Transfans are people who are sexually attracted to transgender people. Other terms include tranny chaser, trans catcher, transsensual and tranny hawk.[1] Sexologists have used two technical names for the sexual preference for male-to-female transsexuals: gynandromorphophilia[2] and gynemimetophilia.[3] Andromimetophilia is an analogous term that denotes attraction to female-assigned people who look, act like, or are men; including butch women, or trans men.[4]
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Gynemimetophilia is sexual attraction to male-assigned people who look, act like, or are women, including assigned-male crossdressers.[5] It can also refer to an attraction to trans women. A related term is gynemimesis, which refers to a homosexual male who engages in female impersonation without sex reassignment.[6] Both terms originate in a 1984 paper of John Money and Margaret Lamacz.[7] The terms were used by Money for classification purposes in his gender-transposition theory.[8]
Andromimetophilia (sometimes misspelled as androminetophilia) is sexual attraction to female-assigned people who look, act like men, or are men; including butch women or trans men.[4] The attraction can be to people who have not undergone any physical transition,[4] or to people who have.[9]
Originally (and still predominantly) used to describe the men sexually interested in pre-operative trans women, the term tranny chaser is now being used in FTM communities as well.
Many members of the transgender community (particularly in the MTF population) use "tranny chaser" in a pejorative sense, because they consider it a fetish-like attraction to the penis of a pre-operative or non-operative trans woman MTF or to the vagina of a pre- or non-operative trans man.. In their pathbreaking book, True Selves, Chloe Ann Rounsley and Mildred Brown have suggested that tranny chasing men may be homosexual men in denial. The term "tranny" is itself considered a pejorative by the community.
In "Diary of a Drag Queen" Daniel Harris describes four types of men interested in him while he was cross-dressed: heterosexual men who wanted the presumed superior oral services of another male, homosexuals who were only interested in his genitals, other cross dressers, and men who were intrigued by the mixture of masculinity and femininity he represented.
According to Helen Boyd, "Tranny chasers are the big bugaboo in the crossdressing community, because their very existence suggests that crossdressers are not all as straight as they claim to be. Chasers are willing to give crossdressed men the kind of attention they desire, and that attention (a drink, a compliment) validates the crossdresser's experience, and completes the fantasy of feeling like a woman."[10]