lies of omission, transgendered persons, dating profiles

Great Debates
1

Within the currently running thread on transgendered persons and mental illness, a side debate has broken out about the interaction between transgenderism and online dating profiles. Viz.: positing that a transgendered person has fully transitioned, does it count as a lie to omit the fact of their transgenderism? If it is a lie, is it wrong?

My primary question: Is it a lie to leave information out, when you believe that information isn’t pertinent but you know the other party would believe it is pertinent? Asusme Person A is MTF transgendered; Person B may or may not care one way or the other, but could reasonably be assumed to think this is relevant information for determining dating potential. If Person A has left the fact of her transgendered status out of her dating profile, has she lied to Person B? Assume arguendo that Person A has sufficiently transitioned that normal (from Person B’s perspective) sexual intercourse is possible.

If this is too contentious a topic, perhaps other examples fit a similar template. Person B could fail to disclose his baldness or bisexualism or details from his mental health history. If he does so, has he lied? And is there some cutoff for level of pertinence? Person A might have stubbier fingers than average, and it’s possible that Person B would find this unattractive; presumably it isn’t lying to leave all myriad such details out.

If you come down on the side of “it’s a lie”, then perhaps there are sufficiently extenuating circumstances that make this lie not morally wrong. Say, fear of harrassment or assault. Assuming for the moment that this fear is reasonable, does that make it okay to lie?

If you come down on the side of “it isn’t a lie”, does your belief extend to all omitted pertinent details? Or is there something particular about this context?

My view: if the MTF transition of Person A is sufficiently complete that she can behave indiscernibly from other women, then it definitely isn’t a lie; it becomes one of many details from Person A’s past that she may or may not feel she has to immediately share. If Person A is pre-transition then I’m unsure. If Person A is still living as a man I consider it wrong to have left that information out – Person B has some reasonable expectation that he will be able to date in public, etc. If Person A is living as a woman but has primarily male anatomy … that’s the most difficult scenario for me. I think she should disclose this but I’m not sure whether it rises to the level of moral wrongness not to do so.

2

Come back when men who suffer from erectile dysfunction premature ejaculation start calling that fact out on their profiles.

From what I have been told it is the EXCEPTION for men to actually even be honest about their height, so I am not sure why there is a special emphasis being placed on transgender people…well except for the very explicit discrimination reasons.

3

Well, there’s the rub, right? Err, so to speak. Honestly I’m less interested in the specifics of this topic as it relates to transgendered persons and dating profiles, than I am with the question of what counts as a lie of omission; but lurking that thread sparked my curiosity thereby. Should someone who suffers from erectile dysfunction put that on their dating profile? I’m totally fine with someone who says we should err on the side of inclusion, but I think they do have to bite that bullet.

4

Why single out men? Age, weight, breast augmentation, other cosmetic surgery, is there some study showing women are significantly more honest in their profiles?

5

Depends on the nature of the dating site. On a very general site lying by omission might not be a terrible crime. On a specialized site such as people only looking to meet individuals of the same religion or culture, etc., a sex change should be mentioned up front.

6

An online dating profile is not a full disclosure document and isn’t intended to be. It’s an advertisement. Buyer beware. It may be morally wrong to claim you’re 5’10, 35, and as fit as your 15-year-old profile pic when actually you’re 5’5, 50, and have a belly the size of a Volkswagen, but what personal information to include or withhold is a personal decision. Should Person C reveal in his profile he has a colostomy bag? How about alcoholism? A single felony assault charge when he was a minor? They’re all potential deal-breakers that should be revealed at some point. The profile may not be the place to do so.

7

As nellie says.

If the way online dating worked was like Amazon and once you clicked on a profile & paid your intro fee you were married, then we customers cold demand a very high level of completeness and truth in advertising from the advertisers.

But online dating doesn’t work that way. Even if all it had was accurate current gender, gender preference in partner and the fact that person is available, that would be better than zero. You’d just have to meet a lot more frogs on the way to your prince(ss) that you do with the actual systems out there today.

IOW, it’s a recommendation service, not a buying service.
A similar thing comes up in job applications and a criminal background. If a company will throw away every application admitting to a criminal background there’s not much point in putting it on your app. It IS worthwhile to 'fess up towards the end of the interview when they’re making serious noises about offering you a job.
My punch line: it’s when a commitment is about be made in the face of a material omission that the omission morally must be corrected. At/after then, the omission is a lie. Up to that point the omission is advertising puffery. Deciding to click the [I’m interested, contact me back] button on a profile, or even deciding to go on a first date falls far, far short of the triggering level of commitment IMO.

8

I don’t believe it’s a lie, by omission or any other kind, for person A not to mention she’s transgender in her profile. I believe that it’s something that should be mentioned before the clothes come off, but unless it’s one of those kinds of dating sites, there’s time for that later.

9

There are other kinds of dating sites???

10

I’m with nellieblye too, a dating profile is an advertisement and should be treated as such - i.e. assume everything you’re reading or seeing might have been true at one time but probably isn’t any more (the famous additional 20-40 pounds and 5 years mismatch between present reality and the pictures presented), or is an exaggeration on the order of “I tame lions as a hobby” when they saw a lion tamer once at the circus and thought “that looks cool.”

So zero duty to disclose in your advertisement, where nearly everything is omitted, or exaggerated to the breaking point.

But the more interesting question may be is there some duty to disclose material facts about your past, whether they be birth gender, felonies, or even erectile disfunction before “getting serious,” and if so when? And what exactly does “getting serious” mean, for that matter?

I think most people would agree they’d prefer their prospective partner to disclose material facts like this before “getting serious,” and if that is the case, it’s just a matter of what is and isn’t material, and where the line of getting serious is (4th date? Physical intimacy? Moving in together? Marriage?).

For the specific example in the OP, is having gender transitioned a material fact like this that should be disclosed at some point prior to getting serious? I think so, and if that’s the essence of the question, maybe a poll is in order in IMHO to capture a broader sample.

11

The idea that people need to disclose their medical history on dating websites is bizarre. The fact that being transgender is a piece of medical history that is extremely risky to reveal (can lead to job loss if revealed in general, or a beating or murder in person) makes the idea that someone is lying by admission for not disclosing it even more absurd. Why isn’t the burden on the person who doesn’t want to date trans people to disclose it? Just put “I don’t want to date trans people (or pre-or trans people or whatever)” on your profile, and they will stay away because it would be extremely dangerous for them to push that boundary. Or bring it up in conversation on the first date, and any woman who’s anatomy doesn’t line up with your expectations will quietly vanish into the night (she probably won’t reveal why in case you have a bad reaction).

12

Seems to me the ideal profile would read something like:Here’s my advertising: blah blah blah for 95% of the content.
Here’s my short list of oddball deal-breakers readers might not expect: blah blah blah for 5% of the content.Anyone who likes the 95% but by bad luck trips some trigger in the 5% will move on and the advertiser will be none the wiser.

If you find yourself wanting to write an ad the other way around: 5% offers and 95% demands, you’re Doing It Wrong. You’re writing an advertisement, not an RFP.

13

You aren’t disclosing because you owe it to the other person, you’re disclosing because you owe it to yourself. Yeah, it doesn’t need to be on your profile, and you don’t need to disclose to random strangers.

But if you’re going to have a serious relationship with another person, you don’t want to be with someone who would freak the fuck out if only they knew your shocking secret. This person is going to meet your parents, your siblings, your old friends. They are going to see your high school yearbook photos. Unless you have completely cut yourself off from your family and friends and constructed a new life for yourself the reminders of the past will always exist.

But even if you’ve constructed a bulletproof firewall between the past and the present, do you want to be with someone who wI I’ll dump you in a second if they ever found out your secret? Even if there was no way they ever could find out, how soul destroying to be with someone who would hate you if they knew the truth about you.

Fuck that. Your past happened. In real life it can’t stay a secret. So you might as well weed out the people who can’t handle it now, before you’ve wasted a lot of time and emotion with them. Life is way too short. You can’t live your life like someone in the witness protection program.

14

I have always advised, urged, even begged other transgender persons to be open about their status if they are pre-operative. I’ve seen, met, know personally as friends too many of us who have been verbally attacked, threatened, had their cars or dwellings vandalized, hit, kicked, beaten, and in some cases put in the hospital over this.

I’ve also advised post-operative and/or fully assimilated transgender persons to be forthcoming as soon as there is a potential issue involved, and to be proactive from the start about certain things (such as “cannot or will not bear children”).

Like Lemur866 said, I also advise “do you really want to marry someone who would think less of you for a medical condition beyond your control?”

There is a statement made by many: “transwomen are women, full stop.” Well, yes and no. In some contexts one can’t just group all women together without making differentiation - women of color, for example, Muslim women, disabled women, etc. We’re women from a gender identity standpoint, full stop, but it’s foolhardy for us to think that we’re exactly like any cisgender XX woman - and indeed, among the thousands of transgender women I know or have met, I likely have only met 1 or 2 who felt that they were exactly the same. (any population that large has outliers).* We KNOW we’re different and we KNOW that we’re generally disliked; we’re reminded of it every hour of every day.

Given that, one wonders “why take the risk?” Because we’re LONELY. Because we’re DESPERATE. Because for some of us, the risk of being beaten to a pulp by an angry cisgender man is WORTH the chance we’ll find someone who will love us, and continue loving us after we come out. Because so many of us can’t even get to that first date to even show what we have to offer in person. The whole “transgender people are trying to trick us to make us gay!” is a hateful conservative trope born from hysterical homophobia, rather than reality. And vanishingly few transgender persons would ever reach out to someone who expressed they weren’t interested.

It seems the most *humane *and *kind *solution would be to have dating sites give an option of “are you interested in transgender persons?” to which the person could say “no/yes.” Maybe it could be “no” by default; although I know other activists would want it the other way around, I disagree. This way the transgender person does not need to out themselves and their private medical history to any and all who browse the site (and some sites are crawled by search engines, I understand), and no cisgender person who for whatever reason isn’t interested in us would be bothered by us.

(And there are men who are very interested in us for sex, and some women too. I could tell a lot of stories. But almost all of us are wanting a relationship, love, commitment, not just sex.)

  • I won’t even go into detail regarding intersex women such as myself, who may not even share XX chromosomes.
15

A brilliant post, Una. Thank you for sharing it.

16

Forgive my naiveté, but I thought most “dating” websites were more sexually-oriented. If not an outright hookup, most people are looking to get down on the first night. My understanding is that only a minority of trans people can pass for cisgender when the clothes come off. Therefore it would seem to behoove trans people to be open about it on their profiles.

17

That was not my experience with OKCupid or Match; if, say, I did my usual search, looking for new friends/short term dating/long term dating, and I saw 100 potential matches, if I re-ran the search after checking the box for casual sex, I’d only get another half-dozen matches.

Then again, maybe my age group is boring.

18

The world has changed, 1/3 of marriages are from relationships that started online these days.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/06/03/study-a-third-of-new-marriages-began-with-online-meetings

19

Agreed, thanks Una.

Whenever I think about this topic (I mean it’s sort of irrelevant to me personally as I am married), I find myself involuntarily thinking “hell, I would want to know! Because umm…”
When I dig deeper into that thought process, I can’t find any underlying basis that I can claim to be reasonable - this thought, when it happens to me, exists because of ingrained, stupid, unthinking, fearful habit - and yet, because it’s my first thought, I suspect it would impact my behaviour in a real-world situation.

So yes - you’re different, but we’re stupid.

20

This. Both the thanks and the admission.

Society and all of us in it still have some learning to do. Some folks are moving the right way, most are glued to the spot, and some are running screaming in the opposite direction. ISTM the net motion is in the right direction but at a painfully slow pace for the folks living the reality right now. A couple days ago I said something in a thread about politics and economics that 70 years is an eternity in the life of a person and a short snip in the evolution of a society.