But that's not the whole story. Kids are also very malleable, open to peer pressure and easily assume identities that earn them acceptance by their peers.
While this is technically true I think one should be careful to insinuate that this is an underlying cause. I don't think most people would say the same about homosexuality for example. It's just a more elaborate way of saying "it's a phase".
Saying it's cultural influence doesn't mean it's just a phase. I'm sure most people have life long personality traits that came from cultural influences.
Moreover, even if being gay or trans is just the result of cultural influence doesn't mean we should respect it any less. That said, it's worth asking the question isn't it?
Exactly. Transphobia often leads to trauma after getting ostracized by one's peers. I've never seen evidence of "wokeness" being nearly as nasty. You don't get bullied or singled out for not being trans.
I doubt that. Resonable people recognice that there is a diffrence between a personal preference of who to fuck, and telling others who they should prefer to fuck.
But I don't know that it actually is. There's no “everyone will be fine with this” – implied is a “most people are reasonable”, so it isn't the right form of argument to be a No True Scotsman.
I'm trans and I'd be fine with it and I think of the arguments that it's transphobic as misguided at best, malicious at worst. There seems to be a vocal contigent of transwomen who identify as lesbians who try to argue that a lesbian who is not trans and doesn't want to have sex with a transwoman (even one with male genitalia) is transphobic. This sounds to me like a kind of very, very bad pickup line.
On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.
So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?
I want to start a family in the traditional sense like my parents and grandparents have done before me, so I would be disappointed to find out I was dating a transwoman. Similarly I'd be disappointed to find out if a woman didn't want children or wanted to live a lifestyle incompatible with my own. It isn't going to work out and I'd have to ultimately call it off.
It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.
I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.
If you have these preferences then the onus is on you to disclose them. As long as you say "I would like to be in a relationship with someone who can have children with me" on your first date, and not discriminate between e.g. trans women and cis women who can't give birth, it's ok.
I'm a little bit confused. At first you talked about "dating" someone, now you're talking about starting a family. These seem to be different, not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not necessarily identical, goals. Can you explain?
It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".
Sure. Dating is essentially the way we assess a suitable potential partner. The end goal in (hetero) dating essentially boils down to starting a family and this is also implied and assumed unless stated otherwise.
I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.
Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.
I think I’m woke, but it seems obvious to me that everybody has sexual preferences that go way beyond the gender of their partner. Some prefer tall and dark, some prefer petite blondes. Some people prefer big black and beautiful. How can we make moral judgement about people’s sexual preferences?
I guess the alternative would be that you have to be willing to have sex with everybody of your preferred sex? Are there people who actually think this?
Well there's definitely some people who think that, they say as much on their videos. One I watched claimed the only way to get rid of transphobia was for straight people to understand that you don't get to care about what kind of genitals your date has. You ll find out in bed.
And that implies that gay people do not exist. A lesbian who says testicles are gross does not actually have a genetic sexual desire for biological women.
Interesting! Do I lose the ability to chose based on other things, then? Like, I prefer brunettes, would that be permitted, or should I be hair-color blind and just take what I’m given? I know you’re not an advocate for it, just interesting that some people hold this conviction!
Hopefully it doesn’t! Would you like to point out how I imply that trans people are deceptive?
Sure, but my preference for being solely with brunettes is not as strong as my preference for being solely with straight people, so the deception is not equal in its merited response. Perhaps this is bigoted, but I’m sincerely interested in your conviction.
Well, trans is not really a hard factor for attraction. Fully cis-passing trans women exist, even in intimate relationships, and I'd wager not all things that go into that even matter to most people.
Feel free to exclude based on physical criteria common in trans people, be it from masculine features, to larger frames to a set of genitals you're not attracted to, but "trans people" as category is way to broad. Because they can functionally be cis women. Unless you have a breeding fetish I guess.
Insisting on a separate category feels like people are holding on to bioessentialist feeling that trans women must be men, which would make a cis man gay. Pair that with toxic masculinity and you have one of the reasons for violence particularly against trans women.
(I have no personal stake at this, like many trans people I mostly date other trans people, less complicated and your partner has less of a hard time relating to you)
Hey, thanks for taking the time to explain so in depth. I definitely get what you’re saying, and I don’t know that I’ve thought about it like this before (to be fair, I’ve only ever been with my wife, so it isn’t a situation that would ever be relevant, and probably that’s why I haven’t).
I mean, you can decide if it ever goes that far, but trans people do not owe you disclosure about their genitals just like you do not owe your partners your entire medical history.
It's probably still the right thing to do, purely because the trans panic defense is still a thing and it would be unsafe, but I see no moral obligation here.
Do we not owe disclosure of certain things as part of our social contract? I would expect a partner to disclose certain things that are non-obvious, but potentially relevant to a relationship/hookup. But maybe I’m wrong, or painfully backwards. I would like to know, though, if you believe we owe no disclosure at all, prior to an engagement?
If you are not into trans women, the onus is on you to disclose that, not on the trans woman. This is because there is a long history of violence against trans women who disclose it, so as a cis man you need to do your part.
If someone starts a conversation with you and then asks you on a date, you have no obligation to tell them anything.
However if a person driving a Ferrari wearing a 5k suit and a 50k watch asks someone on a date, that person may be under the impression that they are going on a date with a rich person and that they will not be going to McDonald's.
I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with taking your date to McDonald's. Plenty of people love McDonald's. But it is not the same thing and that date may not go well.
No. One of my friend is lesbian and active LGBTQ+ member (pro-bono doctor for the one who needs it in her community now, that's what i mean by active), and she knows i only date biologically born women, her friends knows it, never had any issue with them.
I’m a homosexual man. I’ve been called out by woke friends because I’ve said that generally gay men are not attracted to vaginas. I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.
I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.
I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.
OK, but I'm trans and I'd say your "woke" friends are talking nonsense and I hope that they will all actually wake up and realise what inane nonsense they're talking.
Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?
What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.
Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.
My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.
What kind of backlash do you want to see? If we're talking about arguing with idiots on twitter 24/7 then I don't think most people are prepared to do that.
And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?
I can guarantee that the backlash you got was less about your personal opinion, but for calling a relationship between a cis men and a trans man straight.
It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.
I don't like what GP is saying either; it's sneaking some very judgmental opinions under the umbrella of "they want to force me to have sex with X", which is bad faith.
But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".
The problem is with the generalization, which is present in the entire comment. I can't imagine the original conversation was significantly less abrasive.
Generalization is the problem. It is not accurate to say that all gay relationships require two penises.
It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.
I can't believe I need to say this, but there are trans women with vaginas and without testes.
Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.
You've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. (Indeed this comment is basically a parody of the genre.) That's against the purpose of HN, as anyone who's read the site guidelines should know. Where we draw the line is when an account is using HN primarily for that. Since your account has, I've banned it.
Saying that political thinking, of any stripe, is about power is pretty much a tautology. Similarly, equality and justice are about power relations, so there isn’t the contradiction you seem to believe there either.
Politics is the process of distributing power, and left wing politics aims to distribute power more widely, whereas right wing politics aims to concentrate it.
> Saying that political thinking, of any stripe, is about power is pretty much a tautology.
I never stated that (you did). I merely pointed out the fact that humans are largely hypocrites and duplicitous by nature. ALL interactions between humans is underpinned by power.
In the past, the power grab was explicit, nowadays said power is sought after behind the veneer of "civility" and "niceness".
It is basic human nature that I'm criticising. The left are just as bad as the right - but at least, with the right - you can see them coming, because they are mostly explicit (at least relative to the left).
The left are just as power hungry as the right, but are very well versed in this "we are nice, caring people" act - this is why I (a seeker of the truth - and nothing but the truth), am enjoying their dirty inner workings coming to light.
I don't think that quoting you as below substantially changes the meaning of what you wrote, and seems to very directly say that "the left" is "about power". As I said, this is tautological, but you present it as though it were a concealed truth.
> The left ... was never about equality and justice, it was always ... being about POWER
It feels more than a little reductive to attribute this behaviour to "the left" as a whole, when in fact it is a very small number of people. Perhaps you feel it is appropriate in your own context, but again this is a (common) presentation that purports to dismiss an entire "wing" of political thought, but actually just presents crude stereotypes.
Finally, I think the idea that the right present their attempts at power in a more naked fashion just isn't borne out by the evidence. Right wing policies are frequently presented as being dictated by either reason or common sense (often depending on the audience), and those of their opponents dismissed as unrealistic. This is the same kind of veneer you decry on the left, just a different colour - one that some find more appealing.
> I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.
You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".
Attraction doesn't work like this. You're not attracted to chromosomes, you're attracted to femininity.
I could understand if you'd find some to most trans women not attractive, but a categorical exclusion seems transphobic to me.
There are trans women where you really can not tell, even if you're in an intimate relationship. At that point it moves from being a genuine preference to bigotry.
But I can see what you're actually asking: Is anyone going to yell at you because you're not dating them. The answer is no.
Unless you real question was not a question, but more of an implication that something that literally never happens must happen on a grand scale. Damn the woke mob forcing me to fuck trannies!
As a trans person I do not believe in a firm sex/gender distinction. The evidence clearly suggests gender identity (unlike race) has a major biological component.
The David Reimer case is not really "evidence" of anything. At best it's more like a hint or a suggestion. "Evidence" should mean there is a scientific theory and someone conducted an experiment to prove or disprove it and, hey, look at the evidence, it tells us something about the theory. The Reimer case was a complete destruction of a person's life, but it was not perpetrated as an experiment of any kind. Although if I remember correctly the perpetrator did claim he was testing a theory, the unethical and haphazard, disorganised way in which he went about it completely discredits any pretense to science.
So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".
Sure but go spend about 9 minutes around the kubernetes Twittersphere (a group with a large amount of white trans people) and you’ll see very quickly just how nasty it can be in its own way
I don't know if that's true anymore entirely, in a broader context.
(I am sure that trans people far more often have far worse experiences still)
I've heard stories, both online and from my sisters (who live in a pretty woke neighborhood and have a pretty woke circle of friends) about kids and teens who were "criticized" for being "too gender conforming" by "concerned" parents and friends alike. And stories about teens and grownups being ostracized and called names for politely rejecting trans or same sex people flirtations[1].
While I don't think these anecdotes are outright bullying, of course, it shows a certain direction, and it shows certain parental and peer group pressures building up in certain cohorts of society. All this can cause a certain amount of trauma and confusion[0], especially in kids and teens who haven't had a chance to explore and form their personality and identity on their own to a sufficient degree yet, when e.g. you as a kid get a sense that your parents are unhappy about you or when friends and peers call or at least insinuate you are "a bit of a" transphobe or homophobe because your brain is interested in the opposite sex and opposite sex genitalia.
[0] I am NOT saying all trans people are just confused. But I do think that some kids and younger teens are in fact just confused. Well, all kids and teens are constantly confused about everything, that's part of growing up, which is to a great part trial and error and trying to make sense of things and experiences. But this kind of confusion I am talking about relates to the old stories of "My parents wanted a boy and only got me, a girl, so I tried to be as much a boy as I could growing up trying to please them", but with a new slant to it, that might possibly involve hormone therapy at worst.
[1] One more slightly related anecdote, I am directly biased here: When I was like 17 or 18 (still in school, so, long ago), I was at a party and had a guy hit on me. I am a guy myself, but straight. Fine no worries, I told him nicely I am not interested. He (admittedly quite drunk) would then follow me around for some time, trying to convince me with zingers like "only a man knows how to suck another man's cock to perfection, I can show you, follow me!". The following days people would ask me why I "hate gays". What happened after that guy struck out with me is that he went around telling people I am a "gay hater". It took quite some effort to explain myself to people that I in fact do not hate gays and am not "grossed out" by gays, etc, just do not find them to be sexually attractive partners for me personally. I am sure some of my peers still thought I am a rampant homophobe afterwards. The more you defend yourself, the more guilty you look and all that. I am convinced this affected some of my friendships negatively and certainly messed with my mind[2]. I dread to imagine what it's like growing up now in some hyper-woke community, socialized by shit storms and parents and teachers who think math is racist and it's OK to punch "nazis".
[2] One openly bisexual girl from my grade remarked to me "Now you got a glimpse at what it is like for me a lot of the time". True that, only a glimpse, but bad enough for me already.
