In recent years, the argument has been made that T4T originally stands for ‘transfem4transfem’, instead of ‘trans4trans’. I was surprised, as when I found myself in trans spaces in the early ‘10s T4T was unanimously meant to refer to the latter, not former, definition. Now maybe I’m wrong, I was a child and not aware of the term for being trans, so I wasn’t on Craigslist. As such, I wanted to investigate as much of the history of T4T as I could.
Oddly, though, what I found indicates that T4T is more open than even the latter definition, not less. Every definition I’ve found (not direct from the site itself) is about hookups between trans people and crossdressers, with no indication if the latter group needs to be trans or not. Even the post with pics from the site itself only shows screenshots from 2017, a full 7 years after I came out and over a decade and a half after the original postings from the site itself.
This was all a bit shocking to me, but I kept looking. Unfortunately, almost every possible avenue towards a source I found was paywalled.
The only real free sources I found were blogposts made in the mid 2010s or later, with a handful of trans people claiming that they were part of the community that originally popularized the term in use outside of a sexual context.
Ultimately, I don’t think the origin quite matters. It evolved to mean Trans4Trans outside of its original context (both as a sexual term and a Craigslist exclusive term) at least as early as ‘07 or ‘06, and what matters in language is how it has evolved, not its original use case. Still, I’m glad to have learned something new, and am personally glad to have T4T as something for all trans people, not exclusively one group of trans people looking for a hookup.
Paywalled sources will be linked in a comment below. Again, I cannot attest to what they contain, only what others claim they contain.
(I also could have been more thorough, but unless I’m writing an academic paper on this or a similar subject I’m not about to spend an entire day researching.)
