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Transgender is it just me that is totally perplexed?

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TopCat said:
But have they really? Five years later this happens.
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They're divided. The minority refuses to accept the majority decision. The minority thinks the majority is suffering from some kind of mental illness (psychological colonisation). I agree with Nigel that this is, among other things, a generational thing. Madigan is pictured with a bunch of people who are all at least 20 years younger than Long. They disagree with Long. They are not trans-exclusive. Long no longer has control of the agenda, would be my reading of that. And some really fucking shit things have come out of her as a result, shit things that, whatever the provocation, are pretty fucking disgraceful.
 
spanglechick said:
Very much a minority view, though. I don't know any trans women who believe this.
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purenarcotic said:
We’re being told not wanting to sleep with someone with a penis makes us transphobic. No it doesn’t - we all have the right to sleep or not sleep with whoever we want, it’s our body not someone else’s.
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Rutita1 said:
Can you say more on this? Lesbians not wanting dick is obvious surely? Is not wanting dick transphobic? Doesn't that smack of the idea that all lesbians are man haters? Perhaps you were being sarcastic.
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I think it's actually a surprising common point of view (if you delve deep a little bit and ask the "queer community" pressing questions, something I'll go into I'm a minute).

Us old fogeys who are perhaps over thirty may not notice it because we grew up at a time when the Internet were all fields, message boards, and chat rooms and which were the only way to communicate.

Social Media wasn't available, there weren't really many online communities. We'd (including me) would get shit from parents for rinsing the Internet and most of out real lives played out offline. As did gay activism at that time.

That shit is totally different now. Us old lot can confidently say that we are happy with our sexuality because it was never questioned online but for young gays and particularly lesbians it is. Youtube is rife with shit like this (as well as antifeminist shit) but tumblr IS EVEN worse and twitter can be horrendous.

As I've said on numerous other threads I tend to follow what's going on in online communities, particularly the atheist, feminist, and "rationalist (read anti-feminist)" communities and what I've noticed is this sort of rhetoric coming from NOTHING places. So please trust me when I say for young people, just coming to grips with their sexuality, this shit is everywhere and there's an AWFUL lot of bullying that goes with it.

So here's the two tribes where I see this stuff coming from.

1) A split in the "SJW" community, where "queer sex positives" individualist types (usually atheists, from the US) as a reaction to their own label unthinkingly promote irrational ideas due to what I see as "knee jerk progressivism".

2) Surprisingly, the antifeminist and MRA community are very supportive of this notion of "female brains/emotions" and evolutionary psychology. Note these guys are not always republicans or conservative. You don't have to be to be MRA.

Now because both of these groups are generally atheists and consider themselves rational they like to be logically consistent. I'm going to outline that thinking here and then provide evidence (youtube videos, and *creepy* screenshots from tumblr, and twitter):

So for the SJW types, coming from a place of "progess for the sake of progress" and "standing up for the abused minorities" intersectionalist types, the only logical way of defining womanhood and manhood can be gender identity, which is self proclaimed. This is because it's the ONLY way the very progressive statement "Transwomen are women" can hold true. The statement must be true regardless of sex, or disphoria or even expression because adding any of those criteria would exclude gender-non conforming transwomen or transwomen who do not suffer disphoria from, womanhood. And excluding people is NOT progressive.

Sex therefore has to be a social indefinable construct (this is why there's so much leverage of intersex people) and so lesbians can ONLY Be by logical extension women who are are attracted to other women and not females, because female in this line of thinking only exists as a socially constructed way of categorising people based on genitalia. Female is just a label that you are assigned at birth, and your gender is assigned based on that assignment. The only thing relevant is your inherent sense of self (which is self declared).

So if sex is a social construct, then homosexuality cannot exist based on same sex attraction. If you're lesbian AND NOT attracted to lesbians with penises you, by definition, must be transphobic because the only lesbians with penises are transwomen.


2) The MRA/antifeminist take is much simpler and tries to rely on science more (although the science is particularly shonky): Females and Males have different brains. Masculinity and femininity are innate genders most of the time correlating to sex. Females behave like females, not because of sexist social conditioning, but because they were born that way. Sometimes, due to something called womb washing*- when a fetus is bombarded with too much estrogen or testosterone in the womb you end up with a wrong kind of brain in the wrong kind of body; a transperson.

This body/brain split will show itself up as a mental illness (disphoria). Transwomen are only valid if they have disphoria, and express themselves in feminine way. If someone is innately female thier identity should be respected and therefore lesbians should work thier way through their own bigotry (transphobia and ablism- trans in this case needing a diagnosis of disphoria).

So this is where the fight lines are drawn. Most conservatives will agree with the second, where as most liberals will agree with the first. Either way, this ends up in homophobic bullying, particularly of lesbians. If anyone is particularly interested (and you all should be) watch ALL these videos, take time on YouTube to see where the rabbit hole goes:

"your dating preferences are discriminatory"



"Why I'm transphobic"


Response to Arielle (read the comments)


More responses:


Theryn Meyer on the sex gender dichotomy myth
 
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And thousands and thousands more posts like this. Now, us older lot find if easy to tell people like this to fuck off. But if you are young, spend a lot of time online and are coming to grips with your own sexuality this sort of shit is just not on. But it *is the logical conclusion (if you're gonna be consistent) of the above type of thinking.
 
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mojo pixy said:
What about a trans woman without a penis? Would it be transphobic for a straight man or gay woman to not want sex with that person? I mean assuming there's been some attraction, flirting etc. Then it becomes clear this woman is a trans woman. Would it be transphobic to say no, at that point, because this woman is trans (and despite the initially expressed attraction)?
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The whole thing is based on two completely bonkers ideas: that people are attracted to others based on their genitals (people are usually fully clothed when I meet them, don't know about any of you) and that if you're attracted to women at all then you must be attracted to all women all the time.

Everyone is entitled to say no at any point for whatever reason. I think people who believe otherwise are probably a very small group, and one not worth listening to once you break down exactly what it is they're saying.
 
No one is saying people are attracted SOLEY to genitals (that would be stupid) what they are saying is that sexual orientation is not based on sex. Genitals are a deal of braker for most people (bi people not included).

Sexual orientation is a legally protected characteristic based on SAME SEX attraction. To say gays and lesbians (homosexuals) can "get over their socially imposed biases" and be attracted to people of the opposite sex is just rank homophobia.

In response to SpookyFrank (sorry the quote systems fucking up and I can't get rid of it, so reposting without quotes)
 
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FabricLiveBaby! said:
Sexual orientation is a legally protected characteristic based on SAME SEX attraction. To say gays and lesbians (homosexuals) can "get over their socially imposed biases" and be attracted to people of the opposite sex is just rank homophobia.
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Sounds like homophobia and transphobia are the only two options here then. Or we could accept that people are attracted to whoever they're attracted to, that this ultimately transcends arbitrary categories of sexuality, and that there may be all sorts of different innate and acquired factors involved but it's not something people can consciously change just because they feel like they should for whatever reason.

Some things will never be inclusive, rational or fair. Attraction is one of those things.
 
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Ok. I'm intrigued by the MRA nonsense. Does that mean they would also say that men should accept sex with heterosexual trans women?



It seems to me that the whole tumblr/YouTube thing is increasingly toxic when it comes to politics. Fortunately, lots of young people are immune - I teach a trans boy in my sixth form, and while he has a friend in the class who is mired in all that stuff, he himself is blessedly unaware.
 
FabricLiveBaby! said:
:hmm:
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OK lets go back to basic thinking here. Saying that there are not clearly delineated boundaries between different types of sexuality is not the same as suggesting that differences in sexuality do not exist. I have edited my previous post for clarity anyway.
 
spanglechick said:
Ok. I'm intrigued by the MRA nonsense. Does that mean they would also say that men should accept sex with heterosexual trans women?

It seems to me that the whole tumblr/YouTube thing is increasingly toxic when it comes to politics. Fortunately, lots of young people are immune - I teach a trans boy in my sixth form, and while he has a friend in the class who is mired in all that stuff, he himself is blessedly unaware.
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It depends on the MRA. MRAs are mainly in the business of trying to keep women subordinate (something which innate gender segways nicely with) and also getting lesbians to sleep with them. They don't care much about policing other men.

I'd be very surprised if your trans boy hasn't been mired in this. Nearly all the kids I speak to who spend any time online looking into their sexuality get swamped in it.
 
Excuse some thought-noodling.

As a cis, heterosexual woman, I'm privileged to feel removed from this and be able to treat it like a thought experiment. If I met a man and fancied him but he turned out to be trans, and had female genitalia would I still want to have sex with him?

I dunno. Maybe. But I'd also reserve the right not to. Would that be transphobic? I'm not sure.

Would I have sex with a cis man I fancied if his penis didn't function or had been amputated? Again, maybe... dunno... Would it be ableist of me to say no...? Possibly.

But then I've tended to make my relationships out of one night stands, where the initial choices are less invested. But if I was very keen on someone before the sex thing came around, then those choices carry more significance.

And is it different? Is there something fundamentally different about accepting a lover with a penis (if you don't usually like lovers to have penises) than there is if the unexpected body part is the female genitalia? Are penises "worse"?

And then, when trans men have sexual relationships with other men, are those men homophobic if they reject trans meant without penises?

Most trans men I have known are in relationships with women, though.
FabricLiveBaby! said:
It depends on the MRA. MRAs are mainly in the business of trying to keep women subordinate (something which innate gender segways nicely with) and also getting lesbians to sleep with them. They don't care much about policing other men.

I'd be very surprised if your trans boy hasn't been mired in this. Nearly all the kids I speak to who spend any time online looking into their sexuality get swamped in it.
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yeah, he doesn't spend much time online. Not in that way. Snapchat etc.

Certainly he wasn't aware of the terms gender non-binary or gender fluid the other day.
 
For me personally, the visibility of trans men has made me realise with some surprise that genitals are less important than I thought they were - I could conceive of having sex with a trans man who has a vagina. It's the secondary sexual characteristics that seem much more important to sexual attraction in my case. But I suspect I'd be in a minority amongst gay men as a whole. Unfortunately sexual attraction simply is discriminatory - we only fancy certain people and sexual characteristics (rather than gender characteristics) are the main elements of that.

It feels like this is all the wrong way round. The emergence of more trans visibility / gender fluid people should be celebrated as a step towards allowing sexual boundaries to be more fluid, allowing people to be more experimental and less boxed into in neat sexual preference categories. But that has to happen organically in a supportive way, not by trying to shame people that their sexual instincts are phobic.
 
SpookyFrank said:
Everyone is entitled to say no at any point for whatever reason.
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I agree; what I'm trying to ascertain is to what extent posters here feel it would or would not be transphobic to say no to a person who has no penis but used to, based solely on the fact that they used to have one.
 
Mojo, most transwomen (80% I believe is the estimate) have, or will keep male genitalia.

Nearly 100% of transmen have female genitalia due to how complex and unsuccessful surgery is..

This is why transphobia (when it comes to it) cannot be ascerted by surgical outcome alone. Current thought is measuring trans staus by surgery (or intention) to have it, is in itself transphobic, because for adults at least (not kids), demedicalisation is the goal.

Hence the current discussions of the gender recognition act.

It would be, by current orthodoxy, transphobic to not include surgically "affirmed" transwomen in your dating pool. They are women after all. Especially if they have a gender recognition certificate. Transwomen are women because they proclaim it is the current thought.

Apologies for the clumsy language.. . It's hard to navigate. Also I'm a few vodkas down and on my phone.
 
mojo pixy said:
I agree; what I'm trying to ascertain is to what extent posters here feel it would or would not be transphobic to say no to a person who has no penis but used to, based solely on the fact that they used to have one.
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Not transphobic, and not a problem imo, although more understandable for women to say no to a transwomen who turns out to have a penis. Cos patriarchy obviously.
 
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