As a gynephilic transfeminine person, one particularly interesting case is older women. At first glance, it seems that this is just because I'm less likely to be sexuallty/romantically attracted to older women, and thus it's easier to foster platonic attraction than with younger women. But it's much more than that.

Accepting the fact that I'm transfeminine means "giving up my male privilege", as it were. But the gap between male and female status grows as people get older. To the extent that female status is tied to physical attraction, female status disappears with fecundity. I've heard some older women say that they feel they completely disappear while walking through crowds now that they've become older — people just don't notice them anymore. So accepting my transfeminine identity means that the status that I give up increases the more I age.

As a result, I feel some solidarity with older women. I find female aging to be both heartbreaking and courageous.

So my feelings of kinship towards older women is correspondingly profound.

Unfortunately, maybe this works the opposite way for them. They are far MORE to be sexually attracted to younger "men". So, if I want platonic relationships with older women, maybe I need to seek out lesbian women.

However, that's fairly offensive, since I identify somewhat as translesbian^*. To the extent that older lesbians find it easier to be planotically attracted to me, that's only because they refuse to acknowledge my femininity.

One way to try to resolve both problems (of finding older women who I'm platonically compatible with despite the probable rarity of uncloseted older lesbians, and of the offensiveness of older women not respecting my femininity (I'm not sure "they're just old school" is really an excuse for homophobia or transphobia)) is to present as more feminine when around them.

* "translesbian" is a jarringly binary term, suggesting both binary gender and binary attraction. I am non-binary for both, so the term is deeply inaccurate. Nonetheless, it's one prism that is sometimes useful to view the world through, in lieu of a term that succinctly captures my identity of "genderqueer but leaning masculine, and pansexual but leaning gynephilic". (And even THAT is an oversimplification. I swear to god, everyone should identify only using two probability distributions, stating 1) how frequently their gender identity is X amount on the feminine/masculine spectrum, and 2) how frequently they feel attracted to people who are X amount on the feminine/masculine spectrum) (I suppose that's STILL oversimplifying things, since it doesn't capture how a person's identity has shifted over time. However: 1) it's important to live in the present, and 2) trying to convey your identity via 3D statistical manifolds is getting far too heady)