To answer the first question, i’m just gonna copypaste an older effortpost by comrade @AcidSmiley@hexbear.net , she has written up a fairly thorough overview of different aspects of chaserim. I will go more into how much of a problem these people can be later today in another post.

Chaserism isn’t just sexual objectification of trans people (usually transfems). Somebody doing that is just a regrettably common fuckboy mysogynist pig, not a chaser. Dating men comes with its caveats for all women forced to navigate a patriarchal society, it’s not specific to our experience. What is specific to our experience as trans women and fems in a mysogynist environment is how transphobia and mysogyny intersect, forming what is known as transmysogyny. I recommend Julia Serrano’s Whipping Girl to anybody who wants to read further into that subject, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s just hold the thought that chasers are one of many ways in which transmysogyny manifests. Also, we will have to talk about girldick a lot, because that’s a body part most cis people know nothing about. So this will get very NSFW at some point. But let’s start at the core of what makes a chaser a chaser.

Chasers, like the people who fetishize East Asian women or black men, combine their fetishism with views that are inherently marginalizing to the fetishized. Their fetishism ties directly into systems of structural oppression. The fetishization seen from chasers can take different forms, but all of them include a transphobic element, sometimes openly, sometimes in a hidden and roundabout way. This combination makes encounters with chasers more distressing, hurtful and potentially more dangerous than encounters with the average mysogynist. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• being more aggressive and forward when making advances as the chaser falsely sees the transfem as being masculine in her desires and behaviors, assuming that he can get away with things he couldn’t get away with when talking to a cis woman.

• being ashamed for his desire, not wanting to be seen in public with the transfem. This is particularly dangerous, as it can lead to violent backlashes when the hornyness wears off and the more openly transphobic attitudes of the chaser come to the surface. That’s the kind of guy who may turn violent after sex. This is how we get killed. Seriously, most murders of trans people happen in exactly such a context.

• assuming we’re by default sex workers. No shade on anybody who’s in that line of work, i know healthcare in many countries is so dire for trans people that many have no other recurse, but come on. You wouldn’t ask if i do sex work after talking to me for 10 seconds if i was cis. You just wouldn’t.

• fixating on a specific stage of the transition process, or on specific body parts that may be altered during transitioning. Now, i’m not saying that it’s transphobic to be into girldick. It is not. What is transphobic is regarding your sexual gratification higher than our need to feel comfortable in our bodies, and that frequently shows when it comes to girldick. I get the appeal, i seriously do. I love girldick, just like i love all other female genitals. The thing is, even tho i’d find what i have between my legs super cute on another woman, it’s not what i need my body to be like. Those dangly parts down there shouldn’t dangle, they’re configured in a way that feels debilitatingly wrong to me and that needs to be fixed, which is in my case only possible by taking the balls and most of the erectile tissie out and rearranging the rest into a clit, vulva and vagina. Not all transfems need to go that far, there’s other surgical options, hormones also alter the penis in surprisingly profound ways already and i’ve found that even the penis of a trans woman that is medically pre-everything isn’t the same as a man’s penis (more on all of that below). But no matter how we want to go about this, altering our genitals may be a life and death issue for some of us. You can’t brush that aside because you want me to cum in your mouth. Especially not when this boils down to an attempt to talk somebody out of a surgery they’ve saved up for for years, and /or had to jump through all kinds of gatekeeping hoops and get on endless waiting lists. It’s often incredibly hard to get bottom surgery, all of us have thought about that step for years when we do it, so telling us we should reconsider when we finally get to get the genitals we need just because you want to be railed by me just doesn’t fly. Get yourself a dildo. Buy your gf a strap-on. But never, ever dare to try and take this away from us.

• demanding us to perform in sexual roles we’re not comfortable with. I’m not saying there aren’t trans women who want to top other people, but chasers have this porn-bred expectation that the primary sexual function of a trans woman is to fuck them in the ass and that’s something a lot of us not only do not want to, but physically can’t do even if we’re unoperated. Like i said above, hormones alter our genitals on an organic level. Girldick doesn’t just smell, taste and feel different from the male penis, it also usually functions more like a clit than a penis. This does not only mean it will respond better to vibration than to traditional male wanking behaviors, it also means that erectile “dysfunction” is a common, and in a lot of cases, absolutely desired effect of hormone replacement therapy. That doesn’t go for all of us, but never wanting to have an erection again isn’t exactly rare among transfems. I can’t believe i need to stress this, but we’re not men with tits. Yet that’s what a lot of chasers want when dating us.

Like i said before, it’s ok to want to get topped by trans women. It’s ok to be into girldick. But you need to understand that these are issues that are complicated and often extremely painful for a lot of us and that this is more important than some rando’s sexual fantasies. You cannot put your hornyness above our dignity and wellbeing.

Like others have said it depends. Me and my wife and poly and don’t run into them IRL really. But we don’t use apps very much which is apparently where the majority of them are.

Basically to my understanding its the same as any other sex pest. Be aware of your needs and boundaries. If someone pushes them stand firm and tell them to get lose. Respect yourself, you don’t need to cave to malicious demands or someone who talks about you or your people like they are objects. You do not have to settle for the first human shape thing that shows you the likeness of kindness. You and everyone deserves genuine kindness. Not love bomb stuff used as a weapon.

How likely you are to encounter them probably depends on a lot of things like where you live and what you do. I rarely encounter them irl, but they are all over dating apps - like the majority of likes I get or whatever are from chasers

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.

I’ve never encountered one irl, but there’s a fair few online.

It really depends on what your goals are, and what kinds of relationships you hope to have. The problem with chasers is that they tend to fetishize parts of us (broadly speaking) that we would (again, broadly speaking) rather not have in the first place, or something to that effect. Consequently, this means that a chaser tends to have a fundamental disregard for their trans partner’s feelings. I.e., they are shitty partners and it tends to show up in more ways than just one.

Chasers fetishise traits - in this case, trans-ness, but it can be seen in many ways as a broader term: anyone who fetishises you regardless of whether it’s about being trans, your race, your weight, or something else is a chaser.

The question to ask yourself is “are they interested in me because I’m ___, or as a person?”.

somebody who ”chases” trans individuals for their own sexual gratification rooted in stereotypes

Kat Blaque did a video on chasers recently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7MK2Pesago