Transgender Narratives and Online Dating: Reframing Trans-Cis Relations (in Cape Town)

The recent inclusivity and protections of transgender identities on online dating platforms has improved the creation, dissemination and reception of individualised transgender narratives, making both – sites and trans narratives – more accessible and acceptable to (potentially) transamorous cismen. Within research, trans-cis dating relations have been unexplored. Studies that exist (Smith 2007; Doozy 2021), tended to pathologize trans-cis relationships and attractions. This article, using an autoethnographic lens on my lived experience, illustrates how transgender narratives on online dating platforms are personalised and created through question-and-answer exchanges and the nuanced (re)telling of transitioning. I challenge dominant assumptions about the experience of dating a transgender woman in Cape Town, South Africa, among them hyper-sexualised portrayals of transwomen as sex workers, an interest in sexual fetishes and in habitually multiple, temporary sexual experiences. While my online dating experiences have been tumultuous, online dating platforms, I argue, have the generative potential to shift for the better the wider reception of unconventional transgender narratives. I suggest that online dating platforms play a critical role in disseminating, through exchanges, a diverse range of transgender stories that disrupt stereotypical, normative assumptions about trans lives and trans dating. Here, I draw on transitioning narratives understood as existing within the liminality of an ongoing, processual space, rather than in the more normatively (mis)understood teleology of a pre- and post-transition. Hil Malatino describes this space as the trans interregnum, referring to “moments during transition [..] (that do) not have a definite end”, in effect dispelling the “cruel optimism” that a fixation on medical transitioning holds out to transwomen and cismen who find an interest in online dating (635). Malatino also accounts for “creative and caring acts of trans intimacy” (635). Within such a framework, online dating platforms can play a unique role in sharing the complexity of transgender narratives with unfamiliar cismen.