Darrel
1yr ago
I think it’s good to make some accommodation for others’ worldviews. To gently prod at another preference, consider others’ religion/lack thereof. All but your own will seem laughably absurd. Yet if I was invited to dinner by devout Zoroastrians, I wouldn’t laugh in their faces when they suggested we say a prayer before dinner, nor would I immediately start attacking the holes in their holy book. When a belief seems delusional to you, but is important to someone else, then provided it isn’t causing any real harm, I think you can make accommodations. It’s pretty well impossible to have relationships with people otherwise.
On the other hand, maybe this kind of thinking has landed us in our current predicament? If we were all completely open about calling out what we see as insane, then maybe silly belief structures would find it harder to take root. It’d probably be a society with far more hatred and conflict, though, so I don’t know if the tradeoff is worth it.
There are gradations too, with acting around trans women. It’s one thing to accommodate saying ‘she’ and ‘her’, another to point-blank lie when asked “do you think I’m attractive,” and another entirely to agree to join them in the bedroom so as to maintain the fiction.
All up, provided a transwoman isn’t obnoxious about the whole thing, I feel it’s needlessly demeaning and rude not to do the bare minimum along with it. At the same time, there are limits to what I’ll do.
Darrel
1yr ago
I’ve been in MB’s position, and that discomfort is all too relatable.
I was torn. I felt like I should act as if nothing had changed - this was still the same fundamental person; it’d be offensive to treat them differently. On the other hand, I felt like I SHOULD treat them differently. They obviously wanted to be seen as an attractive young woman – shouldn’t I treat them like one?
But there are things I’d say and do around men that I’d never say or do around women. If I kept saying and doing them, I’d be acknowledging that I didn’t see the person as a woman. But if I didn’t say them, I’d be tacitly acknowledging that our relationship had fundamentally and irrevocably changed. And if it had – well, wouldn’t I need to re-evaluate whether I wanted to hang out with the new person?
There was also the appalling mismatch between how the person clearly wanted to be viewed (hot woman), and the fact I couldn’t help but see them as a man in a wig and dress. I wanted to be supportive, but that required me to put on an act I didn’t believe in, that was unnatural and grating to maintain.
I suspect this is the reality for many people, and that Mr.Beast's reaction isn't abnormal. There's a dearth of popular narratives, real or fictional, exploring the messy reality of what it's like to have someone close to you transition. Maybe this will help that narrative get a spotlight, and discussion.
But if you treat groups differently based on whether they are male by sex VS male by gender, isn’t that an admission that trans men are in some fundamental way different in personality than natal men?
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