Is the notion of transsexuality incompatible with the concept of socially defined gender?

The reality is that lesbians don’t want to have sex with men, and for the purpose of the lesbian’s sexual attractions, the six-foot-two person who has Tom Selleck’s body frame and a penis is a man. There is, at some point, a big amount of delusion here; that it’s in the MTF’s refusal to acknowledge how and why they are perceived by the lesbian rather than in their gender identity to begin with doesn’t change the fact that it’s an absurd proposition to accuse lesbians of bigotry for not wanting to have sexual intercourse with men. And this is not just a thing that a few people on the Internet do; there are actual real-world academic conferences where people seriously address this oh-so-awful discrimination by lesbians.

I think it’s an apt comparison, and I’m prepared to handwave your “nobody can address sexual predation by group A if members of group A have ever been the victims of sexual violence themselves” non-argument (guess I just did). It’s saying that their sexual desires don’t matter and their agency over their own sexual choices is wrong, and subjugating their sexuality to the service of an agenda. It’s exactly equivalent to the frat-bro “all those lesbians need is a good deep dicking to set their heads straight” idea, and it’s a close cousin of justifying rape for the same, fairly obvious, reasons that the aforementioned idea is.

I don’t think that’s necessarily an accurate description at all. A lesbian may not perceive a transwoman as a man at all, she just doesn’t want to have sex with that particular person.

I am heterosexual, but it’s not like I am attracted to all men, or want to have sex with all men, purely because they are male. I may or may not want to have sex with a transmale. Whether or not I want to have sex with that person has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on his masculinity, his identity as a man or my perception of either his gender or sex.

Apparently I missed the whole “cotton ceiling” thing, but I do think reducing a lesbian not wanting to sleep with a transfemale lesbian to bigotry is ridiculous on every level. Fundamentally, sexual attraction is something natural, and not something you can control or change to a radical degree. No amount of going around and telling lesbians that transwomen are REALLY women too and you lesbians should totally consider them as mates isn’t going to solve anything. I can guarantee that almost nobody is going to say “gee, really? I see these people in a whole new light now! I will sleep with them because they identify as female.”

Lesbians (and straight men), for the most part aren’t going to care what your gender identity is. They’re going to care whether or not they’re sexually attracted to you which is, in large part, physical. I know it sucks really, really bad, but a translesbian really can be expecting a woman not attracted to men to be attracted to somebody with a masculine figure, features, and genitals.

I know this conversation has to sting really hard:

“Wanna go out?”
“Oh, sorry, I’m a lesbian”
“So am I”
“Oh… well… er, sorry. But being I lesbian I’m not really attracted to, well… uh… you know… sorry”

I really get how hard that must be because not only are you being rejected, but you’re being reminded about how your body looks, about how your physical form doesn’t match your identity. It rolls the sting of rejection and every one of your gender problems into a nice tidy package and delivers it all at once. But to reduce it to the level of discrimination is absolute folly. It’s not about you, and it’s certainly not about societal discrimination, it’s about the person’s sexual attraction, plain and simple. Condescending Robot is right, it absolutely reeks of people telling homosexuals they don’t really know who they’re attracted to. Or even the reek of people who think they “deserve” sex just for existing and being human. And besides, do you REALLY want to guilt somebody into dating you that’s not actually attracted into you (general “you”) with this rhetoric? That sounds like a plan for failure.

It sucks, sure, but while trans acceptance is good, there are some things that you just can’t control, either physically or ethically, and this is one of them.

If it’s just a framing issue, then sure. Reframe the debate so it’s just “you shouldn’t reject a transwoman because she’s ‘really a man’, say you reject her because you find her unattractive to you (even though that unattraction stems from her appearance as a man).” I’m totally on board with that. But that’s what I’m not getting from the articles I dug up after reading this thread, it sounds more like they’re calling lesbians who don’t want to sleep with trans-women (whether pre or post op) “transphobic” and saying that they should get sex like any other lesbian (which again, sounds an awful lot like being “owed” sex; or at best, saying all lesbians will fuck anything they think is a female human with no qualms or thought whatsoever).

What I still don’t get is why they seem to be calling out lesbians specifically and not straight men as well.

Presumably they are, but in this case it’s particularly galling because of the implications of telling women that their sexual agency is irrelevant for political reasons. Also, a disproportionate number of MTF transsexuals desire relationships with lesbian woman as opposed to straight men.

That is a non-argument, since it’s not the argument I made. Try again. Incidentally, not only is the analogy deeply offensive to trans women, but it also serves to minimise the genuine “corrective rape” that some lesbians (both cis and trans) have been subjected to.

Wow - stereotype much? Many trans women don’t fit that description at all. In fact, some of them don’t even have penises!

It is nowhere near justifying rape. Rape is sex without consent. They are not seeking to have sex with lesbians without their consent. They are seeking to get that consent, not by force or coercion, but in the same manner that it would (presumably) be given to them if they were cis women. I fully agree they’re not “entitled” to it, but there’s a big and important difference between wanting something you’re not entitled to and trying to take it by force.

A problem of the cotton ceiling is it doesn’t really have a generally agreed-upon scholarly definition. So if you Google around you can find an array of definitions, some of which seem really extreme. I can ask 5 transwomen and get 5 different answers.

It happens so often in fact that most transwomen would never even think to ask the initial question. In the communities I am part of, it’s actually sort of an unwritten rule - “do yourself a favor, leave the lesbians alone. You’ll get nothing but abuse.”

However…once in a very great while, you find a woman who turns out to be a lesbian who is strongly attracted to transwomen. Those women are like diamonds. :slight_smile:

If a non-transsexual man categorized someone not wishing to have sex with him as “abuse” he would (rightly) be derided as a mouthbreathing Reddit-using MRA who should go back to his pony cartoons.

How about trying to take it by deception?

I didn’t define the “abuse”, you imagined that all on your own, taking by implication that because I quoted the example above that I was claiming all conversations, everywhere, went like that. It was the general concept of rejection, but the specific issue was that generally when the t-girls ask the g-girls out the t-girls get an earful of insults and mockery, vis, verbal abuse.

That’s fair enough, obviously you’d know more about this than I would :slight_smile: Is it fair to say though, that for (at least) the large majority it is not about forcing cis lesbians to have sex with them?

What deception are you talking about?

Absolutely fair. I mean, there may always be creeps and bitches in any population.

My experience (which as an appeal to authority is somewhat broad) is that the most disappointing thing is the obvious one, that transwomen feel that they are not considered “good enough” and “aren’t cutting it” as women, rather than any special lusting after lesbians. It’s just all about being considered “one of the girls” rather than sex.

Personally I’ve always found g-girl lesbians to be polite and accepting, and relationships between g-girls and t-girls seem to be increasing in number. For example, at one time it was an “accepted fact” that 75-90% of marriages dissolved when the genetically male partner (gosh that sounds awkward) started transition. My personal experience, and that of the counselors I know and work with, is that number is now down to less than 50%.

However, that observation may be deceptive in one manner. There is a technical paper or three I have on the growing ability of straight women to become “situational lesbians” with transwomen, pre and post-op - in short, that a woman would enter a lesbian relationship with a transwoman, but would never with a g-girl. And in my experience (again, appeal to authority) this is true - I know of almost no cases of the hundreds of transwomen I’ve encountered where a confirmed lesbian enters a relationship with a transwoman.

And in many sad cases, including a couple of very dear friends of mine, their wives have told their transwomen partners “I love you, I would die for you, but I will not have sex with you as a lesbian.”

Don’t engage. He’s made it clear that he holds a bigoted opinion on the issue, that he gets to define everyone else’s gender identity. So he’s obviously referring to them being “deceptive” because they “pretend” to be a gender they aren’t.

As for the OP, I honestly think transsexualism, meaning those who change their biological sex to conform to their internal gender, specifically exists because of society defined gender. There’s no inherent reason why why having a female internal gender model would be incompatible with having a fully masculine body. There’s no reason why, for example, having a female brain in a male’s body should feel wrong, except that you are constantly being told that females should be a certain way.

To put it another way, an example was given of a man who lost his penis in an accident, and how he would want to have that penis. That makes sense, since that’s what he had before. But why would a trans man want a penis? He’s never had one before. Yet he feels like he should have one. This is such a complex idea that I have a hard time thinking it is biological. I could see the brain naturally craving testosterone, but not a penis in and of itself. It just doesn’t fit what we know about biology.

And don’t think that, by blaming society, I am belittling the plight of transsexuals. There’s nothing wrong with you adhering to gender roles unless there is something wrong with cisgendered individuals like myself who adhere to gender norms fairly well. I’m saying that there is something wrong with society.

Transsexuals have brains more similar to that of their opposite assigned sex. Seems straight forward to me. Imagine what kind of internal pressures there must be where cutting your penis off seems like a good idea.

From Wiki:

From digging around, it seems the consensus is that post-op trans people have lower incidents of phantom limbs for their removed parts versus normal people, e.g. mastectomies of FtM versus cancer patients. It’s just not part of their internal model.

Oh, I know what was meant, I’m just not sure where it was suggested this was happening. We were discussing sexual relationships in the context of full awareness of the other person’s birth-assigned gender, so alleging there was some kind of “deception” involved seemed like a complete non-sequitur and a straw man.

My “bigoted” opinion is that a man who fails to conform to traditional gender stereotypes is not less of a man. A man is male for the same reason a tomcat is male, and I’d rather people stop reading more into it than that than trying to twist the definition so that they’ll conform to the stereotypes about how men think and act.

Most of the trans people I know, particularly trans guys, do not remotely conform to the common stereotypes of the gender with which they identify.