I don’t recall signing up for any one person’s concept of “utilitarian principles” which apparently inform their ethics.
You’re defending a right of one party to not be forthright entering a relationship, while demanding the other party must be forthright - based on something you call “utilitarian principles.” Step back a minute and think about how what you are writing looks.
Where’s the threshold for when the majority no longer shares an equal moral obligation with a subgroup? What is that critical percentage point? Be very careful whatever number you choose, as I’m certain there are quite a few oxen to be gored with nearly any value that is selected. Or, if the magnitude of the number is weighted by any sort of fuzzy “utilitarian” logic, then the number becomes opinion-based, and at that point it’s not utilitarianism, it’s merely one’s bias on one side of the issue or another.
Another factor when considering percentages is that while transgender and gender non-confirming persons may make up no more than 0.3-0.6% of the population, we tend to be much less likely to be in a committed long-term relationship, or married. Our apparent impact on a dating site thus may easily be magnified by 2-4 times whatever our actual population ought to be on the site (simply my guess based upon what I know of my community) (and as I said earlier, if it’s on a site called “Southern Baptist Mingle” then there may be not a single transgender person present…then again, I know at least two Southern Baptist ministers who are transgender and in hiding…).
So if we break the 1% barrier, are we significant enough? Or is the number 2%? 5%? 49.99%? At what point should a person who simply doesn’t want to date, or who is disgusted by transgender persons, obligated to be honest and forthright about that fact when trying to filter their responses on a dating site?
But the risk of significant negative consequences to a transgender person revealing their status to a potentially hostile audience are much, much higher than the risk of significant negative consequences to a person not wishing to date a transgender person to a potentially hostile audience. Thus both the utilitarian principles and ethics here point to the wisdom of the latter group disclosing their views rather than the former disclosing their status.
If you find out someone is transgendered any time before you were going to have sex, the worst that can happen is you are disappointed and have to start dating someone else. After what were presumably some nice or fun dates, since you want to have sex with that person.
If a transgendered person walks around announcing to everyone they just met 5 minutes ago that they are trans, they stand a pretty good chance of bodily harm from the people they’re announcing that to, people who overhear, or people that person shares that information with. To say nothing of the even higher likelihood of lesser degrees of consequences including legal consequences (you used the wrong bathroom! Predator!), loss of employment, loss of housing, and social ostracization from those 80% of people who are not O.K. with transgendered people.
To be fair - this being the internet age, announcing you don’t want to date transgender people could potentially result in the receipt of some angry abuse. But the odds of it reaching anything like this level…
Just to clarify - by “dating” do you mean “spending time like going out to dinner or a movie” or by “dating” to you mean “have sex with this person”. Because apparently “dating” means the former to some and the latter to others.
That’s probably another thing to clarify before heading out for dinner and movie - whether or not you expect sex to be the third act.
Pretty basic logic if you ask me. A dude thinks he’s a female when in reality and biologically he is a male. What would you classify this if not a mental disorder?
The great thing about “basic” logic is that it allows you to ignore the more advanced kind that includes consideration of decades of clinical research into the topic.
The situation of transgender individuals trying to date already puts more burden on them than almost anyone else trying to date has to contend with. I don’t feel like I’m in a position to advise transgender people on how to behave with regards to when to inform their dating partners; they face some steep risks ranging from ridicule and disgust to violent beatings and murder.
An episode of “The Closer” revolved around a trans man who was murdered by a shocked and horrified woman who had become involved and was not expecting to find herself involved with a person who had female-body configurations. Part of what made the episode good suspense was that this is a rare situation for such violence —it’s mostly trans women who are at risk, and mostly from men.
I was once flirted with by someone I assumed to be female; she was presenting as a woman, and was friendly and invited me to go smoke pot with her. In the apartment she led me to, I felt uncomfortable once I was stoned and it felt to me I was being leered at in a prurient way that felt, I don’t know, …snarky. Creepy. We had kissed a bit and done some light fondling. I didn’t like how I was feeling and withdrew a bit and thanked her for sharing her pot and declined the offer to stay; she grinned at me and abruptly groped me in the crotch. At no point did she either yank her garments aside to reveal anything so as to confirm male-body types of parts or tell me “Hey, I’m transgender”, but somehow I drew the conclusion that I’d been spending the last half hour with a peniled person. (Quite possibly identifies as a crossdresser not a transgender woman, but who knows?) I think this is the sort of scenario that lots of guys who demand being told “up front” are concerned about: they envision being tricked into participating with someone they think of as a female woman and thus lured into kissing and fondling someone who turns out to have boy-shaped parts.
Yeah, well? What harm was done? I didn’t appreciate the crotch-grab. I bet lots of women go on dates with guys and wish their partners had told them upfront “I like to grab women without their consent and force myself on them a bit to see if they’ll fight me off or submit to it, then call them bitch if they do”. I found the person rather creepy. We’d all probably like disclaimers from the world’s creepy people: “I behave badly when I think maybe I’m gonna get some action, I practically drool, wanna go on a date?” But ultimately that’s what dating is, it’s the environment where you find out how things might be with this person.
This person was not a good poster child for transgender people and their dating behavior. It’s decently close to worst case scenario for the poor worried cisgender straight guys. As someone who’s been there and done that (or had that done), I say “get over yourself, you’ll live”.
You, and some other posters, are still, in my opinion, misrepresenting the reasons why a man wouldn’t want to date a pre-op transgender woman. Feel and/or worry has nothing to do with it.
(Pre-op seems weird and somewhat skeevy to type there, but I’m guessing it is the acceptable terminology. If not, someone please let me know)
I think what you want to say is that you are only interested in dating people who have vaginas, and not penises. That’s not “cis” and it’s not “gender typical”, either. If you will feel disappointed if there’s not a chance for PIV sex at the end of your first date, I think that’s worth putting in your dating profile. There are lots of women (cis, gender typical women, even) who aren’t interested in sex on a first date. And there are men who don’t expect it, either.
Especially if you will feel you wasted your time if it turns out you you dated someone who won’t offer you PIV sex right away, you should say so. Probably not quite that bluntly, but I’m not up to wording it nicely right now.
Thanks for sharing, but I fail to see the purpose of what you wrote. Most of it inaccurately describes what I or other gender-typical straight men may think.
I was once at a party where a woman explained that she’d had an elective C-section so that her baby would share a birthday with her mother. I admit, I was horrified. But that’s at least one case in the last decade or so of a C-section with no medical need. I rather doubt it’s the only one.
Yeah. I suspect that a large fraction of the mental health problems in the trans community are caused by society’s reaction to them. I read somewhere that a really high percentage of gays were suicidal and mentally ill back in the old days, when it was socially unacceptable to be gay. I bet that if society were more accepting of trans people they would have mental illness rates similar to the mental illness rates of left handed people.
Not always. To speak from anecdote again…I have a close friend with gender dysphoria who has decided to live as a non-gender-conforming man. That’s in part because he is really creeped out by the idea of surgically modifying his body – even though parts of it make him uncomfortable. And it’s in part because he doesn’t think changing his body will actually cure him.
He is influenced by the experience of one of his romantic partners. They were assigned female at birth. At great cost, they transitioned to male, and were still unhappy. They now identify as non-binary, and recently paid a lot to have all their beard-hair removed. They usually present as “ambiguous”, but when they wear gendered clothing it’s female clothing. That person seems relatively emotionally stable to me right now, but apparently had a lot of really bad depressive episodes, both when they looked like a girl and also when they looked like a girl.
My friend says he’s done a lot of research, and there is a large population which is not helped by gender-confirmation surgery. I suspect the underlying issue is that it doesn’t fix the problem of family and co-workers thinking they are freaks, which is the source of a lot of the emotional problems.
I applaud anyone who is helped by gender confirmation surgery, but I don’t believe it is a panacea.
Then what do you mean? Because it’s really unclear to me.
If you don’t want to waste your time with a transwomen, because she has a penis, I think you should say something in your dating profile about what you are looking for in a date, something specific enough to warn of a transwomen who can pass but who still has a penis.