rae
1yr ago
At the risk of getting bogged down in semantics, the "in every single case" clause in KMC's comments was what made me raise an eyebrow - while sure male puberty (or EPO) is a competitive advantage, the way it was phrased could be interpreted ambiguously as meaning people who went through male puberty are at an advantage by always being bigger and stronger while female athletes can have superior technique/training - see KMC's subsequent comment. Best to clarify to avoid a potential motte and bailey.
rae
1yr ago
Fair point, that was a straw-man. My uncharitable interpretation was perhaps motivated by my own personal experience of being in the >95th percentile of teenage boys and not being able to match my overweight, untrained male classmates despite going to the gym 3x a week and trying to average around 3k calories a day. I didn't feel like my male puberty had given me much competitive advantage when I would get beaten in arm wrestling by random female classmates or the teacher assigned me to play football with the girls in PE, so while I agree that the male/female athleticism distribution is bimodal, overlaps do exist.
I didn't mean overlap in the athletes (unless you're comparing modern-day female athletes to early 20th century male ones) but the general athletic level of the population. As for the arm wrestling, I was beaten by a highly athletic female classmate, and then it was a challenge against one that wasn't particularly athletic as far as I know, not petite but fairly average build, perhaps top third to top 50%. There's a possibility I have mild endocrine issues, I have signs of low prenatal androgen exposure (and paradoxically high T levels despite low masculinisation, suggesting some compensation for lowered androgen sensitivity).
Which is another reason that I'm favouring the hypothesis that endocrine disruption is responsible for the surge in transgender identification, and that the focus should be on that rather than nebulous concepts of gender identity, along with waging the culture war over what should be purely a medical issue.
I sort always had the implicit assumption that much of the culture war aspect of the issue comes down to the elite levels. It's not clear to me that the local D level rec-league shouldn't just be an open league. For individual sports no one cares if you win the novice, 35-40 yr old, 65-70 kg, nearsighted division of your local park run. Like if it matters to someone, anyone can find a "competition" where they hand our participation trophies.
Most of the attention is on elite levels sure, but the laws in Kansas block transgender girls from playing in public school and college sports, which as far as I know aren't elite. The culture war debate extends to the trans girl that wants to play on her high school soccer team as well as the top echelons of women's sports, although in both cases the number of trans athletes is still extremely low.
rae
1yr ago
Saying MtF trans people don’t exist is a bizarre viewpoint - what do you call the obviously real number of people who are born male, have gender dysphoria, and are transitioning to have the characteristics of females by taking hormones and going through surgery? Those people clearly exist, and MtF is an apt descriptor, as they are going from male to female - in some cases successfully enough to pass, in some cases not. The “MtF” term is useful to distinguish between MtFs and FtMs - I don’t see any commonly used alternative words that avoid confusion (many times I’ve had to explain to people the direction of transitioning of people I know - e.g. X used to be a girl and now is a boy).
Also trans people have existed since recorded history, there’s ancient Sumerians trans priestesses called Gala, the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, and kathoeys (aka Thai ladyboys) are not a recent western phenomenon.
I’m a trans woman (so not surprisingly in the pro-trans camp) and I have thought very hard about the ground truth of transgenderism, and am exceedingly aware of the physical reality of being trans - the entire point of transitioning is to have fewer of the physical traits of your natal sex, as those are what’s causing psychological distress. There’s nothing requiring cognitive dissonance there, HRT and gender reassignment surgery do make you take on the characteristics of the opposite sex, albeit not all and with varying degrees of success.
The social construct of gender is a very real thing in that other people will identify you as a man or a woman and treat you differently, and that may not align with your preferences. If you transition, your goal is then to be perceived as the opposite sex (again, you may not be successful). I don’t see how this requires any cognitive dissonance, or creates any contradictions with my position towards sports, which is allowing trans women in women’s sports if they didn’t go through male puberty or if it can be medically proven that they have no physical advantage resulting from their natal sex.
rae
1yr ago
You don’t transition because you have the internal experience of the opposite sex - you transition because you have distress at having the experience of your natal sex. You don’t need any exposure to the modern trans gender discourse to develop gender dysphoria, simply existing in a society with different genders is enough.
Trans people don’t believe they are actually changing their sex, which is which the term “transsexual” was abandoned in favour of “transgender”. But hormones are not purely aesthetic and feminisation/masculinisation of the brain is actually scientifically observable - not only on MRI scans but also on test scores, e.g. post HRT, visuo spatial ability is enhanced in FtMs, while verbal working memory is enhanced in MtFs (see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306453020301402).
If anything, I’d say trans people experience distress at their internal experience not aligning with their desired gender and post HRT it does - many anecdotal reports of how your mental state changes on estrogen or testosterone, not only from trans people but cis people who also undergo HRT (e.g. men with low T who report increased energy, confidence, etc).
As someone who has dysphoria and tried many ways to deal with it, I have yet to see any treatment that’s better than transitioning - it’s the current medical consensus for a reason - but if you know of any, feel free to link them.
rae
1yr ago
“Getting a sex change” is also an old timey term for gender reassignment surgery, so I’m seeing more of a general move from sex towards gender when it comes to trans discourse. Definitions are generally fuzzy and shift over time anyway and nature doesn’t care for human’s need to categorise everything into neat little boxes.
Even sex doesn’t have an easy binary scientific definition (how do you categorise intersex individuals?) and so best to precisely detail what you’re saying. I personally think it’d be better to use terms like “chromosomal sex” and “phenotypic sex” - the former you can’t change, the latter you can to some degree. Then you have gender which relates to phenotypic sex but is mostly irrelevant to your chromosomes - we didn’t even know they existed until the late 19th century.
I don’t agree with some of the philosophy behind trans activism but our goals are largely aligned, and obviously I will be more sympathetic to an ideology that supports my existence than one that does not.
Gestures wildly at Europe
In what sense? I live in a European country and transgender HRT, along with many surgeries, are available through the public healthcare system. One of my trans friends got put on blockers and transitioned as a minor. Sure it’s not as easy as the US where you have informed consent, and the public healthcare system has hideous waiting lists (in general), but the medical consensus here is still to treat gender dysphoria with transition.
rae
1yr ago
That sounds plausible, and even detransitioners talk about it, but it's an open question what it all sums up to in the grand scheme of things. For example, how come it inevitably turns out that 90% of women in communities like this turn out to be trans? How come trans bros hardly ever show up?
Hormones aren’t magic and while they will nudge you some percentage towards the neurochemistry of the opposite sex depending on age, they can’t undo years of male/female socialisation or drastically change an existing personality. If I had transitioned as a minor, I probably would have ended up with more of a “typical” female personality and I’d be on tumblr/TikTok instead.
rae
1yr ago
This both not at all universally the definition trans advocates use and in fact a minority opinion(see truscum discourse) as well as a phrasing that obscures more than it enlightens. What is distress? What are the experiences of a natal sex and how do you differentiate them from those of the complimentary sex having only experienced one of them(or in the case of prepubescent children neither of them)? Memes are powerful things, anyone in the wrong side of a social media pile on can attest to their ability to induce distress.
There’s a lot of medical literature documenting gender dysphoria but I can tell you my own experiences: while I didn’t know what it was like to be female, I knew what it was like to gain the attributes of adult men by going through puberty, and that was a profoundly negative experience. I would constantly try to minimise those attributes by shaving every inch of my body, taping away my genitals, and fantasise about mutilating my penis so doctors would make me a girl. I had no awareness that transitioning was a thing; my body just felt wrong, and socially I was upset whenever I would be put into male roles. Whereas when I transitioned, the constant negative thoughts and obsession about the wrongness of my body traits slowly went away, and I could finally bear to look in the mirror without being absolutely disgusted.
What I reject is appropriating a place in society that was not carved out for you
What places in society aren’t carved out for me? I’m fine with sports being segregated based on hormone levels (present and during puberty), but I see any attempt at sex segregation to be outright harmful. Sending trans women to women’s prisons or not should be decided on a case-by-case basis, a petite passing trans woman is going to get sexually assaulted and likely raped by going to a men’s prison, while a large natal male sexual criminal who’s not on HRT but self-IDs as a woman is a different case entirely.
What else? I’m generally opposed to making things like scholarships and awards based on identity rather than merit. Women’s shelters? Same as prison’s - and I’m not sure they’d let in a 6’ trans man with phallo so it’s not just about biological sex. Women’s bathrooms? Toilets should be unisex tbh, but a passing trans woman will look more out of place in the men’s than the women’s.
rae
1yr ago
Some trans people do fit in better with the personality of the opposite sex, but some don’t; there is indeed a cluster of trans women that are attracted to women, into STEM, have interests typical of male nerds and are generally not very feminine. But AFAIK they tend to be high IQ contributing members of society and if transition improves their life and mental health, what’s the harm? The dysphoria can manifest differently but be just as real, and it’s better that they transition early than later in life when they are married and have kids, which was the average situation for female attracted trans women back in the 80s and 90s (see Blanchard’s research).
rae
1yr ago
Would you have those boundaries be purely based on biological sex? If so, would you then have a 6’2 hairy muscular trans man like Mitch Harrison go into the women’s locker room?
Conservatives and TERFs often state that allowing trans women into women’s spaces allows any male sexual predator to access them by identifying as a woman, but if you go the other way and say trans people should go where there biological sex says, what’s to prevent a man from going into the women’s bathroom and saying he’s actually a trans man?
I think the middle ground of having people go where they pass as makes the most sense. A passing trans woman with fully developed breasts and SRS shouldn’t change in the men’s locker room - she’d attract very confused stares at the very least. But someone who’s only been on HRT for a few weeks should probably stick to the spaces of their birth sex regardless of what they identify as.
Getting rid of the autists would be a disaster for humanity tho, who would be crazy enough to obsess over computing or electromagnetism or breeding if it weren’t for autistic people? I don’t know what share of modern inventions we can credit to autistic obsession but it’s probably quite high :)
rae
1yr ago
Thank you!! No worries, I didn’t find your questions nitpicky at all. Even if there’s… strong disagreements, I very much enjoy the fact that people here are at minimum willing to respond and have a discussion around trans issues, as opposed to other forums that would allow no dissenting views on either side of the subject. I’m quite happy to share my perspective, and also try to understand other people’s - I think it’s healthy to poke your head out of your culture war bubble and try to understand the other side beyond the caricatures your own presents, regardless if you lean left or right.
rae
1yr ago
MtF/trans woman (and FtM/trans men) are the commonly used terms for the phenomenon. Are there any other terms that you can use that would be understood? Otherwise you can add it to the list of many terms like horseshoe crab (not actually a crab), peanuts (actually a legume), mincemeat pie (has no meat), etc. If you tried to call peanuts “pealegumes” people would just be confused, even if you’d be right.
All models are wrong, but some models are useful - FtM/MtF (and FtNB/MtNB) is a handy way to identify a trans person. With older folks or those less steeped in LGBT issues, “trans man” or “trans woman” often provoke confusion - sometimes they think a trans woman is an FtM and vice-versa, while the full “female to male” terminology makes it explicit that the person started off as female and now appears male, or is attempting to, even if their biological sex isn’t actually male.
rae
1yr ago
“AFAB sports” would be completely dominated by trans men and/or various people with intersex conditions that were originally assigned female at birth. You’d have to add more qualifiers (e.g. hormone level verification) and we’re back with a similar, if less ideologically charged, debate.
I will have to disagree on the implication that transition is fruitless and a false hope by comparing it to Death Valley. Many trans people are able to pass and integrate society successfully as members of the opposite sex (trans men generally moreso than trans women), and while medical science may not be advanced enough for a complete sex change with a functional reproductive system, HRT + surgeries are enough to improve mental healthcare outcomes. There may be no gold in the hills, but there’s at least some silver.
I recently read the Transsexual Phenomenon (link here: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/2019-04-07_5ca961529c262_HarryBenjamin-TheTranssexualPhenomenon1copy.pdf ), a seminal work from 1966, and I would highly encourage you to skim through it as it’s a work on trans people that predates the current gender ideology lens, with none of the present terminology. It shows how the phenomenon clearly existed in what many conservatives think is the golden age of America - and the amount of harm the system did to people who didn’t fit into the sexual and gender norms of the period. Psychotherapy to make trans people desist was seriously attempted back then and just didn’t work - as a medical clinician, the author of the work found HRT and possible surgeries to be the most effective remedy for many, and this was in post-war USA.
One interesting element he mentions is how there’s a scale of being transgender, and that some patients need no intervention at all, some are helped simply by taking estrogen but otherwise living their lives as male, while some should indeed have the full gender transition including surgery. I personally agree that current approaches and societal mood are perhaps too quick to push people into a transition pipeline and that not all people with gender identity dysfunction need to go all the way - a scale like Harry Benjamin proposed, revised for more contemporary mores, has tremendous value and would perhaps curtail some of the excesses of the current approach.
As a person who’s suffering from gender dysphoria and is undergoing medical transition, what delusion am I suffering from? I know my biological sex, I’m very much aware that I’m not female, but the hormones I’m taking clearly are having a positive effect. Gender dysphoria is an awful psychological condition that can be incredibly debilitating and intense, and I’ve tried repressing for years, I’ve tried going to the gym, I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried living as a feminine gay man, I’ve tried reading TERF blogs and conservative rhetoric to the point it became self-harm, but HRT is the only thing that managed to reduce the daily feeling of disgust and despair I had towards my body. I know very well it’s not perfect and that I won’t become a real 100% woman, even if I may pass, but why should I deny myself what’s currently the most effective medical treatment for my condition?
Perhaps I can summarise; as a trans person, I don’t think I’m the opposite sex in any way, instead I’m in deep distress over being the sex I am, and I take medication that alleviates that distress.
rae
1yr ago
Sure, according to Wikipedia the terms MtF/FtM have been superseded by trans woman and trans man precisely because of the need to separate gender and sex. However I’ve found in some conversations, some people are confused by trans woman / trans man and that MtF/FtM is less confusing. If there was a better unambiguous term, I would use it.
But also, I’m personally not a big fan of the sex/gender dichotomy anyway, and I prefer the older sex types as seen in Harry Benjamin’s work (which I linked in my other post), where you have chromosomal sex, reproductive sex (do you make female or male gametes), phenotypic sex (how the sex is expressed in your appearance), and social sex. There, MtF/FtM is fine as it refers someone going from one phenotype to another.
rae
1yr ago
I think only in China were lockdowns severe enough to qualify as “home imprisonment”, as far I know in Western countries you were allowed to leave your house to go buy groceries, walk your dog, exercise (albeit sometimes in a reduced area), etc.
Lockdowns were a case of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency, which does not have the same quasi-universal moral consensus as committing genocide. What makes you be against them in particular? Are you against all government intervention that reduce freedom in the name of safety (making you a libertarian), does it violate some moral principle in particular, or do you think the response was mistaken/ineffective in the case of Covid-19? Are you against /all/ travel restrictions, or would you be fine with some level of social measures (see: closing down non-essential businesses, allowing limited scale gatherings, vs. China-level restrictions)?
You may have a different opinion on the matter, but most people will trade some level of freedom for safety. The motivation for lockdowns was slowing down the spread of the pandemic and potentially saving millions of lives; would you be against them even if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they worked?
rae
1yr ago
I guess I’m one of those people that sanewashes the transgender movement - I don’t agree with 100% or maybe even 50% of the movement, but I do feel compelled to defend it to some degree because at least it defends my right to be accepted in society and have access to healthcare I need, unlike the current anti-trans conservatives in the US. That’s one of the downsides of the culture, you’re thinking about picking a fight with an ideological monolith and losing all the nuances from discussing individual philosophical differences.
However I feel obligated to point out that you picked a wrong example from the transgender movement; how is sexual dysphoria contradictory with gender being a social construct? You can argue that they’re unrelated, you could feel dysphoric about having the physical characteristics of your biological sex, and you could have gender dysphoria about being treated as a man or a woman in society; the latter would go away in a theoretical society where men and women were treated 100% the same, whereas the former would be present even on a desert island.
If you wanted weak men of the transgender movement, pick the tucutes who believe gender dysphoria isn’t necessary to be trans, that gender presentation isn’t related to gender identity, and that it’s transphobic to be a gay man and not want to pleasure a trans man’s vagina. Those are actual beliefs held by some people in the community and much more contradictory in that they devalue the very concept of gender identity.
rae
1yr ago
Large language models like ChatGPT are simply trained to predict the next token* (+ a reinforcement learning stage but that’s more for alignment). That simple strategy enables them to have the tremendous capabilities we see today, but their only incentive is to output the next plausible token, not provide any truth or real reference.
There’s ways to mitigate this - one straightforward way would be to connect the model to a database or search engine and have it explicitly look up references. This is the current approach taken by Bing, while for ChatGPT you can use plugins (if you are accepted in the waitlist), or code your own solution with the API + LangChain.
*essentially a word-like group of characters
rae
1yr ago
Bit of a late reply but unfortunately I lost my previous attempt, so here goes:
I do think there’s a very good point you’re making about the risks of allying with people who are ostensibly after the same end goals but for completely different reasons; but I think the differences between say, your position on firearms and one motivated by self-defence are smaller than between you and someone pro gun control. Ideological purity is a fractal and I don’t think it’s possible to agree 100% with any individual on policy or societal goals, but that doesn’t mean there’s not individuals with whom you agree more than others.
And while from your perspective the world where they rule, warts and all, is worth it for your own reasons from my perspective there are a lot of kids who will be mutilated by these people on this pyre. Just like many kids will die in school shootings for lack of gun control I have a hard bullet biting answer for it being worth it but I recognize I'm biting quite a bullet here.
I’m not American so the concept of the 2nd amendment or frequent school shootings is very foreign to me, but I admire the fact that you don’t brush them aside. I do understand the concerns with surgeries on minors, but the number is very low (56 genital surgeries between 2019-2021, 776 top surgeries) and my experience is that there is a significant amount of gatekeeping - I’m not sure about the US but in my country you need a gender identity disorder diagnosis + referral letters from two psychiatrists and that’s as an adult. Calling it “mutilation” is emotionally charged language that brings to mind violent traumatic maiming, when the end goal is a surgery that improves the patient’s life.
Let me see if I can pass the ideological turing test on your position and let me know where I fail:
Your attempt at the Turing test is mostly correct except for the comparison to a BID patient getting an arm amputated; no pro-trans rights person would make that point.
Firstly, the end goal of becoming an amputee vs becoming the opposite sex is very different; if done perfectly, the former will impair your daily functioning and makes you unable to do things the average healthy person can, while a perfect sex change wouldn’t - unless you want to argue that 50% of the population is somehow impaired compared to the other.
Current technology doesn’t give you a perfect sex change, but I don’t see how any of the modern treatments give you any impairments to your daily life, let alone any that are comparable to amputation. Fertility is the main thing that is impacted; but you can plan around it by freezing sperm or eggs beforehand (or by halting HRT - at least for MtFs, it’s possible to have normal sperm counts once T levels are back to normal). Fertility is also not relevant to your daily life in the same way having limbs is, and I personally wanted a vasectomy anyway which is something that’s available to cis men.
Let’s go step by step for each modern treatment;
-
You can go on HRT and have the hormone levels of the opposite sex, giving you some of their sexual secondary characteristics. The main thing you risk is loss of fertility, but it’s generally reversible at that stage. Otherwise, there are no changes that make your daily life worse than either the average man or woman.
-
If FtM, you can get top surgery. This is a cosmetic procedure but you will be unable to lactate after; this is desirable for many, as men don’t lactate. Larger breasts will have visible scars but this is a purely cosmetic feature once they’re healed.
-
Bottom surgery is more complex; the loss of fertility is permanent at that stage, and you have to remain on hormones for the rest of your life. But, if it goes well, you can have a healthy, fulfilling sexual life with genitals that you actually like, instead of ones that you can’t stand.
Also as a side note, did you know that there was a study in the mid-20th century on institutionalised patients that showed that castrated males lived on average up to 12 more years than intact males (depending on age of castration)? See also medieval eunuchs who had a considerably longer lifespan than their aristocratic peers. So a transfem patient could very well have a longer healthier life by going through the so-called “mutilation”. Personally if any procedure could give me an extra decade of life, I would heavily consider it.
If as you've said gender and sex incongruencies are entirely separate issues, one is physical and one is something that might not exist on a deserted island then we can't use the sexual dysphoria as an argument for gender affirming care and yet this move is constantly made, and when it's made the movement is disagreeing with you because you are not useful to it at the moment.
Do you mean that you shouldn’t give gender affirming care (i.e. medical treatments) if someone has only social dysphoria and no physical dysphoria? I agree with that and from what I can see that’s the general position many trans people have. The most frequent manifestation is trans people with no bottom dysphoria not getting bottom surgery, which is where the whole “women can have penises” angle comes from. Some trans people won’t take HRT (often they will just identify as non-binary tho), however many that have mostly social dysphoria will still go on HRT in order to pass.
[…] at some point the thread dies when it becomes necessary for the TRA poster to actually start throwing some of the popular trans movement under the bus for ideological consistency.
I think from the start I have tried to be clear that I don’t agree 100% with all of the modern day trans rights beliefs? Going back to the very interesting point you made about defending a position from whichever mutually exclusive variant is most convenient, I would be interested in seeing whether or where I did that - I am trying to be as ideologically consistent as possible, if only for my one sake, although it is possible I am adjusting my position as new arguments are made.
There isn't a way to sugar coat unnecesarilly flaying a healthy person's penis that would not have ever desired the procedure if not exposed to this idea. The question of what percentage of patients this describes is of course up for debate but the horror it should invoke can't and shouldn't be sugar coated. I understand why you flinch away, I have the same reaction to pictures of dead kids being used to argue against my position, but the instinct is a weakness.
The difference is that a kid being shot is always a horrifying thing, while gender affirming surgery can sometimes be horrifying, and sometimes the best thing to happen to someone.
That said I honestly would take losing a limb over being reduced to the trans version of my sex, in my case an FTM. I would rather not have a leg than be FTM. I do not think this is an unusual position.
That is honestly extremely difficult for me to comprehend. You use your legs every day, having a prosthetic leg would be a severe inconvenience in your daily life to say the least, preventing you from doing many activities you take for granted. Meanwhile the FtM version of you would probably still pass as a male socially. I could perhaps understand preferring to lose a leg than your genitals if your genitals are your only source of sexual pleasure, but the FtM version of you would still be able to enjoy sex, if in a different way.
Hm… although perhaps that can be a good analogy for you to understand gender dysphoria? What you feeling about becoming an FtM version of yourself is how I feel about being a biological male. To me what’s horrifying is not “flaying my penis” but having a penis at all, and I am filled with utter disgust every time I have to look at it. As I said in a previous comment, I wanted it removed as a child who had 0 awareness of the existence of trans people - there was a point where I honestly thought of taking a kitchen knife and faking a bloody accident.
I can’t see how someone would undergo bottom surgery without having similar feelings, and I certainly can’t see how they would go through it if they valued it as much as you seemed to value yours, just by being exposed to the idea. There’s certainly plenty of trans women who value theirs and keep it, and I don’t see the number of minors getting SRS as anything concerning at the minute.
Why is there a need for a single classification of sex that’s used in all instances? There’s clearly multiple concepts to which sex and associated words refer to: which gametes you produce, which chromosomes you have (karyotype), which morphology you have (phenotype), and which gender roles and social expectations you occupy. Why would you try to collapse all of the above into a single “real” binary classification instead of just using the appropriate concept for what you’re trying to communicate?
E.g., if you’re saying “look at that man over there” to refer to a passing trans woman, you will (at least initially) confuse your interlocutor, because as you said, humans categorise people as men or as women based off their appearance, and a passing trans woman gets put in the category “woman” for her social interactions by people who don’t know otherwise.
Or, if you, a straight man looking to date, ask me to introduce you to a woman your age, and I have you meet a (very good looking) 6’ bearded trans guy, will I have really fulfilled the request? What if I came with a very attractive woman with CAIS instead? Clearly, the words “man” or “woman” don’t refer to the person having XX or XY chromosomes in common usage.
At some level I guess this is an ontology debate - I’m firmly in the camp that believes categories aren’t real, but they can be useful, and they should always be understood as fuzzy. Take the “is a burrito a sandwich” debate - it’s clear that there is a property of “sandwichness”, which a burrito had less than a BLT but more than say, a soup.
There’s similarly a property of “‘maleness” and “femaleness” that trans men and trans women have different degrees of than cisgendered people, depending on their innate traits, how long they’ve been on hormones, what surgeries they had, etc, and that will impact what strangers refer to them as, and what gender-based expectations they get hassled with.
Surely you know how this game goes? You share non-passing trans people, I can share passing ones. What do you think about 6’3 Mitch Harrison who competed in the Titan Games? Sure not all trans men look like this (but most do eventually pass as short effeminate men), but they are out there - both me and gay men I know have dated trans guys who passed.
I wouldn’t introduce a passing trans woman to a straight man uncritically, because most straight men aren’t interested in trans women and many are downright threatened by the concept, genital preferences are a thing, and the cost-benefit ratio is too low. But, I could gently approach the subject and see if that particular person is interested - I have done so in the past, I’ve had straight friends say “if she’s hot and had bottom surgery, I don’t care”. And what do you think is more likely - that a straight man would be interested in a trans woman that looks like this, or for a trans man that looks like Laith Ashley? Which one do you think confuses gay men, and which one confuses straight men?
Trans women aren’t the exact same as cis women, and I’m happy to accept that. Both the “trans women are exactly the same as cis women” and the “trans women are just men in a dress and we can always tell” camps are wrong.
rae
1yr ago
Maybe you personally have an extremely good ability to detect trans women, but most people don’t. Plenty of trans women don’t arouse suspicion in their daily lives, some are able to go stealth, some are able to have medical professionals think they’re biological women and get asked about pregnancy/periods (a real anecdote). Have you not heard stories of straight men flipping out once they’re told the woman they’re attracted to/slept with is trans? E.g. this story of a teen flirting with a trans woman, them going to his hotel room, then going back to hers and violently beating her once she says she’s trans, because he had no idea and felt humiliated.
rae
1yr ago
You made a big leap from left-handedness to missing limb, which is commonly accepted as a disability, and ignored all of the in-between.
What about something like autism spectrum disorders? A mild case of autism can be beneficial; how many technological and scientific advances do we owe to people who had autistic obsessions in engineering, physics, programming, etc.? Some autistic people see “normies” as the dysfunctional ones and are able to be very successful and productive in the right environment - but there’s a point where it becomes entirely a disability. Where do you draw the line?
If an adult is trans but not taking hormones and has no intention of taking any in the future, their trans status is highly questionable unless they have a medical contraindication or live in a hostile environment where transitioning is dangerous.
More options
Context Copy link