The Trans Chaser is a cisgender character who has a strong sexual interest in transgender or gender-nonconforming people; however, their attraction has no romantic element, and is often little more than a sexual fetish. The most common portrayal is of an (ostensibly) straight cisgender male who surreptitiously hooks up with transgender women or cross-dressers. If Played for Laughs, it usually involves a subversion of an Unsettling Gender-Reveal, where he reacts a little too positively upon learning that the woman he's with is transgender. More serious works may insinuate that the Trans Chaser is a Closet Gay, and that having sex with someone who resembles a cisgender woman is the best way he can rationalize his attraction without having to question his heterosexuality.
The context of this trope has usually changed over the decades. Until the 2000s or so, this depiction was often no more nuanced than Fetishes Are Weird, with it being a point of shame that the chaser is such a sexual deviant. But from the 2010s onward, where public attitudes about transgender rights began to shift, the Trans Chaser is far more likely to be depicted as an Armored Closet Gay—if not an outright Politically Incorrect Villain—who is openly homophobic or transphobic, but hypocritically has no problem having sex with trans people. Of course, the vast majority of works featuring this trope only focus on the chaser—it's very rare to see an work examining the perspective of a trans character being fetishized outside of a specific subset of Queer Media.
Compare Everybody Wants the Hermaphrodite, Bigot with a Crush, Armored Closet Gay, Race Fetish, and Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny. May overlap with Asian Hooker Stereotype, with countries like Thailand having a stereotype of being a hotbed of Sex Tourism for people looking for "ladyboys."
No Real Life Examples, Please!
Examples:
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The JOJOLands: One of the main characters is Dragona Joestar, who was assigned male at birth but enjoys dressing and presenting femininely to the point of getting surgical breast implants. Dragona is assaulted by a bigoted police officer who initially assumes them to be an attractive cis woman, but upon discovering that Dragona has male genitalia he becomes even more excited.
- The Boys: Jack from Jupiter (an Expy of Martian Manhunter), who is depicted as one of the most hedonistic members of the Seven, is revealed to frequent Dr. Peculiar's high-class brothel and hire transgender prostitutes. The Boys even discover a video of him shouting transphobic slurs to the prostitutes mid-coitus.
- A Picaresque Royale: Kamoshida becomes rather attracted to Ren upon finding out she's trans.
- In the unproduced Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel The Revenge of the Old Queen, the first scene featuring government paranormal investigator Ray Ammbo shows him being caught watching a transgender stripper on his TV.
- Tangerine (2015): Razmik is exclusively attracted to transgender women, to the point where he insists a cisgender prostitute he has hired leave and berates her for working his usual block.
- XXY: The characters and even the viewer seem to be encouraged to Gaze at, and encouraged to want to look at, Alex's body. One of the boys at the beach gets really excited at Alex having both male and female genitalia, and Alex asks Álvaro if he regrets not seeing her or not seeing it. The camera also really likes to nicely frame Alex's nude or semi-nude body.
- Nevada: James H. enjoys transgender fetish pornography, which Maria takes as a sign that James may be trans.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: In A Dance with Dragons, Yunkish slavemaster Yezzan Zo Qaggaz likes to collect "grotesques," including a hermaphroditic sex slave named Sweets.
- Arrested Development: Lawyer Barry Zuckercorn is shown to exclusively solicit crossdressing prostitutes:
Barry: Hey, you're not one of those silly men that's dressed like a woman, are you?Prostitute: No, baby, I'm the real thing.Barry: [drives away]
- Broad City: Discussed in "Citizen Ship." Ilana predicts that everyone on the boat is into women with penises because "Lawyers love 'em."
- Orange Is the New Black: The misogynistic and bigoted guard "Pornstache" is interested in having sex with transgender inmate Sophia.
- Pose: Trans character Elektra has a lover, Dick, who insists on her remaining "a girl with extra" rather than allowing her to transition on her own terms. This eventually leads to them breaking up.
- Veep: In Season 7, Jeff Kane mistakes Amy for a prostitute and drunkenly invites her to his hotel room, saying, "If you've got a dick, I'll pay double."
- MAD: One comic strip in an issue shows a man sitting in a diner booth across from a woman holding a pet duck. He says he felt the typo was obvious when he made a post online looking for "chicks with ducks."
- DAR! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary has a strip
in which the author, Erika Moen, talks about how she finds trans men hot. She even lampshades this trope by having a trans man in the comic say "We are MEN. Not some in-between for you to fetishize," but her Author Avatar dismisses his complaint. She would later get a lot of pushback for this comic, especially from the trans community, and amended the comic strip with an apology statement in 2012.
- El Goonish Shive: Ashley's favorite Manga is Ranma ½, and while she already had an interest in Elliot earlier, she crushes on him really hard after witnessing his transformation into a girl.
- Thinking Too Much to Think Positively: In "Mystery Men", Xan describes the phenomenon of her and other trans women being followed by creepy men on Twitter whose likes are full of trans pornography. She discusses the possibility that these men consider being trans a fetish, and they hope that the women they follow will admit they have a fetish and start posting trans porn themselves.
- Trans Girl Next Door: Discussed. One comic describes some guys trans women meet during online dating, including a guy who only sees trans women as a fetish for "discreet hookups" and a guy who wants to "experiment" despite having "experimented" several times before.
- Con Man: Sean Maher's character mistakenly believes that Wray's convention booker Bobbie (a cis woman) is male, then interprets Wray's garbled explanation to mean that she is transgender. He immediately finds her "courageousness" attractive to the point of fetishizing her and desiring sex with "the real you." It doesn't help that Bobbie plays along.
- Family Guy: The episode "Quagmire's Dad" deals with Quagmire coping with the news that his father Dan has come out as transgender and now goes by Ida. At the end, he finally accepts Ida's identity as a woman, something reflected by his inexplicable erection.
Quagmire: Sorry, sorry! Damn thing can't tell the difference.
