Chaser

Chaser describes someone, usually a cis man, who pursues trans people specifically and as a type. The word is not about who someone is attracted to. It is about being treated as an instance of a category rather than as a person.

The distinction that matters is what happens next. Being attracted to trans people is unremarkable; trans people are attractive. A chaser is recognisable by the pattern that follows: the conversation goes to your body within a few messages, you are compared to other trans people they have met, and the relationship is conditional on nobody finding out.

That last part is the usual tell, and it is the most damaging. A chaser will want you privately and not publicly, which means the person telling you that you are beautiful is also telling you that you are unshowable.

It is a word trans people use about an experience, not a slur invented to punish anyone's attraction. The people it describes generally recognise the behaviour when it is laid out, and generally dispute the label.

This is one of the reasons spaces made for trans people exist at all. Not because attraction from cis people is the problem, but because a space built for trans people meeting each other takes most of the question of whether you are being met or collected off the table.

A chaser is not simply someone attracted to trans people

The word gets used loosely enough that any cis person interested in a trans person can be accused of it, which is both unfair and useless. Attraction to trans people is not the behaviour being named.

What is being named is a pattern: the body first, the comparison to others, the insistence on privacy. Someone who does none of those is not a chaser, whatever their type.

Saying it well