Is that the same study as this?
And I can certainly judge you for that attitude.
Doin’ it right now, as a matter of fact.
What is unclear about it? Seems straight forward to me. If I’m on Craigslist and looking in the “W4M” section I assume that the person is a gender-typical woman. If not, I would think she would be posting in the “T4M” section. Not really hard to understand.
I think the term you’re looking for is “cisgender”. Correct?
(FWIW, I don’t think it’s fair to judge someone as transphobic if they’re not necessarily sure if they would be open to dating a trans person. It’s a complex issue – I mean, I imagine there are trans people who wouldn’t date another transperson for whatever reason. Or wouldn’t date a cisperson. When you talk about it and how you approach it is a different matter.)
The word you’re looking for is cisgender, as Una and Guinastasia said. Cisgender is a biological thing; gender-typical is social and varies depending on where you are and in whose company. I’m cisgender, but merely having an engineering degree already makes me gender-atypical. My clothing and social behavior fit the prejudice-set “engineer” a lot better than the prejudice-set “female”. My musical tastes fit the prejudice-set “gamer” much better than the prejudice-set “female”.
Since no one seems to have answered this…
I think I speak for most of the people in this thread when I say: 
There is nothing artificial about them. These are basic concepts and writing things in bold don’t make your words any less silly. Ethics is largely driven social utilitarianism. I’m not saying that anyone MUST divulge their transgender status in dating profiles (not even really sure what dating profiles are, do these websites ask you if you have a preference for not dating transgender folks? Is there a little box you can check?
And I think HIV+ people should be upfront about that too.
And there are more honest ways of exercising that right and less honest ways of exercising that right.
Nope, you’re wrong.
Sure, people are dishonest in relationships all the time and this frequently leads to anger and disappointment. I’m not trying to outlaw dishonesty in relationships. I am combatting the notion that there is nothing wrong with this dishonesty.
You brought up the allergy issue. I was looking for something that ~80% (but not all) people are allergic to, that is also uncommon. So I picked poison ivy in an urban environment.
If you can think of another thing that ~80% of people are allergic to but is rarely encountered, I would be happy to substitute that for poison ivy.
So in summation, the use of poison ivy in an urban environment is in fact very appropriate if you are going to use allergy as an analogy for aversion to transgender dating.
When the allergy is rare and the allergen is common then it is up to the allergic person to be careful. When the allergy is incredibly common and the allergen is rare then it is up to the person introducing the allergen to provide notice of the presence of the allergen.
This is a good point. The burden of disclosure is not the same for the transgender as it is for everyone else. They have to be much more careful about who they disclose to because they can be subjected to violence. I don’t know if “coming out” for gays was ever as bad as it is for transgender today but I recall a lot of gay bashing when I was a kid.
But that is where the burden lays. If you don’t want to be dishonest, you have to be upfront. Perhaps this means you have to spend a lot more time feeling someone out than the rest of us do. Perhaps you can’t go out with someone you just met spontaneously as easily as the rest of us. I don’t think failure to be upfront makes you evil or immoral but it is a bit of dishonesty.
Meh. Less than 20% of people are going to disagree with me and 80%+ are going to agree with me. You can’t make every kneejerk liberal (or conservative) happy, you shouldn’t even try.
80%+ of the population is transphobic?
There is certainly a lot of xenophobia associated with how we react to transgender. Our attitudes towards the gay community have largely changed because so many gay folks are “out” and we know them and work with them and are related to them. It took a while.
People used to get disowned and beaten up and fired for being gay. Now we have three gay teachers at my kid’s elementary school, several conspicuously gay lawyers at work, and gay cops on the beat. We are cool with them getting married and we are cool with them adopting kids.
It didn’t happen overnight and we’re not all the way there. But, at some point it was no longer OK to beat up gays and they started coming out and then we started seeing them as people and not just sexual orientations. I don’t know how we get from here to there with transgender but dishonesty does not seem to me to be the best path.
But I am pretty sure that there isn’t some sort of conspiracy to promote xenophobia against transgender, its been there all along and we are slowly but surely learning more and more and starting to identify transgender people as more than their transgender status.
There once was a time when all you knew about someone was that they were black and you felt you knew all you needed to know. Same with Asians and then gays. Eventually we started to see them as complete people and not just this one label. Hopefully we get there with the transgender folks too but dishonesty won’t get us there faster.
No, I am not.
Of course it’s not fair. Especially when someone wouldn’t be open to dating a transgender person not because they are transgender, but because they do not have the anatomy that someone is looking for in a date.
While much of the negative reaction to transgender people is not the result of an active conspiracy to promote xenophobia against them, there most certainly *are *multiple campaigns intended to stir up FUD and hatred against them (see, most notably, the various “bathroom bill” campaigns and associated bigotry). The Overton Window is moving in the right direction but only because those seeking to improve the lot of transgender people have learned the hard way that they can never stop pushing or else the people pushing the other way will immediately regain all the ground they’ve recently lost.
On the dating front, I do think it unreasonable to force transgendered people to announce everything before the first date like some form of legal disclosure. Likewise, however, I think it unreasonable to not have mentioned it by the tenth date either. Somewhere in the middle is a…well, if not a happy medium, then at least a tolerable one. And of course disclosure should happen before any physical intimacy is attempted (and IMHO I’m going to include kissing in this category).
But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
The opposite of transgender is cisgender, not gender-typical. Of course if you’re the new Lord of the Dictionary excuse us for not having received the memo.
You can use whatever words you want.
No, it doesn’t. You have arbitrarily decided to make up a specious social-utilitarian argument for transferring the “burden” of transgender-dating avoidance from the people who want to avoid dating transgender people (which is where that burden rightfully belongs) to transgender people themselves.
A more meaningful and consistent ethical analysis, which doesn’t depend on transitory statistics about current social attitudes, says that the person who wants to avoid a particular outcome is the one responsible for taking the necessary steps to avoid it. Nobody else is ethically obligated to statistically predict what your probable wishes might be without your telling them.
There is nothing “dishonest” about not being immediately “upfront” about either being transgender or wanting to avoid dating transgender people.
But if you’re not immediately upfront about it, then that means you may spend some time dating somebody before finding out that they’re unsuitable for you, because one of you is transgender and the other person doesn’t want to date somebody transgender.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that either: disappointing discoveries are just part of dating. What is wrong is whining that the other person is at fault for not having spared you the disappointment by immediately telling you that fact about themselves.
Nope. If you want to be spared eventual disappointment in dating, whether it’s about transgender, transphobia or any other possible characteristic that a potential date might have, it’s on you to clear the air right at the beginning by explicitly making your requirements known.
I see things differently.
I think its the bathroom bills that are moving the overton window. 80%+ of people don’t want to date transgender but almost 60% of people disagree with bathroom bills and that is changing the way we see the transgender. Heck almost half of Republicans are against bathroom bills. And 85% of folks don’t even have a friend or family member that is transgender. Imagine the percentage when they find out that there are people in their community and in their families that are transgender.
But we always risk getting ahead of the overton window and becoming politically unacceptable when we push things. The people who supported gay marriage when it was “leave them alone, they’re not bothering anyone” are less supportive now that there are lawsuits attempting to force people to supply cakes and flowers to their wedding. You risk losing traction when you push too hard.
I wouldn’t “force” anything but I feel its dishonest if you deliberately withhold that information.
But that’s just my opinion too. I base my opinion on statistics and utilitarian arguments but its still just my opinion. But in a democracy, opinions count and no amount of “ooh, I’m judging you (and the other 80% of Americans) for not thinking like I do” is going to change those numbers. We don’t give enough of a shit about your opinion of us, we stopped caring about those sort of opinions after the first two years of high school.
Yes it does. You have arbitrarily decided to ignore a long established sound utilitarian argument for transferring the “burden” of transgender dating avoidance from the transgender people (where the burden rightfully belongs) to the non-transgender people who are innocent bystanders in a world where transgender folks who can pass account for less than 0.5% of the dating population and where over 80% of folks don’t want to date that 0.5%.
That is of course hogwash. You should throw it out. It stinks.
Just like you shouldn’t put poison ivy in a salad without telling people even though some people would be OK with eating poison ivy.
Except for the fact that the transgender person knows that the overwhelming majority of people don’t want to date transgender people and decides not to share that information.
Nope, its dishonest regardless of how you rationalize it. Its not the end of the world, but its dishonest. Plenty of relationships crater over dishonesty.