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Notes -
My intention was to gesture at the "showing skin is fine, and prudish fussie-duddies should get over it", free-the-nipple sort of liberal memeplex without getting into the weeds. I obviously didn't mean that I thought Amadan and SnapDragon thought the colors of the trans women's clothes clashed, but I did mean to imply that they were, perhaps, being judgemental in taking it for granted that revealing clothing is always "sexual", let alone "off-puttingly" so. In your example, I think Bob is doing something inappropriate insofar as his showing himself off to Alice is intended to seduce her or pressure her into sex - but if Bob, in fact, began wearing shorts because he likes the feel of them or thinks he looks good in them - if we forget about the deliberate posing - I don't think the mere fact that Alice might find the look sexually suggestive means she has a complaint against Bob, except to the extent that his genitals are so visible as to fall afoul of actual indecency laws, which is a very different conversation.
(It may very well be that at least some of the trans women SnapDragon and Amadan have encountered were doing more deliberate things in line with Bob propping his feet up when he knows Alice has to look. It certainly seems to be the case with the person you also, perhaps confusingly, called "Bob" in your other reply. But I do think I'm right in saying that SnapDragon and Amadan object to the revealing clothing itself already, hence why the sentence you quoted was focused on the clothing itself.)
Let's put it this way: there are situations and contexts where wearing tight/revealing clothing or sexually suggestive logos is appropriate, and situations where it is not. In my experience, trans women are much more likely to push the boundaries of appropriateness. They are also much more likely to try to, ah, flaunt their "assets" in a way that a non-trans woman wouldn't. By which I mean, fat women don't usually go to casual events with clingy bodywrap dresses showing off their every bulge and roll, and flat-chested women don't usually try to draw attention to their nonexistent cleavage down to their hairy navels. In fact, they will usually try very much not to show off such bodily defects. Why, then, do fat trans women (men) get it into their heads that they are so uWu sexy doing this? At, say, a baseball game? I have never seen a fat woman wear a tutu and a lycra blouse over unshaved legs to a casual event; I have seen more than one fat trans woman do this.
Yes, I think it is often a sex thing. I think they have a fetish and they are involuntarily making us play along with their fantasy. No, not all trans women. But a lot of them.
I don't think "it is often a sex thing" actually follows from "trans women often dress more provocatively than cis women". I believe the main reason for the latter fact is, rather, that once you've broken one taboo, you're more likely to break another. Or to put it another way, when you've already made yourself a freak in the eyes of an appreciable fraction of society simply by transitioning, when you've already joined a class that a good deal of normies will find disgusting on principle and decided to love yourself in spite of their contempt, you're well on your way to unlearning all other socially-constructed shames. You're very likely to think "to hell with fatphobia, I don't have to disguise my figure to gain the approval of a bunch of snobs"; to think "radical feminists had the right idea, forcing women to shave their legs is patriarchal bullshit, body hair is natural, body hair is beautiful, why should I hide mine if I don't want to?"; and so on, and so forth. I believe there's a fair number of trans nudists.
And like… I think this explanation is broadly neutral? You might believe, as I do, that this is a basically healthy, enlightened attitude and that the kinds of cis women you describe, who regard small breasts and body hair as "defects", would be a lot happier if they adopted at least parts of. Or you might believe that it's a slippery slope of post-modernism where throwing out the basic division of the sexes leads inexorably to the breakdown of any belief in aesthetic principles or social norms of any kind, in favor of a kind of feel-good hippieslop. Either might follow. The point is that your observations are handily explained by my framework of "people who've transed their genders have basically thrown out the social rulebook already, so they're likely to be unconventional and scandalous in all sorts of other dimensions", with no need for transness to itself be a sex thing.
Your explanation is "They have freed themselves of society's lame constraints."
My explanation is: "It's a fetish."
Your explanation is more charitable than mine, but I think my explanation is more realistic. It more closely matches what I have observed about trans behavior, and it more closely matches what I observe about the specific ways in which they choose to present themselves.
Of course you could be right and I could be wrong. But it will take more than an alternative, more charitable theory to convince me.
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Now that I've slept on it, can I just extend a bit of an olive branch here? I do appreciate your willingness to keep calmly engaging in a fairly unfriendly thread. While I think you're uncharitably wrong about me, you're not completely wrong. I probably am unduly influenced by the "ick" factor, and have blown some negative experiences out of proportion. Anyway, others in the thread have done an excellent job of arguing my side; I don't have anything more to add.
I appreciate this in turn! Thank you.
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