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Okay, but you didn't actually specify the trans people active in your hobbies as doing any of those things in the actual post. The closest was the idea that word would spread if you told a transfem streamer she was "ridiculous" for having a female avatar over her natural male-sounding voice - but I don't think that people giving you the cold shoulder if you call them "ridiculous" unprovoked amounts to "threatening heretics". If I tell a Christian that their belief in sky-fathers is ridiculous while they're hosting an unrelated activity, I can expect to be kept at arms' length by other Christians in that activity's community, but that doesn't mean the Spanish Inquisition is back.
I also note that the list of dreadful experiences has suddenly expanded from "threaten heretics" to also include mentioning their transness too frequently and dressing in ways you don't like; if we separate them out from the fear of being ostracized should you react poorly to those things, as you seemingly do by listing them on their own, what is it that actually bothers you about those things, if it isn't an ick?
Imagine you have a young woman, Alice, who works in an office and reports to an older man named Bob. Bob makes little secret of his sexual attraction to Alice, which is not reciprocated. Bob never touches Alice in an inappropriate way, or sexually propositions her, or makes inappropriately sexual jokes in her presence etc. However, he begins wearing shorts into the office with loose-fitting boxer shorts underneath them. When talking to Alice, he tends to rest his foot on filing cabinets or angles his legs in such a way that his genitals are visible to Alice, if only just. It is abundantly obvious that he is intentionally exposing himself to Alice, but with plausible deniability. (If you want an illustration of what I'm talking about, watch this clip from Friends, except that the man in this clip is completely unaware of what he's doing.)
In your opinion, would Alice be justified in finding Bob's behaviour inappropriate, off-putting or creepy, if not actually qualifying as sexual harassment in its own right? And would your answer change if Bob "identified as" Barbara, but his genitals were unchanged?
Or supposing, to return to an example in a previous comment, Bob began to come into the office wearing a T-shirt with "CUM SLUT" emblazoned across it. Or if he began coming into work wearing enormous prosthetic breasts under his sweater? Would it be reasonable of Alice to find either of those off-putting or creepy?
@Amadan and @SnapDragon described the trans people (let's be honest: trans-identified males – no one is claiming trans-identified females behave like this*) they knew dressing in "intentionally provocative" and "off-puttingly sexual" ways. I don't know exactly what kind of dress they were referring to. But I think it's fair to assume they were not complaining about these people wearing plaid despite paisley suiting them so much better. Glossing their complaint as amounting to the trans people in question "dressing in ways they don't like" is an uncharitable strawman, and it's really obnoxious.
*Which is not what one would naïvely expect, given that trans-identified females purport to identify as members of the sex which experiences a vastly higher sex drive and commits a hugely disproportionate share of rape and sexual assault.
My intention was to gesture at the "showing skin is fine, and prudish fussie-duddies should get over it", free-the-nipple sort of liberal memeplex without getting into the weeds. I obviously didn't mean that I thought Amadan and SnapDragon thought the colors of the trans women's clothes clashed, but I did mean to imply that they were, perhaps, being judgemental in taking it for granted that revealing clothing is always "sexual", let alone "off-puttingly" so. In your example, I think Bob is doing something inappropriate insofar as his showing himself off to Alice is intended to seduce her or pressure her into sex - but if Bob, in fact, began wearing shorts because he likes the feel of them or thinks he looks good in them - if we forget about the deliberate posing - I don't think the mere fact that Alice might find the look sexually suggestive means she has a complaint against Bob, except to the extent that his genitals are so visible as to fall afoul of actual indecency laws, which is a very different conversation.
(It may very well be that at least some of the trans women SnapDragon and Amadan have encountered were doing more deliberate things in line with Bob propping his feet up when he knows Alice has to look. It certainly seems to be the case with the person you also, perhaps confusingly, called "Bob" in your other reply. But I do think I'm right in saying that SnapDragon and Amadan object to the revealing clothing itself already, hence why the sentence you quoted was focused on the clothing itself.)
Let's put it this way: there are situations and contexts where wearing tight/revealing clothing or sexually suggestive logos is appropriate, and situations where it is not. In my experience, trans women are much more likely to push the boundaries of appropriateness. They are also much more likely to try to, ah, flaunt their "assets" in a way that a non-trans woman wouldn't. By which I mean, fat women don't usually go to casual events with clingy bodywrap dresses showing off their every bulge and roll, and flat-chested women don't usually try to draw attention to their nonexistent cleavage down to their hairy navels. In fact, they will usually try very much not to show off such bodily defects. Why, then, do fat trans women (men) get it into their heads that they are so uWu sexy doing this? At, say, a baseball game? I have never seen a fat woman wear a tutu and a lycra blouse over unshaved legs to a casual event; I have seen more than one fat trans woman do this.
Yes, I think it is often a sex thing. I think they have a fetish and they are involuntarily making us play along with their fantasy. No, not all trans women. But a lot of them.
I don't think "it is often a sex thing" actually follows from "trans women often dress more provocatively than cis women". I believe the main reason for the latter fact is, rather, that once you've broken one taboo, you're more likely to break another. Or to put it another way, when you've already made yourself a freak in the eyes of an appreciable fraction of society simply by transitioning, when you've already joined a class that a good deal of normies will find disgusting on principle and decided to love yourself in spite of their contempt, you're well on your way to unlearning all other socially-constructed shames. You're very likely to think "to hell with fatphobia, I don't have to disguise my figure to gain the approval of a bunch of snobs"; to think "radical feminists had the right idea, forcing women to shave their legs is patriarchal bullshit, body hair is natural, body hair is beautiful, why should I hide mine if I don't want to?"; and so on, and so forth. I believe there's a fair number of trans nudists.
And like… I think this explanation is broadly neutral? You might believe, as I do, that this is a basically healthy, enlightened attitude and that the kinds of cis women you describe, who regard small breasts and body hair as "defects", would be a lot happier if they adopted at least parts of. Or you might believe that it's a slippery slope of post-modernism where throwing out the basic division of the sexes leads inexorably to the breakdown of any belief in aesthetic principles or social norms of any kind, in favor of a kind of feel-good hippieslop. Either might follow. The point is that your observations are handily explained by my framework of "people who've transed their genders have basically thrown out the social rulebook already, so they're likely to be unconventional and scandalous in all sorts of other dimensions", with no need for transness to itself be a sex thing.
Your explanation is "They have freed themselves of society's lame constraints."
My explanation is: "It's a fetish."
Your explanation is more charitable than mine, but I think my explanation is more realistic. It more closely matches what I have observed about trans behavior, and it more closely matches what I observe about the specific ways in which they choose to present themselves.
Of course you could be right and I could be wrong. But it will take more than an alternative, more charitable theory to convince me.
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Now that I've slept on it, can I just extend a bit of an olive branch here? I do appreciate your willingness to keep calmly engaging in a fairly unfriendly thread. While I think you're uncharitably wrong about me, you're not completely wrong. I probably am unduly influenced by the "ick" factor, and have blown some negative experiences out of proportion. Anyway, others in the thread have done an excellent job of arguing my side; I don't have anything more to add.
I appreciate this in turn! Thank you.
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That’s not a fair comparison. I preferred the comparison to a Black person among white people, although that one isn’t perfect either. In my experience, Christians and Black people generally don’t test others to see whether they hold haram beliefs, whereas trans people and trans-friendly communities routinely test whether you agree with them. For example, I once felt tested through a joke, where my reaction seemed to be examined to see whether I laughed along. Another time, I was asked directly about JKR and Harry Potter. I’ve never had similar experiences with Black people or Christians, despite knowing far more of them than trans people.
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