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Notes -
The general complaint among the, uh, supply is that the demand is high, but extremely low-quality, even by gay hookup culture standards of quality, precisely because the demand is from people who are principally heterosexual, and probably have deep roots in heterosexual culture -- including, possibly, a wife. Therefore they're exceptionally flaky/indifferent/uncertain, leading to the kind of debasement I discussed in my other reply to you as a desperate attempt to lock-down any reasonably qualified leads. So I'm not sure this is a lopsided market in the way you're suggesting; it's more of a matching market where neither side seems to be happy. Cf all other dating environments.
However, by far the most common kind of pairing you find for this type of person is actually femme-to-femme, both because the masculine options are so low-quality, and because some meaningful fraction of this group is bisexual or AGP. In our earlier discussion on this topic, I was talking about this sub-population; when you assumed I was talking about transmasc-transfemme pairings, I was actually confused! When you said that transitioning "is weirdly common among men willing to openly date trans women," well, that wasn't surprising or confusing at all to me, and it was interesting to see that it was confusing to you.
IMO, trans women who try to date men are, for obvious reasons, often pulling from the pool Blanchard described as "gynandromorphophiles", which are often also AGP. Gender transitioning, for this pool of individuals, is often both appealing in the AGP sense, and appealing in the sense that it gives them "skin in the game" that establishes cred among bisexual trans women who treat cis men with suspicion.
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