Intersex & Transsexuality – A Study of Experimentation
FEATURE | ISSUE ELEVEN | MAHIMAHI / SEX
Written by Mathilde Redamare (they/them) | @MathildeRedamare on YouTube | Contributing Writer
As a sucker for classic romance literature, I find the word chaser compelling. Romance stories told from a woman’s perspective are often built around the hunter-and-prey dynamic: the endorphin-producing high of pursuit, the glint of something animalistic in the pursuer’s eye, the chest heaving with longing and anticipation as the distance between hunter and desired is slowly closed.
Being pursued by a chaser is not like this. So why do we use the word?
From my understanding of communities that are fetishised (including my own), a chaser is someone who pursues people specifically because of an aspect of their body or identity that they fetishise, with the aim of sexual conquest over them.
In my mind, the chase does not describe the journey towards romance, however short-lived. It is a chase after understanding: of sexuality, anatomy and identity. This is especially the case in my experience with people who pursue transgender and/or intersex people. From the moment a cis-endosex man catches a glimpse of some deeper understanding about himself and his attraction, that understanding becomes something to be pursued through sexual content, or through sex itself.
Writing in a review of Stephen Ira’s Chasers, artist and poet Zach Ozma considers experimentation as a process of reaching towards a self that does not yet fully exist: “In experimenting we reach beyond what we are.” The experiment, Ozma writes, “seeks to know more, seeks a different condition and so creates it.”¹
Trans artist and writer Cueponi Tlacatl describes being placed in precisely this position. Speaking to writer Eva Reign about her experiences with cis men, Tlacatl recalls, “They were ‘curious’ about what it was like to be with a trans girl. Any trans girl.”
What kept recurring, she explains, was the realisation that these men “weren’t interested in me.” She felt less like a person and more like someone else’s experiment.² Her individuality was incidental; what mattered was the category of body she represented and what contact with that body might allow a man to discover about himself.
I can attest to this myself. As a former sex worker, it did not matter who I was. It did not matter what my face looked like, what chemistry the client and I shared – what mattered was that I was an empty vessel that could contain the expectations of the experience or journey that the client wanted to go on. I was a body. So did my sexual encounters with men feel any different when dating, when anticipating pursuit, flirtation, the dance between trying to keep cool and calm when knowing how much things could heat up? In short, no.
This is where the romance of the chase breaks down. The chaser may experience suspense, anticipation and revelation, but the person being chased becomes interchangeable. They are not necessarily the destination of his desire. They are the landscape through which he travels towards an answer.
“In experimenting we reach beyond what we are,” Ozma writes. But who is allowed to do the reaching, and who is expected to become the unknown territory? Foucault warns that “by saying yes to sex,” we do not necessarily say no to power.³ Crossing a sexual boundary does not automatically dismantle the social hierarchies that shape the encounter. As Judith Butler argues, the problem is not that the trans or intersex body is seen, but that it is often seen first as a type. Recognition becomes a form of reduction; the person is constituted in the interaction not as a full subject, but as the embodiment of a category through which another person negotiates their own sexuality.⁴
A man may therefore cross the boundaries of his established sexual identity without crossing the deeper boundary between treating another person as an experience and recognising them as a person. The chase, then, is not always after the transgender or intersex person. From my perspective, the cis-endosex man is often chasing a version of himself that he can only glimpse through them.
Alexis Michelle puts it best in a roundtable with Them: “I think chasers are people who just haven't really made peace with the expansiveness of their sexuality. Once they make peace with that, and they realise that trans people are human beings, I think then they possibly could actually have a worthwhile relationship with a trans person.”5 Sometimes, that is a deeper understanding of their sexuality, but sometimes that is the start of them realising that they may not be a cisgender man at all.
Within trans communities there is a persistent joke, one that carries more than a little truth for some, that the most obsessive chasers are occasionally chasing something they recognise in themselves. As one participant in the same Them roundtable put it, “Usually ... chasers wind up being trans women.”5 Whether understood literally or metaphorically, the joke gestures towards something larger: that desire is not always directed at another person, but at a possibility for the self.
So what are the building blocks for these circumstances? The first is probably to do with male socialisation. As Michael Kimmel puts it in The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality, “Learning to wear a mask ... is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity ... boys learn self-betrayal early.”6 This becomes especially poignant when you consider Kimmel’s view of the placement of the male gender in society: “Being a man means ‘not being like women.’ This notion of antifemininity lies at the heart of contemporary and historical conceptions of manhood…”6 If masculinity teaches men to suppress uncertainty, vulnerability and emotional intimacy, then sex becomes one of the few socially permissible places to ask questions about themselves. It is expected to reveal something: desire, masculinity, queerness, permission, even identity.
But why then does the trans or intersex person have to become the mirror for the chaser to observe himself through?
I agree with Ozma that we are reaching beyond ourselves when we experiment, but experiments have subjects, and too often the subject becomes exactly that: the means through which someone else seeks to understand themselves. Desire, then, is never the problem. The problem begins when another human being ceases to be encountered as a person and instead becomes the terrain upon which somebody else hopes to discover who they are.
Sources
Zach Ozma, “Summer of the Chaser: A Review of Chasers by Stephen Ira,” The Poetry Project Newsletter, no. 269 (Summer 2022).
Eva Reign, “Trans Women and Femmes Speak Out About Being Fetishized,” Them, 21 July 2018. https://www.them.us/story/trans-women-femmes-fetishization.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. (See especially Butler’s discussion of recognisability, recognition, and the conditions under which a person becomes socially intelligible as a subject.)
Them Staff, “Trans Women of All Ages Discuss Chasers, Polyamory & Dating,” Them, 12 February 2025. https://www.them.us/video/watch/trans-women-of-all-ages-discuss-chasers-polyamory-and-dating.
Michael Kimmel, The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.
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