Please excuse me if I inadvertently offend. I am a 51 year old bisexual man. I have been an active bisexual man since the late eighties. My wife teases me because of twelve serious relationships I have had with persons born female, ten have been queer. Six of them would probably identify as trans men now but this was the nineties. I also casually dated a lot other queer women, some of which have now officially transitioned.
Ok, all that preamble is in the service of this question. Is "having a type" the same as fetishing? If not, is fetishing like what some do to black men and "BBC hunting"?
If this is an offensive question, please let me know and I will delete. As I said, I am 51. I am from such a different era (which sucked for bi men) that I might as well be from a different planet. I just hate being ignorant on a subject that has been such a big part of my life.
Having a type and fetishizing definitely isn’t the same. The difference is, when you have a type, you date people with a certain appearance or with a certain style, etc. because you think they’re hot. Everybody has a type. The fact that they might be trans is not inherently part of that process, although of course, indirectly, it can be. If you’re attracted to masculinity, hang around other queer people a lot and don’t really care what’s in someone’s pants, masculine, queer women and trans men tend to show up in your dating pool.
With fetishes, the most important thing to them is that the person is trans. If they weren’t, there’d be no interest. From what I understand, the main reason most trans ppl don’t like dating someone who fetishizes them is, that they aren’t seen as men or women but explicitly trans men or trans women. Sometimes not even that.
Also, yes, "BBC hunting" is a form of fetishization.
Opposite end of the aisle here, but I hope my comment is welcome. I think a lot of this stems from the bioessentially prescriptivist attitudes a lot of people have. It's for similar reasons that trans women are often framed as predators in women's spaces that trans men are framed as "smol beans" to protect, or misguided by the Trans Agenda™. It's an assigning of hyperagengy to AMABs and hypoagency to AFABs, and it's really gross.
The most "fun" part I'm guessing is when you call it out as a reactionary attitude and cue the shock and horror to the thought, that maybe unsolicited infantilization doesn't paint transmascs in the positive light they think it does.
I think a lot of this comes from the idea of "passing". It's much easier from what I've seen for trans men to pass than trans women... primarily because of facial hair and body structure if the person is not on hrt.
It's pretty crazy if you look on any porn site under the trans category. If there even is porn with a transmasc person (rare), it's almost always with a cis man and the trans man is always on the bottom. Feels gross that that's the only thing available most of the time.
That might be a category with higher straight crossover appeal (and as a result preferred algorithmically without additional data prompts) but trans dom kinks are prevalent.
Anecdotal but a friend told me she shifted her client base to cis male subs for various reasons, the foremost being greater demand.