I think the Bloodhound Gang has a lyric that describes this well:
I did read it and this is what stands out. At no point in Jen’s article does she describe this scenario at all. At no point in my comments have I described this scenario at all.
I do recall this scenario…oh yeah, it’s called fiction. The Crying Game (1992) - IMDb
That’s not real life. Trans men and women living their lives are not purposefully seeking to deceive or trap anyone. No one is waiting for a moment of intimacy to say “Surprise, I’ve got XYZ genitals!”
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And in fact, the article is quite clear that this scenario is not the norm. It’s actually the central piece of the article–that the people that engage in violence with trans women do so full well knowing what genitals they signed up for.
I have little doubt that trans people know this “trap” scenario is likely to get them killed.
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I have trans friends. It’s not something they’ve ever hidden. And these aren’t romantic/intimate friends either.
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They’re making an unreasonable assumption? Why would anybody bother trying to guess about the genitals of somebody they don’t know? There is no “leading” involved, it’s bad form to expect people are obliged to live up to your fantasies about them.[quote=“namenotreserved, post:24, topic:101580”]
Since effectively all who present as female, by gender, are also female by sex the former is making an implicit statement about the latter.
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Not everybody subscribes to conventions of gender or gender presentation. They are certainly not universal, even if it might seem more convenient to act as if they were.
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This exactly. It all gets so weird and murky. What if the straight male celebrity falls in love with a trans female that’s post-op? Is that “gay” since she’s XY genetically? What if the burly “straight male” celebrity is a trans man (no surgery) who falls in love with a trans female (no surgery either). Since they have a vagina and a penis between the two of them is that not gay? Is it uber gay since the genitals aren’t on the “right” gender? (And to everyone that’s going to freak the F out, that isn’t my personal opinion, it’s just a thought experiment as to what the general public may think).
Maybe I’m just getting too old and cranky (it’s certainly not out of some sort of enlightenment or lack of opinion), but I just can’t be bothered to care about these sorts of things. Dude likes a chick with a penis? Woo hoo. Good for them. I don’t care, and neither should anyone else who is not either of those two people.
The whole gay accusation does bug the hell out of me. Why do you care? What is the big f-ing deal? Why are you so concerned with what some other people are doing that only concerns other consenting adults? Oh noes! Someone else somewhere else is getting their rod jobbled by someone who I wouldn’t want to do that with! Hey, at least two people found a way to have some harmless enjoyment. Society need not get involved in what is essentially a private issue.
If it’s a religious thing, is your all powerful deity so weak that he needs his relatively powerless creations to stand up for him? That’s pretty incriminating right there…
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What do you mean? I use that as a pick-up line…
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Personally, I fantasize about a day when “accusations that he’s gay” just aren’t recognized as accusations anymore.
If you’re dating a violinist, some people might assume you like classical music. And they might be terribly wrong about that, maybe because your love doesn’t involve agreement on musical tastes, or maybe because she’s a violinist in a jazz band. Either way, no one will be hurt by the question, “so do you like classical music?”
I’m not holding my breath for the day when everyone will know enough to never make wrong assumptions. But I’m hoping for the day when a wrong assumption about one’s sexuality or gender will be no worse than a wrong assumption about one’s taste in music.
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Tell me you love a transgender person and I simply think “you could have just told me you love a person”.
If you tell me you like country music. I’m judging you. Harshly. And probably slapping you.
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Well there is an there isn’t. Some people are specifically attracted to people with red hair, but if they marry someone with red hair we don’t spend the rest of our lives thinking they did it just because of their hair-colour fetish. But when the thing people are attracted to is something they aren’t “supposed” to be attracted to (trans people, people with disabilities, fat people, extremely tall women or short men, whatever) we take a much dimmer view of their “fetish”.
And there’s a good reason for that. When someone is attracted to something “unusual” it could be in part because they have internalized their fear of or disgust at whatever that thing is into a fetish that is a sort of mixed bag of shame and pleasure for them. That could end up being toxic in their relationships. Like you say, in the end it’s a person you are with, not a blonde, not a nice ass, not a peculiar abnormality. We think that people who are attracted to people in wheelchairs are going to be less able to respect a person in a wheelchair than we think people who are attracted to large lips will be able to respect a person with large lips.
I think that might be reality-based, but if it is it’s based on a reality where we all collectively created that shame in the first place.
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fair points. I’d only say that if you have a fetish for big butts and you date someone solely because they have a big butt. It’s not really a solid foundation for a healthy relationship. It really applies to anything that can be a “fetish”.
Like someone for who they are. All of them. Sharp edges and all.
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I totally agree. The flip side of that, though, is that if you have a fetish for big butts and you ask someone out because you love their big butt, and then you end up dating, getting married, having kids, nursing them through their cancer, and growing old together, at some point you can say, “Man, I’m really glad I liked that look of that ass!” Attraction isn’t the basis of a healthy relationship, but it’s the start of a good deal of healthy relationships.
The really bad behaviour is if someone has a fetish, seeks out people who fulfill that fetish, and then deceives those people into thinking they are seeking or committed to a realtionship in order to get access to their sexual fetish. That’s using another person as as sex object.
I guess what I didn’t think about when I wrote my response above, though, is that when something is sufficiently stigmatized (like being a trans woman is) even seeking that thing for casual sex becomes problematic. If I advertise on a dating site, “I want to have sex with guys with big muscles, not looking for a relationship, just hook ups” then I’m likely to get some takers and I’m not really creating a problem by doing so. But if I advertise that I want to have sex with trans women in the same way, whether I think negatively of trans women or not, I have to acknowledge that I might be contributing to the idea that trans women are available for that - that it’s the only way they will get affection.
When I was actually looking for a long term relationship I started by looking for women who were 6 feet or taller. There were hundreds of thousands of people on the online site I was looking at, how else could I pick someone?
And if that were a valid analogy to seeking trans women, we’d live in a beautiful world.
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True.
BTW, I’m currently listening to an audiobook of recent Nebula winner “All the Birds in the Sky”; and it keeps constantly annoying me by mentioning irrelevant facts about the most minor of minor characters. It feels like the author regrets that she made the whole book a cis, hetero love story and wants to make up for it by sticking random labels on minor characters that have no other characterization than one of the letters L,B,T,Q or I and disappear from the story again after a sentence or two.
I disapprove of violence. If you threaten violence, you deserve to be exposed to country music. If you were to actually slap me, I’ll find some German rap music to punish you with.
Also, I just went on youtube for a few minutes to find out what all the hate on country music is about. Apparently, the genre includes more than Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson - the bad stuff never made it across the ocean ;-).
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Huh. For me, the range of identities of the characters in the book made the setting feel more real - like, I know these people, I know social groups like this, so this all feels like a normal, real world. Just with magic and mad science.
It’s not the range of identities that annoys me, it’s the way they’re presented. It feels like a series of politically-motivated violations of the “show, don’t tell” principle for me. In real life, I don’t meet gay people. I meet people of unspecified sexual orientation, and later I find out whether they have a girlfriend, a boyfriend or whether they are looking for either.
In the book, I feel like a nameless minor character is mentioned, and immediately classified by sexual orientation, transgender-ness, etc. A few lines later, after some interactions that had nothing to do with the character’s sexual orientation, gender identity, etc., the character drops out of the story again.
I feel reminded of how my grandmother used to deal with issues of race and class. When she mentioned someone to me that I didn’t know, she would first tell me whether the person in question was Jewish or not. Then she would go on to tell me the profession of that person’s parents, and only then would she tell me why she was even talking about that person. She grew up in the 20s and 30s, but in my time, I was taught not to care whether someone was Jewish, or whether their parents were farmers or university professors.
But maybe I’m just in the wrong social groups myself. After all, even the most progressive of my friends aren’t American progressives, but Austrian progressives. Which leads to different approaches to identity politics, and especially to different ways of talking about it.
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As a trans woman, I would just like to go on record as saying that dating is hard. Honestly, I would love to go out on a date with a guy and not worry about any of this stuff and just have a “normal” first date. But I can’t. Revealing my medical history (I have XY chromosomes and I used to have a penis and testicles) is not normal first date conversation and is not something I want to do. It’s not really normal pre-first date conversation either. But if I don’t have that conversation I run the risk of being accused of “keeping a secret” on the mild end of the accusation spectrum to “trying to trick my date” on the other end. One way to avoid all that is to date men who are specifically attracted to and looking for trans women. Unfortunately, or fortunately really, I no longer have the equipment that most, but not all, of these men would like for me to have. In other words, most of these men no longer find me to be what they’re looking for. I gave up, to be honest. Maybe that’s pathetic, but it’s the truth. I gave up. I haven’t had a date in 8 years. It sucks, but people are awful, so …
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What does it mean to be “sexually male”?
There are two common answers to this: genital configuration at birth and chromosomes.
Those who point to genital configuration at birth seem to be unaware of how often this is actually ambiguous to the medical team involved in the birth. Which is one of the reasons you’ll sometimes hear the phrase “assigned [fe]male at birth” when people are discussing their transitions.
Those who point to chromosomes seem to unaware of, for one thing, that XX and XY are not the only possibilities (XXY and XYY are among the other possibilities), and also that chromosomes do not determine development by themselves (see androgen insensitivity syndrome).
(tl;dr: biological sex is way more complicated then the binary we’re commonly presented with)
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Thanks for sharing your experience. This is such a complex social problem that I think we can get caught up in hypotheticals and forget that we’re talking about people.
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That does suck, and people are awful.
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What I have learned from this thread is to paraphrase Margaret Atwood.
A cis man’s worst fear of a trans woman is that she will humiliate him, but a trans woman’s worst fear of a cis man is that he will kill her.
Sadly, it seems that some people here think that unintentional humiliation is as big a crime as intentional murder.
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