Sometimes they did genuinely use the label before coming out as/realizing they were trans. The term gets grandfathered in even though it’s no longer correct at all. Like trans men who still identify as lesbian.

Eh. I’m all for letting people use the labels they feel most comfortable with, i don’t care that there’s people who think it’s contradictory that i call myself a nonbinary trans woman, or that i use lesbian as a label in spite of theoretically being bi / pan. Queerness always includes some amount of ambiguity and some amount of defiance, and our language should be a way to combat epistemic injustice, that is: to fight cishetnormative society’s attempts to deny us the language to describe our own experiences. I refuse to let my labels function as a taxonomy for straights that see me as a specimen; they should be jumping-off points to explore how i violate norms imposed upon me, cues for freely improvising gender and sexuality. Trans women have no obligation to stick to gender conforming labels and always insist on being the girliest girls, it can be extremely liberating to allow ourselves androgynity.

With that out of the way, i see way too often that there’s both chasers who use this particular language on dating apps, and trans women who will put up with the grossest fetishizing because they think it’s the only way for them to get laid at all. So i can’t really say what i think of that when you put it in a vacuum, it could be “yeah, that’s what she calls herself, cool that she has the guts to do that with all the transmisogyny around” or it could be super fucking sad. I’m not gonna judge her in the latter case, the blame for this should be on a transphobic system, not on trans people who see no less humuliating way to navigate it, but … speaking from experience, when trans people have internalized that much transphobia that they’re willing to put up with being treated like this by cissies, they’re not safe for me to be around and i’ll gtfo, that’s just necessary self care.

Yeah my FIL does that on dating profiles. I think she’s trying to attract the sort of men that go for that fetish.

If she does it for she wants to, then more power to her. If she does it for she has to, then that’s a bad thing. What else is there to be said?

Up to them honestly though I myself feel weird about it. I’m not a femboy or a sissy but I’m a trans woman. Same deal with cross dressers. I’m just not a crossdresser and I don’t want people thinking I am