despite some right-wing narratives, many cultures throughout history have had third-genders, or categories for people who move from one of the predominant binary positions to the other, but whether this is the same as being “trans” in the modern sense is actually debatable, since many of those cultures didn’t have the same frameworks for looking both at queerness and cisheteronormativity that we do today (15 Just A Wikipedia Link. Still Worth Checking The Sources On That Page). Either way, it is easy for modern trans people to feel a kinship with these ancients. But as things stand for the modern day? I personally think T4T is a very beautiful thing!


Transmisogyny & My Conclusions:
If I had to draw any ultimate conclusions from some of the data I looked at... it is actually that my own thoughts and theories, paired with the pre-existing theories, about “transmisogyny” are likely correct. Transmisogyny is the unique intersection that trans-women / transfems experience through being both women and trans. Transmisogyny is itself really under a larger grouping of intersectionality known as “femphobia”, that is, the oppression and xenophobia society produces towards feminine individuals of all kinds and towards the feminine itself . What is the intersection between misogyny, rape culture, bottomphobia, fairy-hatred, transphobia, the history of black and colored women not being seen as “real women”, etc, etc... and really, Patriarchy more generally? It is femphobia.

The Blair-Hoskin study suggests that there is a sizable portion of people within almost all demographics that would date trans-men, but not trans-women, even if it would be more plausible for their labelled orientation to date trans women (the study calls this an incongruity), that is, when they were not just outright totally exclusionary. Other studies, as seen in the previous blog, suggest that cis-men react more negatively towards trans-women than to other groups, but also that they *do* see trans-women as women… and therefore are more likely to treat us the way men treat women, which is to say; as objects. This also being supported by a single google search for “trans porn”, which will rarely display transmasculine individuals, nearly exclusively showing transfeminine ones. And following from that logic, we also experience more violence than transmascs do on average (16).

The whole theory of autogynephilia that I mentioned earlier is incredibly trans-misogynistic. Even if a fraction of trans-women seemingly have transitioned for those reasons, the whole experience isn’t unique to trans-women, all whilst the original theorist claims that bisexuality doesn’t even exist amongst trans women, and then further proceeds to completely forget about trans-men. And similarly, TERFs will treat trans-men like they’re just “confused lesbians” who are fundamentally good-intentioned and “can be saved”, but that trans-women are evil, sexual predators. They imagine that trans-women are malevolent masterminds, but that trans-men are kinda just confused side characters.

And I cannot be clear enough, trans men experience transphobia too… they are trans after all. They even will often experience misogyny and femphobia, particularly whenever society deems it that they do not “pass” well enough. The fact they’re so forgotten and pushed to the side is itself a unique form of oppression. But… for most of the world, the transmasc is a side-character, and the obsession lies in the transfem.

That's pretty much my overarching conclusion from the data; that transmisogyny is a very real phenomenon. If I want to put a positive spin to this, I guess the other conclusion is that ***intersectionality is incredibly important!*** Trans-Women aren't merely trans, they are also women, and thus experience not only womanhood and trans experiences, but the unique combination of those two things. But with all of that out of the way….. I just wanted to apologize for this blog being so much longer than the last one 😔. And to thank you for reading!🖤🖤🖤


(a). Autogynephilia is a very loaded word. Most generally defined it is “sexual arousal to the thought or action of dressing like / being a woman”. It comes from an old theory of trans-typology that saw it that all trans femmes who were at all attracted to women were just transitioning for personal sexual arousal. This theory is pretty much debunked, though it has been evidenced that some fraction of trans-woman do have reasons akin to this, as in Justin Lehmiller’s book, but that a larger majority do not.
(b). Chasers / Trans-Chasers are cis people who fetishize and actively seek trans partners (sometimes only one of MtF or FtM, sometimes both) usually with the intention of having sex.
(c). T4T / Trans4Trans is an acronym for trans people who are seeking relationships with or currently in a relationship with other trans people. There are other variations of this like: T4NB (Trans4Non-Binary) NB4NB, MtF4FtM, etc.

(1). First Paragraph of Chapter Two in “Tell Me What You Want” by Justin Lehmiller
(2). http://www.gruberpeplab.com/teaching/psych3303_spring2019/documents/13.1_Chivers2004.pdf
(3). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/
(4). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/
(5). https://www.apa.org/topics/neuropsychology/men-women-cognitive-skills
(6). “Why Men Have More Gender-Bending Fantasies Than Women” Section of Chapter Three of “Tell Me What You Want” by Justin Lehmiller
(7). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00918360903005212#d1e610
(8). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8772014/
(9). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3612492/
(10). https://gendercriticalwoman.blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/TransgenderExclusion-BlairHoskin2018CV.pdf
(11). https://justlikeus.org/news/2023/03/31/trans-day-of-visibility-ally-lesbian/
(12). https://justlikeus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Positive-Futures-report-by-Just-Like-Us-compressed-for-mobile.pdf
(13). https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/03/31/young-trans-support-school-pupils-just-like-us/
(14). https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/9/1/1/294561/Meanwhile-t4t
(15). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
(16). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2024.2440856#abstract