On dating apps, I know how hard it is to be a transwoman

Australia’s landmark ‘Tickle vs Giggle’ discrimination case has shone a light on the harsh realities for transwomen looking online for other singles – and I should know, says Diana Thomas

‘I went to dinner a with a gorgeous, charming, intelligent man… and felt deliciously female and tingly and alive’ (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

An Australian woman called Roxanne Tickle has just won a landmark case against a female-only app called Giggle, which denied her membership on the grounds that – despite her having lived as a woman since 2017, having gender-affirming surgery and hormone treatment and officially changing her gender on government documents – she was a “trans-identified male”.

The judge, however, ruled that “a history of cases decided by courts going back over 30 years […] established that, on its ordinary meaning, sex is changeable”.

My first reaction to this news was pure joy: “You go, girl!” My second was: “But are you sure you even want to be a trans woman on a dating site?”

Flashback to a Saturday evening last December. I was giving my sister Suzy a lift to my flat, where we were going to watch the Strictly final together when I mentioned that I had been chatting to a man on Hinge.

“Ooh, how exciting!” Suzy said, as I explained what I liked about him.

“I’ll show you his picture when we get back to mine,” I replied.

Once we’d made it up the stairs to my top-floor apartment, I took out my phone, showed her the picture, and she burst out laughing. “I was talking to him this time last year!”

So we opened a bottle of red, compared notes on the man over our first glass, then got down to the serious business of judging the frocks and the dances on TV.

Sadly, my budding romance soon fizzled out. He ghosted me, and after a couple of unanswered messages, I got the message and walked away.

It then occurred to me that he might well have searched for me online using my photographs and discovered that I’m trans.

I’d not mentioned that on my profile. I’d agonised over whether to do so. I didn’t want to be dishonest. I’m as out as anyone can be. But when I had been open about it on another dating site, I got almost no responses, and some that I did get were beyond creepy. Besides which, I live my life as a normal woman and am always treated as such. I wanted to date that way, too.

Maybe if I just gave someone the chance to like me – just as me, with no preconceptions – then they might be able to cope with the fact that, although I look like a woman, sound like a woman, have normal female levels of oestrogen in my blood, not to mention 100 per cent silicone-free boobs and nothing but ladybits between my legs, I was, in fact, born male.

Transgender woman Roxanne Tickle was barred from using the female-only platform Giggle for Girls (EPA)

So I just posted as a woman, and the likes came pouring in, from more than 150 men, and quite a few women, too. But after that first micro-flirtation, I went off the whole idea of online dating.

Maybe one of the men who liked my profile would be broadminded enough to deal with my gender identity. But I wasn’t willing to risk the possibility that someone I met might react violently. I didn’t want to be added to the roughly 5,000 trans people who report being victims of hate crimes every year.

In any case, I’m old-fashioned. When I’ve fallen in love, it’s always been because I met someone in real life and there was that instant, glorious electricity that only comes with actual, physical proximity.

I went to dinner a few weeks ago with a really gorgeous, charming, intelligent man. Now let me be clear, for his sake, it was not a date. He was half my age, was only having dinner with me out of kindness and absolutely nothing romantic happened. But we talked for four hours and I felt deliciously female and tingly and alive.

So now I know for sure that my heart and body are still in working order. And who knows, the next time I dine with a man, it may just be the real thing.