What It's Like to Be a Fetish

Shemales, tgirls, trannies, ladyboys, or whatever the porn industry wants to call us, is one of the most popular categories of porn consumed by straight men.

Trans women are essentially fetishized for being chicks with dicks. If a trans girl wants to be a porn star, she better hold off on getting surgery.

What is it exactly about chicks with dicks that has such a broad appeal? I think part of the explanation involves what psychologists call a "hyper-stimulus" or "supernormal stimulus".

A supernormal stimulus as an exaggerated version of a normal stimulus that is more stimulating than the normal version. For example, researchers can take artificial bird eggs and make them look like exaggerated versions of regular eggs and birds find them even more attractive. Another purported example is many works of art that have exaggerated body proportions:

Similarly, men are already turned on by the image of a nake female body. But then add in an "extra" element that is taboo and the stimulus becomes exaggerated, a supernormal stimulus.

Despite the popularity of trans porn, there is still a lot of stigma surrounding it. Guys who work with trans pornstars have a harder time finding work. Trans porn stars receive little recognition by the industry despite representing a huge chunk of all online porn traffic.

There is also stigma for men who watch trans porn. It's not something most men are willing to admit to their friends. It's a secret little fetish for most them - something they do in the privacy of their incognito browser. And many men probably go through their own guilt issues surrounding their love of trans women and what that means for their sexuality.

And if they aren't even willing to admit to watching trans porn, think how fewer are willing to date us, let alone take us home to Mom for Christmas.

So many men want to fuck us but not date us. They fetishize us but won't love us. They objectify us but don't validate us.

We are often just an item to be crossed off someone's sexual bucket list. "I fucked a tranny! Check!"

That bucket list fulfillment often happens on craigslist and in motel rooms around the country. Just go onto the male-4-trans category if you want to see what fetishization looks like in real-time.

Many times these men are bi-curious and want to experience the first dick in the "least gay" way possible. And hey, if that penis is attached to a soft feminine body with breasts, how gay could it be? And yet once they cum they don't want to stay and cuddle or stay up late whispering sweet nothings. They got their taste of D - time to go home.

And along the same lines, many men want to fulfill their fantasy of being fucked in the ass. The irony is that most trans women are not super into that at all.

Look, there's nothing wrong with finding trans women attractive or being attracted to their bodies. The problem is reducing our entire personhood to our genitals. Furthermore, the problem is in the implicit "Othering" that entails: seeing us as "tgirls" rather than girls, "ladyboys" instead of ladies.

There is a term for men who fetishize trans women and want to date us to fulfill their sexual kink: we call them "chasers". They chase after trans women in a predatory fashion, often with the nicest intentions. They compliment us to no end but at the end of the day they're not interested in our minds or personalities but what's in our pants. Rather than being attracted to the totality of our being, chasers have a narrow fixation on the shape of our genitals.

So often in the dating world trans women have to navigate between the tension of accepting that a man might be into you vs. wondering if they are a chaser. And many trans women end up dating chasers because often that's who is willing to date us. There are obviously exceptions to this but in my experience trans women dealing with chasers and fetishization is a very common occurrence.

And even if they're not chasers they're probably going to struggle with the issue of keeping their trans girlfriend a secret from their family and friends.

The point of this post is not to be all "Woe is me - no one wants to date a poor trans woman." Personally, my dating life is great. But I nevertheless wanted to illustrate what it's like to be a fetishized sex object. It can be exhausting and isolating at the same time. There is a reason so many trans people end up dating other trans people: sometimes it's just easier because we "get it".

a steemit original
images: wikipedia commons, pixabay