Sex Question Friday: Why Are So Many Straight Men Into Transsexual Porn?

Every Friday on the blog, I answer people’s questions about sex, love, and relationships. This week’s question comes from a reader of the blog who was curious about why so many heterosexual men are pleasuring themselves to pornography featuring transgendered and transsexual performers.

I run a porn blog and I keep getting messages from men wanting to see tranny / shemale porn.  I'm assuming these men are all straight-identifying, but maybe that's just my gay-identifying bias.  I'm wondering what, if any studies or knowledge is out there about men who are attracted to and watch this kind of material or even look for them in real life?  It does absolutely nothing for me, but this particular fetish is unavoidable if you frequent any kind of porn social network and it seems a lot of people are into this.  What are your thoughts?  Why might this be a turn-on for some, and what does it imply, if anything, about their sexuality? 

Thanks for submitting this extremely interesting question. I would like to begin by pointing out that while the terms “tranny” and “shemale” may be commonly used on porn sites to describe a specific genre of porn, those terms are generally considered offensive within the transsexual community. As a result, I will avoid using such terminology here. That said, you are correct in noting that a large number of men seem to be interested in transgendered pornography and, believe it or not, the first psychological research on this topic actually dates back several decades.

The technical term for men who are attracted to feminized men is gynandromorphophilia¹ (how’s that for a tongue twister?). When I say that these guys are into "feminized" men, I do not mean they are attracted to effeminate males or guys who simply display feminine behaviors--whan I mean is that they are attracted to men who physically possess both male and female characteristics. Thus, the sexual interests of gynandromorphophiles may include either pre- or post-operative male-to-female transsexuals or male cross-dressers. Although men with such interests are usually stereotyped as being gay, that could not be further from the truth. In fact, research has found that the vast majority (73%) of men who have sex with male-to-female transsexuals identify as straight or bisexual.² Likewise, persons who run transsexual porn sites have reported that most of their clients are straight men and that they have next to no gay audience at all.³

Why do some men become gynandromorphophiles? We don’t know for sure because relatively few studies have been conducted on this topic. However, research has revealed that for a lot of these men, the appeal seems to reside in the fact that there is something inherently exotic about transsexuals and that transsexualism represents a unique combination of masculinity and femininity in both appearance and behavior. Here are some actual remarks made by men about what attracts them to male-to-female transsexuals:

“An exoticness, a uniqueness, something that can’t be obtained elsewhere. They’re just totally unique in their sexuality in that they’re both…men and women and at the same time, neither men nor women. To me that’s my fascination.”²

“I like the girls with a little something extra, you know what I mean.”²

Is gynandromorphophilia a fetish? The jury is still out on that, although it does seem to co-occur with other fetishes such as BDSM with some frequency.¹ For now, the most we can say is that attraction to feminized men is a unique erotic interest that is not uncommon in the male population and, contrary to popular belief, guys who have such interests tend to be masculine themselves and usually do not identify as gay.

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¹Blanchard, R., & Collins, P. I. (1993). Men with sexual interest in transvestites, transsexuals, and she-males. Journal of Nervous & mental Disease, 181, 570-575.

²Operario, D., Burton, J., Underhill, K., & Savelius, J. (2007). Men who have sex with transgender women: Challenges to category-based HIV prevention. AIDS and Behavior, 12, 18-26

³Escoffier, J. (2011). Imagining the she/male: Pornography and the transsexualization of the heterosexual male. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 12, 268-281.

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Comments

[Rod Fleming]

This is a reasonable overview and thankfully respectful. I have been researching this for over a decade and I broadly concur with the general slant. I personally take some issue with the classification of this preference, however. I do not think that a preference that does not disrupt a normal life is a 'disorder', and Blanchard's description of 'gynandromorphophilia' thus, and its inclusion in the DSM, is presumptive and needlessly medicalising of what is a simple variation in preference. I really don't think it's even a fetish, unless having the hots, say, for Asian women or African women (if you are of another ethnicity) would be. It's just your preference. Dating, having sex with and falling in love with transsexual women is no more damaging than doing the same with cis-women, though there are differences.

Your assertion that transattracted men are 'are attracted to men who physically possess both male and female characteristics' is completely the opposite of the truth, however, at least in most cases (se below): instead we are attracted to women who have certain characteristics normally male, eg stronger features, larger feet, hands, heads, smoky voices and, usually, penises, and not to men at all. That is why most transattracted men self-identify as heterosexual.

Transattraction does challenge our understanding of the term 'bisexual'. This has classically been taken to mean an attraction both to masculine men and feminine women, but actually such individuals are rare, which is probably why some studies, such as Bailey's, were so inconclusive. If however we substitute a definition as ' attracted to individuals who display both male and female characteristics' and we relate this to both the considerable prevalenceof transattraction and the Kinsey Scale we see a very neat congruency, which also reflects a predictable biological variation in attraction from fully feminine through increasing levels of androgyny to fully masculine.

I consider myself heterosexual and transattracted, but I have met men who consider themselves homosexual and transattracted; it is possible that they are indeed looking for 'men with female bits' but they are a rare sort and it's difficult to be sure. This however would also fit with an explanation based on variation.