Hello everyone — cliché topic, I know. Everything you will read is mostly just ranting and stating the obvious, but I decided to write this shit because I’m depressed and bored, and so that if you have nothing better to do, you can waste your time reading this.
I was clinically diagnosed with transsexualism/gender dysphoria and shortly thereafter came out as a trans woman a couple of months ago. It was really hard to admit it; there was a lot of shame in conceding the truth that has been in my head since my childhood. I was unprepared just how brutal it was going to be to live openly as a trans woman, especially while being pre-HRT, pre-OP, and with no vocal training.
My face is unusually feminine (with makeup at least), but my body and voice unfortunately give me away.
Despite the whole mocking, discrimination, misgendering, verbal abuse even by psychiatrists, and psychological violence I’ve encountered regularly since then (and it’s no exhaustive list I have to say this), among this whole sewer ridden with excessive problems, I’m realising something demoralising and devastating about trans women’s dating world.
The overwhelming majority of men who are sexually interested in me are fetishists of “femboys,” “femmes,” “twinks,” and “trans” (as they usually list it, when they do). These men are obliviously transphobic — most of them believe that being attracted to a trans woman with a penis is “gay”. Their brains, for instance, see trans women in the same cluster as “twinks,” which is a gay subcategory, and “femboys”, which are primarily male identifying individuals who have very feminine appearances.
This means that most men who fetishise me and see me as a sexual object in their “girls with dicks” fantasies, do not see me as a woman, but instead as a “fake woman” in the same category as twinks and femboys, and many of them perceive their own sexual attraction to me or other trans women as a form of homosexuality.
When in the future I fully medically transition, once my hormones are female, my phenotypical sex becomes female, and my genitalia becomes female… what would most heterosexual men think about the idea of dating me, or even having sex with me?
Well, the answer is in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships: approximately 96.7% of heterosexual men don’t want to date or have sex with trans women.
So then, the way I see it is that the majority of heterosexual men, whether they consciously realise it or not, perceive having sex with trans women as a sort of gay act. They don’t see us as women, or at the very least not as “fully women”. If we do not disclose our trans identity to them before intimacy, we risk being victims of severe violence.
The dating pool of trans women is exceptionally low, and the small dating pool that does find us desirable, sexually objectifies us and views us as not “fully women”, but instead as an “exotic type of women” — but not “real, biological women”.
That’s what I have thought for now. Hope you had fun reading what my mind shat into the internet. I have to spend time hibernating in dissociation. Goodbye.