Character Unlocked
On dating-while-trans
I have started this essay several times over the last few months and have abandoned it each time, for the same reason that stopped me the first go-round. A trans woman writing about the tribulations of dating is read, before the first paragraph finishes, as an entry in a genre already saturated with grievance: somebody complains, at length, about the world’s refusal to supply what is owed. Saying that this piece belongs to a different genre changes nothing in the eyes of a reader determined to misplace it. I am writing it anyway, because the alternative is silence on a topic worth examining honestly—a silence which has never been the “safe” option it pretends to be.
A few clarifications belong up front, and one of them concerns where I am standing while I write this. I have never been thin. I have never been “emo” or “scene.” I have never, before or after transition, been permitted to read as androgynous. The archetype described in the next two sections is not my autobiography. It belongs to other trans women, and I describe it because understanding it is the only way to understand what happens to women like me, who do not carry it, and who generally meet a closed door rather than a complicated one.
Second, none of what follows argues that women, as a category, owe anyone anything in particular, romantically or otherwise; nor that men, or the trans women who are so often miscategorized under that same umbrella, are owed anything in particular. The argument concerns a narrower claim: that the plus-size body-positive movement, for all its stated politics, has never actually extended its revaluation of desirability to plus-size trans women. The likeliest explanation for this gap is not indifference, but categorization.
Third, nothing here should license a disappointed rejectee to treat their own frustration as microcosmic evidence of injustice. Distinguishing legitimate grievance from that neighboring error is most of the actual work of this essay.
Fourth, the phrase “trans woman dating problems” tends to summon a story about straight men. That story describes a minority of trans women’s actual romantic lives. Most trans women, whatever they eventually settle into, report attraction that runs in more than one direction, and an account built entirely around straight men covers, generously, perhaps half of a population’s experience. A bisexual trans woman generally moves through two distinct economies: one where men pursue her, and one where she pursues women. The two operate on different mechanisms entirely, and the second—the one this essay is actually about—is the one I have the most standing to describe. It is also the harder one to discuss frankly.
Fifth, some of what follows draws on reporting and description that circulate independently of any one person’s dating history, and it will be marked as such. Some of it rests on something narrower: testimony, a pattern trans women describe to each other in these communities that nobody appears to have actually surveyed. That is still testimony, and it should be weighed as testimony, though it should not be dressed in a certainty that only data would earn. Where a claim below is documented, it will be stated as documented. Where a claim is testimony, it will be stated as testimony.
There is an aesthetic archetype worth naming before anything else herein: emaciated, eyelinered, self-deprecating; situated somewhere inside the emo and scene subcultures that treated androgynous beauty in assigned-male bodies as a legitimate and even celebrated register of appeal for the better part of two decades—the archetype existed independently of transition. This beauty standard has occupied an ambiguous position upon the gender landscape since at least David Bowie, if not earlier; coded as insufficiently masculine by mainstream standards and rewarded precisely for that insufficiency within its own subculture, producing a template of desirability built entirely around a kind of assigned-male softness that had nowhere else to go.
This detail matters more than it looks like it should, because the archetype described here was explicitly invented for men. It was legible as a form of desirable masculinity long before many of the trans women who carry it did transition, and that origin does not disappear just because the body wearing it later turns out to have been a woman’s.
A trans woman who already inhabited this template before transition inherits a peculiar problem afterward. Her transition is read by others, and sometimes felt by her, as confirmation of something that was already legible, standing in for the rupture which transition often represents. Acceptance arrives, and sometimes arrives easily, which sounds like the desired outcome—until the specific quality of that acceptance is examined. It resembles the completion of an aesthetic project that had been underway the whole time, welcomed for its continuity with what came before. What actually changed, the thing that cost her the most, goes largely unremarked. The compliment received most often is some version of “I could always tell,” delivered as flattery and received as something closer to erasure. What she built at considerable cost gets filed under what everyone already suspected.
This archetype answers one question and opens another. Pre-transition legibility determines how the transition itself is read by the transmisogyny-exempt; it says nothing about what happens afterward, once she is actually dating—and dating, for many trans woman, means operating inside of two economies with two separate sets of rules. The who want her present one class of difficulty, and the women who she desires present an entirely different one. The two rarely appear in the same essay, in part because most of what has been written on transfeminine dating assumes a straight man on the other end of the conversation, or a sapphic partnership often formed through mid-marriage transition. That assumption drops the harder half of the subject before the argument even begins.
The harder half of the first economy is what happens when a man expresses interest and that interest goes unreciprocated. The prevailing ethic of romantic autonomy holds that a person’s heart is owed to no one who wants it, that withdrawal requires no accounting beyond the fact of disinterest itself. This ethic is, in the abstract, true; and it functions, for most, as near-costless.
The instinct to read a woman’s rejection as a referendum on his own worth, or more specifically on his own masculinity, is not something men reserve for trans women. Cis women who turn a man down encounter this same anger, and any honest account of the dynamic has to start by admitting it is a baseline feature of male entitlement. Trans women do not uniquely provoke this response. What differs for a trans woman is not the existence of that entitlement but with what it is compounded.
Where disclosure came late enough, her refusal arrives already entangled with something he may be primed to experience as deception, so that an ordinary rejection lands instead as a rejection plus a betrayal—two grievances where a cis woman’s “no” might have produced only one. The anger that follows, when it turns physical rather than merely bitter, too falls upon all women; but trans women are very much documented to experience this at rates considerably higher than a cis woman declining the same man. This falls hardest of all on trans women of color.
What results is a set of survival practices that look, from outside, indistinguishable from dishonesty: the slow fade rather than the direct no, the redirection rather than the refusal, deployed specifically to avoid the moment a man discovers his interest has been declined by someone he did not expect to have the standing to decline it. Every one of these practices reflects an accurate read of the actual distribution of risk. The unconditional right to withdraw exists in the abstract. In practice, it is a right some people get to exercise for free and others have to purchase through careful management of exactly how and when it becomes visible.
The self-improvement rhetoric aimed at romantically frustrated men deserves its own scrutiny, because it interacts with the previous section in a specific and dangerous way. The instruction is familiar: earn more, train harder, groom better, and the desired outcome follows as the mechanical consequence of the correct inputs. This is the logic of a video game, in which enough of the correct actions are guaranteed to produce a “character unlocked; level up” screen, along with the reward waiting therebehind. Applied to another human being, this framework treats attraction as a meter to be filled, without regard to anyone with her own reasons and her own right to decline, regardless of how thoroughly the meter has apparently been filled.
Applied specifically to interest in a trans woman, the framework compounds its own danger, for the reason named by the previous section: an unreciprocated interest already carries the added charge of deception, and a worldview built entirely on inputs and outputs has no honest way to metabolize a null result except personal insufficiency or a rigged game. The second explanation curdles quickly into resentment. Elliot Rodger—the “Supreme Gentleman”—has become shorthand, among people who study this territory closely, for exactly this progression. The metaphor strips the woman on the other end of it of standing as a person exercising judgment and reassigns her the status of a level to be cleared. It is all “bodybuilding.com,” now.
The second economy—the one a bisexual trans woman enters when she pursues women1—runs on a different and in its own way crueler logic, and it is the one this essay is actually trying to name, and the one I am writing from directly rather than at a remove. Inside the online body-positive and plus-size communities that grew up alongside and inside “alt,” emo, and post-emo aesthetics, the prevailing preference for thin men does not stop at ordinary thinness. The threshold in question sits well past slim, past lean, past fit; arriving at a specific and visibly underweight silhouette, ribs and clavicle prominent, frequently described by members of these communities themselves, without apparent self-awareness, in the vocabulary of deprivation and starvation.
It would be easy to write this section in the voice of a finding. It is testimony instead: trans women frequently describe, to each other and independently, the identical shape of exclusion inside these spaces, in language that converges closely enough to stop reading as coincidence. No one appears to have surveyed this directly, and a caveat belongs here that I want to state plainly rather than bury: the testimony behind this section comes from trans women talking to other trans women, usually in the aftermath of a specific hurt, and a conversation that starts from hurt surfaces the moments that hurt more reliably than it surfaces the ambiguous or unremarkable ones. That does not make the pattern less real to the women reporting it, and it does not make it less real to me. It does mean this essay cannot say how the pattern compares in frequency to every ordinary evening nobody felt moved to describe afterward.
What follows is a claim about a real and recurring experience, offered as exactly that rather than as a claim about its prevalence.
The preference itself is not the strange part. What is strange is where the specific silhouette comes from, and what choosing it, over and over, does reveal. The “Skinny Emo Boy” archetype is a beauty standard invented for men. It began as a description of a certain kind of desirable man; not as a description of what these communities find attractive in women, plus-size or otherwise. When a plus-size body-positive community holds this archetype as its stated ideal partner, it is holding a male beauty standard, and every trans woman who clears that threshold is being read against a template built for men.
Several explanations for the general preference circulate inside these communities, and most contain some truth without accounting for its specific extremity. Internalized fatphobia explains why a culture that codes thinness as attractive would produce this preference even in people who intellectually reject the culture producing it. A wish to be, visibly, the larger person in a pairing explains part of the specific silhouette involved. A particular irony explains a further part: a community organized around the principle that no body should be judged demonstrates its own continued desirability, to itself and to an audience, by pairing with a partner conventionally desirable by the very standards the community otherwise claims to reject.
None of these explanations, taken alone, accounts for why the ideal is a male archetype rather than a female one, or why a movement built to expand the acceptable range of women’s bodies left the men in its own dating pool narrower than before it started.
A parenthetical belongs here rather than a full digression: thinness itself, used in this essay as shorthand for androgyny, is not a neutral aesthetic preference. It carries, underneath its claim to be a simple body-size metric, a racialized history: thinness-as-androgyny standards descend substantially from white supremacist-aligned beauty ideals. To treat this preference as raceless obscures that lineage to the point of dishonesty, and frankly, that deserves its own essay rather than a paragraph inside this one. I flag it and move on because it is a large topic to which I do not believe I can here do justice.
None of this arrived from nowhere, and the deeper lineage deserves naming precisely so the point above is not mistaken for a claim about it. Body positivity as a politics is older than any of this and comes out of Black fat-activist organizing that pushed back against anti-fat discourse decades before Tumblr existed. That origin is documented and should not be flattened into an internet trend. What is being described here is narrower: the mass-market, Tumblr-era version of body positivity and the alt, emo, and indie subcultures adjacent to it developed inside the same spaces, among heavily overlapping populations, at the same cultural moment, and the two aesthetic projects cross-pollinated without either side particularly noticing.
That version of body positivity addressed itself to women’s bodies and left the male body’s aesthetic requirements almost entirely unexamined. What filled that silence was whatever the adjacent subculture already supplied for two or three generations prior: a thin, pale, androgynous ideal with its own separate history, absorbed wholesale into a movement that never subjected it to the scrutiny it applied everywhere else.
A trans woman entering this space already carrying the archetype clears the aesthetic bar without difficulty and meets a second problem instead. I am not that trans woman. I was built stocky and broad before transition, and I meet something closer to exclusion. I do not clear the bar as a man, because a stocky body is not a thin body regardless of how little fat sits on it; and I do not clear the adjacent bar as a woman, either, because the plus-size feminine aesthetic these same communities celebrate runs toward soft, round, and hourglass. A broad-shouldered, dense, rectangular build fits the latter template no better than the first.
I am excluded by the same aesthetic vocabulary from both directions I might approach it, as a man and as a woman, and the exclusion has nothing to do with my weight or my health. It has to do with a silhouette these communities inherited rather than chose, and never examined closely enough to notice they had inherited it.
Underneath the aesthetic filter sits a second filter that almost never gets named as such, though it already has a name inside trans and queer politics: the “cotton ceiling:” the pattern by which queer women who profess openness to dating trans women decline, in practice, to do so. The term is usually applied to a blunter phenomenon—the blanket refusal to consider trans women as partners at all—and that blunter version is real. What this essay argues, however, is that the same mechanism operates in a subtler register inside plus-size and body-positive spaces specifically: one that does not look like exclusion because a subset of trans women, who fit the “Skinny Emo” archetype, are indeed included. This inclusion is the part that disguises what is actually happening.
A cis woman who is attracted to a thin, androgynous trans woman is not thereby proven to see trans women as women. Frequently, she is simply attracted to a boy-coded aesthetic that a trans woman happens to be wearing, which is a different thing entirely. The two are easy to mistake for each other from either side of the attraction.
This argument invites an obvious objection, and it deserves an answer rather than being left for a critical reader to raise on my behalf. If exclusion confirms the thesis, and inclusion also confirms the thesis once it is read as attraction to the archetype rather than to the woman, then no observation could ever count against it, and a thesis immune to disconfirmation starts to look less like an argument and more like a mood dressed up as one. The objection has real force, and it does not land the same way on both halves.
That a stocky, broad trans woman like me is excluded from these communities is a claim about what did not happen. It is either true that the door stayed shut or it is not, and testimony is well suited to reporting a fact of that kind, whatever it is not suited to doing with its exact frequency. That a woman attracted to a thin, androgynous trans woman is not thereby attracted to her as a woman is a different kind of claim; it is an interpretation of something private, laid on top of an observable fact, and it deserves the confidence of interpretation and no more. What we do know is the shape of that door and for whom it opens. What can only be proposed—offered as the best account available rather than the only one possible (and I believe that it is)—is why it opens the way it does.
Women in these communities, cis women and “AFAB” trans and nonbinary people alike (including many who describe themselves as queer), frequently exclude trans women from romantic consideration; an exclusion which is voiced publicly, if at all, as a preference about thinness rather than as what it actually is. A trans woman spending months or years working toward a body she believes will finally clear that stated threshold is solving a problem that was never the operative one, and the arrangement’s particular cruelty lies in its silence: a filter nobody admits to running cannot be argued with.
A particularly compelling form of testimony comes from people uniquely positioned to compare both sides of the same phenomenon through direct experience. Many trans women who, before transitioning, attempted to date within these same communities while presenting as thin men—and were rejected despite meeting the stated thinness criterion—and who then transitioned and continued observing the same dating dynamic from the other side, frequently discuss a remarkably consistent pattern: thinness by itself was never enough.
The filter excluded slim men alongside average and heavy men alike, admitting only the heavily fetishized and frighteningly emaciated aesthetic earlier described. After transition, that requirement often ceases to apply, even as it continues to govern the treatment of men and “boymoders” in their vicinity. Across these accounts, the constant is that the filter did not track thinness itself but a far rarer physical ideal that most people, thin or otherwise, do not possess and never could possess. It is difficult to explain that pattern without concluding that the women applying this standard are, at some level beneath their stated politics, categorizing trans women according to the same rubric they use for men—because that is, consciously or not, the category into which we are sorted.
The most painful aspect of this arrangement, as it has been described inside some trans communities, is the doubt the exclusion leaves behind, rather than the exclusion itself. Many trans women carry a very specific fear: that transition, for them, was motivated in part by an unspoken recognition that they could never be acceptable in the one body type these particular communities would tolerate, and that the impossibility of that body drove home, more than anything else, the sense that the body they had was wrong. This fear asks whether they were running from an impossible standard as much as they were running toward something true about themselves, and it does not resolve cleanly.
A person can know something real and durable about her own gender and also have that knowledge sharpened, accelerated, or tangled by an external condition that supplied none of its actual truth. The two facts sit side-by-side, neither canceling the other, and the difficulty of separating them is itself a form of suffering, produced by a specific, highly judgmental, and ultimately contingent aesthetic preference which has hardened into something that now reads to the people inside it as something unquestionable and perfectly natural—a preference in a vacuum; “it’s just my type.”
The consequence of this is concrete rather than abstract: trans women, including some of the same women who tried first as thin men and were excluded regardless, describe a connection between this specific and silent exclusion and periods of suicidal crisis. This recurs, independently, across more than one account, across a community with no particular reason to coordinate its complaints and no obvious incentive to invent this one. It is offered here as testimony rather than epidemiology, and it earns being stated plainly, rather than folded quietly into a footnote, because it recurs across enough unconnected people to obviously compose a pattern.
A systematic review and meta-analysis in the Journal of Eating Disorders found meaningfully higher eating-disorder symptomatology in transgender populations compared with matched cisgender comparison groups. One national survey of American college students found trans women screening positive for clinically significant eating-disorder symptoms at a rate second only to genderqueer and gender-nonconforming students, and well above what is typically reported in cisgender men and women. Other reviews of the research put the share of transgender and gender-diverse people reporting some disordered eating behavior somewhere between 20% and 50%, depending on the study and the threshold used, with formally diagnosed eating disorders showing up less often but still at a markedly elevated rate compared to the general population.
Some of the researchers behind this work describe disordered eating, in this population, as a way of managing gender dysphoria directly, with no dating community or aesthetic filter required to explain it; while this explanation is obviously true in many regards, it is incomplete. This explanation does not capture the full range of how the phenomenon manifests, nor of how much pain it has caused.
There is a version of the video-game logic on this side of the argument too, and setting it beside the first version is the reason for placing both economies inside a single essay. The man told to earn more and train harder believes the correct inputs guarantee the reward, and treats a woman who declines him anyway as having broken a contract that was never actually offered. The trans woman working toward a body she believes will finally clear the threshold operates on an identically-mechanical theory of desire, aimed at herself instead of at another person. Get thin enough, and acceptance follows. Transition correctly enough, in the right way, and the door opens. Both theories describe attraction as a meter with a fill line: legible and fair, responsive to the correct sequence of effort. Both theories are wrong for the same reason.
The parallel should not be mistaken for an equivalence. What follows from the man’s version of this logic is directed outward, at the woman who declined him, and at its worst, it turns violent. What follows from the version a trans woman aims at herself is more often directed inward, at her own body. At its worst, it generally turns into the disordered eating and the crises earlier-described. These are not the same harm wearing two costumes. A theory of desire that treats attraction as a fair and legible transaction produces different casualties depending on who holds it and at whom it is aimed. What the two versions share is the underlying error: what actually governs whether the door opens is a judgment nobody is ever asked to explain, and the judgment in question is frequently not aesthetic at all. It is more often a judgment about category, decided before the meter is ever consulted—a judgment which no degree of thinness was really ever likely to move.
These subjects—the archetype, the refusal a man cannot safely receive, the self-improvement mythology aimed at frustrated men, the aesthetic threshold operating inside plus-size dating communities, and the mechanical theory of transition some trans women apply to themselves against that threshold—share a common error worth naming directly, and underneath that error sits the actual claim this essay has been building toward. The common error is technical: each of these scenes treats desire, or its withholding, as a problem solvable through the correct procedure, adopt the correct aesthetic and acceptance follows, execute the refusal correctly and safety follows, complete the correct self-improvement checklist and reciprocation follows, achieve the correct body and the silent filter opens. None of these procedures exist in the form their believers require.
The claim underneath it is less comfortable: a political movement organized around expanding whose body counts as desirable has spent a great deal of energy re-describing which women’s bodies deserve romantic and sexual regard, and comparatively none considering whether trans women’s bodies do, plus-size or not. That gap is not an oversight which the movement simply has not gotten around to closing yet; it persists, stridently and with increasing body count, because the cis women and transmasculine people running these communities (including many of the ones demonstrably attracted to some trans women) are for the most part not extending desirability politics to trans women as women at all. Even the trans women they are attracted to, they appear to be reading as something closer to very feminine “Skinny Emo Boys” rather than as women.
These communities did not invent a beauty standard for women and then apply it imperfectly to trans women. They inherited a beauty standard for men—androgynous and underweight; a beauty standard which reads as desirable in large part because it is androgynous—and they are projecting that standard onto trans women because, on some level their stated politics does not reach, they are still perceiving trans women as men. A trans woman who fits that archetype gets folded into a category built for men long before she arrived in it. A trans woman who does not fit it is left with virtually nowhere to land, because the category that would have made room for her, plus-size and female, was deliberately never extended to include her.
The “cotton ceiling” is usually described as a question about whether lesbians will consider trans women as partners at all. It surely does not stop there. This is the same ceiling, locked by a different hatch: it is possible to be desired by these communities and still be sorted, underneath that desire, as a man.
I said at the outset that I expected this to be misread regardless of what I actually wrote, and I stand by that expectation. A piece which spends part of its length on straight men’s entitlement and the rest of it arguing that body-positive queer communities do not actually see trans women as women invites at least two separate audiences to each recognize half a familiar villain and miss the argument holding both halves together.
I have tried, throughout, to mark plainly what is documented and what is testimony, and while this earns the trust of a careful reader, it does not resolve the underlying reliance on testimony into something which a more skeptical critic would be obligated to accept. It is better for that to be stated directly than to let mere carefulness of labeling stand in for an argument that rests, at its center, on what is naturally a transfeminine discourse rather than anything that could be handed over to a hostile for fact-checking.
That said, the version of this essay which is never published is not a neutral object; its absence is filled by whichever mistaken or partial framework happens to arrive first—confident, incomplete, and certain it is the only account in the room. I would rather deal with mischaracterization than leave the field to such patent dishonesty.
Let us be honest here: in relationships between cis women and trans women, the trans woman almost always has to be the pursuer. This, too, is ultimately inherited from the parallel expectation placed upon men; the difference is that, in this case, it is actually rather forgivable, because cis lesbians are well known to avoid pursuing one another, too.