I accept that in a transphobic society, there will always be people who fetishize me. What I don’t accept is that it is impossible to be attracted to a trans person and not have a fetish.
As a person in the BDSM community, I understand the nuance differences. There are people who fetishize the idea of a person being trans and this is often coupled with assumptions and projections about how they operate sexually. Fetishizing a trans person looks like pathologizing transness and never accepting that they exist beyond this pathology. It doesn’t look like a person finding me attractive, being interested in my body and even enjoying aspects of it that aren’t like a cis woman’s.
Trans bodies are not a representation of a fetish, and it’s only within a transphobic framework that our bodies are understood as such. When you accept trans women as women, it becomes easier to comprehend that while cis women may not experience being fetishized for being transgender explicitly, they are often fetishized for many other reasons. It is not the existence of those fetishes that then marks them as a fetish inherently. Fetishism is something that they experience; but it is not their experience nor is it does it define them. But the difference here is that our society at least grants them their gender, and the idea that they exist beyond that.
Because transgender people are stigmatized, they are often forced into doing sex work. For many transgender people, sex work is the way that they survive in a society where it has historically been legal to discriminate against them. The impact of that is that the vast majority of representation people have of transgender people is in some way connected to sex work and explicitly sex workers who need to fetishize themselves in order to survive. The understanding of trans people as an inherent fetish is largely connected to the fact that trans people are rarely allowed to represent themselves beyond this context.
There have been several high profile instances of trans women being celebrated outside of the context of sex work and almost every time there has been pushback. For me, this is the perpetual cycle that needs to be broken. Because trans women are oppressed, they often end up doing sex work, and then because they’ve done sex work, they are often seen as an inherent fetish, and because they’re seen as an inherent fetish, they’re not seen as suitable for public society, and because they’re not seen as suitable for public society, most people only understand them as a fetish, and therefore oppress them. In other words, it is the oppression of trans women that gives you the understanding that transgender people only exist as a fetish, for the most part.
However, in my life, I’ve had multiple long-term relationships. I’ve been in love more than once, and currently as a polyamorous person I have several long-term partners who very much love me and are very much proud to be seen with me. They don’t fetishize me for being transgender, in fact, they didn’t even know that I was trans when we met. What I think people in your position will always struggle to understand. Is that the reality for many transgender women moving through the world is that while plenty of people fetishize us, and plenty of people see us as through stigmatized lens, it’s actually fairly common that when men are attracted to you, and especially if you fall into a certain range of beauty, you will meet men who desire actual relationships with you. Will that be most men? Probably not, but that really doesn’t matter they are men who do and I often think that when people go out of their way to reinforce the idea that trans women only exist within the scope of a fetish, they are often fighting to maintain their access to trans, people by reinforcing and engaging in transphobia that makes trans people more accessible to them because of stigma.
Blaque In The City 
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