I think it is the responsibility of the trans person to let you know they are trans in case you are dating with the purpose of having sex (which nearly everyone is).
The analogies presented here are not valid. If you are dating for the purpose of having sex, your economic status is not relevant, because almost all of us can afford a condom. Having sex with someone who doesn’t have the organs or ability to do so would pose a problem, just like they need to inform you if they have STDs and you should not be asking people if they have AIDS. Of course an STD is a very different from having a mismatching organ, as that doesn’t cause any harm to anyone. But in both cases if you have an obstacle to having sex, you should inform the other person.
Any obstacle to having sex pretty much should be informed in advance. If you are dating online and your spine is broken and you can’t feel your downstairs, you should let the other person know. We cannot be expected to demand the obvious things that come with 99.9% of the population one by one explicitly: “I am looking for someone with one-and-a-half to two legs, 2 hands, one nose, at least one working eye etc”. If you are a man and you cannot achieve an erection even with drugs or a prosthetic, it is in your benefit to let the other person know, not to waste both of your times.
Asking a women if she has a vagina is HUGE insult and will never be practical until technology is far more advanced.
If you are say over 70 and do not have sex in mind, then there is no need to inform of any of this.
Do your restrictions become no longer applicable after a successful GRS surgery?
What if a woman had a vaginal prolapse and had to have reconstructive surgery? Or other women who have had a vaginoplasty due to cancer treatments of chemotherapy or radiation therapy?
Are teenage boys required to inform potential dates that they suffer from premature ejaculation?
As a male if I need to take medication to perform do I need to indicate it on my dating profile, and if so where is the option to select? (need answer fast)
Should I have been outraged when my ex failed to bring up her endometriosis and a need for lubrication?
What if your cardio condition limits your ability to perform when on top, do you broadcast to potential dates that if they need to be on the bottom to concentrate and reach a release that they need to look for other partners who are more fit?
As it is all about the sex, why the double standard?
(Also I assume you have never worked in a nursing home…they are crazy)
Thanks for this post, very enlightening. I’d always heard that we all started undifferentiated as female in utero and then developed from there.
Also, now I’m picturing a paradise/apocalypse in which some experiment goes horribly awry and the entire human race develops a condition in which androgens are blocked and all children are born female.
Except for a rare male from a mother and father who were in a very isolated area and somehow escaped the contagion - who will be hunted for sport.
Well if a trans person has had surgery and they have something that works like a female sex organ I guess there is no real need to inform anyone. There is some gray area due to the boobjob. In my opinion the best way is show the upper part with cleavage and it becomes in many cases obvious (I mean if you did a boobjob as a trans you don’t need to inform that you are trans, just that you did the boobjob, if anything). I am not personally into that, but I have heard that many men don’t make a big fuss over it like I do, so I guess if that is the case there is no real need to inform on that either.
If a woman has had vaginal surgery and can still function in sex then there is no need to inform ahead of time.
Teenage boys don’t need to inform about things that are expected from the vast majority. Besides that is not a real barrier because they can recover very quickly.
If you need medication to perform that is not relevant, unless you expect the other person to buy you the mediation or prescribe it to you. It’s not a barrier in any way.
There are gray areas and I think in general if you can perform but need some help or have some limitations that is not something that you need to inform about. You need to inform about things that for a reasonable person would physically prevent you from having relations, or make them unenjoyable.
:dubious: This is not so much a can of worms as a barrel of cobras. No, I really don’t agree that it would improve the dating scene if everybody listed all the potential impediments to their sexual performance right up front, so to speak, in their profile. TMI and then some.
Sure you can be expected to demand them if they are really important to you in a potential date, and if you will feel resentful or put-upon if you don’t find out about them right away.
Doesn’t matter how common or “normal” or expected a particular characteristic may be in the dating pool. If you feel you would need to know right away if a potential date was one of the rare people who didn’t have that characteristic, or if you want potential dates to avoid you if they happen not to have that characteristic, it is on you to make your requirements clear.
Now here is the only place where I feel any sympathy at all for what is in general the simultaneously entitled and cowardly position of “I don’t want to date transgender women but don’t want to be upfront about admitting that.”
I agree that there is a toxic and transphobic attitude prevalent among too many cisgender women that being perceived as possibly transgender is insulting. (I suppose there might be a similar attitude among cisgender men, but heterosexual women don’t seem to have as much anxiety about what might be in their date’s underwear as heterosexual men do, so we don’t fret so much over how to find out whether or not our dates might be trans.)
Two points about the “but I don’t want to offend a cisgender woman by asking if she’s trans” issue:
Too bad. Just because many cisgender women are transphobic enough to get offended at being asked about their birth-assigned gender does not entitle you to offload the responsibility for your own dating preferences onto transgender women. If you don’t want to date transgender women, it’s still on you to make that clear, no matter how many potential dates you may offend in the process. Don’t expect transgender women to automatically announce to strangers their own gender status just to spare you the potential embarrassment of asking a cisgender woman about her gender status. (And by the way, many cisgender women who are not transphobic will still be offended about having the subject of genitalia brought up at the very start of the dating process, because it’s traditionally seen as a tad low-minded to be concerned about that sort of thing right away.)
This problem is rapidly solving itself as more transgender women are openly identified as such in media and the arts, because as a lot of guys have already noticed, a lot of transgender women are smoking hot according to traditional female beauty standards. It is putting it mildly to say that I would not be offended if a guy thought I looked sort of like, say, Candis Cayne or Antonia San Juan, although it would raise serious concerns about his visual acuity. And the standards of comparison currently suggested by younger women such as these are just off the charts.
So relax, it will not in fact be very long before being mistaken for a transgender woman ceases to be widely perceived as an insult.
You might be surprised to learn how many deaf people would disagree with this, especially among those who are more immersed in Deaf culture. For some, being Deaf is a point of pride, much as members of other minorities tend to view their culture with pride. Cochlear implants and such are also quite controversial in the Deaf community. (To be clear, I’m no expert on Deaf culture, but I’ve been learning more about it because I have a child with a genetic condition that limits her ability to hear.)
I don’t think anyone would deny that the deaf lack one particular ability that hearing people have, but there are lots of abilities that some people have that other people lack, and the view that “hearing” is such a critical ability that those who don’t have it are in some sense incomplete is perhaps a rather hearing-centric way of viewing things. Some Deaf people would say that not being able to hear is much less of an impediment than hearing society’s assumption that everyone can hear.
Putting aside the question of “Is deafness a disability”, there’s the more important question: “Do we make things better or worse by labeling deafness a disability?” The quote below is the view of a Deaf college professor, which I personally found rather eye opening. Getting back to the subject of this thread, I think that the same question could be asked about how we label people who are transgender.
Not all impediments, only things that will physically prevent you and another reasonable person from achieving relations, or make them unenjoyable. Those things are rare.
Okay lets be realistic here, modern dating is capitalistic and your demands or self descriptions are always perceived in the context of how the majority presents itself. No man is going to write (if dating online): “must have real vagina.” Simply because those men who won’t write that will be perceived by some in a more positive light and have an increased target audience, no matter if that is due to a good reason or not. Women simply do not experience this effect as much (due to having many more options) and may not know what I mean.
Personally, if a trans woman had surgery that made her truly indistinguishable from a born woman I would not care either way.
Any woman who identifies female would be insulted from the insinuation that she looks male (not trans! the assumption is that if you are asked “are you trans?”, is that you look like you are of the opposing gender), as much as any male who identifies as male would be insulted if people assumed he is female, exactly as a trans person is insulted from people assuming they are not the gender they identify as. There is nothing phobic about this issue, and it will never change as long as humans have different genders.
If trans people will look like the their identity gender and will not be distinguished from a member of that gender, then yes, the question will no longer be an insult, yet no one would ask it due to the market effect of looking bad when opposed to people who do not ask.
If so, then it’s up to individual men to decide whether their goal of screening out transgender women from their dating pool is worth taking the hit of possibly being perceived more negatively if they’re explicit about that goal.
So, either:
put “no transgender women please” in your profile, and accept that it will be negatively perceived by some cisgender women; or
keep quiet about your no-transgender requirements, and accept that you might possibly spend some time dating a transgender woman before finding out she’s transgender and kindly telling her “thanks but no thanks”.
You’re equally entitled to choose either of those options, ethically speaking. The option you’re not entitled to is the cowardly one of whining that all transgender women should pre-emptively announce their transgender status up front in order to shield you from any negative consequences of taking responsibility for your own dating preferences.
People who have same-sex partners and people who change their sex there is something not natural about this. About all this gays getting married more power to them. How can I hurt straight people. I think anyone who is in a position to adopt children only should do so I won’t be allowed to adopt only in to a natural light and varmin I think anyone who is in a position to adopt children only should do so I will be allowed to adopt only in to a natural like environment. I mean a man and a woman that I think should be married and that cannot have children or just wants to help should be able to do so. Can people of the same sex that is married should not at all be able to adopt for the child sake. They gave up that right of having children when they decided to get same-sex partners.
This is not true at all, nor do I see how you could possible think I think that, unless, like other topics on this board, anything less than 100% agreement with whatever you say means I 100% agree with the exact opposite.
I don’t care what gender you are. I’m talking about sex. If someone asked me “Who’s Una Persson?” I would say “Some woman on a message board i read”
If someone asked me “Would you have sex with someone who had a penis instead of a vagina?” I would say no, and it wouldn’t matter what their gender was.
That’s another thing with a lot of stigma – “outing” one’s medical status can have reprecussions, socially and even in one’s career, and many folks would be uncomfortable telling strangers their medical status due to very reasonable concerns.
Which says nothing about sex – everyone should inform a sexual partner about any medical issues like HIV status before they engage in sex.
So, is that a yes or a no? Do you think medical issues like HIV status should be disclosed before sex becomes a possibility, or do you think people should wait until sex is a certainty before disclosing it?
Meaning, too bad for you? Yes. If your dating policy is to ask all potential dates about their birth gender to ensure that you aren’t dating anybody transgender, then you will have to accept that some people, whether cisgender or transgender, will be offended by that question.
And of course, the cisgender and transgender people whom you offend with that question will also have to accept that they encountered a potential dating partner who asks offensive questions. But I think everybody involved in online dating probably knows to expect that.
(Note, btw, that this does not translate into a universal etiquette license to ask people about their birth genders in all situations. Only in dating situations are you ethically entitled to screen your acquaintances based on their genital characteristics.)
They have exactly the same choice that the transgender-dating-averse men we’ve been talking about do. Namely, either
state right up front what their preference is, or
keep quiet about their preference and accept that they may end up finding out somewhere down the road that they’ve been dating somebody who doesn’t conform to that preference.
Transphobic people are not automatically obligated to disclose that fact about themselves right away to strangers, any more than transgender people are.
The point is that if transphobic people (or more generally, transgender-dating-averse people) want to be sure that they aren’t dating anybody transgender, it’s up to them to make that preference clear.
I think the answer to the OP is unequivocal “yes”, trans-genderism is just a mental disorder, much like trans-racialism. No one doubts that Rachel Dolezal is a mental case, or Shaun King, or Bruce Jenner, or that Senator chick from Massachussets (forgot her name, Trump called her Pocahontas), or this white guy, claiming to be a Filipino.
It’s simple, really: the greater the population of the earth, the larger the number of complete nut cases.
Add in the fact that all of human existence is struggle (and if you take away the basics of struggling, ie food and shelter, and create an environment where people don’t have to fight for basic means), you wind up with people creating it out of thin air.
Nope, not unless they want to or they’re expecting to have sex on that date. Infectious-disease status should be disclosed when (a) you are in a situation where you might infect the other person, or (b) the other person asks you about it, or (c) you feel comfortable spontaneously sharing that information.
Requiring people to disclose their STDs on their dating profile or during non-sexual casual dating activity would IMO take us too close to the molten scenario of expecting all possible sexual impairments to be advertised in advance. Yuck and no.
Absofuckinglutely. If you don’t want to engage in any dating activity with HIV+ people, it’s on you to make that preference clear to potential dates. Your issue, your responsibility.
As previously noted, an HIV+ person is morally (and in many cases legally) obligated to announce their STD status before actually running the risk of infecting a date via sexual activity. Prior to that, though, they are entitled to keep the information to themselves unless a date asks them about it.