Dating as a gay trans man means going after men while a good deal of the world quietly assumes you are not one. The numbers are friendlier than the mood music. Most trans men are not straight, the clinics that once refused to treat men like you gave that rule up decades ago, and the apps you are likely to use have had a place to say so since 2017. What follows is what the record shows about who will date you, how to set up a profile, and how to handle disclosure and sex without guessing.
Most trans men are not straight
Start with the arithmetic, because it takes some of the loneliness out of the question. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey collected answers from 27,715 people across the United States. Among the respondents who identified as trans men, 23% called themselves heterosexual or straight. Nearly three quarters, 72%, picked something else: queer (24%), pansexual (17%), bisexual (12%), gay or same-gender loving (12%), asexual (7%).
A 2022 paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, built on case studies of Canadian trans men who have sex with men, puts the share of trans men who identify as gay, bisexual, queer or as men who have sex with men at roughly two thirds. Wanting men is an ordinary way to be a trans man, not an edge case someone forgot to plan for.
Labels here are looser than they look from outside. Some men say gay and mean it flatly. Others prefer achillean, which covers men and people close to manhood who are attracted to men without insisting on one shape of manhood. None of these words have to agree with each other, and none of them is a promise about what you will want in ten years.
The clinics used to rule it out
For decades, gender clinics worked from the idea that transition ended in a heterosexual life. To be approved for care, trans people had to state that after medical transition they would be heterosexual. A man who wanted men was, by that logic, asking for the wrong thing.
Lou Sullivan, born on 16 June 1951 in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, is the first trans man known to have publicly identified as gay. He was repeatedly refused surgery because of his sexual orientation, and because the clinics of the period expected trans people to take up stereotypical heterosexual roles. So he campaigned to get homosexuality struck off the list of contraindications for that surgery.
Alongside the campaign he built the community it needed. Quarterly gatherings for trans men started in 1986, the FTM Newsletter followed in September 1987, and the group grew into FTM International, renamed the Lou Sullivan Society in 2007. Diagnosed with HIV in 1986, shortly after his own surgery, he died on 2 March 1991. Sullivan put it himself: "I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I'm going to die like one."
The rule changed after him. By 1994, three years after his death, a homosexual orientation had been dropped as a contraindication in the diagnostic criteria. Before the century was out, the researcher Ira Pauly acknowledged that it could no longer be said that every trans man was attracted only to women.
What the dating research actually found
The most quoted number in this area comes from a 2019 study by Karen Blair and Rhea Ashley Hoskin, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Participants were asked which genders they would consider for a future romantic partner. Across the sample, 87.5% ticked only the cisgender options.
The spread underneath that figure is the useful part. Among cisgender heterosexual participants, 3.1% said they would date a trans person. For participants who identified as queer or bisexual, the figure was 55%. One of the authors, writing about the study afterwards, was careful to point out that participants were never asked for their reasons, so everything from open prejudice to simply not knowing any trans people remains speculation.
Gay men were not reported as a separate group in that paper. If someone quotes you a precise percentage of gay men who would date a trans man, they are inventing it.
Whether gay male scenes are welcoming is contested in the research itself. One strand describes trans men having less success integrating socially into cisgender gay men's communities, which it characterises as more body-focused. Another argues that many cis gay men have welcomed trans men into gay communities and increasingly recognise them as sexual and romantic partners. Both claims sit in the same summary of the literature, which fits what most people report: it depends on the city, the scene and the year. The particular flavour of being overlooked rather than shouted at has a name, transandrophobia.
Apps, and what goes on the profile
Grindr added a gender identity field and a pronoun field to profiles on 21 November 2017, each with a write-in option for anything not already listed, alongside gender-neutral language across the app and a set of written answers linked from those fields so that users with questions had somewhere to go other than you. Fields do not fix a room. They do give you something to point at, and they move part of the explaining off your shoulders.
- Say it in the profile if you want it said before you meet. Plenty of men prefer that to a conversation at the door.
- Say what you want, not just what you are. A profile made entirely of disclosure reads like a disclaimer.
- Decide in advance which questions you answer. Surgery status is not small talk, and you are allowed to say so and stay friendly.
- Keep at least one photo that looks like you on a normal Tuesday, in the light you actually live in.
Some men set their profile to T4T and stop there. That is a strategy rather than a retreat: it removes the entire category of conversation where you explain yourself to someone who has never thought about any of this. Is T4T dating worth it? goes through the trade-offs honestly, and what the mainstream apps let you set covers the big platforms. T4TSpace is a dating app by and for trans and non-binary people where every account is checked by a person, open in the browser while native apps are being built.
Telling him, and when
No rule says you owe anyone your history, and no version of this is risk-free. What the record shows is that saying it plainly does not always protect you. The 2022 Canadian case studies include a man who put his trans identity on his dating profiles, repeatedly and in clear words, and still met partners who reacted with anger once they worked out what it meant.
That is an argument for controlling the setting, not for silence. Some men do it in writing before meeting, so there is a record and no ambiguity left to manage in person. Others wait for a second date somewhere public. The right moment is whichever one leaves you with the exits.
Do I have to tell someone I'm trans? works through the question properly. If you live stealth, the calculation shifts again, because a date is also a person who now knows something your landlord and your employer do not.
Where disclosure is a safety question, treat a first meeting the way you would any first meeting with a stranger: public place, one friend who knows where you are, your own way home. First date safety has the checklist.
When he wants the idea of you
A man can be drawn to you partly because you are trans without treating you as a specimen. The word chaser does not describe an attraction, it describes a habit: the person keeps steering back to your body, your history and your surgeries, and loses interest in whatever makes you an individual.
- He wants to meet, but never anywhere his friends might be.
- Questions about your body arrive before questions about your work, your family or your week.
- He uses words for you and for your body that you have never used yourself.
- He treats the fact that he will date you as a favour, out loud or just in tone.
How to tell if someone is a chaser goes further into the patterns. The test that saves the most time is one question, asked privately: does he want a relationship with you, or with the category?
Sex, words and sexual health
Sex is where the vocabulary problem stops being abstract. You get to name your own parts and tell a partner which words to use, and doing it beforehand rather than mid-sentence is normal, not precious. Among the 2022 case studies, the participants who negotiated deliberately, including those who negotiated around kink, ended up with clearer frameworks for communication and consent than those who did not.
Health services have moved more slowly. The same paper reports participants saying that prevention work on HIV and other sexually transmitted infections was built around cisgender men who have sex with men, and it argues that trans men who have sex with men need services designed for them rather than folded into a wider category and then left out of the design of it.
The practical version: find a clinic that already sees trans patients, and describe the sex you actually have rather than the sex the form expects. In the UK, Terrence Higgins Trust keeps pages for trans men and trans masculine people covering safer sex, PrEP and PEP, testing for HIV and other infections, and living with HIV, along with a helpline and a list of clinics. Anything about your own risk, your own body or what to take belongs with a clinician rather than with an article.
Questions people actually ask
Does starting testosterone change who you are attracted to?
The research disagrees with itself, which is worth knowing before anyone tells you it must. A 2021 European study of more than 900 trans people found no direct effect of hormone therapy on sexual orientation. A 2014 US study found that 29% of trans women and trans men reported a change in orientation at some point during social or medical transition, and a 2016 US study found that most trans people became more fluid in their attractions after social transition. Attractions shifting is common and unremarkable. Nothing makes it happen on schedule.
What should you do if a match says he is only into cisgender men?
Take the information and move on, because the alternative is auditioning. A 2019 study found 87.5% of participants would consider only cisgender partners, and one of its authors was clear both that people get to decide who they date and that the study never asked anyone why. Some of that exclusion is prejudice, some is having never met a trans person, and you cannot tell which from three words on a profile. Arguing converts almost nobody and costs you an evening.
How do you meet other gay and bisexual trans men offline?
Community organising was doing this long before the apps existed. Lou Sullivan started quarterly gatherings for trans men in 1986 and launched the FTM Newsletter in September 1987, and the group became FTM International, a support network that outlived him. The modern descendants are trans masculine groups, queer sports clubs, HIV charities with trans services, and city-specific meetups. Where to meet trans people offline has more of them, and how to make trans friends covers the part nobody calls dating.
Is being a gay trans man the same as being transmasculine and achillean?
They overlap without matching. Gay trans man is a plain statement: a man who is trans and is attracted to men. Transmasculine is a wider umbrella that includes trans men and also plenty of people who are not men at all. Achillean describes men, and people close to manhood, who are attracted to men, which leaves room for a relationship to manhood that is real without being simple. Pick whichever one you would still want on your profile in a year.
Do you need bottom surgery before dating men as a trans man?
No. Plenty of gay trans men date, have sex and build relationships with no surgery at all, and plenty have some procedures and not others. Gender clinics once treated attraction to men as a reason to refuse surgery entirely: Lou Sullivan was turned down repeatedly on exactly those grounds, and a homosexual orientation was only dropped as a contraindication in the diagnostic criteria by 1994, after his death. What kind of sex you want, and what you want it called, is a conversation with a partner. Anything medical belongs with a clinician.
Wren · Editor
Wren is the name the T4TSpace blog is published under. The posts are written by the small team that builds the app, and signed with one name so the voice stays the same from one piece to the next.