Owen lives in Upstate New York, and was taught to respect trans people from an early age, he said. But the shame he received from his girlfriend made him question himself. “I immediately tried to change, [after] six plus years of loving myself,” he said. “I unfollowed all the trans girls on Instagram and Twitter.” He stopped watching trans porn, too.

She ended the relationship in March. Though she didn’t say, Owen knows why: “What did my attraction to trans women have to do with my attraction to her, a cis woman?”

Instead, Owen's girlfriend was devastated, the 22 year old recalled. At first, she cried and interrogated him: Was he gay? Was she just a prop for him to look straight? Why did he hide this from her? Then, she got mean. Over the course of a month, Owen said she used his sexuality as a weapon against him. According to Owen, she pitilessly mocked him, remarking on how disappointed he must be that she doesn’t have a dick. He obviously “wanted to be a bottom,” he recalled her saying; to “get a good fucking.” Sometimes, when they were intimate, Owen said that she would climb on top of him and mockingly simulate fucking him in the ass.

Owen’s girlfriend never expected to see transgender porn on his phone. No one knew he’d been hiding his attraction to trans women since middle school. Despite the discretion, deep down, Owen optimistically hoped his fear was unfounded; “I always figured she'd find out and be so accepting that I’d feel like I never should have hidden it,” he said. He was wrong.

But abstinence was ineffective. “It just made me desire trans women more,” Owen said. “I couldn't go back.”

He’d love to have a healthy, public relationship with a trans woman. But it feels unlikely. He doesn’t really know where to meet trans women, and if his next girlfriend is a cis woman, he expects to keep this secret from her. The trauma of being shamed by his ex has marked him with paranoia. If found out again, he’s afraid he’d be ostracized completely, “scarlet letter style.”

Owen is one of countless men who are attracted to trans women but are too afraid to say so publicly. I’ve reported on this for years, but the coverage rarely draws these men out of hiding. In July, though, an interview I conducted with four straight guys inspired many such men to speak up, across the internet, onto countless social media timelines, and in emails to me. Their reasons for hiding may seem obvious, a blend of homophobia and a fear of being stripped of their masculinity.

But there is another source of pressure to conceal trans-amorous desire that may be even more powerful, yet has long gone unspoken. I have seen it myself many times over since I first transitioned—and I saw it again quite recently, wrapped up in many of the notes men wrote after reading my article. They had all been impaired by the same, devastating rejection by cis women in their lives.

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Owen’s story is the most typical example of this rejection, and perhaps the most damaging, but the stigma against trans amory is much more complex than that story alone.The rejection doesn’t always come in the form of transphobia. Sometimes, it’s a matter of misguided advocacy.