From the linked article - what does any of this have to do with being a woman?
But it only took so long before I had to admit: I was jealous. I could barely contain my envy when the hero of Hinemosu Notari’s Mirror Image crossdressed so hard he became a futa, and I saw too much of myself in the shy-but-slutty futas and femboys of the artist InCase. Still, I managed to convince myself I wasn’t trans; I just wanted to live in a girl’s body, like the protagonist in Custom Girl who plays a futuristic VR game that allows him to experience sex as a woman! That’s normal for boys to desire fervently and constantly, right?
I realized later that I’m not the only one who felt this way. Many trans women in my community with whom I’ve spoken have expressed similar feelings about futa and “trap” comics — about boys who are girlish enough to “trap” straight men into having sex with them. Thirty Helens, a trans woman who is herself a creator of futanari comics that she posts on her Tumblr, told me in an interview that consuming futa material before transitioning “helped partly fill a void left by being in the closet while maintaining a mental distance from transness.”
The fervor over whether futa “makes you gay” or “straight” that I used to see online is understandable, she says, “because I used to do all these logic backflips in my head to do anything to convince myself I wasn’t trans while still engaging with that side of me a little.” But, she continued, “it helped me come to terms with a lot of stuff after transition. It helped me to feel more secure and sexy regarding my body.”
Transitioning was inevitable for me as well. Once I read Katou Jun’s Avatar Transform!, there was only so much I could do to deny it. Similar to Custom Girl, the hero in Katou’s story explores a futanari body in a VR world, while slowly abandoning all pretense at maleness in real life.
The more I read the chapters in which he realizes a woman’s body in VR feels more natural than his own, the less I could deny it: I wanted that. I wanted to be cute, girlish, even beautiful. It took until the summer of 2015 — more than 10 years after I first read Tilt Mode — to begin coming out to my friends and family, and months more to begin hormone therapy. But I did it, and the results have been more fulfilling than I could ever have imagined.
All this is not to say that futa is intrinsically a trans genre, nor are all its aficionados trans themselves. But as Thirty Helens says, “I think they’re inherently linked. These bodies resemble our bodies and it’s time to stop pretending otherwise, it’s time to stop being afraid that it makes you gay . . . and maybe even more people can connect in a real way without doing the same thing I did, engaging but still keeping a distance from trans womanhood.”
Futa didn’t make me a dyke-y trans girl. It just helped me realize that’s who I wanted to be. Hopefully, it will help other fledgling dickgirls realize it sooner than I did.