So, how much of an issue are chasers in a transfem’s day to day life? It really depends, and not all of it is predictable. Some girls just get more of certain kinds of trouble than others and usually, i can only guess why that happens.

ofc you will run into them a lot more often if you are on any dating platforms, and especially if you are looking for men there. I’ve only dated t4t since i came out, and it’s always been girls and beings that i met through mutual hobbies, local trans communities, discord etc., i’ve never been on any dating app. And i’m extremely and militantly lesbian, my body and face fit more into a lesbian than a straight dude idea of what a woman should look like and i just gravitate towards a clothing style that the kids on tiktok would describe as “man repellant”, so i get a ton of compliments from women and queer people and very little attention from cishet guys unless they are some scruffy philosophy or sociology studying antifa dude hanging out at the local queer bar with his bisexual friends (btw that’s the kind of guy that’s most likely to flirt with me in a way that actually feels charming and validating even if i’m not interested).

So the number of chasers i’ve ran into is much lower than for other transfems, but it’s not zero. In general, advances from definite chasers that say chasery things along the lines of what AcidSmiley described in my last post feel about as bad as any other form of inappropriate flirting, and i wouldn’t say it’s any more dangerous than a guy who hits on me and thinks i’m cis - i’m not a fan of the situations where i have to tell some very drunk and high douchebro off while wondering if he’s clocked me or if he’ll only clock me when i have to raise my voice and what it will do to his ego when he realizes he’s not only flirted with a [slur], but that the [slur] couldn’t give a flying fuck about his attention. Guys being ashamed of their attraction to us is unfortunately still a thing. And even if they are not freaking out, some guys just think that trans women are starved for potential partners and fall under the low hanging fruit umbrella (which is extremely wrong, it’s so much easier for me to get laid now after coming out that it isn’t even funny). And that makes them particularly sensitive to rejection from us.

That may sound a lot more scary than it actually is in practice. So far, my experience has been that living as a trans woman has mostly led to people being friendlier and more open towards me, to me having a lot more opportunities to be wild and over the top gay, and the number of people threatening me or being inappropriately pushy in their advances has not exactly been zero before i came out. One thing you’ll eventually realize as a trans woman is that on a surprisingly large number of occassions, people have not treated you the way they would treat a man even before you came out. Transmisogyny doesn’t magically start happening to you once you grow boobs or go outside in a skirt for the first time. No matter how thick that eggshell around us is, we tend to not fit into a male gender role very well, and that has consequences. That’s what it means when they say gender is performative - an egg’s performance as a man is just off and people notice even tho they can never properly describe it. When i was an egg, it was incredibly common for people to be confused by me being “kinda gay” but not in a way they could explain.

Coming out will change the way people treat you, but it isn’t that pandora’s box of hatecrimes and misery that some make it out to be. The worst parts of my life largely happened while i was repressing, or in the earliest stages of my transition.