criticalinvert:

“While both trans men and trans women were historically required to meet the gatekeepers’ oppositional sexist ideals, trans women often faced an additional standard: They had to be sexually desirable in their identified sex as well. In the 1970s, Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna came across several instances in which gatekeepers were rather blatant about this practice: “A clinician during a panel session on transsexualism at the 1974 meeting of the American Psychological Association said that he was more convinced of the femaleness of a male-to-female transsexual if she was particularly beautiful and was capable of evoking in him those feelings that beautiful women generally do. Another clinician told us that he uses his own sexual interest as a criterion for deciding whether a transsexual is really the gender she/he claims.””

— Julia Serano – Whipping Girl. 2007.