Memoirs of a Tgirl, Chapter 3 So you catch your boyfriend doing Internet porn.... what else is new.... You feel betrayed. But, worse, totally inadequate. The girls he’s been lustfully watching have something you’ll never have. “Women 2.0…special girls with a little something extra,” the porn sites seductively spin it. Less euphemistically, they more often scream: “Incredibly slutty shemales chicks with both boobs and balls…tantalizing Tgirls.” But no need to worry. Your guy’s not some closet weirdo. Most straight, normally faithful guys seem intrigued, if not sexually turned on by, so-called shemales. We represent the fastest growing segment of the porn business. Still, you wonder. What’s going on, what’s the attraction, the turn-on? I wonder, too — and I’m a shemale myself! Back in the day, I would have been just a regular male-to-female pre-operative transsexual — ingesting estrogen and living fulltime as a woman while awaiting the knife, sex reassignment surgery (SRS). That was the traditional narrative of “a woman born into the wrong (male) body” — the feminizing, often arduous journey to become finally “the woman I was meant to be.” That was then. Now, more and more special girls like me keep postponing the final surgery and opt, instead, to stay suspended in a transitional stage of half-man and half-woman, like some kind of freakish mythological creature. There are always convenient excuses: SRS is so expensive, you know…anyway, I still haven’t finished electrolysis…I want to get adjusted to my newest regimen of estrogen therapy…what money I’ve saved up seems better spent on what people actually notice when I walk down the street — breast implants and facial feminization surgery. When you really stop and think about it, a vagina is just an engineering redundancy anyway, for I have two holes to service cock already. So down deep I know I’ll probably never go all the way, for then I would no longer be special. I’d be just another unattached, on-the-market woman. Too many guys prefer me just the way I am. I am desired, therefore I already am. But what am I exactly, and why am I desired? Here’s what I’ve learned: “A woman’s vagina is a scary place for a guy to understand,” a trannychaser named Chris tells me. “But a guy knows what makes male equipment feel nice. A girl like you has both that familiar equipment and breasts, so I’d feel less pressured because I would know what I’m doing.” Even more experienced guys express this same sentiment — a mixture of fear and loving of the opposite sex — to justify their attraction to shemales, foreign but familiar. “Men fear the inability to bring a woman to orgasm. We can never be sure,” says Mike. “But when a t-girl comes, it’s obvious, even if she’s embarrassed, as some are, of that male part of her body.” Plus, according to a guy named Victor, “Tgirls don’t come with all that perplexing emotional baggage of genetic girls that men can never explain. I don’t find beauty in the male form. But, unfortunately, I relate better with males. With a Tgirl, subconsciously I’m probably thinking here is a guy who looks like a girl.” So it’s a guy thing, so much so that so-called trannychasers are sometimes defined as latent homosexuals. That’s the conventional wisdom. But it’s not so simple. In my experience, these men are definitely women-lovers, attracted to the feminine, at least a man’s idea of the feminine, while sexually repulsed by masculinity. If latent anything, they’re wannabee Tgirls themselves, although I’ve only had a couple of guys actually admit to this uncomfortable self-knowledge.