But every other chaser? Why bother convincing clueless, gun-shy boys on OkCupid of the sexiness of a girl with a cock when there are thousands of men out there who already know it, and among whom you get to have your pick? Want a movie star? You can have one (albeit a B-lister if you’re willing to satisfy a guy’s curiosity about bottoming for a transsexual, otherwise a C-lister). Want a tech scion to show you his yacht? Great! The ones with powerboats are best, guys with sailboats will make you pull random ropes, and to imagine yourself as a cool Jackie O is one aspirational self-delusion too far. Want a walking Bruce Weber photograph with washboard abs cut so deep it looks like he’s constantly side-lit? Take a couple of male models and save one for later. The only thing you can’t have is a decent guy who will take you home for Thanksgiving dinner, but you’re not going to get that off a non-fetish site either, so at least have the good sex.
How many girls did Reese know who, to prove to themselves that they could be just like every other woman, found themselves sifting through thousands of men on some straight dating site, looking for the non-horrible ones—a task that even cis women find awful? And then, how many times had Reese heard about these girls who wasted hours, days, weeks, months trying to find one of the non-horrible ones who would be willing to give a trans woman a try, only to finally end up in his bedroom, standing exposed with only a stupid lacy lingerie set for armor, as he sized up the new-to-him proportions of slender hips to wider shoulders, and nervously muttered that it’s not for him?
No way. That shit is way more traumatic than running into any chaser. Go to a fetish site for men who already know they want a trans girl, and select a decent one from among the many begging for you. In matters of the heart, Reese had one firm maxim: You don’t get to choose who you fuck, you get to choose from among those who want to fuck you.
* * *
—
She found Stanley on the most embarrassing of her many embarrassing fetish sites—a site that hadn’t updated its technology, much less its design, since the era of Web 1.0, but on which she reliably pulled all sorts of guys who didn’t know enough about the queer world to look elsewhere for the kind of submissive trans girls they’d seen in porn but never in the bars they frequented.
On their first date, he showed off by taking her to a Jean-Georges restaurant. He picked out a bottle of French Bordeaux from a separate section of the menu, where the prices were so high that they were vaguely shameful and had to be tucked in at the end, like the ads for dominatrices in the back pages of free weeklies.
After an appropriate period of chitchat, she asked her standard opening question: “So tell me about your previous experience with trans girls.”
“I’ve always liked trans girls, but my experience has just been escorts,” he replied, then paused. “I’ve had ongoing things with escorts, but in the end, those always made me feel bad.”
“Because you don’t like paying for sex?”
He blinked. “No, I don’t mind paying for sex.” Then without affect, so she couldn’t tell if it was a joke, he added, “What do you think this dinner is?”
Without seeming to register her aghast face, he continued, “The problem for me with trans escorts is that they all want vaginas. Most of the ones I met were doing it to make money until they could get one. It made me feel bad. I want to see that little bulge, and they all wanted to get rid of it. That’s why I went to that site. I figured anyone calling themselves a sissy or tranny had probably come to terms with her cock.” He broke a piece of bread with his hands and popped it into his mouth.
Reese continued to stare, unable to formulate a response. He said, “Come on, you asked me a blunt question about my sexual past and sexuality. I gave you a blunt answer. It’s your turn. Don’t act demure now. Do you want a vagina?”
He had blue eyes in a big bland face, shaggy hair, and was dressed like he planned to be photographed for a lifestyle magazine for wealthy understated men interested in bird-watching or some other non-vigorous outdoor activity, in a waxed canvas Barbour jacket with many pockets and a heavily cabled turtleneck. When they met on the street, she joked that she was expecting a Wall Street guy in a suit. “Those are the sellers. The bankers. Guys who want money,” he said dismissively. “I represent the buyers. The guys who already have money. I could show up to work in my swim trunks.” Even Reese knew enough about finance to recognize this as a suspect oversimplification, but it sounded so much like a line from Glengarry Glen Ross that Reese merely said, “Wow.” And even she was unsure if that wow was because he had impressed her with his confidence or because she had never heard such a clichéd performance delivered with so little irony so soon after an introduction.
“I sometimes want bottom surgery,” Reese said. “When I turned eighteen, I got some money that my grandmother left for me. It was about two-thirds of what I needed to go to Thailand and get one. Instead I spent it on a road trip with a boyfriend and moving to New York. I got a job here in a daycare, then as a server, and I figured that it’d be years before I could afford surgery working as a waitress, so I’ve worked to get comfortable with the idea that I have a penis, but that it’s a woman’s penis. I’m pretty much there, mentally. It helps that I grew up watching trans porn. I watched way more trans girls getting fucked than cis women, so I think I internalized the idea of trans women with cocks as the hottest, most feminine women out there.”
“I like that,” Stanley said, and grinned for the first time. “I could see you as a hot Jersey housewife. I want to put you in a pair of yoga pants, tight enough that you can’t hide your cock.”
Reese really liked wearing yoga pants, but his interest in her penis so early in the date meant that she wasn’t yet going to give him the satisfaction of saying so. She wondered if he’d somehow gotten confused. She’d clearly stated that she was a strict bottom on the fetish site. “You know I don’t top, right?”
“What? Of course not. I don’t want that.”
“Okay, well you had so much interest in my junk.”
“I’m interested in everything decorative on a woman.”
Referring to Reese’s genitals as purely decorative was an objectively asshole thing to say. But instead of being offended, she was turned on.
The waiter stopped by the table at this moment to refill Reese’s wineglass, and Reese inadvertently blushed, unsure what he had heard. Meanwhile Stanley was saying, “I like dressing up women. Controlling them. It’s never role-play.” The waiter set down the bottle and departed with a maximum of discretion.
“Wait, what’s not role-play?” Reese asked.
He looked at her sharply. “You need to listen better. The whole dominant thing. That’s just who I naturally am. I don’t need protocols, or bullshit like that. I want the subjugation to be real. But the only politically acceptable way to subjugate women is financially. Because women want that subjugation themselves. One thing I liked about those trans escorts was how easily I bought them.”