With the many examples touched on in the thread, I think we’ll have to disassociate appearance with sincerity. A sincere transwoman can be anything from totally feminine to totally masculine. She may have extensive medical intervention or none at all. She may dress in flowery dresses or a men’s suit. She may have no facial hair or have a full beard. In terms of discussing legal issues, it probably makes more sense to base the gatekeeping requirements on degree of commitment to gender conformance and/or sex conformance as applicable. Not everything will need to meet the same requirements (e.g. workplace pronouns versus women’s sports). Trying to make legal requirements based on degree of sincerity will be very hard to accomplish since sincerity will be very hard to define adequately.
I’m basing what I’m saying on what trans men who have been in those relationships have told me about them. They’re the one who characterized these relationships as toxic and abusive. They’re the ones telling me that they aren’t treated well in these relationships.
And by “treat them like men, not butch lesbians,” the number one thing I mean is, ‘refer to them by their preferred names and pronouns.” There’s also some issues in the bedroom that I described earlier.
I’m curious now too. When a topic isn’t acceptable to discuss in polite company, we tend to assume other people are thinking the same things we are, but that often isn’t the case. Saying ‘trans women are women and trans men are men’ could mean anything from ‘I’m being polite to make my friends happy’, or ‘it’s a semantic distinction based to redefining words’, to ‘they have a man’s brain in a woman’s body’, or something metaphysical like male and female souls. So what does it mean to you to say “trans women are women/trans men are men”?
There are two sides to every story. Unless lesbians are bending your ear to give you their take, you should probably not be assuming it’s a one-way issue.
I can’t imagine being in a relationship with someone who kept reminding me he felt entitled to be treated like a man. There would have to be something wrong with me to put up with this demand, and there would have to be something wrong with the person making this demand. Doesn’t matter if that someone is a trans or cis; this has toxic co-dependency written all over it.
Issues in the bedroom are inherently addressed on an individual level. Butch lesbians and transmen can approach sex in exactly the same way; there are no gender norms that govern this.
No idea how you got all that out of what I wrote. I described a particular toxic relationship dynamic that sometimes occurs between cis lesbians and trans men. It doesn’t describe every relationship between cis lesbians and trans men, and it’s not the only kind of toxic relationship that exists. All groups have shitty people in them.
And when I say these relationships are toxic, I don’t mean “sexually unfulfilling,” I mean “emotionally abusive.” And, yeah, I think that’s a lot worse than someone writing a column about how much they get rejected in dating, and wondering if there’s some level of prejudice in play. Serano didn’t have trouble getting bisexual people to accept her as a woman. She didn’t have trouble getting straight men to accept her as a woman. She only had trouble with lesbians accepting her as a woman. And it seems that this is less of a problem for younger trans women, who are finding a lot more acceptance among lesbians in their age cohort. If lesbians around Julia Serano’s age are highly resistant to dating trans women, but lesbians a generation younger are generally okay with it, what conclusions do you draw from that? Has the fundamental nature of lesbianism changed?
Having sex with a trans woman does not automatically mean having sex with a penis.
So would you be OK with lesbians asking transwomen if they have a penis before rejecting them?
I’m putting myself in the typical lesbian’s sensible shoes. If my potential dating pool consists of two populations–one comprised entirely of folks who have what I desire and one comprised of lots of folks lacking that something, what would propel me to that second group? I could see lesbians who are very hard up going to that second group. I could see lesbians who are curious or adventurous going to that second group. But I don’t understand what would make the average lesbian make that choice, given the awkwardness of asking someone about their genitalia.
As I pointed out before, people exclusively attracted to vaginas are not attracted to not-penises. They want fully functional vaginas. They are 100% perfectly entitled to select partners based on this foci of attraction. There is no room for debate about this. There is no analysis required. No moralizing necessary.
You seem hugely unaware of how misogynistic and lesbophobic your biases appear. The obliviousness is what concerns me more that anything. Really, I’m gonna need you step back and appreciate the picture you are painting. Queer penis-havers maligning queer vagina-havers because the latter refuse to comply with the former’s sexual demands. Check. Queer penis-havers treating a woman’s no as tantamount to a hate crime. Check. Queer penis-havers treating their access to sex as a right that overrides a vagina-haver’s right to sexual fulfillment. Check.
Who are the bad guys in this equation? It’s not the victims of misogyny.
I think that’s probably something that should be volunteered by the trans woman before things get intimate, although depending on how things play out, I don’t think it’s necessarily inappropriate to ask.
Well, there’s a difference between “being open to the possibility of dating a trans person,” and “actively seek out trans people as partners.”
Consider this hypothetical. A lesbian meets another woman, and feels there’s a bit of a spark there. There’s a good flirty energy, she likes the other woman’s personality, and she finds her physical appearance attractive. Things are going really well between them, until the other woman says something like, “Before this goes any further, there’s something I should tell you. I’m trans. I had SRS fifteen years ago. Anatomically, I’m female, but I was born male.” The lesbian immediately breaks it off with the other woman.
Is it fair for the trans woman to feel “some kind of way” about that?
What do you mean by “fully functional vaginas,” and in what ways do you think vaginoplasty fails to achieve that?
Of course. It must be crushing to be rejected in that way.
Of course it is fair to feel a certain way. Everyone is entitled to feel a certain way about rejection.
But I just can’t work up a lot of sympathy for someone who thinks that there’s only one explanation for why cis dykes living in San Franscisco (!) aren’t beating down their door. Sure, transphobia might be a significant factor. I won’t deny that. But there are more charitable explanations.
As I said upthread when you asked if this was analogous to race, I think there are practical challenges to being with someone who falls outside your comfort zone. You may like the person but not like them enough to want to deal with baggage. Is someone who is leery of dating a transwoman transphobic? Or are they understandably worried there will be landmines or awkwardness or other complications that they aren’t emotionally equipped to handle?
Like, I’ve thought about this for myself. If I woke up tomorrow hungering for a lover, I would feel compelled to let potential partners know that I’m inexperienced, since it would feel dishonest not to do so. I would do this knowing it would lead to almost everyone rejecting me. I’m sure I would be very hurt by this. But I’d like to think that I would not pin it on a pervasive hatred for virgins. It makes much more sense to blame it on grown folks knowing exactly what they like and them not wanting go through extra complications to get it.
This is a pretty derpy question but I’ll bite.
A vagina isn’t just a receptacle for sex play. Like any other non-vestigial body part, it performs a function. In females, a vagina is a self-cleaning, self-lubricating structure with its own microflora and ph balance; these things help ensure sexual and reproductive health.
The vagina is also called the birth canal. Conveying uterine contents to the outside of the body is actually the most important function of vaginas. When this function is impaired, women can get sick and even die (see female genital mutilation).
Some members of our species have an innate attraction to this body part. Since I am not one of them, I can’t relate to this attraction at all. But as a sexually active vagina-haver and a veterinarian, I can tell you one thing. Human arousal to vaginas is every bit as instinctual and irrepressible as the arousal that animals have. It just is. When you see it at work, it’s clear the frontal lobe is not driving the wheel; more primitive brain components are. This is not a surprise since our sexuality is the end result of millions of years of human evolution, and our sexuality selects which genital characteristics are arousing enough to get passed down to the next generation. Pheromones and other things flying below our radar of consciousness are likely at play, just like it is with dogs and horses.
This is the story of the fully functional vagina. It cannot and should not be compared to vaginoplasty.
I mean… that’s just how dating works, but sure, those could be concerns that would lead to rejection, without making the person necessarily transphobic. But why would lesbians, specifically, be so much more strongly affected by them than any other group Serano tried dating?
The more I think about, the more it seems that the issue isn’t that she was trying to date lesbians, so much as she was trying to date second wave feminists. Lesbians around Julia Serano’s age are very often going to be second wave feminists, and second wave feminism finds a lot about trans identity philosophically problematic. This seems (purely anecdotally) less of an issue with younger women, who are more likely to be third or fourth wave.
So, lesbians don’t want to date trans women because the trans woman won’t be able to give birth?
I’ve got some surprising news for you about lesbian sex, apparently.
This is a winning rejoinder, @Miller. You are totally right that cis dykes just don’t really know what they want, just like the old patriarchs used to say. Everyone knows surgically altered penises can do everything vaginas can do except better.
Well, as the one person out of the two of us whose is sexually attracted to female genitalia, I can tell you that pH balance or susceptibility to urinary tract infection aren’t large parts of what drives my sexual interest in them. Possibly it’s different for lesbians, but it seems unlikely.
This stuff doesn’t operate on a conscious level. It just is. Ask me to explain why I’m attracted to penises and I will struggle to justify that in any kind of intellectual way. Because intellect has nothing to do with it.
You can’t argue lesbians into lusting after genitals they don’t want but you think they should want.
Because women are women and men are men. Women don’t do sex the same way that men do. Cuz sex is real.
The thing about Serano’s piece that frustrates me the most is her pitting men against women in terms of sexuality, of all things. I know you say she’s a feminist, but she doesn’t sound like a feminist when she does this. How is it surprising to her that men are horny enough to want to have sex with her, but women aren’t?
This reminds me very much of how sexually frustrated young men whine about how easy it is for ugly women to have sex compared to ugly men. Instead of implicating the size of the average male libido compared to the size of the average female libido, they immediately place the blame on stuck-up Stacey hating any guy who isn’t an alpha Chad. If only Stacey would stop being so superficial and be as non-discriminating as guys are, then all would be well and happy in the land. It’s like it doesn’t occur to these fools that women have very valid reasons to not want to hook up with any Tom, Dick, or Harry. Pregnancy is one. Rape and sexual violence is another But there’s an even bigger one: for lots of women, if the emotional chemistry isn’t there, the sex won’t be worth it since the sex frequently won’t end in an orgasm like it will for men. So a woman will say “no” if she knows there’s a good chance she won’t be in the right headspace with a certain person. A man, who is more likely to be thinking with his penis than with his head, will be more inclined to say “yes”. Neither strategy is morally good nor bad, but they both make sense from a biological perspective. It is very derpy for Serano to not understand this.
But as we’ve already mentioned, lesbians have politics that other groups do not have. I would not expect a vegetarian activist to be eager to try some meat, even if she was hungry and meat was the only thing available. I would expect her to resist because her identity rests on being a vegetarian. I would not expect omnivores or even carnivores to be this way.
Then how do you explain the fact that she had similar success rates with bisexual women that she did with straight men? Shouldn’t the bisexual women’s responses have been more in line with the lesbian women?
Are you saying her success with bisexual women outweighed her sex with all men (bisexual + straight)? Because I interpreted her as saying that she had more success with men in general, with some success with bisexual women and zero success with “cis dykes”. That would translate into more men hollerers than women hollerers.
I’m seriously laughing though. By her own account, she isn’t suffering in the sex department. Not even with cis women! Her dance card stays filled, if what she’s saying is true. And yet she’s managed to convinced at least one person that her tale of woe is worthy of publication.
This is treatment that a ciswoman would never get.
Initially I thought the greater context made her more sympathetic. But the more we keep talking about this, the more I appreciate Yardley highlighting it.