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Fascinating breakdown, thanks, I never really thought about it this way. This actually slightly clears up one of the bigger mysteries I've pondered for years while hanging in degen-adjacent spaces - the memetic insistence of how traps/femboys are totally not gay. It's impossible to take the egregious contradiction on its face (there's not even a fig leaf like with e.g futa - you are literally fucking another man), and I presumed it was mostly cope, but from this point of view it apparently is a valid and intended feature, I'm just too normie to see it.
I now have several more interesting mysteries to ponder, chief of which is what is the overlap with loli mentioned downthread, and whether or not this is basically a, for lack of a better term, culturally evolved substitution where
degensconnoisseurs can openly lust after femboys (which are considered based and mostly retain the uh, required body type) instead of lolis (which are heavily stigmatized even in degen-adjacent spaces). It would explain a lot of things, it can't be just the bi-curiosity in the water supply.Further ramblings from downthread:
Apologies for the Reddit link.
It's actually kind of interesting to me that, from a certain point of view, you go from 100% masc to 0% masc and then back to 100% masc- from "I wanted a woman and got a woman as far as I know" (full masc) through "pretending not to notice the cracks" to "the illusion is obviously broken but we're fine with it anyway" (totally not masc) to "not even bothering to keep up the illusion" to "this isn't meaningfully distinct from being gay but that's what I wanted anyway" (full masc).
Having sex but putting aside it's not the thing you actually wanted/having to put extra effort in to enjoy it is probably the least masculine thing you could do more or less by definition, and the middle position on that graph is the one that symbolizes that the most.
I think our words for how people think about gender are probably still pretty bad here; that's why we can point out that "traps are gay" is incoherent as a concept but not actually be able to explain it any better than that language allows us. Actually, I'm doing the same thing with what "masculinity" is above, too, but this isn't yet the effortpost it needs to be to do this properly.
Futa is honestly really weird and doesn't tend to line up with traps/tomgirls at all; the latter tend to have an intentional de-emphasis on both kinds of secondary sexual characteristics whereas with futa they're both on absolute full blast all the time (proportions range from the large side of normal to wildly exaggerated). Maybe you get a slight hourglass and exaggeration of pecs into breasts with a trap (the meme is "draw a girl, call it a boy" but only the low-effort traps are done like that), but with futa you usually get a wasp waist, massive breasts, and a dick half as long and just as thick as their arms.
I only say this because I've noticed that the portrayal of traps tends to be more immature/loli-adjacent than the characters that surround them- their faces tend to be rounder, their outfits tend to be closer to what a child would wear or slightly out of place in that direction with respect to the rest of the cast (if applicable), and the context and memes around them is more immature and more evocative of a loli than a "proper" grown woman (the "boys are the best girls" thing, as opposed to normal male sexuality... which is more likely to pattern-match to futa anyway).
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