• AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Chasers aren’t just cissies who find us hot, everybody does that because we are hot, that’s not chasing. Chasing is an implicitly transphobic form of fetishism. All trans people with some experience and a working self-preservation instinct avoid chasers because typical chaser behavior includes:

    • aggressive flirting often bordering on sexual harassment, driven by the idea that it’s ok to treat us like men, in this case meaning that it’s ok to be sexually demanding and up-front towards us in ways that chasers would never show towards cis women

    • emotional manipulation targeting specific weaknesses of trans people, such as playing on dysphoria-specific insecurities

    • being ashamed of fucking us and not wanting to be seen with us in public

    • wanting us to fulfill certain very specific sexual fantasies that frequently trigger our dysphoria (such as aggressively topping the chaser) or invalidate our gender identity (such as being “sissified” by the chaser)

    • making demands to remain at a specific, fetishized transition stage which frequently includes trying to talk us out of surgeries that require year-long struggles to get them in the first place. A lot of chasers only care about the girldick, which is a real problem when you’re a girl that absolutely needs to get her dick turned inside-out to get a nice neo-vagina.

    • Cromalin [she/her]@hexbear.netOPM
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      1 year ago

      yeah, it’s more insidious than just wanting to date us, being a chaser often means they dehumanize trans people and see us as nothing more than genitalia

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, there’s something that just sets chasers apart from all the general shittyness that women have to endure when dating men. I also agree with the meme’s premise that cis lesbian chasers are very different from cis dude chasers. The lesbian gaze just works differently. When your way of desiring somebody is built around admiring and glorifying that somebody, the results are just different than when your way of desiring somebody is to reduce that somebody to a collection of body parts. That’s not to say cis lesbians always act in that way, we’ve all grown up in a mysogynist culture that teaches the male gaze to all of us, lesbians whether cis or trans aren’t immune to copying that mode of desire. It’s also not to say that cis lesbians can’t be objectifying and othering towards trans women, but i always get the impression that the problematic ones in that crowd simply lack the experience with and understanding of trans women instead of being as inherently bad as the guy chasers. idk, maybe i’ve just missed on the really bad lesbian chasers so far, but my own shitty experiences in that regard have been with dudes in spite of me mostly hanging out in queerfeminist spaces. The people everybody else tells horror stories about also tend to be guys. And this is by far not the first chaser meme i’ve come across, but the first one that even acknowledges lesbian chasing as a thing.