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The New Chaser: Objectification of Trans Women in the Age of Performative Allyship

In June of 2024, queer and trans-owned magazine Autostraddle published “A Trans Guy’s Guide to Picking Up a Trans Girl”. Written by Buzzfeed alum Gabe Dunn, the article immediately became the subject of debate with over 200 more comments than any of the author’s other articles. Many took offense, describing the article’s suggestions as “manipulative,” “dehumanizing,” and “transmisogynystic claptrap.” Indeed, the article reads more like a man trying desperately to hide his objectification of trans women behind a veil of queer solidarity and pithy stereotypes than real dating advice. Many claimed Dunn to be a chaser, someone who pursues trans women out of a fetishistic sexual desire rather than actual romantic interest. Though the article itself was not taken down, Autostraddle deleted social media posts about the article after significant public backlash.

Amid these negative comments, there were also several trans women who wrote they wished someone would show them the care and interest the article suggests; how could someone be a chaser, they seem to say, if they take the time to listen to you and engage in your interests? Dunn does not fit with the image of chasers they know: those chasers are often cis men who are not afraid to put their vapid fetishization and dehumanizing beliefs at the forefront. They show no interest outside of physical anatomy, and imply or outright threaten physical violence if the object of their desire shows any agency or self-worth. They make it clear that trans women need to fit into a narrow caricature of objectified submissiveness, and that their personalities and interests don’t matter. Dunn’s article seemingly contains none of these red flags, and even suggests an understanding and connection with trans women. Yet the criticisms are hardly unfounded, and upon closer inspection a different set of more subtle and insidious warning signs emerges.

The truth is that even people with a nominative interest in trans womens’ lives, interests, and personhood can be chasers; in fact, chasers have shifted away from blatant objectification and towards veiled transmisogyny as trans issues and identities have gained stronger footholds in American culture. New chasers know what not to say and how not to act, but they haven’t analyzed any of their biases. They don’t see trans women as people worthy of real respect, but they know that the rulebook for interacting with trans women has changed. Performance of allyship makes it easier for chasers to get close to trans women, to earn enough of their trust to start a relationship. These relationships can look healthy on the surface, but often still involve the chaser hurting their partner emotionally, socially, or even physically when their biases inevitably surface.

Transgender people, and trans women specifically, are often the target of performative allyship even outside of romance and sex. There is a significant gap between how many people will put rainbow flags in windows or make supportive posts on social media and how many will actually support and defend trans women. For example, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—an annual women-only music festival started in 1976—adopted a trans-exclusionary “womyn-born-womyn” attendance policy in 1991. A survey of attendees conducted a year later showed that 73% supported trans women attending the festival, and trans women held an annual protest against the festival starting in 1995. Despite this, the festival organizers refused to change the transmisogynstic policy, and the festival saw consistent attendance for another 20 years until it closed its doors in 2015. Similar patterns of virtue signaling and empty support emerge on the personal level: the number of people who listen to and care about trans women is much higher than the number who continue to do so when sex is off the table. The new chaser takes up a significant portion of this gap. They claim to care about trans women and act the part of a respectful ally, but only ever in the context of sex, as Dunn’s “pick-up article” clearly shows.

Pick-up artistry has been dismissed as laughably sexist and ineffective since the late 2000s. Even the man who helped invent it has called its community “hateful” and “wounded”. Yet Gabe Dunn’s article shows how even the most sexist parts of dating culture can be repackaged as cute or endearing by smothering them in a veneer of queerness. By using progressive language, tongue-in-cheek references to common dating qualms, and appealing to a common queer identity, Dunn manages to put a new coat of rainbow paint on a familiar misogynistic practice. Even the title of the article admits the sexist structure that Dunn is drawing from, with nothing more than a transgender modifier slapped on the front. This use of queerness to disguise bigotry shows how, as usual, trans women have to be on guard for people who would use and dispose of us. It shows that there are still plenty of people who only think of us as sexual prospects they can trick into bed, even if those tricks have become a bit more sophisticated.

The negative comments are insightful and call attention to several hypocrisies within Dunn’s writing that reveal his underlying transmisogynistic beliefs. He suggests that his readers should “get to know her interests” and “listen to her,” but then relies on Reddit-born stereotypes to describe those hypothetical interests; niche video games, EDM, avant-garde film, and Dungeons & Dragons, among others. He refers to these hypothetical trans women as “the dolls,” which is at best a misguided use of a term specific to within the transfem community and at worst a dehumanizing diminutive. He congratulates the reader on the possibility of “enlightening and hella hot” sex, and makes the specific note to avoid complimenting her tits right away, “even if they are great tits. (You can compliment those later).” Despite all of his comments on how “stunning” and “unconventional” trans women are, he also bemoans that his readers have the “responsibility” to ask for a follow up date. Every paragraph seems to introduce stranger and more insulting ways to talk about a woman you’ve just met.

If all else fails, he suggests the reader “invite her to a trans thing,” a vague concept he puts little effort into defining even as he repeatedly proposes that the reader appeal to queer identity to pick up trans women. He repeats three times that trans guys have “advantage[s] over basic cis men,” and can use the “societal conditioning” that makes trans women trust trans men over cis men “to their advantage.” He even goes so far as to poke fun at the idea of “choosing the bear,” a commentary on the banality of sexual assault that asserts women would sooner choose to be alone in the woods with a wild animal than a man. It is as though Dunn is flipping a coin with every sentence, with one face saying that his readers need to show respect and interest for trans women and the other saying they are little more than targets to be reached. It’s this juxtaposition of queer solidarity and gross manipulation of trans women's preconceptions—this dichotomy of apparent feminist enlightenment and hidden sexist objectification——that typifies the new chaser.

The new chaser pays lip service to feminist ideas to get close, preying on the insecurity and vulnerability so many trans women experience. They make small talk, pay shallow compliments, giving just enough to establish a facade of allyship and respect. Once they’ve earned their target’s trust, they push the relationship towards sex. Often this is abrupt, and sometimes clumsy: it could be a shy text message asking for sex after months of silence, a sudden invasion of personal space during a lunch-and-bitch, or interrupting a trans woman mid-sentence to suggest they go back to their place to “netflix and chill”. The defining feature of this abrupt sexualization is that it is not a performance of genuine desire, but a bid for social control. Prominent transfeminist author Julia Serano calls this trans-sexualization, where “rather than empowering [trans women],” sexualization and sex itself is used to “leverage power over them.” For the new chaser, sexualization is primarily about keeping a trans woman under their influence rather than appreciating her as a person.

Someone being clumsy or forward with their sexual intent is not in and of itself chaser behavior or trans-sexualization. Unfortunately, the only way to know for certain is to see what happens when a trans woman turns them down, or when they get bored of whatever sex she does agree to. If they respect her boundaries and communicate openly with her, they are trustworthy. For the new chaser, however, any rejection is a sign that the game is over and they are free to show the vitriol, objectification, and villainization they’ve kept below the surface. When they no longer see their victim as a sexual prospect, they reveal how integral that sexualization was to their image of her—to their ability to treat her as human. Serano describes how common it is for chasers to act “dumbfounded and angered by [her] unwillingness to engage them” in a sexual nature, “as if the only reason to be out as transsexual was to[...] solicit sexual attention.” New chasers will accuse their victim of leading them on, playing with their feelings, manipulating or deceiving them. If she expresses her own feelings of hurt or manipulation, the chaser will say it’s unfair of her to attack them or assume their intentions. They’ll spread gossip about her in order to isolate her from the community. To them, the trans woman has stopped being a sexual object and instead become a bogeyman of sexual perversion, sociopathy, and deceit; they switch instantly and irreversibly to rhetoric that sounds much more like a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) than the trans ally they claimed to be.

Any trans woman who has dealt with these new chasers will explain how it feels like a mask is dropped or a cover torn off. It’s a betrayal, and it hurts. It leaves you confused, disoriented, and—since these new chasers commonly first attempt to isolate their prey—often without a strong support network to fall back on. But the bigger issue is that many victims of these new chasers never reject them, never see the mask slip. Many aren’t comfortable or practiced with upholding their own boundaries, so the chaser just uses them and tosses them aside, leaving the woman to think that there’s something wrong with her. This is why this issue is so important: these people traumatize our sisters. Too many have fallen victim to objectification and emotional betrayal, have suffered years of manipulation and abuse because they settled for the bare minimum. Over and over, trans women have said “they don’t misgender me” or “they listen to me sometimes” in defense of their chaser partners. That’s how poorly we are treated. How can we be proactive in preventing this mistreatment; what are the signs we can look for to protect ourselves?

In a perverse sort of luck, chasers can never completely hide the way they think about trans women. There are indicators you can look for, both in how they interact with others and how they interact with you. Look at the other people they hang out with: a room full of queer people lacking in trans women is a red flag. A group with one trans woman can be even worse, because she is almost certainly at the center of a storm of disrespect. Keep track of how people talk about trans women when they aren’t in the room. Is it a lot of gossip and sex jokes and not much else? Do they engage in callout culture? Are they just friends with any of the trans women they may know, or is it always sexual? If you have other transfem friends, don’t be afraid to ask if any have had bad experiences with this person. If they have a dating profile or you know their hookup preferences, do they only sleep with trans women? Do they only talk about trans women as doms and tops?

Pay attention to how they treat you: do they actually give you space to feel vulnerable, or does it feel like you’re inconveniencing them? Do they take an active interest in learning about you, or does it always end up being about them? Do they respect your boundaries, or do they get upset and accuse you of not liking or trusting them? Do they acknowledge the ways they can hurt others, or do they only ever act like they’re the victim? Are they capable of having a tough discussion without turning it into an argument or fight? If there is an argument or a fight, do they resort to personal insults or play the victim card instead of trying to understand your perspective?

Many of these are signs of emotionally unstable and manipulative people in general, rather than chasers specifically, but this is because chasers are manipulative and unstable people at their core. Even if they end up not being a new chaser, someone who fills a lot of these criteria is probably an unhealthy person to be around. It is also important to note that there are also still classic chasers out there, who do nothing to hide the way they objectify trans women. In reality these new chasers have probably been around just as long, but as performative allyship and politically correct language become more prevalent, so too does the type of person who will use those things to their advantage.

The more difficult question to answer is how to deal with the fallout of rejecting a new chaser. It can be incredibly hard to drop someone like this cleanly after they have latched onto you. The fallout may take the form of a loud, emotional confrontation or a quiet campaign of gossip and whispers, but it’s exhausting and awful to experience no matter how it looks. Unfortunately, this seems inevitable. It is the way chasers keep their power after the game is up—if you are the villain, then no one looks too hard at how they acted, and they can repeat the process with the next trans woman. Your best defense is to build a group of people you trust, tell them clearly and honestly what’s been going on, and hope they will have your back. For every chaser like Gabe Dunn who invites you to their place to play Fallout: New Vegas (which, by the way, is single-player) or takes you to so-called “queer events” because the only thing you have in common is queerness, there are a dozen trans women who have dealt with them and know what to look out for. Build your community, and look for the signs. The hope is to starve them out; force them to actually introspect and do the work of reckoning with their own transmisogyny. In the interim, it is enough to simply keep our own safe and secure.

WORKS CITED

Dunn, Gabe. “A Trans Guy’s Guide to Picking up a Trans Girl.” Autostraddle, 18 June 2024, www.autostraddle.com/a-trans-guys-guide-to-picking-up-a-trans-girl/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Nancy J. Burkholder (28 April 1993). "MWMF Anti-TS Awareness: 1992 Gender Survey Results (forwarded email message)". Google Groups. Archived from the original on 22 January 2011. Retrieved 18 June 2019.

Notopoulos, Katie. “The Man Who Helped Invent Pickup Artist Culture Now Sees It as “Hateful.”” BuzzFeed News, 23 Oct. 2015, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/neil-strauss-is-worried-about-pickup-artists. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl. Seal Press, 14 May 2007.

"InYourFace News Interview with Riki Anne Wilchins". Camp Trans. 25 August 1999. Archived from the original on August 17, 2000. Retrieved 17 October 2024.

Macdonald, Jocelyn (October 24, 2018). "Setting the Record Straight About MichFest". AfterEllen. Archived from the original on December 19, 2018. Retrieved 10 September 2019

Wikipedia contributors. "TERF (acronym)." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 16 Oct. 2024. Web. 17 Oct. 2024.

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