In her 2023 Netflix special It’s Great to be Here, comedian Michelle Wolf makes two trans jokes. The second joke comes in the context of a segment that touches on themes of sexual violence and the racialized innocence of white women. Wolf mentions the statistics on femicide and notes “and then I heard about all these trans women getting murdered and assaulted. And all I could think of when I heard that was, ‘Welcome.’” It’s a tired joke because of how familiar this trope is for so many trans feminine people. It feels like a rite of passage to be “welcomed” to womanhood, often by very well-intentioned cis women, in precisely this sort of context. “Jump on in,” Wolf goes on to joke, “the water is terrible. And full of missing women.” The joke is met by a combination of groans and uncomfortable laughter that builds over time as the audience seems to settle into the joke. Wolf goes on to reference the statistical data showing that trans women are murdered at higher rates than our cis counterparts, but asks speculatively whether this is because we are trans or “cause they’re not used to presenting as a woman?” It’s worth noting that the implicit claim embedded within the joke—that is, the thing that we understand to give Wolf the credibility to even jokingly welcome us to womanhood—is that cis women enjoy a special relationship to objectification and the kinds of violence presumptively enabled by it. And given that the context of this joke actually occurs as an aside in the midst of a bit directed at white (cis) women, there’s also an insidious racial logic to the claim that is not unique to Wolf’s joke.
I’ve always been suspicious of this claim. It’s difficult to look at the histories of white supremacy without attending to the specifically gendered and sexual nature of those histories and their ongoing manifestations. The notion that the objectification of white women forms the core experience of womanhood seems determined to reproduce the kinds of ungendering that women of color have routinely been forced to undergo by allowing feminist scholars and activists to develop accounts of objectification that are wholly divorced from the material conditions of our lives. Moreover, I wonder about the idea that trans fems need to be welcomed into objectification, as though we have not experienced it (a claim which might presume that we all “used to be” white men) and as though that welcome itself might not in fact point to specific contours of the forms of objectification to which we are routinely subjected.
In a recent advice column for Autostraddle, Gabe Dunn offers their advice to trans mascs hoping to find a trans fem partner. I happened on the pick-up guide as it made its way through trans Twitter with mostly critical commentary. The advice in question is largely reminiscent of what might be produced if a pick-up artist sat through a yearlong DEI training (the surface has changed but the product remains otherwise unchanged) and is itself fairly unremarkable in that way. What is remarkable, however, is how it presents the question of objectification with respect to trans people in general and T4T relationships in particular. Ironically, the most interesting thing about Dunn’s advice is how Dunn inverts the tired trope of welcoming trans fems to womanhood by welcoming us to being objectified; instead, Dunn welcomes trans mascs to doing the objectifying.
Sexual objectification is a topic that tends to excite our political sensibilities; whenever the topic of sexuality comes up in my classes, it’s one of the first things students grab onto. Of course, this makes sense; we run into it every day. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to point out that this fixation on objectification in sexual contexts tends to miss the broader problems. Accounts of sexual objectification tend to either treat it as a problem strictly related to sexuality and gender or to assume that sexual objectification precedes other forms of objectification. Thus, sexual objectification is a problem both in itself and because it enables other forms of objectification to occur. The latter claim is worth exploring much further than I can in this brief blog post, so I’ll set it aside for now (but I will note that Talia Bettcher’s “When Tables Speak” is one place you might turn to if you’re curious). The former, that sexual objectification itself is a kind of moral injury, has been amply explored by feminist philosophers and philosophers of sexuality. I’ll narrow the question by asking if there’s a right way to desire trans people in particular.
It’s certainly possible to discuss trans desire without discussing chasers, but I suspect we have a great deal to learn by considering them here. Chaser is a term used to describe someone, usually a cis person and the typical example is a cis man, who is attracted to trans people because of their trans status and for whom this attraction is expressed through behaviors often described as fetishistic. If you were to peruse a site like Twitter for trans people discussing chasers, you might walk away believing that trans people hold universally negative views of chasers. I say might because it would, of course, depend on the particular rabbit hole you ended up in. Views are rather more mixed than one might otherwise assume. In his brief autoethnography of his own transition, entitled “In Defense of the Tranny Chaser,” Billy Huff asks, “What’s wrong with wanting to desire and fuck my trans masculine body? What’s wrong with desiring my own objectification?” For Huff, there is something specifically desirable about a partner who is openly, libidinally invested in the fact of one’s transness; that is, someone who desires not simply to fuck someone but to fuck, in this case, a trans masculine body. Chasers are often held up as the example par excellence of the wrong way to desire trans people precisely because of the kind of naked objectification implied in taking trans status as a primary category in the formation of a sexual desire.
If part of my goal here is to think through the specific forms of objectification targeting trans people while also holding that sexual objectification is not, by itself, a bad thing, it will be useful to clarify what forms of objectification might be objectionable or point to problematic background beliefs. I’ll suggest here that disgust is a useful starting point for such an analysis. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed describes disgust in the following way:
Disgust is clearly dependent upon contact: it involves a relationship of touch and proximity between the surfaces of bodies and objects. That contact is felt as an unpleasant intensity: it is not that the object, apart from the body, has the quality of “being offensive,” but the proximity of the object to the body is felt as offensive. The object must have got close enough to make us feel disgusted. As a result, while disgust over takes the body, it also takes over the object that apparently gave rise to it. The body is over taken precisely insofar as it takes the object over, in a temporary holding onto the detail of the surface of the object: its texture, its shape and form; how it clings and moves. It is only through such sensuous proximity that the object is felt to be so “offensive” that it sickens and over takes the body.
Ahmed also notes that disgust contains a kind of ambivalent orientation within it in which, as much as the disgusting object repels us, we cannot help but be drawn to it. Disgust is characterized, then, by a push-pull dynamic in which we both move to and recoil from the object of our disgust. Disgusting objects become particular sites of affective intensity for those disgusted by them in ways that are not dissimilar from how desirous objects might be. Indeed, much of what Ahmed gets up to in The Cultural Politics of Emotion lends itself well to the notion that desire and disgust might be intertwined with one another in the case of the disgusting object. In order, then, to identify problematic forms of trans objectification, we might look to how disgust plays a key affective and orienting role.
Julia Serano’s three types of transphobia are a useful starting point for thinking through how disgust so clearly serves as an affective orientation. The three types she describes are trans-unaware, trans-suspicious, and trans-antagonistic. Trans-unaware names those whom Serano refers to as “passively transphobic” (e.g., only expressing such attitudes when they come across a trans person, or when the subject is raised), noting they may be open to relinquishing those attitudes upon learning more about transgender lives and issues. Trans-suspicious persons might acknowledge that transgender people exist and should be tolerated (to some degree), but routinely question (and sometimes actively work to undermine) transgender perspectives and politics. This can often appear in the form of the person “just asking questions” or ones who continue to insist on highly medicalized approaches to trans life. The trans-antagonistic person, however, actively promotes anti-trans agendas (e.g., policies, laws, misinformation campaigns) and is highly unlikely to be moved by outreach or education; attacking trans people is a motivating factor in their life. We can think here of how trans people seem to live rent-free in some people’s minds. They appear to go out of their way to have reasons to talk about trans people, feverishly hunting down any mention (or not) of us in the news in order to weigh in and remind the world how disgusting we are. Is it any wonder, then, how whispers of trans desire tend to dog the heels of our most devoted haters?
As I said before, discussions of chasing tend to rely on the language of sexual fetish while glossing over the question of objectification embedded in it. At best, I worry that this framing has largely limited our analyses of chasing as a form of sexual desire because of the ways in which it attempts to form a strict binary between “good” forms of trans attraction (e.g., T4T) and “bad” forms. At worst, the description of chasing as sexual fetish runs the risk of pathologizing any form of trans attraction as expressed by cis people. Neither seems particularly helpful for understanding the present world in which trans people live, but I’ll focus on how these two concerns might run into one another. T4T has come to occupy in some trans spaces an almost ethico-political status; claiming T4T can be understood to not only name a particular way of being oriented sexually or romantically, but also to stand in for a particular claim of communal identification. As Amy Marvin has argued, however, T4T often serves as a form of cover that conceals the intracommunity failures of care and harm that can permeate trans spaces. Similarly, part of what T4T, as a form of sexual identification that carves out trans sexuality from cis sexuality, implies is that trans people do not engage in chasing behaviors toward one another or are constitutively incapable of doing so in virtue of trans identification. This kind of framing, however, fails to account for the ways in which T4T might actually share some significant features with chasing in terms of how an erotic object is formed. It also fails to account for the experience of being chased by another trans person, an experience that Dunn’s guide brings to the fore.
If we understand T4T as, at least in some cases, an erotic analog to political separatism, then it makes sense as a response for surviving a transphobic world. However, my contention here is that it doesn’t actually get us out of the problem of living in a world in which we are often cast as the kinds of disgusting objects that Ahmed describes. This is precisely because knowing that the person desiring us is also trans isn’t actually a sufficient condition, or even a necessary one, for knowing that that desire isn’t rooted in disgust. Without more careful analyses of sexual desire, we risk reproducing the very harms we’re trying to escape.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Tamsin Kimoto
Tamsin Kimoto is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. They also have a courtesy appointment in Asian American Studies and American Culture Studies at WashU. Their research interests include queer and trans of color studies, prison abolition, Asian American feminisms, science and technology studies, and Continental philosophy.
