What is a chaser?
Someone drawn to the category rather than the person. The difference shows up fast.
A chaser is someone whose interest in you is interest in trans people as a category, with you as an interchangeable example. The word gets used loosely and sometimes unfairly, so it is worth being precise about what it actually describes.
It is not about being attracted to trans people
Plenty of people are attracted to trans people and treat the people they date as people. That is not chasing, that is just attraction, and treating every cis person who swipes right as suspect will cost you good relationships.
The distinction is not what someone finds attractive. It is whether you are a person to them or a type they are collecting.
What it looks like in practice
The conversation goes to your body in the first few messages, usually before your name has come up twice. Questions are about mechanics rather than about you. Compliments are about the category — variations on how much they like trans people — rather than about anything specific to you.
They want to meet quickly and privately, at their place or yours, and resist anywhere public. They will not be seen with you in daylight. Their profile has no photo, or photos that do not show a face.
And the tell that matters most: when you redirect the conversation to something else, the interest visibly drops.
Why it does damage
Because it is legible as attention, and attention is scarce. Being wanted intensely by someone who does not see you is corrosive in a way that plain rejection is not, and it tends to leave people doubting whether they can tell the difference at all.
It also shapes behaviour. People who have dealt with a lot of it start treating the fetishising version of interest as normal, and lower what they will accept accordingly. That is the real cost.
What to do about it
Nothing dramatic. Ask a question that requires them to be interested in you — what they are like on a Sunday, what they argue about, what they last got obsessed with. Someone who is there for a person answers easily. Someone who is not gets bored, and you will feel the temperature change.
Then block. Not argue, not educate, not give them a chance to explain. You are not obliged to run a training programme, and blocking is free.
The structural version
It is worth knowing that most apps marketed for trans dating admit anyone interested in dating trans people — that is their published design. So the volume of this you encounter is not bad luck, it is the room you are standing in. t4t spaces exist largely as a response to that.