Some of you are possibly familiar with admirers and chasers, but most probably aren’t. There are people out there (in my understanding, predominantly male) who have a ‘thing’ for transgender women of varying types. I’m certain there are admirers and chasers for transgender men too, but I have no experience with them, so I’m focusing on the ones I’ve seen.
Admirers are basically benign guys that just like looking at transgender women. As Douglas Adams would say, they’re mostly harmless. Chasers though, range from just having an attraction, similar in all ways to heterosexuality, but with the preference being that the woman was misgendered male at birth, to full on obsession. I have encountered both in my life, and luckily only online.
It seems most of us transgender women have a need (or at least a want) of outside validation. When we’re closeted, this tends to take the form of having a kind of anonymous online place to post photos and/or thoughts. Some hide their faces, others go so far as to post with nudity. I was somewhere in the middle of that. Never posted (nor will I ever) anything with nudity, and never hid my face.
These sites take on many forms, some are blogs, some were MySpace pages, Flickr, Tumblr, Geocities (now defunct), etc… And most of them were publicly accessible. As in Facebook, there were ways to comment, or like, or favourite photos individually, or follow people, and so on.
My particular page, has a few hundred followers (500+). Most are other transgender women, but there are plenty of males following me as well (and the odd cisgender woman). On one hand, this is largely validating for me, that I can be attractive to males and have them find me interesting. On the other hand, I’m a lesbian (so far) and while I can appreciate the sentiments, they sometimes creep me out. 🙂
Admirers never (or almost never) want to meet me. They just request things like show more leg, or more blonde pics please, or more cleavage, etc… As I said, mostly harmless.
Chasers are the ones that want to meet. At times their comments and messages can be quite graphic, including sexual descriptions. Other times, it’s very simple and cute flirting. Those are the ones I try and be very nice to, and explain that I’m happily married, and not looking for anything outside of that. (which it also says on my profile there, but most people don’t read profiles). I’ve been propositioned, and even kind of proposed to. Those are things that come across as creepy. Especially when they know I’m married.
The validation is addictive in a way. Much less so, now that I’m out, but before that, it was a really good feeling to see that people could see me as a woman (another sign I missed apparently), and a not unattractive one. I think it was also an outlet for my bottled up extrovert side. A way to be out, without being out.
I still look for validation, but I don’t actively seek it as much as I want to. lol. I have a confidence in myself that I never had before that is remarkable (hence my remark). That confidence is what makes it possible for me to be me, even if I’m having a bad day with beard shadow, or body hair. It overrides my dysphoria. That confidence does get boosted when I hear compliments though, and I always like that.
I’ll save my thoughts on ‘passing’ for another post.
– Jess