I first encountered transgender porn when I was a 17-year-old Marine Corps recruit in the San Diego area. Back in those days, porn shops were common, especially near military bases, with glossy magazines being featured. I stumbled on a section featuring transgender women and didn't even know what I was looking at, at first. I think that was my first understanding that such a thing even existed, though I'm pretty sure I thought I was looking at some sort of an intersex phenomenon, not having any idea what HRT could do.

Those magazines were designed to fetishize transgender women, or to appeal to men with that sort of a fetish.

Not too many years later, I learned of another kind of fetishization in gay communities I was just discovering. I learned that some gay men seemed exclusively or overwhelmingly attracted to men of a particular "race," like East Asians . We even had some language for it. I won't specify here, because it's degrading.

I had a couple Asian gay friends who had to navigate that sort of fetishization. They had to be on the lookout for guys who saw them as real people as opposed to guys who valued them primarily for certain facial features and skin tone, which they found degrading.

They said finding the line was tough. They said distinguishing the difference between valuing beauty and elevating a fetish was not always a simple process.

I imagine there's something of a parallel there with trans fetishization. Phaylen Fairchild the trans activist has written recently on Medium about the subject, and has delved into it in the past as well.

She fell in love with a guy who turned out to be little more than a chaser, who claimed to love her, but in the end really just loved that she was trans.

The process of figuring that out was very traumatizing for her.