Recently, I decided to take a jaunt down to New Orleans for Jazzfesst 2024. Since restrictions have been lifted, I love to travel, and I’ve made a point of taking advantage of the little bit of extra cash I have to explore the places I’ve once dreamed of. New Orleans was, for me, a fantasy land for so long. It was the setting for many of my favorite bits of media. When I first went to New Orleans it was to speak at Tulane University and ever since then, I fell in love. The air in New Orleans is heavy, the streets full of history and perseverance. It’s a city that shouldn’t exist, but continues to. I suppose it’s that spirt that I feel also flows through me. Perhaps that’s why I always feel so at home there. I’m aware of the fact that I see New Orleans through the lens of a tourist, but it’s one of the few places I’ve visited that I’ve decided I must visit at least once a year. So when an executive told me they were going to the first week of the fest, I figured that would be a good excuse to go there myself. While I was in town, I did what I usually do when I travel. Cultivate my experience the old fashioned way; showing a bit of leg and looking for a handsome man with a bit more knowledge of the local scene. I always try to do the locals; I mean, what the locals do.

I enjoy using dating apps as a way to connect men to local men on my travels. Frankly, it’s become a bit of a life hack for me because I find that the shit that pops up on Google is never as good as the shit you stumble into with a handsome guide. On this trip, it wasn’t looking like I’d be able to find one. I was just in town for the weekend and as it turns out, people had plans! However, I connected with this one guy who was also visiting New Orleans, but had lived here for many years. He was peculiar, quirky and dominant. All qualities I tend to prefer in men. He, along with his wife and children were all visiting NOLA for Jazzfest as well! How awesome that we managed to cross paths! He was a white man from the east coast and we had a lot of mutual interests and commonality. I organize sex positive events and as it turns out, so did he and his wife. So on Saturday evening when he invited me to meet him at a bar with his wife, as I had nothing else to do and no other handsome guides to show me around, I said fuck it! I’m a lot more openminded on vacation, I suppose.

I think one of my most pronounced areas of hypocrisy is when I’m looking for men locally, I tend to be very very discerning, especially nowadays. If I’m being frank, I like men but don’t trust them to be honest with me, or themselves, on average. Something I pieced together a bit too late is that a lot of men actually enjoy securing sexual experiences through some form of coercion or dishonesty. A few weeks ago, this guy who recently got back with his girlfriend wanted to fuck me in the back of his car while his girlfriend was fast asleep. I said no, of course (I only fuck men with girlfriends if their girlfriend is fully aware of it), but that’s stuck with me for the past week or so. When we were having our regular thing, he was a sweetheart. When we called it off, he revealed to me how willing he was to lie because it turned him on. It disappointed me because it reaffirmed my hesitation to connect with men.

I am a polyamorous black transgender woman in her 30s… I basically exist in this very genuine, very open, cards are all on the table kinda way. I have better sex when I’m honest, which is why if I plan on having sex with someone, always tell them that I’m transgender. I just don’t have the patience for experiences that are less than satisfying to me at this point in my life… but I guess when i’m on vacation I have more patience… and lower standards. I’m sure to some people reading this, it seems like I may be using men for local food and drink suggestions and company, but to me, I’m getting something (usually for free) from men who overwhelmingly only have a desire to use me. Requiring that they meet me somewhere public usually gets rid of most of the users and fetishists. And I suppose if I’m going to start dating someone that I meet while on vacation, it’s gonna be the man with the plan who takes initiative. Otherwise, i’m pretty fine on my own. In general, I’ve had a lot of positive experiences with this approach and one of my current long term partners is a man I met while on vacation in Portland and I care for him very much… but back to this guy.

So I pull up to Anna’s bar on Royal, and he’s there with his wife, who is absolutely exhausted from traveling on the same day. Transparently, I consumed an entire Delta-9 lollipop on my walk over, and it didn’t quite hit until I started sharing a joint with them. The wife waited for her uber back to the hotel, but I was glad that I got to meet her. I get so tired of married men not communicating with their wives that it really engendered a degree of trust within me that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have. I’ve met a lot of married men on my trips who are trying to cheat on their wives and I guess that’s what always disappoints me about New Orleans. NOLA is essentially the Las Vegas of the south. A lot of people go there to let loose in ways they wouldn’t back home. It’s clear that for that reason, some of the men who travel to New Orleans are particularly fascinated by me. When I say that my standards are often lower when I travel, mean that in LA, it’s very hard for me to justify making time to meet up with anyone unless I’ve had extensive conversations with them that indicate that they are not fetishizing me. Being a black transgender woman, there are a lot of men who only seem to be able to interact with me through the lens of fetishism. I don’t enjoy that, so generally it’s important to me that really clarify if someone is interested in me, or just trying to fulfill a fantasy.

But fuck it. Let’s have a good time. We’re in New Orleans .

He takes me to Frenchman Street where we listen to some live jazz in the little red bar on the corner. I always try to go to The Apple Barrel when I’m in town. We wait for the band to play and continue talking about ourselves and I learn a lot about him and some of the really cool renovations he’s done recently. I have a weakness for men who build things. He actually shares a lot of qualities with my partner in Portland who is also hand-y and enjoys making large and unruly things, but also delicate things like jewelry. To me, little things like that set a good foundation for me having a fascination with someone as an individual. I also build and create things, but feel like my job doesn’t often allow me the freedom to do as much as I’d like. So it’s always cool when I see other people build and create things.

After listening to some jazz, we went to this really cool event at The Domino and danced the night away. I love to dance, and he was pretty good at it. I feel like you can always tell if a man’s good in bed by how he dances. I pretty much never sleep with the men I meet on vacation, but if I’m being honest, I was becoming curious. I’ve recently realize that I’ve held myself back from having a lot of experiences because of trauma and I’ve been trying to push through that. I tend to hold myself back a lot from connecting with people, and it’s usually because I have a long history of sharing my body with men who didn’t really respect it. Like I said earlier, I’ve accepted that far too many men actually get off on expressing some form of dishonesty that encourages you to make yourself sexually available to them. So even when I really want to, or the idea is hot to me, I usually don’t actually do it. Transparently, I also have 4 long term partners whose sexual health I care for and that also stops me from doing it, even if it’s something my partners would be ok with. None of them go it on the first night. I had to develop trust with them. I had to learn that they truly meant what they said because I’ve learned so many men will simply say the right thing to get the result they desire. Frankly, I’m in the phase of my life where I am the most sexually satisfied. Where I’m finally able to open my eyes, enjoy sex and closeness for real intimacy shared between two people who greatly care for one another. For most my life, sex has been a performance I do for the satisfaction of those who lie to me, but have things I need. What I’ve wanted doesn’t matter. But my partners know me, I know them, I trust them and I have no question about their intentions. I don’t question whether they fetishize me or are simply with me because they are excited by our racial difference. I know that they’re there for me and that allows me to relax and give myself to them fully. I may be ambiently flirty, but I’m not generally very intimate or open with men unless I know I can trust them.

Monday morning, I had to check out of my AirBnB and I had a few hours to kill so him and I went on a ghost tour with him around the quarter. I’ve been on many of these at this point, but it was still really enjoyable and it was nice to spend more time with him. Even though I haven’t been really receptive to new partners recently, I did like him and before saying goodbye to him, I told him that I’d love to visit him on the east coast as he lives in one of the cities I know the least about. It would be nice to go somewhere and just have someone, especially someone you already connected with. Especially someone you’re already attracted to. But my feelings around this started to shift after the fact and I was reminded of why I don’t typically agree to connect with people so quickly.

He would send me point-by-point updates of his vacation. I thought those were kinda fun because he was doing things with his kids that I didn’t even know were options on my trip. I’ve only experienced New Orleans as a sexually liberated adult so it was cool to see what someone would do on a family vacation. I enjoyed the updates, but I am not a very prolific texter. I try to not be on my phone more than I need to so i’m not as responsive as I’m sure he wanted me to be. One of the peculiar updates he kept sending me though, were photos of several black women whom he thought looked exactly like me. The first was a photo of a photo in a coffee shop. A black girl with brown/black locs and glasses wearing black. Her facial features didn’t look anything like mine, and her hair was abit longer, but I guess she had a but of a gothy style so okay maybe I see how he could think we looked alike. Then he sent another of a street performer with, at least to me, very obviously east African features that don’t look much at all like my west African features. This one had long box braids and she was a street performer, so I suppose she expected to have her photo taken? But still, she looked nothing like me. She was just black with a vaguely similar hair style. She was gorgeous, but looked nothing like me. Then he sent me another photo. A black woman dining with a white man. She had longer locs and a much more conservative style and it occurred to me that he was just walking around taking photos of black women… this was odd. Mind you, New Orleans has a very large black population. In fact, that’s one of the things I enjoy about it! So it’s not like…it’s uncommon for black women to be in New Orleans. It just occurred to me that FOR HIM, it must be particularly exciting to see a black woman. And that’s when it really occurred to me that while he may have appreciated other aspects of me, he was more fixated on our racial difference than I had realized.

I suppose this is the point where I tell you, from my perspective, why this felt like I was being fetishized and how that compares to my current partners who are white who very much do not do that. Firstly, I can’t actually think of a time any of my partners have compared me to other black women, and if they did, they were women who actually did look like me and shared features or a style that was similar to mine. It’s not so much the comparison that feels fetish-y to me as much as you’d have to have a very narrow perspective to think I would be excited to see… another black woman. It reminds me of the time where I was a regular at this bar and I would get constantly mixed up with a much younger, much shorter, much thinner, black girl with a very different style. When someone slipped up and called me by her name, it was clear to me that all they saw between us was our race. Despite the fact that we were cartoonishly different in both style and personality, to the white person primarily seeing our race, we are essentially the same person. And it’s not so much seeing our race that’s the issue, it’s the fact that you see nothing else that is. When white people do this, I know that they are simply not having the same experience. They see us as interchangeable and barely unique. It would be be understandable if we had a similar cadence or aura, but we almost never do. So someone showing me photos of other black women, knowing how horny they were for me, makes it clear to me that they carry a similar type of unconscious bias that is accented by their sexual attraction towards me. It’s very obviously racial fetishism to me and none of my current partners have come close to doing anything like this to me. They recognize that I am uniquely Kathryn.

I wrote on this blog a while back that despite currently having multiple white men as partners, I think my desire to date new white men has very much dwindled specifically because of stuff like this. Yes, I’m a black woman and yes, my skin is beautiful, but I’m much more than that. I was attracted to this guy because he seemed creative, open minded, quirky and he enjoyed building and creating things. Those are the primary features that stood out to me about him, not his race. However, when he was thinking of me, he thought mostly of my race. This is a massive issue with, I’d say, most white men. Even the “woke” white men often carry deeply established bias that will always define me as the other. I heard so much about his wife, her qualities and what made her uniquely attractive and none of those things related to her race. I’m sure if I pointed out random white women with short hair and curvy bodies, he’d be defensive of his wife being unique to those women. However, for him, my race is a large factor and it’s not lost on me that this is a very common pattern among white men who marry white women.

I’ve often been seen as the exotic other by men who choose to build their front facing, socially acceptable relationships with white cis women. That guy who wanted to cheat with me wanted to keep his white cis partner in the dark. He saw me as the cheap sex object and her as the thing to protect and hold onto. He got off on the dishonesty and while he blew smoke up my ass about how hot and amazing I was, he still chose me as his mistress and it’s hard for me to ignore the racial dynamic there. When I point this out, I’m always met with arguments about how it has nothing to do with race, there’s just far more white women in the country, but I’ve lived through this enough times to know what is and what isn’t. It’s not just a coincidence that within the polyamorous world, I know several black women who do not have primary partners, but are often on the receiving end of fixation and fascination from white men who are married to white women. Coincidences happen, but there’s probably a reason why my primary partner is a man of color. Very few white men are able to see women of color as anything more than something fun they do on the side or on their way to pursuing a relationship with a white woman that gives them more social capital. White men will deny this and say i’m projecting, but like I said, i’m a polyamorous black trans woman in her 30s; my patience around this is thin and I don’t want to put myself in another relationship where I have to later calculate that I was just being fetishized.

So, I hesitated, but I decided to draw this to his attention. To express that these messages made me feel fetishized and that I didn’t like being in this position. Perhaps to him, it felt odd that I’d get the impression that he was racially fetishizing me, but what else am I to conclude from him sending me several photos of black women who look nothing like me interspersed between messages about his sexual desire for me? He was initially receptive to hearing what I had to say and was very deeply apologetic. He brought up his autism for the first time; a very common defense I’ve fielded when white men have made me or someone I’ve known uncomfortable. This guy was much older than me and while I completely believe he made it to that age, but didn’t quite know that what he did was odd, I know plenty of autistic people who’d know better. That aside, I still didn’t want to declaratively state that he WAS a fetishist, I just wanted to communicate to him that he was making me feel that way. I only told him that because we had a positive experience and I really wanted to continue speaking with him, but I was starting to lose interest as his following question made me realized he likely DID racially fetishize me.

I was entertaining the conversation under the premise that he probably wasn’t actually fetishizing me until he tried to essentially argue that I was being hypocritical because my profile says, “I like Daddies.”. From that, I pieced together that he likely actually DOES fetishize black women and trans women because that’s really the only way that argument makes sense. The premise of the question equates my attraction to older dominant, caretaking type men to his fetishism of the skin I was born with and the gender I did not choose. I’ve had these arguments with a lot of white men who fetishize me. When he said this, I regretted mentioning it to him at all because so often “hey this makes me feel uncomfortable” is seen as a open invitation for debate. I’ve learned from my own mistakes that it doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean it that way, sometimes your actions can make someone feel that way. How you respond to that feedback is often an indication of where you’re at. I had no such desire to debate with him, I was just expressing how he made me feel and whether he meant it or not, I still felt that way and trying to essentially say “well you do it too” really indicated to me that we were not having the same conversation at all, and that he was indeed fetishizing aspects of me. There’s a very distinct difference between me being fetishized for my race and/or gender and me being attracted to “Daddies”. I told him I would write in my blog to explain the difference, though it seems very obvious to me.

I’ve spoken many times on this blog about how fetishism alienates me largely because of a collection of very ignorant, untrue, hurtful tropes that I simply do not embody. When you’re a black transgender woman, you are stereotyped as an aggressive, dominant person with an incredibly large penis that you specifically use to dominate and subjugate white men. I’ve been on hormones for almost 2 decades, so there is no BBC to be found, and there wasn’t even before HRT. Many men who get off on this fetish don’t seem to understand that their shemale porn fantasies are just that, fantasies. That you will very rarely meet a transgender woman who is far into their transition who is well endowed because hormones actually decrease the size of your genitalia. While there are transgender women who are well endowed, they’re often trans women who are living in a way that often combats the long term goals of medical transition; if they even are on HRT to begin with. I’m 33 years old, and I started my hormonal transition at 19. I also am averse to dominating a man because of trauma and without getting into too much information, I couldn’t physically penetrate someone even if I wanted to. But for the fetishist, this is the primary fixation and I feel alienated by it because it’s not something I can perform, neither mentally or physically. It is simply not an option. So when men approach me with their fetishes, I have to then devote most of our time to explaining to them that I am submissive, I don’t want to fuck them; I can’t fuck them and I am not their fantasy, but a reality. So often, when I say these things, you can hear the disappointment in their voices. Sometimes I’ve been very clear about this being how I feel, only for men to, once again, believe that they can dishonestly trick me into changing my mind and making myself sexually available to them. it’s a very distinct line in the sand for me, but men who are fetishists are so aggressively fixated on it that they have historically violated my consent just so they can get off. That’s the major reason I don’t hook up with men. I’ve had so many experiences of men touching me where I don’t want to be touched and then being upset with me that I don’t enjoy what I told them I didn’t want. They never think I mean what I say.

I’m someone who has experienced immense trauma at the hands of much older men, and I know that’s largely why I “like Daddies”. Now that it’s age-appropriate, I feel less bad about being attracted to older, responsible, protective men who enjoy leading in relationships. Unlike skin-tone or gender, no one is inherently a “Daddy”. Most older men aren’t Daddies, hell I’d say most men with kids aren’t even Daddies. To me, a Daddy is a very particular type of man and it’s a position that is earned through a demonstration of ability, not bestowed upon you because of gender. I feel very silly calling all men Daddy because most men don’t deserve the title; especially the title of being mine. So no, I don’t fetishize older men the way he fetishizes black women. It takes a lot more for me.

Fetishism is a very complex issue, but to me, it comes hand in hand with being dehumanized. When people fetishize me, it’s very clear that I had no real choice or ability to self-define. I don’t just get to be Kathryn, a woman with eclectic interests, an incurable wanderlust and a base desire to give myself to a man who’s gained my trust. I’m a collection of assumptions, stereotypes and ex girlfriends who were also black or trans. I’m never allowed to just organically define myself, I must adhere to a series of stereotypes, or disappoint the person interested in fetishizing me. Often times when men find out I’m serious about not dominating them, they’re disappointed. When they find out that Im not a sexually aggressive hip hop video vixen, they’re disappointed. And I’ve witnessed this disappointment through my life. It’s part of why I really connect with the minority of men who’ve educated themselves enough to actually see me.

When it comes to fetishism, my unpopular opinion is that everyone should be honest about it. I’m a pretty kinky person, but I don’t have many fetishes at all, and the few I do aren’t based on things people can’t change. This guy had all the woke markers on his and that made me feel comfortable enough to connect with him, but my experience of him after didn’t make me feel like he was “woke” at all. I think some people paint over their still-developing politic with definitive declarations of how progressive they are and this acts as a sort of bandaid that helps them ignore a much deeper wound left by being socialized in a society where isms are seen as solidly factual and contradicting them requires more than saying just a few poppy phrases. I would expect messages like that from someone whose first message to me was “I love black girls” or “I love black shemales”. As a person, I hold a lot of space for mistakes. I don’t expect perfection and I don’t expect people to always get it immediately. It’s clear to me that maybe if he doesn’t fetishize black women, he is still primarily seeing them as the other, and that excites him. I don’t want to be compared to other black women and I wasn’t comparing him to other white men. It would feel odd for me to do so, but likely because we live in a white supremacist society where the uniqueness of white people seems more pronounced to white people. That’s how subconscious biases work. I know he didn’t intend for me to have this reaction, but how confidently he sent it to me reveals that there’s still work to be done. And the thing is, most white men will likely never be interested in doing that work at all, and as a black woman who devotes and has devoted most of her living and waking hours to educating people about these things, it is exhausting to register that dating the average white guy comes with the burden of educating them. And even devoting a lot of time to figuring out if they’re fetishizing me is a lot of time and labor that I find less desirable with age. Many black women avoid dating white men all-together to just avoid having these experiences or doing that type of labor. And the older I get, I really get it. It’s hard for me to be attracted to men I’d have to teach not to dehumanize me.

All-in-all, I had a good time in New Orleans and while this was annoying, I’m not gonna say it ruined my trip because it didn’t. I really enjoyed the time we spent together, but it was another reminder of why I tend to be more discerning when it comes to men and why I probably shouldn’t easily entertain the interest of white men. At this point in my life, I can say that most of the white men who’ve expressed attraction to me were indeed fetishizing me. I’ve learned that when you withhold sex from these white men, you start to get a more reasonable vision of how they feel. If his wife hadn’t been so exhausted on this trip, we might have fooled around and I would have likely regretted that after putting two and two together. I find that white men who fetishize are very quick to rush you into bed and will lose interest if you don’t ever go for it. Each of my current partners pursued me pretty extensively over a course of time before we ever had sex; and like I said earlier, I’m in a phase of good sex with men I trust. The best sex of my life. At the end of the day, I’ve unfortunately shared my body with a lot of men who fetishize me and that sex is always so forgettable, but the trauma it’s caused, so memorable. I deserve better. My body is not a rehabilitation center for men.