http://everydayfeminism.com/2017/04/cissexist-say-never-date-trans/
What can I say? I prefer for my man to have a penis. :o
I literally have no idea what the message of that video was. If you don’t want to date trans women that’s cissexist of you, but it’s normal to have preferences but not really because you may have been conditioned to have those preferences, unless you have past trauma about penises in which case your preference is totally understandable, but as long as you don’t say out loud/online that you wouldn’t date a trans woman you’re in the clear?
I’m from the past where there were men, women, straight people and gay people. Transsexuals were a rarity. Now everybody needs to label themselves as something other than straight and the gender they were born. My daughter’s friends are all bi*, except for the one who is demisexual**, and my daughter thinks she may be asexual. She marvels at how statistically 10% of people aren’t straight yet 100% of her friends are not straight. What are the odds, she wonders. The odds are that your friends don’t want to say they’re straight because of peer pressure to be anything other than average.
- Two of them were going out for a couple of months, but “they didn’t do anything”. Of course they didn’t. They’re both straight.
** Demisexual - you only feel sexual attraction to someone with whom you have a strong emotional connection. This is completely normal and many people are like this. But now it has a label so people who are otherwise perfectly average can feel special.
From your cite -
No, it isn’t.
That’s a feature, not a bug. If you ask about my preference, it’s about my feelings. End of discussion.
Regards,
Shodan
Well obviously you weren’t paying attention. 
What I got from it is that if I am dating a man and I find out he doesn’t have a penis then it is cissexist (or transphobic? are the terms interchangeable?) if I decide I don’t want to have sex with him.
It would be nice if there was a polite way to inquire about a person’s parts before the first date, but asking a man I just met if he has a penis seems a bit forward.
I’m a progressive feminist academic, and I think many of the articles at Everyday Feminism are completely daft. I shudder to think how they go over in circles where people make a sport of mocking feminism.
I’m not seeing what is wrong with saying “I don’t care what gender you are, if you have a penis, then I’m not dating you because I’m not into penii (or penises or whatever)”
Yeah, the site is sooooo far out in left-field that you could mistake it for a Poe.
Let me begin with the observation that “cissexist” sounds awkward to my ear (too many sibilants and a syllable ending in s followed by one starting with s). But that’s just taste.
As far as I can make out, the author seems to be adopting the position that if there is any X conduct or thought that transphobes have, and you happen to independently share it, then you should self-evaluate as to whether you should be expressing that thought or conduct. So saying you’d rather not get it on with men with vags/women with penises can be heard as suggestive that you may not be 100% on with that they are real men/women, so you really should not say it. Or at least that’s what I got.
At least she’s asking nicely.
But, y’know what? I cannot make a commitment to sit down to figure exactly what will make me the 100% perfect ally in every deed, word, thought and feeling, 24/7, on every conceivable subject, of every group.
I’ll stick with living and letting live and trying my best to be kind and respectful to others, thank you very much.
I think there’s a bit of strawmanning going on here.
The author (or vlogger, I suppose) is not saying: If you are dating a man and you find out he doesn’t have a penis then it is cissexist or transphobic to decide you don’t want to have sex with him.
The article is simply saying, “If you are dating a man and you find out he doesn’t have a penis and this means you don’t want to have sex with him, I invite you to consider that this reaction may arise from your immersion in a transphobic society.”
In other words, the author argues that at least some of the people who conclude “I have sexual attraction only to women, and by ‘women,’ I mean persons without penises,” are reaching that conclusion only because of society’s pernicious influence in defining women as persons without penises. The author is suggesting that there’s value in examining your own reactions and discerning if your reaction might arise from such cultural programming.
And the author points out that even if your reaction in this area is not purely driven by cultural conditioning, there’s not much value in loudly announcing it. In other words, by your vocal insistence, you’re adding to the problematic societal chorus, even if your individual reaction is inner-derived.
As an analogy, we might imagine a cis-man, straight and white, who does not find himself sexually aroused by people of color. We might reasonably inquire if it’s possible that this preference is the result of the social opprobrium directed at interracial couples, and we might reasonably invite him to consider if this might be so for him.
And even if his reaction is one that has arisen for purely internal reasons having nothing to do with that social pressure, we might observe that there’s little reason for him to loudly trumpet his complete lack of attraction to women of color, because in doing so he’s perpetuating the social clime that was the reason for the question in the first place.
What is silly premise. If I don’t want to date some one with frizzy hair does that make me a hairist? If I am physically attracted to people with brown eyes am I a blueist? Can I make these statements in public without the wrath of the PC police coming down on my head?
What any of us find attractive in a potential companion is a purely private and personal matter. The fact that I don’t find you attractive, for whatever reason, should not result in you labeling me a bigot.
I think a lot of the tumult about this particular trait is people feeling deceived by someone presenting themselves as being biologically male or female when they are not. I can check out your hair or eyes in public and tell if I am attracted or not.
A lot of people put this in the same category as any other kind of pretense. If you are trying to get people to associate with you based on a false premise, anyone falling for this is going to feel like an idiot when they find out the truth.
It may not be a great statement on the qualities of human nature, but people end relationships when they find out the other person dyes their hair or they see them without their makeup. The unpleasant surprise of finding out the person who you have invested time in is completely incompatible sexually is rather a larger jolt. Personally, I can’t say I would blame anyone put in this position for being quite angry.
I don’t think anyone should be treated differently when it comes to employment, housing, marriage rights, etc. But if you are going to start demanding that everyone must throw out what they consider to be attractive in a prospective mate then I am going to have to vehemently disagree. There are no “equal rights” in intimate relations. No one is, or shall be, required by law or conscience to have romantic relations with everyone regardless of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, veteran status, disability unrelated to job requirements, genetic information, military service, or other protected status.
So do I.
What’s the value, and why is that influence pernicious when it comes to dating and sexual attraction? I am not talking about denying a transgender person housing or employment - I mean not finding him or her sexually attractive.
Suppose I don’t find myself attracted sexually to a woman with a penis. And I examine myself thru introspection and find that 50% of this is due to cultural programming, and 50% is something else. So what? Again, I am speaking specifically to the notion of finding another person sexually attractive.
I find this also to be a little disingenuous.
Feminist author: “Do you think that your lack of attraction to people with penises is sexist?”
Practically everyone else: “No.”
Feminist author: “Why are you announcing it loudly?”
Regards,
Shodan
The only definition I could give to that term would be if you thought cis gendered people were inferior to trans people. You were sexist against cis people, in other words.
What they apparently mean by the term is something I’ve actually thought a lot about, though. I know that I actually have a revulsion response to a penis, and it is one of two things that takes someone who would otherwise be attractive to me and makes them unattractive. A “feminine” looking guy could be attractive to me if he didn’t have a penis. The other thing is a lower voice. The one that rides the line is hairiness, which can get to be too much, but unlike the others, can be offset.
Is this culturally ingrained? I don’t really think so, because that suggests that sexuality is culturally ingrained. The revulsion I feel for a penis is the same revulsion I feel towards the concept of being attracted to a man–even though I fully acknowledge that this is a hot girl with a penis.
That said, I am working on it, intentionally. Because I don’t want to say I didn’t try. I can’t make myself attracted to penises, I don’t think, but I do think I might be able to ignore them.
So, yeah, enough talking about myself. The one thing I don’t know is if I am normal in this. Or is this just me? But, based on how I seem to be, it doesn’t seem to be some sort of bigotry, but a sexuality. It would be like calling a guy misandrist because he doesn’t want to have sex with men.
And I’m fully aware of how completely unfair this is to trans women who don’t want to have an operation. That said, there do seem to be a lot of men for whom a penis is attractive. A lot of men who insist on the biggest and best penises in their porn. And then just men that seem to have a “trans fetish”–though I wonder if calling it that makes trans women feel exploited or not.
So maybe it can be okay without feeling the need to fight this “cissexism.”
I do know one thing: I have a foot fetish, too. But it doesn’t work with men. But it does work just fine with trans women, as long as the penis isn’t visible. So it’s not that I don’t see trans women as women.
Can you explain how you would ignore a penis if you wanted to have vaginal intercourse with a woman you were dating?
One of the arguments being made APPEARS to be that trans women are already waging an internal battle against feeling unattractive to their population of choice, and that by dismissing them from your personal dating pool due to them not adhering to the “conception” of womanhood (read: having a vagina), this contributes to that internal struggle. But let’s say that as a cis woman, I ALSO struggle with feeling unattractive to my population of choice, due to an outside of my control reason (PCOS causing weight and hair issues; amputation of a limb due to an accident, etc). Do I then get to label people sizeist, or disabledist, or whatever? No one gets to go through life insisting that other people find them attractive so they’ll feel better about themselves- the laws of attraction don’t work that way.
And while we are at it, isn’t calling that huge lump on the vlogger’s throat an “Adam’s Apple” sissexist? I hereby declare that it should be called a “Resident of Eden’s Apple.”
Well, when I say that, I mean I’m working on it in the area of porn, not deliberately trying to figure out which women are trans and dating them.
It’s my understanding that a lot of trans women don’t want their penises touched or anything. That would be the scenario where I think this might be useful. I’m also not someone who particularly wed to vaginal intercourse–my penis in her butt feels pretty good, too.
Then again, I’m also someone who really freaking loves cuddling, to the point that I think I would give up sex forever if I could cuddle with whoever I wanted, so maybe I’m weird. I honestly don’t know–guys don’t talk about these sorts of things.
That’s like the women should be wymen thing that no one pushes anymore. Trying to push language that wasn’t used for oppression as sexist doesn’t really work.
That said, we do also say mail carrier and fire fighter and stuff–but I don’t think that’s about sexism. It’s about wanting to cover all groups. It seems weird today to say fireman and mean a woman, since man means male to us today.
I don’t know if Adam’s apple has the same issue, though. Does it sound male to people? Do they even get the Eden allusion? If so, I’m sure a different name will show up, albeit, not as silly as your suggestion.
I do only see one alternative in a quick google: “Laryngeal protrusion.” But that’s way too scientific and long for a common name, I think. There is also “goozle” purportedly in the American South, according to Wikipedia. I could also see just calling it a larynx, using metonymy. Similarly with “voice box.”
I think the last one may be what I would use. It just sounds better to me than Adam’s apple, anyways. Maybe add “big” to it for ones that protrude out more.
a lot of why trans girls are popular all of a sudden is the bi crowd wanting its cake and eating it too in the fact that they can say there going out with a girl who just happens to have a natural strapon
yes ive been told that by men and women…
Fair enough.
Hey man, cuddle away! It seems like a preference for cuddling over sex would expand the amount of people that you could date. Not really anything wrong with that.