Trans folks are asking: Why are people so mad when femboys come out as trans?

Gender identity and expression come in all shapes and forms, including femboys (aka men who often wear traditionally feminine clothing, hair, and makeup) and trans women (aka women who weren’t assigned female at birth). Sometimes, femboys later come out as trans women. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course: it’s often a long and complicated journey to discover one’s gender identity. But for whatever reason, the same people who accept (and even adore) femboys seem enraged when they come forward with their trans identities.

That’s why one user took to a trans subreddit to air their confusion on the topic. “Be it fictional characters or real people I have seen entire fanbases get incredibly heated and angry when a femboy is revealed to be a trans after all,” they wrote in a Reddit post, citing famous streamer F1nn5ter and video game character Bridget from the Guilty Gear series, both of whom garnered controversy when coming out as trans after being known as femboys by their fandoms.

“Are people who react this way just femboy chasers? If you first started out as a femboy and later realised that you are trans did you have similar experiences?” they continued. “I really wonder why people would have such a negative reaction to it.”

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As you might expect, trans people were quick to point out the root cause of the phenomenon: good old-fashioned transphobia.

“A lot of transphobes will really push the existence of femboys as somehow superior to or more legitimate than trans women because they want to invalidate our identities anyway [they] can, and pressuring us into being ‘feminine presenting boys/men’ rather than what we are (women) is one way to try and do that,” one person commented. “This certainly isn’t true of every femboy or person who appreciates femboys, but it is an alarmingly large number of them.”

“Maybe it’s something about finding the ‘transfeminine beauty’ appealing but still hating trans people,” another commenter theorized. “The Venn diagram of chasers and transphobes is like almost a perfect circle at this point.”

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Then there’s the fetishization of it all. Many people who see femboys as attractive don’t extend that attraction to trans women, some users said, even in cases where there are no physical differences between the two.

“There’s people out there that love to fetishize femboys, and because they’re not attracted to trans people they get upset when said ‘femboy’ turns out to be trans — since to them they stop being attractive or sexually appealing,” as one user put it.

“Their inner image of femboys are feminine, obedient, hypersexual cuties while trans women in their heads are masculine, unf*ckable social justice warriors,” another commenter wrote. “They cannot reconcile their attraction to a person who goes from category 1 to category 2.”

Other users said the outrage could come from a lack of representation for femboys in media — in combination, of course, with transmisogyny.

“Especially when we’re dealing with fictional creations, making your one gender-nonconforming character a binary trans character implies that you can’t truly be so gender-nonconforming, you’re either cis or you’re (closeted) trans,” one commenter explained. “Incidentally I don’t know of any ‘femboy’ rep in media or social personalities compared to trans women.”

They continued by using F1nn5ter’s transition from femboy to genderfluid trans person as an example: “Finnster was the go-to in trans subreddits like this one for anyone trying to demonstrate that a man can be a man and secure in their gender without having to be masculine at all, and now I bet most of us can’t think of a role model for that concept,” they wrote. “That’s not Finnster’s fault obviously, it’s just not a huge thing outside of drag or something.”