Now that pornhub released statistics showing that a significant number of cis women seek out porn of trans men under pretty fetishistic and transphobic names, can we finally admit that the rise in the amount of explicit gay fanfic/fan art/head cannons where the character popularly assigned the bottom is a trans man is fetishistic?
Cause every time it's brought up people defend it as being written/read by trans men. However fandom is a cis women dominant space, fics with trans men in it have become so much more mainstream in fandom recently, and there's a pretty obvious development from the older 'femanized bottom' trope to 'trans men'. Significantly as well, if it was primarily written by/for trans men, it wouldn't be exclusively trans men bottoming for cis men, and we would probably also expect a significant rise in trans male characters outside of porn and for a wider range of characters.
I think it's less 'trans men are the main readers/writers' and more 'trans men barely get to see ourselves represented and are drawn to deptions of trans men regardless of fetishization'. It's basically impossible to find trans porn that isn't fetishized! If there was porn which featured trans men topping I'd be reading it! (I'm already writing it). But there isnt, so trans men end up in spaces which are predominantly by and for cis women.
And to be clear, its not fetishistic for cis women to write/read NSFW stories about trans men, and there's a vast variety in the quality of the representation between indervidual fics from fetishistic to well done. It is however undeniable that there is a fixation on PiV sex where trans men bottom to cis men (to the point where very very few fics don't involve it), and there are patterns in which men are popularly fancannoned as trans men.
I mean, fair enough. Not much to disagree there, though I wouldn't say that the majority of trans fiction on ao3 specifically is piv. It's mostly an issue with the "Mainstream" or whatever to call it, porn sites like pornhub but I also don't think it's caused by them.
I do wish we at least had more depictions of bottom growth/phallo/meto and generally carried rep in erotica, but that unfortunately falls on all of us to contribute and be as loud about it as possible.
I don't see anything specifically wrong with fetishism. Just as with any fetish, be it feet, ears, trans people or whatever else a specific person may be into— it is something they are into, that turns them on, but it isn't a judgement on their ability to interact with other people in itself. Someone with a foot fetish can still act normal around people who have feet (I'd say that's most other humans, with exceptions). Same goes to people with a fetish for trans people. They can write their widely inaccurate pornographic material and then go off into the wild wild world to talk to trans people with the respect we deserve— or, they should, obviously, since we all know that not everybody has this incredible ability of realising what's porn and what's a living breathing person who isn't interested.
Still, as the point lists, while extreme fetishization obviously can lead to someone having a warped view of a certain group (in here, trans people), my solution to this would be more contend produced by us because obviously, telling a random person on the internet that their depiction of how a trans man would have sex isn't going to do anything (1. There usually is going to be at least one trans man who would have sex like this, 2. It's a fantasy. I can't be bothered.)
Of course there are chasers. Transphobia is everywhere. And trans people have been dealing with this dehumanisation for so long, at this point it's tiring. And yet, I just don't think getting angry at porn is the way, since it is, at the end of the day, the result— not a cause.
Anyways
I'm not going to debate most of the points you've brought up here, and initially I wasn't going to respond at all. At the end of the day, a lot of my experience with fandom and how it treats trans men is qualitative not quantitative, and there's not a definitive answer to this.
However, I do think its important to acknowledge the distinction between fetishess/kink (ie a foot fetish), sexual attraction, and fetishization, since it seems like you've misunderstood what fetishization is, and fetishization of minority groups is a lot more significant than just sexual attraction and does play a role in oppression. Its completely understandable, especially if you're entrenched in the (white) queer community, since there's a lot of nuance and grey areas between stigmatized attraction, sexual attraction, and fetishization. A fetish/kink is an attraction to something not typically thought of as attractive/a thing someone finds arousing, sexual attraction is a desire to have sex with a person the person finds attractive, and fetishization is veiwing a group as an object to have sex with first and foremost. It's inherently dehumanizating, and the person doing the fetishizating doesn't veiw the subject as a complete person with their own desires and personality, and usually based on prejudiced stereotypes.
