Possibly, though I suspect that it would actually be ‘as many’ in terms of percentage per-capita, not absolute count. We’re not exactly alaska here, but we’re fairly low-population compared to some places. And I will repeat that I think the percentage of transgendered people in any random population is very, very low.
And while there may be transgendered people around here somewhere, I have serious doubts that I’ve met them. I am welcome to be corrected - though I suspect that any such people around here are simply too smart to bandy the fact around and wear a sign on their foreheads. (I don’t get in serious relations with a large enough percentage of the population to make a random sample, and I expect only when entering in those situations should a transgendered person pre-emptively point out their uncommon status.)
Hmm, why would I see that question? Hmm…
Risk? I didn’t say anthing about risk. Or beating my wife.
Risk, risk risk. You know, your manner of assuming that all homophobes are faggit-k1ll3rs reminds me of the assumption that some people seem to hold that all gay people want to rape random straight men up the butt.
Have you any inkling of how ridiculous you sound? There are some things that can be reasonably assessed as to be an issue in certain circumstances, and some things that are rare. When something is quite likely to be an issue, but extremely rare, it’s incumbent on the person who knows about it to mention it. Failing to do so will be perceived as deliberate deception. This is obvious.
Just as obvious that it’s not a rational expectation for every person to interrogate every person they’re involved with on every possible rare possible problem. That’s insane. I have extreme difficulty in believing you honestly hold this position, because you seem demonstrably intelligent enough to string words together into sentences.
You have this problem with reading comprehension. It’s probably a mental disorder. You should get it treated.
And yes, I do suspect that some nontrivial percentage of my statemates are homophobic bigots. And probably some more of them are homophobes but not bigots. And some more of them probably don’t care one way or the other. And some of them probably like transsexuals more than non-transexuals, and/or are a transsexual themself (though I beleive I’ve never met one of these people).
Here’s the answer key. Some people are homophobes, having an aversion or negative reaction to persons in nonstandard gender roles, likely in most cases due to unfamilairity and resulting fear. Some of these people express their fears as anger, leading them to make bigoted comments. And some of these people take their anger further and express it in physical violence, confronted with a situation that bothers them.
Note that the word used in the above paragraph is “some”. Not “all”. Assuming that all homophobes are violent about it is like assuming that all blacks are violent gangbangers just because some of them are.
I don’t know. I appreciate your aharing. I confess to not understanding the mind of a homophobe, and I am trying to learn something from you.
The “beating my wife” claim is not impressing anyone no matter how many times you repeat it.
If, when “entering into a serious relationship” (whatever that means to you, you define it for now and I will stipulate), if at that point there is no risk at all to you to find out that someone is transgendered, then what is the issue?
And yes, when you talk about the realtive population of transgenders in your state (whatever it happens to be) I assume you are referring to the probablilty (or “risk”) of meeting one.
As a self confessed homophobe, it seems likely to me (but rather than assume, I am asking you directly) that you feel that should that event occur, your feelings would somehow be different than if the lower risk event occurred.
You are the one that keeps talking like that, and you are the one who says you live in an environment full of bigots as a self confessed homophobe.
You said, and I acknowledged long ago both that you would simply run. I accept that. Not ideal in my mind, but close enough. Let’s move on.
Now I am more curious what that means in the context of your homophobia, in a state of bigots. How does your homophobia present itself if not in this manner?
Have you any inkling of how ridiculous you sound? There are some things that can be reasonably assessed as to be an issue in certain circumstances, and some things that are rare. When something is quite likely to be an issue, but extremely rare, it’s incumbent on the person who knows about it to mention it. Failing to do so will be perceived as deliberate deception. This is obvious.
ha ha ha. cute.
You should have a hard time believing thatis my position because it is not. Apparently my ability to string together sentences is not sufficient for you to understand them.
Here is my position:
If you know of some matters which are dealbreakers for you, and, in sizing up the situation at the time from which you would prefer the deal not happen if there is a dealbreaker present, and you honestly can’t tell if the situation has arisen or not, then it is incumbent on you to ask. It is also incumbent on the other person, once asked, to be honest.
Or, in a nutshell:
If it matters to you, then ask!
OK, but what about you?
How does your homophobia manifest itself?
You said it was like agoraphobia. Are you afraid to leave the house because there might be homosexuals out there?
Or are you just implying you have some generalized fear or anxiety when “confronted” with some people in your neighborhood?
Or is it something else?
I mentioned or implied earlier, either way there is treatment available. You don;'t have to live that way!
I am not picking on you, just hoping to learn what you meant, since you brought it up. No one here asked if you area homophobe or what your statemates are like. You volunteered it, and so, it is fair to see how it influences your answers.
You are entitled to not answer or say fuck off or whatever, but we are entitled to interpret that as we will too.
I am just trying to engage you in a discussion you came to willingly about matters you raised. If it is not fair to do that, then sure, instead of answering the other questions, please tell us why it is not relevant even though you volunteered it by way of introduction. Why was it worth noting at all at the beginning if it is now not relevant in your mind?
I asked someone earlier who made a similar point -
What is everyone required to tell any stranger with whom they may be flirting about themselves?
From post 21,
You can assume all you want, and you can nitpick all you want, but you know that this is what the foundation of the OP is. Otherwise, it would be a more general question on the ethics of dating and when or when not to reveal private matters.
I have no doubt that TG folks encounter people like me all the time who would be polite and empathic while gently breaking it off.
Those cases don’t make the news.
I’ll tell you a story.
I once was pursuing what, in retrospect was probably the hottest chick ever to be interested in me. We became friends and drinking buddies and then this led to that and finally her parents were away and we could use their big house in teh country so up there we went, and finally at long last off came the clothes and down went the drinks and just before tab a went into slot b she mumbled something seemingly out of the blue and extremely anti-semitic and off topic.
Tab A went back into slot A from whence it came, and I don’t think I ever saw her again after I drove home.
So, that sort of behavior is a deal breaker for me. Do I expect every person I flirt with to tell me up front she is not anti-semitic? Of course not. If it becomes enough of an issue it can be dealt with when it comes up.
If for some reason it keeps happening to me, because I am hanging out with skinheads or some of the self-identified Christians in my town, and I am tired of putting tab a in slot a instead of slot b, then I will simply ask earlier.
In the end, it is incumbent on me, if it is important to me, to find out by initiating the matter.
And to not kill people for the answer, which happens a lot, you know, having read and google the info in post 21, if somehow you are going to claim and expect us to believe you didn’t know it before.
I don’t get why this is a difficult concept. Lots of single people say they can’t be with a married person, so if they have suspicions, or maybe as a matter of course, they ask any potential new partner, “Are you married” (because we all know absence of a ring is not proof of not being married).
I don’t see, how, ethically, since the OP is about ethics, this bit about transgender is any different then deception about marriage status.
People do not transition in order to be transgendered. They transition in order to be able to live comfortably as men or women. Many, many people who have gone through gender transitions do not, in fact, consider themselves transgendered.
This goes back to what I mentioned in an earlier post - all too often words shift meaning unexpectedly when the topic of transsexuals not thinking they are transgendered and transvestites thinking they are and so on and so on. It sometimes turns into a gotcha.
And which of the people posting to this thread do you think is Allen Ray Andrade? Because I would like to know how someone posts to the SDMB from prison.
That goes back to a point that was made earlier.
The number of transgendered people is quite small. The number of people who don’t want to have sex with transgendered people is much, much larger. (if you were thinking of trying the “Cite?” dodge, feel free, but don’t expect it to taken seriously.) Therefore, the burden of establishing whether or not transgenderism is a deal-breaker devolves onto the member of the small minority rather than the practically-consensus majority.
I decline to believe that transgendered people, as a class, fail to realize that many or most men don’t want to have sex with someone who ever carried a penis below the waist, regardless of how much silicone they now carry above it. No doubt there are exceptions, but they are exceptional. Therefore, it seems to me to be a matter not merely of ethics but of common courtesy to warn people of what they are getting into before they have a go at getting into it.
If you want to call that bigotry, knock yourself out. I mentioned earlier, however, that if having a preferred gender is bigotry, then homosexuals who refuse to have heterosex are just as bigoted as the guy who won’t screw Glenda who used to be Glen.
And therefore the idea that it is such an imposition to realize that some rare conditions are a deal-breaker is silly. I don’t imagine the number of people who shit themselves at the moment of orgasm is all that great either, but I would appreciate my prospective partners letting me know before we head back to my place, so I can say a polite but definite No.
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison because you’d know if someone shit themselves at the moment of orgasm. You wouldn’t know if you were having sex with someone who ever had a penis unless they told you.
I’m still interested in knowing what guys would do with my AIS hypothetical. (For the record, I knew about that without House! Take that, Hugh Laurie.)
I don’t know about that, if you are talking about intercourse. I know rather little about the mechanics, but I would be surprised if they lubricated. Of course my experience base of comparison is rather limited.
But part of the point about people who shit themselves during orgasm is that it would be something you wouldn’t know about until after, unless they told you.
Anyway, lack of lube doesn’t equal a fake vagina. People with vaginas do buy lube. Let’s assume that the guy in question has no clue. He would, however, realize if he was with a woman who shat herself during orgasm.
I find this extremely difficult to believe, since you are apparently not paying attention to what I write (thus forcing me to repeat it many times) and preferring to ask accusatory well-poisoning questions instead.
For the purpose of this specific discussion, “entering into a serious relationship” has already occured at the point of the first romantic kiss. Yes, I know that’s a bastardization of the term, but if you want to know the point where a reveal becomes definitively necessary to avoid people reacting like they’ve been tricked, that’s a good start to the discussion.
What transparent bullshit. Your questions were explicity about the risk the transgendered person would be in, from me, when I found out they were transgendered. It took several tries to finally convince you that I would not respond by going into a frothing rage and rippin their spine out and beating them to death with it, or whatever vicious fantasy you were imagining about me.
You even said that I said “finding out later will be risky for her”, which is of course complete unmitigated bullshit as well. I haven’t made the slightest threat to anybody in this thread.
You refer to two events here, “that event” and “the lower risk event”. Which one is “discovering rather late that your romantic partner is a transsexual”? And what’s the other one supposed to be?
I can’t answer your questions if they don’t make any damn sense.
Only in your vicious fantasies have I been talking like that.
I don’t particularly care if you don’t think it’s “ideal”; I imagine you have many reactions to things that I would not find “ideal”.
But yes, let’s move on. I’m tired of the “no really, what risk would she be in?” line of questioning.
Given that, as I have repeatedly said, I have not knowingly ever encountered a trangendered person (or, I’ll add, even a homosexual person), and because as I have repeatedly said I do not allow my homophobia to manifest in ways that effect political or public arenas, the only way that my homophobia presents it is in answer to questions relating to the subject. Such as this thread, for example.
Presuming you’re attempting to make any sense at all, this paragraph is probably supposed to be in reference to my homophobia. Which wouldn’t be completely retarded if you had some basis for proposing that homophobia is “extremely rare”. Too bad you’re agreeing with me that I live in a state full of homophobes and homophobic bigots, huh? Because that makes this clever attempt to turn my words back on me a heck of a lot less clever.
You really don’t get any of this, do you? Only a moron asks about things that are assessed to be wildly improbable, whether or not they matter.
You don’t do this either. As you’ve admitted yourself - you forgot to ask about antisemitism! Oh noes! You left an item out of your thousands-of-items-long checklist that you make every girl go through before you meet them!
I’m not afraid of meeting a homophobe becaus I honestly don’t believe it’ll ever happen.
Here’s an equally stupid question for you. You don’t like being crushed by meteorites, right? Are you afraid to leave the house because there might be meteors out there?
Or are you just implying you have some generalized fear or anxiety when “confronted” with being under the sky in your neighborhood?
I thought this was nonsense before, and I think this is nonsense now.
But if you have a “cure”, you should pour it into the water supplies all over the country. Seriously. I’m harmless, but a lot of the homophobes out there are outright bigots about it.
Come again? At what point did I say my homophobia wasn’t relevent to the discussion? Are you paying any attention to the words I am typing? Or are you just overlaying them in your mind with wild imaginings which you are then attributing to me? (Which would explain a lot.)
Of course, your vicious fantasies in which you have me playing a part have no part in the discussion, but that’s another matter. The reactions of homophobes (and also the smaller set of violent, bigoted homophobes, which, I will add for the slow, doesn’t include me) are the driving force of the discussion. If nobody cared about the present/former sex/gender status of the people they met, romanced, and/or screwed, this thread would be two posts long, with the second one being “What the hell are you talking about?”
Yes, of course - excuse me, that was badly phrased. I meant you would not know about Brenda’s orgasm-triggered diarrhea until after you had had sex, unless she told you before.
I think I have too much blood in my caffeine stream.
Okay. And if a woman is a pre op M to F, you won’t know if she had a penis at one point even after sex, if she doesn’t tell you. In the news story linked (the one where the man murdered his sex partner over it), he had no idea until a separate third party informed him.
So why doesn’t this make it a fair comparison? The fact that the shitter know they have no chance of perpetuating the deception*, and the transgendered has reason to think they might get away with it?
I note that some think that some might disagree with this term. However I think it applies in any case where 1) the transgendered person has reason to suspect that their partner would not want to carry out the act if they knew, and 2) they refrain from mentioning it anyway.
Pretty much, yeah. The guy in question wants to have sex with a woman. An MtF post op woman thinks of herself as a woman. Not as a man, not as someone who used to have a penis. Why would it make a difference?
Should a woman with a Y chromosome (with AIS) who looks exactly like any other woman tell every man before she has sex with him if she’s never thought of herself as male?
OK, shodan warns us of playing gotcha, then shows us his best example.
I guess then whatever he says about the OP topic must be true. :rolleyes:
Of course, Nothing you have written in this thread is serious.
So you, presumably not a member of a group, are prepared to impose ethical obligations on an outside group how again?
I am pretty sure any ethical code I am aware of is imposed by internal consensus, not by any persuasion of an outside group.
The ones I have been reading the last few weeks all have preambles stating pretty much that they are imposed on themselves. Hard to imagine those sections being little more then boiler plate.
Courtesy maybe, but that is not the topic here. You are free to start antohter thread on that topic if you wish.
But feel free to point me towards any ethical code we are all obliged to live by other than a professional one. Unless there is a professional one for transgenders, in which case let’s parse it to see what it says.
Doesn’t seem bigoted to me. Just like a stange undestanding of “ethics” but lots of people have that problem. Look at my local City Council for example
Also seems like a strange time to fail to take responsibility for one’s own participation in mutual actions, and that’s the part I have the hardest time grasping (pun intended).
I worry about those who doth protest too much sometimes
OK, so what would you do in the case that you found yourself buying a drink for someone only to find out she had boobs and a dick? Is it really that bad? You’d buy me a drink and I have a dick and you wouldn’t really know my intentions either since I am just some cool guy next to you at the bar. Is it really that bad for you?
Common courtesy I could agree with, but I don’t see how ethics comes into it at all. In the context of a more serious relationship there are all kinds of personal facts that should be shared, but the only information I’d say someone has an ethical obligation to disclose before having sex is information about potential danger to their partner. Someone who expects more information than this should avoid casual sex with people they don’t know well.
Now, everyone is entitled to their own sexual preferences, and no one is obligated to have sex with someone who doesn’t meet their personal criteria. But it isn’t up to others to make sure you never wind up in an intimate situation with someone who doesn’t meet your own standards. If you only want to have sex with certain kinds of people then you have to be the one doing the screening. You can’t expect others to recuse themselves if you’ve never even mentioned your preferences. It’s certainly nice, and probably wise, for people to bring up anything they might reasonably predict could be a dealbreaker, but it’s not an ethical DUTY.
When it comes to transsexuals it may be that most men wouldn’t want to sleep with a transwoman, but some do, and if you reach the point of nearly having sex with a transwoman then she might well assume that you’re one of the exceptions. Thinking of The Crying Game, Dil incorrectly but understandably believes that her new special friend Fergus already knows that she has a penis. She’s mistaken about this and he’s horrified when he first discovers the truth, but that’s a misunderstanding, not an ethical lapse.
I feel like I have hijacked the thread, and I apologize. How about wanting to know if your prospective partner is married? Maybe that is a better analogy.
Nonsense. Ethical obligations are perceived as being dictated by situations and the effects of actions. They’re not a matter of anyone’s concensus.
And people outside a group may express their opinion on what the situations and the effects of actions imply the obligations for members of any group.
Because that person might care about the properties of those they fuck. If the transsexual is a heartless bastard who is just using the other person for sex and cares nothing about their desires or wishes about how they use their body, then sure, keep it a secret. Use them. Heck, rape them. Who cares?
Now on the other hand, if we were having a discussion about the ethics of a situation…
Hmm, yep, it seems so. If they give a damn about the feelings and desires of the person they’re having sex with, anyway.
It just seems so arbitrary. A woman with AIS could look exactly like any other woman, and in fact, a lot of them are models. I mean, I don’t give people the rundown about every single one of my health facts before I do them, so why this?
