a/b/o is a reactionary trope that relies on cissexism-derived biological essentialism to function. Like, that’s the engine that powers the bdsm/power dynamics, cisheteronormative breeding/family building, “dub/non-con”, etc. elements that draw people to it, and led people to create it in the first place. 

Like, my best attempt at describing a non-transphobic, non-shitty typical a/b/o adjacent fic would include:

• Werewolves (let’s face it, werewolves can be really cool if written well, and there’s a lot of really good ways to write them, a lot of ways to subvert tired subtropes within the trope)
• Found Family-focused family/pack building (because wolves often adopt wolves from other packs into their own, blood lineage isn’t really a thing; much like vampires being created, newly turned werewolves of any age can be considered their sire’s child; if it needs to have a pregnancy arc between two men or two women, there’s IVF/IUI, or magically/spiritually-induced pregnancies, and of course writing a fully fledged complex trans character with their own non-pregnancy arc and virtues/flaws/goals/etc. and getting relevant trans beta writers who aren’t your friends to keep it on track if you’re a cis writer)
• A flexible, non-binary gendered society (rather than the rigidly structured biology-is-destiny a/b/o society) that’s trans inclusive either explicitly, or implicitly if it’s a new social universe with different rules. 
• If mating seasons have to exist, they’re cultural more than biological, and no biological processes that could impede or trouble a person’s ability to properly consent. 
• No inherent, glorified or reified power dynamics, certainly none rooted in or fostered through biology. 

That doesn’t seem very much at all like a/b/o to me. It’s a werewolf AU, which is the reason why a/b/o was created in the first place. It wasn’t enough. It needed something more than just a supernatural bent

I’ll continue on below for a bit on some simplified functions of a/b/o, but it’s mostly just some ramblings.

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Like, to quote the originators of the genre/trope:

I’d like to see Alpha male Jared, and Bitch male Jensen. Jensen is a snotty prude (think Lady from lady and the tramp) he may be a bitch male but he’s not just going to let anybody take a go at his sweet little ass…until he meets Jared…then prudey little Jensen turns cock slut for Jared. Bonus points for J2 being OTP, Jensen was a virgin before Jared, and now that they met each other, it’s for life.

…

There are three types of men, alpha males, beta males, and omega males. Alpha males are like any ordinary guy with the exception of their cocks, they work just like canines (the knot, tons of cum, strong breeders, etc) The beta male, is an ordinary guy without the special cock. Omega males are capable of child bearing and often called bitch males.

Like, I want you to look at that real close and see what’s going on in there.

This was created to be a trope where there’s a world where women, as we explicitly know them, don’t exist, but where a subgroup of men take up the functional role of the woman in the heteronormative social structure of the world. It’s also not surprising that (assumedly cis) women created and initiated the spread of this trope.

Look at the language used. This is heavily, explicitly gendered for a reason. If you’ve read much of anything about how the male gaze impacts female sexuality, you’ll know a common response is for women to position themselves out of the proverbial frame entirely, so that no part of them can explicitly exist as an object, where they can take on the role of a subject. There’s no women whose experiences will directly link to her own and her own perceptions, comfort/discomfort/etc.

However, many of these women also have been heavily affected by the male gaze and heteronormativity, and that combined with not knowing what a real gay male relationship is like, what it looks like, what experiences might be unique to it…they fill in the blanks with their own conditioning. 

And maybe seeing a lot of that toxic masculinity in media content was unsettling because of how women get treated in that content, and how they in turn might feel in those shoes. But if a MAN, even if it’s a heavily female-coded man, were to undergo that…well, it’d be easier to appreciate those tropes and dynamics they’ve been force-fed to believe were arousing, hot, desirable. Especially if they can have two hot men in it. They can enjoy that self-created taboo, bypass their own discomfort and insecurity, and project it onto a type of person different enough to suspend their disbelief and maintain that difference, even if they’re pumping that guy full of all the typical misogynistic tropes and experiences they’re not comfortable having directed towards them and other women.

In short, it’s a way to get off on heteronormative norms/tropes, using another as a vehicle in order to keep up their cognitive dissonance.

Of course, this eventually spilled out into the Het fandom (makes perfect sense, since many of the a/b/o originators and proponents were het women), and then worked its way into Femslash fandom by piggybacking on g!p in order to meet the necessary criteria for PiV sex. 

Just, in this case, you necessarily shift some of the puzzle pieces around. Trans women take the place of the “alpha”, acting as an acceptable vehicle for a toxic masculine cis man, since lesbians aren’t into men. Even if the trans woman is generally written, in nearly every way aside from part of her body, as a toxic cis man. The original a/b/o’s “Bitch Male”/Omega Male is swapped out for the  Omega Female, usually a spunkier, more in your face version outside of romantic/sexual contexts in the media content, but let’s be real here, she’s still by and large submissive when it comes down to it. 

In a world where more wlw grew up feeling predatory for their attraction to other women, for feeling sinful, for being rejected from female intimacy het women enjoyed with each other after coming out, etc., it’s pretty common for a lot of lesbians to lack initiative, not be able to read or communicate romantic/sexual cues between each other…to essentially be “useless lesbians’ as the joke goes,and to feel isolated and undesirable. 

So writing a F/F fic where some hot woman modeled in the image of some hot cis woman pursues you? Takes the initiative sexually/romantically? Doesn’t beat around the bush, but is blatant? Who can’t control her lust around you? Who can give you the perfect nuclear family you’ve been conditioned to want in order to feel value in our heteronormative world, but were told you weren’t worthy of or could never feasibly attain? Who gives you a sexual encounter you have some education in and some emotional stake in due to common conditioning of PiV sex > all else? Who can give you plausible deniability for a number of contexts due to a lack of ability to explicitly consent? etc. etc.

Like, yeah, that’s going to feel comfortable for a lot out there. That’s going to seem pretty hot/arousing. It’s a way to get off on the norms and expectations thrown on women in society, but in a way that lets them distance themselves ever so slightly from men by shifting it from text to subtext, explicit to implicit.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s a few snippets from one of the most popular g!p/omegaverse femslash writers (if not the most popular) that help illustrate how/why this trope has found an audience

Why Do I Write G!P?
The elephant in the room. It arouses me, but it’s also a form of self-comfort. I grew up in a very fundamentalist home. Women being with women was at first unspoken, and then derided, both by my church and at home.
I felt insanely guilty for my attractions, so I developed ‘cheat codes’ to deal with it.

It was okay if the woman I had sex with in my dreams had a penis, for example. It was okay if she forced me to have sex with her. It was okay if we basically simulated heterosexual sex.

Because of my childhood (which included conversion therapy), I found myself falling into heterosexual roleplay patterns, at least sexually. It was a lingering thing from my childhood.

It’s still there, and I know I’ll never be rid of it.

…

I associate penetration with power. You know, being steeped in sexism from an early age turned some problematic thoughts into kinky lemonade.
And since I’m a femme sub, taking power away from the top by ‘penetrating’ them can ruin the mood for me. I mean, I can write power bottom scenes with the best of them, and I enjoy them, but… *shrug*
if I’m going to write omegaverse or g!p, someone’s getting fucked, and it’s not the top.

There are rules to a/b/o. There are specific reasons it’s sought out, read, and created, and that’s why it’s hard to imagine a version of it without those harmful elements, because the trope requires them for the audience to be satisfied.

It’s why all gay male a/b/o fits a pretty specific pattern. it’s why femslash a/b/o fits a very specific pattern. There’s nearly no deviation as a rule, because there are so many parts that have to be in play and functioning in a specific way in order to get the desired result. 

I could go on for hours about this, and the above is all a pretty damn simplified take of what’s going on in a/b/o for it to exist in the way it does and meet the needs of the audience, and I’ve already written a lot about this in the past, so I’ll try to cut it short here.

Two different things. They can overlap, a person can be both trans and intersex for instance, but they’re distinct. 

It’s waaaay late and I should be asleep, so I’ll keep it brief to the point of simplification, perhaps. 

A trans person is generally someone who is not the gender/sex they were assigned at birth. For instance, a doctor looked at me when I was born and declared me male, a boy. I’m a trans woman, so I’m female, I’m not what I was assigned at birth. This is inclusive of non-binary folks, of course, who are often not what they were assigned at birth, either in full or in part. 

To quote Intersex Human Rights Australia, “Intersex people are born with physical sex characteristics that don’t fit medical and social norms for female or male bodies.”

Both communities are negatively impacted by cissexism and the rigidly enforced gender/sex binary, though intersex folks have a number of unique experiences related to the specific form of oppression and erasure they face.

Within the scope of g!p works (and other similar forms of art), however, both trans women and some intersex folks’ lack of representation are often used as justification for the fetishization we receive. I’ve seen plenty of people write g!p works, claiming it’s to offer intersex representation, when it couldn’t be further from the truth given that’s not representative of intersex realities. Same as how it’s not representative of trans woman realities in general. There’s a lot of misinformation due to people conflating our bodies and our realities with the porn we’re fetishized through, and since there’s little to no actual accurate representation, people base their ideas of us and our bodies off of that fetishsitic porn.

You’re literally thisclose to understanding. 

There is absolutely more to being trans than our typical genital configuration at birth. You don’t need to tell me that, I’m a trans woman, I know this intrinsically.

When it comes to the g!p trope, he’s some major points of what we know:

• It became a known, if rare trope as trans porn started taking off in the late 80s and early 90s. As trans porn became more popular, it also became more prevalent in wlw fandom, solidifying its presence in the late 90s/early 00s, making a bit of a jump in popularity when the a/b/o trope took off during the height of the Supernatural fandom.
• As a trope, its sexual content heavily mirrors the core elements of trans porn. It doesn’t deviate from that framework. 
• The g!p characters overwhelmingly possess the major aspects of transmisogynistic stigmas that get passed off as erotic taboo elements for people who aren’t us. The same things that amplify the cis gaze’s taboo fantasy gets us abused, exploited, hurt, isolated, and killed.  

I could go on for a few hours on everything that makes g!p function as a trope, but I’ll limit myself and leave you those to chew on. You can look through my archived posts for some more detail on the nuances and specifics if you want.

But here’s what we also know:

• Trans women are the overwhelming majority of women with penises. We’re virtually the only women with penises that cis people and trans people alike have come across in any form of media content. 
• This means that we are the framework worked off of when people think of women with penises, and we are the ones affected by media representation of women with penises.
• When people create media including women with penises, the penis generally exists in that content as a vehicle for a variety of desires. When a marginalized person is desired for various physical aspects of themselves, with the substance of their character, their lived experiences, their diversity all tossed away? That is called fetishization.

Your argument breaks down to be essentially that because people fetishize trans women’s bodies and create media content through that fetishized lens, that those g!p characters aren’t necessarily trans, because there’s more to being trans than those fetishized parts of us. It’s an argument that fetishized caricatures of marginalized people aren’t necessarily those marginalized peoples.

It’s a very cart-before-the-horse surface level perspective. Think of all the harmful media stereotypes out there and ask yourself if people shouldn’t be upset about them because they clearly don’t reflect the reality and complexity of the people they’re negatively representing.

Let’s take the well known character of Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter, at one point, remarks that Jame isn’t a trans woman. But every frame of Buffalo Bill’s existence in that film works to play on transmisogynistic stereotypes. Every single scene with that character sends the message that trans women are delusional, dangerous sexual predators. But since an authoritative character claims Buffalo Bill isn’t trans, am I supposed to declare the film free of transmisogynistic representation? 

What about Rocky Horror Picture Show? Again, the main villain is an amalgamation of all the common transmisogynistic stigmas at that period in time, fused into a single murderous, rapist, alien entity. We also know the creator of RHPS considers (in the nicest light it can be stated) trans women to be cross dressing ‘third sex’ individuals, not actual women, and doesn’t believe anyone assigned one binary gender can actually be the other binary gender. But apparently, since it doesn’t explicitly say Frank N Furter is a trans woman, it’s not a problem? It’s not transmisogynistic representation?

No. Media literacy has taught us enough to know that there’s tremendous transmisogyny afoot in those two cases. 

So there’s parallels with g!p, obviously. You get a lot of folks literally removing part of a trans woman’s experience and playing around with it and experimenting with it through people who aren’t explicitly trans women. They’re treating trans women as a collection of ideas and kink potential to be picked apart like a berry patch instead of real human beings. Even if they say it’s not a trans woman, the result of their effort is a character that is all the fetishized trans woman elements, often a fair bit of the stigmatized elements, minus all the meaningful experiences. If I carve a pumpkin and empty all the insides out of it, and put a candle in there, it’s still a pumpkin. A Jack o Lantern, sure, but still a 100% pumpkin.

And that’s bound to happen. It’s inescapable.

I mean, when 99% of cis folks don’t understand how trans women tend to be sexually intimate… when they don’t understand what dysphoria is and how it works and how it can affect us physically and emotionally…when they don’t understand almost any of our lived experiences…then they’re not going to be able to accurately portray us even if they wanted to.

And I’ve read enough G!P fics where authors wrote those as a means of trying to add trans rep. but because they didn’t understand us at all, it wasn’t remotely representative, and it was entirely fetishistic.

So while the g!p trope was built on the foundation of trans women’s fetishization, and all such characters are inherently and implicitly trans women if not explicitly, they absolutely don’t reflect our realities, whether because of a lack of understanding, or an overriding fetish, or a cissexist & fetishistic mix-and-match approach, or what have you.

It is trans fetishization, it is transmisogyny, and they are erasing us through these works by overwhelmingly flooding the market with misinformation and messaging that ultimately does come back to bite us in the form of sexual violence, community exclusion, enhanced cissexism, .

Because it’s late and I’m exhausted after working and commuting, I’ll cut things a bit short and I’ll quote trans guy user SynthDicks here on his take on Mpreg a ways back, which was very on point and relevant to this discussion

• like… you cant write about pregnant men in a way thats divorced from trans men. writing about one way in which bodies adjacent to trans manhood are sexy or fun or desirable, while writing some complicated world in which the rest of the ways trans male bodies are characterised are done away with is creepy and transphobic. all it means is that both bits of the revulsion/fetishisation complex that trans bodies are placed under happens at the same time …
• and using trans manhood purely for a pregnancy arc- erasing all the experiences that come from being a trans man- for the purpose of focusing on that one aspect of trans bodies is dehumanising and fetishising. its a fetishisation of trans bodies and a revulsion at trans experiences. these arent opposing statements. theyre the same statements

I really, truly hope you’re a little closer to understanding how this all works after all this rambling. If I had the energy to make a properly structured and cohesive post, I would, but alas. 

 (2/2) What Im trying to say is that while I like your post its a tiny bit problematic because there are cis women lesbians who need to be in Contact with vaginas to be sexually aroused

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To recap, this is the referenced post, and this is the particular quote as I wrote it:

• “Being solely attracted to genitals is transphobic. Requiring engagement with specific kinds of genitals is fetishistic.”

I’ll flat out say it. If a cis lesbian exists out there who feels zero arousal and attraction to another person until she makes contact with a vagina, then she absolutely fetishizes vaginas. There’s no getting around that. If you are in a sexual relationship with another person, and that partner (A) needs to have a vagina, and (B) you absolutely compulsively need to make contact with it in every sexual encounter between the two of you, then there’s most likely a fetish going on.

We know with a high level of certainty that sexuality is intrinsically multi-faceted. Individuals weigh different elements involved in it differently, but it’s multifaceted. This is pretty well established. So when a person’s sole source of arousal comes from making contact with a specific part of the body (often in a specific way, or decorated/dressed in a particular way), without prior arousal/attraction, that’s breaking the mold, and such fixations are considered fetishes. 

Uninteresting fact: genitals can be fetishized. Trans women are proof of this.

There is a literal horde of chasers out there who lust after trans women because they assume we have penises, that said penises can and will get erect consistently and persistently, that we can and will penetrate with said penises, that oral can and will be performed on said hypothetically erect penises exactly like it would a cis man, that said penises can and will ejaculate, etc. etc. etc.

And the inability for trans women to do just about any one of those things? Totally shuts down attraction and/or interest in us. Which sets in stone that certain meanings get applies to certain parts of our bodies that are not natural, but social, and people act on those meanings (whether fetish or cissexism or whatever)

So genitals can and do get fetishized. On all kinds of people. If someone requires full uninhibited access to a partner’s genitals and requires the ability to perform certain acts on those genitals, or they lose all sexual interest/attraction (essentially, it’s 100% a dealbreaker for them in any relationship, sexual or romantic), then they’re fetishizing genitals. People can consent to relationships with people who fetishize their genitals, maybe some such relationships end up alright in the end, but it doesn’t change that fetishization is happening.

It’s super easy. Yeah, genitals can be part of a person’s sexual attraction, but when they require a certain set and require specific access/engagement, or else the relationship is off, that’s fetishization.

Like, all the chasers who come to trans women saying they “only go for women with cocks”, I’m pretty sure they would not be up for a trans woman who does not want her penis engaged with or seen at all, even if there are plenty of other ways to have sex, and she might be into using a strap-on. They certainly wouldn’t be into a trans woman with a vagina. They require a specific set of genitals, and specific function, and specific access, or they walk. That’s fetishization. And anyone approaching a romantic/sexual partner with that framework of ‘needs’ is also fetishistic, across the board.

If someone’s okay with a partner fetishizing them, then that’s their prerogative. People with fetishes aren’t necessarily bad people. People consent to those relationships all the time, it’s not my business to get in anyone’s way, I’m just calling it like it is. If that makes me problematic, then I guess I’m problematic. 

Of course, if that “requirement” is simply verbalized shorthand for the person only feeling comfortable with people assigned female at birth and not feeling comfortable with anyone assigned male at birth, regardless of gender, then that’s going to simply be cissexist conditioning 99% of the time, not a fetish, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with needing to make contact with vaginas for arousal.