Boypussy, Dom Daddies and Tranny Chasers: Trying Grindr for the first time as a trans man

It’s been over a year since I got laid. But that doesn’t really mean anything, because the second I came out as a trans man I became a born-again fucking virgin.  

Before I transitioned, I was hooking up with men just for shits and giggles. If I had to live my life as a femme queen, I was at the very least going to get male validation out of it. As a certified manic-pixie-dream-girl, I had self-proclaimed ‘bicurious’ men wrapped around my fingers. One man once told me I looked like a “really pretty drag queen”. He clocked me as a man in makeup before I did.  

Then I came out and suddenly the ‘bicurious’ men were no longer curious, and I no longer craved their validation. My energy was now entirely focused on coming out to my family and navigating the complexities of gender affirming healthcare. So, I deleted Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. I promised myself to become a pretty man before I considered sleeping with one again. 

A year later, it’s the eve of my 24th birthday, and I decide I’m just too old and too hot to be celibate. Being on HRT for seven months has suddenly made me empathise with those boys in high school who would get boners in class. I am also miraculously 1000x more attracted to men than I ever was before. Testosterone induced puberty is no joke.  

I open the app store and download Grindr. 

As I watch it download, I’m hit by a wave of anxiety. What if the only men who like me on here are chasers who fetishise me for my transness? What if they don’t realise I’m trans? What if they’re disgusted when they find out? What if no men like me at all? 

I open the app and create an account. I put my real first name. I set my gender to ‘trans man’ and add the tags ‘trans’ and ‘t4t [trans for trans]’ for good measure. I’m relieved to see I don’t have to add any photos, and immediately start cruising through the explore tab. I’m hit by a grid of shirtless headless torsos, dusty bathroom mirror selfies, and unimpressive photos of sunsets. But the vast majority are blank profiles.  

Art / Olive Bartlett-Mowat

I immediately notice that barely anyone has their actual name on their profile… oops. I didn’t get the memo that instead of your name you put things like ‘Keen to suck’, ‘Dom Daddy’, ‘hung and tall’ or my personal favourite, ‘Nihilistic sex?’ 

Even without a photo, I receive 12 messages in the span of 20 minutes. Eight of them simply say, “Hey”. Another spams me with six unsolicited dick pics. A 55-year-old asks me if I’m “looking for a bisexual daddy”. 

I decide to be a big brave boy and add a photo of myself. Only one problem – everyone on this app is shirtless. I can’t be shirtless. I scroll through my camera roll and find a photo from a day when I was binding with tape and had taken a photo shirtless in the mirror. I crop out my tape but decide to keep my face in it.  

Over the next couple of hours, 53 different people message me. At work I receive a message from Mr. 'Nihilistic sex?’ and make the mistake of opening it. My jaw drops. My coworker notices and asks to see. She takes my phone and gives the entire room a dramatic reading:  

“Are you interested in a kinky hung dom top at all? You’re gorgeous — I love stretching boypussy.” I scream in shame. My coworker just said boypussy. 

That night I meet up with a friend, who is also trans, and tell him of my Grindr adventures. He himself has been quietly cyber-cruising on Grindr for many years. Seeing as it's my birthday, he suggests changing my name to “it’s my birthday!” to see what happens. I do it and put my phone on silent.  

When I get home, I have 67 Grindr notifications.  

At least half of them are wishing me a happy birthday. I also receive 22 more unsolicited dick pics. I look at them, analysing all the different shapes and sizes. The number of penises I have seen in my lifetime has doubled in the past 24 hours. 

Surprisingly there have only been three chasers, but one is particularly persistent. He's only looking for trans men and spam messages me throughout the day. Later I go to another friend's apartment, and suddenly this guy messages me "I'm close". At first I thinks he means he’s jacking off, but when I check his profile he’s zero metres away from me. I panic, block him, turn off my location and take my name off my profile. Reddit tells me he's most likely in the apartment directly under me. 

Now I know why no one has their name or face on their profile.   

Four days in, I’ve had genuinely good conversations with six men —- out of 167. Six of them were nice, funny, interesting, hot guys, who didn’t say anything weird about me being trans. They called me handsome, hot, sexy and a ‘beautiful boy’. Before I opened this app, I had never been complimented by a man as a man. 

But as soon as they started making plans to hook up, I ghosted them.  

I know deep down I struggle to believe that a cis gay man could truly find me attractive. As I spent hours scrolling through photos of cis men's bodies, I compared myself to every aspect of them. I knew if I met up with someone from Grindr, I wouldn’t even be able to get naked in front of them. So why would they choose me over the millions of real men on this app? 

But the 167 men who messaged me over these four days proved me wrong. I put myself out there as a transgender man, and they pursued me. Despite my fears of the app being overrun by evil tranny chasers and transphobes, the vast majority of men who messaged me were just horny guys cruising for a fuck.  

These men are just no match for my gender dysphoria. For the past year I have seen my body as something I have to compensate for to assimilate into gay culture. 

What Grindr made me realise is that I will never liberate myself from the shackles of internalised transphobia and gender essentialism unless I accept that my body is not a cis body. It never will be. Before I throw myself into meaningless sex with strangers, I need to figure out how to put value on my own body. To not just let it be used by men in the same way I did when I was in the closet. 

I must find the inherent beauty in my trans body and the pleasure it can bring myself and others if I choose to accept it as it is. I can’t use sex to validate my manhood. 

It’s time to reconnect with my trans roots before I even consider a root. No beautiful faggot in this world is going to make me feel like a real man until I realise that I am a beautiful faggot. For now, I’ll put Grindr down and pick up the copy of Stone Butch Blues I’ve neglected to finish. If I can’t save myself, maybe Leslie Feinberg can.