how to spot a chaser

“What is the difference between a chaser and someone who just happens to be into trans women?”

I ask the guy I just fucked. It’s evident to me that this is somebody who gave in to type. He had this big, macho guy thing going on because it helps him get laid. All the cis women, trans women, all the twinks and whatever else he is attracted to look at him and want him to dominate them. But he’s really chuffed that he got to play receiver for once. I wonder if being anally penetrated has opened him up on some metaphysical level because he’s been going on about his sexual history for a couple hours now.

His list of sexual encounters is made up of mostly cis women, some femme-y gay guys, and yes trans women, too. He’s worried about being labelled a chaser because he just happens to spend so much time with trans women – platonically, romantically, sexually. “I’ve asked a lot of people this, too.” he says response to my question. I assume he means he’s asked a lot of the trans women in his life what they think a chaser is, so that he can avoid becoming that because he doesn't want to be shunned by them. His conclusion, after doing some field research: “Basically, it seems like the difference between being attracted to trans women and a chaser is that a chaser is someone who fucks trans women and is also a bad person.” 

He spent 3 hours in my house post-coitus talking to me about all the trans women he was fucking and/or in love with and repeatedly affirmed that he wasn’t a chaser Maybe I shouldn’t have, but, I believed him.

Although I’ll be honest and say that my ability to detect chasers is not particularly astute. Generally, I want to fuck people who want to fuck me. Sometimes those people have sexual desires that are incompatible with mine, or they have fantasies that I am also interested in, but don’t really feel drawn to doing with them in particular. Sometimes I do want to domme someone, slap ‘em around, and top them. Sometimes a man on Tinder asks me to do that and, due to the mysterious forces of psychological and sexual calculus going on in the depths of my psyche, I just don’t really feel like it. Sometimes I want to submit myself to someone, suck and lick whatever they ask me to suck and lick, and offer up my body to be destroyed by them. Other times, when someone expresses their interest in my sexual servitude, it’s like, okay… that’s crazy why would I let you do that to me?

Plus, I famously initiated m sexual awakening via Craigslist, leveraging parts of my identity to appeal to others. I've definitely encountered my fair share of people who were being weird about my race, and I've definitely fucked a few of those people. My barometer for that kind of stuff is not, shall we say, well-calibrated. So yeah, whether or not someone wants to fuck me is a chaser? I can’t really tell — and, at least when it comes to sex, I’m not sure I care. If I want to get my dick wet, and there's some person who wants to fuck me and I find them attractive, I'm not particularly interested in what is motivating their attraction to me. I kinda just want to fuck them. And I kind of feel like, if you ask someone why they are attracted to you enough times you'll get a list of personalty traits, physical traits, you might get to some parental abandonment wound that informs your dynamic, but I think you'd eventually just end up at "I don't know why."

When I first moved to Chicago, I had sex with the old guy who found us our apartment. I’m not sure what exactly drew me to him – maybe I was charmed by his humor, his vibe. Or maybe I could just tell he wanted to fuck me and I thought it’d be a kick.

By our second or third tryst, he had shown me the other people he was fucking and the secret Tumblr blog he maintained full of pornographic GIFs. There were a lot of trans women with giant cocks shoving their dicks into the crevices of whimpering men. He was excitedly telling me about how much he loved fucking trans women, being fucked by them. Maybe that kind of behavior warrants a chaser label but, honestly, I didn’t feel particularly objectified by him. We talked for a long time about art and his sleazy life as a teen in the late 80s, he gave me snacks and drinks. I felt respected by him. Plus, the sex we had was great. I spontaneously fisted him (wrist deep!) and gave him a 10 minute orgasm and he stretched me out with a huge dildo and tapped on the end of it with a rubber mallet, which would send reverberations of pleasure throughout the rest of my body. 

I text my friend Cody out of the blue and ask what his experiences with chasers are. I get the vibe that they do not have a particularly scientific approach to differentiate between chasers and people-who-happen-to-be-attracted-to-your-whole-thing either. He describes people who think bears are attractive vs people who ask him invasive, dehumanizing questions, the kind that feel leering. I'm familiar with receiving these kinds of questions, the kind of question that slices you up into parts just by being asked. Sometimes an interested party asks Cody to give his weight in pounds getting off on the mere mention of a number. He thinks they get off on the calculus, that there's joy in finding the exact difference between his weight and theirs.

While pondering about the ontology of chasers, I worry if I might be one. I think about how I'm turned on by certain types of people. How I don't approach dating or sex in a love-is-blind kind of way, that I acknowledge certain physical traits turn me on: big arms, short guys, tall women, light eyes, really dark skin, really fair skin, long hair, blonde buzzcuts, bald heads – and I acknowledge that my initial attraction to people is because of some combination of these things I'm into.

But I find myself creating an imaginary audience, watching my dating and sexual history, keeping a tally of the people I love and how many of them can slot into any particular visual archetypes. I feel embarassed about having a type – or, rather, types. The anxiety from the not-chaser guy from earlier has rubbed off on me and I wonder if people see me as some shallow pervert. I hope that the variety in my taste protects me from such allegations, as well as my ability to be attracted to and repulsed by someone's personality, regardless of their appearance. I can get the ick! I can have a slow burn! (Look at me, I'm doing the same thing as that guy, defending myself against imaginary chaser allegations!)

I ask my trans friends at parties to define chasers. I ask the same question of my non-white friends, I ask my older friends with graying hair, anyone who has a thing about them that might be easily organized into a porn category. No one really gives me a clear answer, but everyone is sure they can clock one. The main consensus is that being pursued by a chaser makes one feel tokenized. They give one a creepy feeling, that one could easily be replaced with any other vaguely similar looking person. That it doesn't matter who is sitting across from them at dinner on a date (or beside them in bed) as long as they have certain character traits like weight, skin color, or gender. As long as you have the parts they want, a chaser doesn't really care about the other parts of you.

I have empathy for someone who happens to be into trans women and their anxiety about being called a chaser. Plenty of trans people I know have their guards up against it, recoiling at even the slightest hint of fetishization. The language around loving trans people, trans women in particular, is so volatile. The media around loving and fucking trans people is often clumsy or pornographic, mired in the context of a mass culture of transphobia, I think we are sensitive to being dehumanized and weary of someone turning creepy or violent on us, on pushing our boundaries and expecting us to act like what they see on screens.

But I also wonder if this vigilance around chasers is partly the result of a widespread internalized suspicion of being attracted to trans women at all. It's no new revelation that this seed is planted in everyone by our culture, in cis people and trans people: the idea that we're not attractive, not worthy of love, that there's something perverse or unnatural about being with us.

So, what if the window of someone’s sexual preferences seems to align with this part of the gender spectrum? I think many trans women are very attractive – and many of us try very hard to be appealing and charming, so it seems pretty natural to be into us. If someone fucks or dates more than one trans woman in their entire life, does that make them a chaser? Is that worthy of suspicion? Is it part of this internalized transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny – the same thing that makes everyone question fancy cis boys who listen to Clairo and makes men afraid of anal sex or even afraid to wipe their own ass for fear of being called gay? Does all of this trepidation around being interested in trans women come from that fear of being emasculated?

This suspicion feels like it applies for anyone dating anyone who isn't just, like, a cis person that is relatively demographically similar to you. That being with someone who is fatter than you, or a different race, or much older, or is trans is some aberration from the norm, that you must have like, a fetish or something. It's so notable to us that we have phrases for all the different ways you can date someone that aren't similar to you: there's chubby chasers, Jungle Fever, Yellow Fever, Oxford Study, age-gap, etc. Do these phrases inspire as much cringe in you as it does in me?

Maybe these phrases spring up from within their respective communities to protect themselves from creeps. But I also think a lot of these phrases can be used to label and mock anyone who is dating someone who I, guess for lack of better phrase, is demographically transgressive? Like, is it worth pointing out that we don't really have the urge to call two thin, cis, white people dating any particular name? (although, I do get a kick out of privately calling white4white couples white supremacists.)

I don't know if chaser is really a useful word. Thinking back to that guy's definition for chaser, it feels resonant. Sometimes people are just shitty people who happen to fuck trans women sometimes. Sometimes perfectly nice people fuck trans women, too. And sometimes they are slutty and fuck a lot of them.

I feel embarrassed about writing this whole thing. I'm not sure why I'm so hung up on the idea of chasers and why I have to spend a couple hundred words defending heterogenous relationships. I think it has something to do with the fact that I look completely different from all my friends, family, and lovers and that I often feel like the obvious odd one out when I'm on a date with someone – or in most group settings for that matter. I'm sensitive about my relationships being labeled in these perjorative ways. I get the feeling when I'm walking around with some of my male friends that I look like a sex worker they hired for the day. When I'm hanging out with my my cis female friends, I sometimes feel like a giant woman who's been put in charge of tinier women, like some kind of mother hen.

Maybe I've been blabbering this whole time about chasers because I have had that seed of doubt embedded in me – that I do question the love, attraction, affection of any kind that comes my way. When someone expresses interest in me at a party, on an app, wherever, first, I think they're lying to me or they don't really understand what I have going on. Then, if they do seem to know what I have going on, I can't help but think: what are you, a chaser or something?

1. I was on Ask a Sub with Lina Dune! It was so fun. Listen here.
2. Speaking of being a bad person: listening to this song a lot lately.
3. Here's a list of 200+ resources for community self-defense, basic needs, solidarity, creative caretaking, and organizing within the Chicagoland area.