Again, you’re either missing the point or deliberately misinterpreting the point.
Nobody is saying “they are exactly the same in every respect and if you dissent, up against the wall with you”. What trans people are saying is that the differences aren’t *really *meaningful. And if you’re saying “but the only reason I wouldn’t sleep with a transwoman is because my cock strictly needs a ge-noo-een vagina and a god-made lubrication system to perform”, I’m going to bring up the fact that I once came all over a warm melon peel. And it dripped down my fingers. And honestly it was too much effort for too little difference for me to ever do again.
But that’s on YOU for forcing ME to inflict that visual image on yourself. You sick fucking bastard.
And you HAVE to realize this attitude is soft bigotry. “do your thing in your obscure corner away from the public eye and we won’t have any problem” is pretty much The Gay Issue. Which, yanno, was also absolute bullshit, since demonstrably you (societal you… societal US) had enough of a problem with it that we condoned police raids on gay clubs à propos of nothing and shunned people for the temerity of just affirming their gayness which didn’t and doesn’t affect our lives in any way shape or form.
And it’s still a gay problem, nevermind a trans problem. Plenty of people still consider two dudes (or two girls) kissing in public as some kind of political statement or infriging on their rights or whatever nonsense.
There is a lot of diversity in “real” vaginas. You got some that are tight and others that are loosey-goosy. I’ve been told that some look like grilled cheese sandwiches, especially as they age.
Modern technology may devise a synthetic vagina that is superior to natural ones in terms of sexual intercourse. Imagine a vagina that can be tightened to accommodate penises of any girth.
I think it’s also confirmation bias. Once someone finds out a person’s trans, you’ll start noticing this trait, or that trait, or they just LOOK more like the opposite gender, and it you’re like, “HA!!! I knew it!” Even though said trait isn’t anything exclusive to one gender or another.
Look at it this way: if someone DOESN’T pass, so what? This is going to come off as crass, I suppose, but the world is full of people who aren’t all that beautiful. It sucks no matter what the reason is.
Just don’t dress like you’re auditioning for People of Walmart, and you’re good to go.
Yes. I’ve done this experiment. It’s very easy to convince someone a cis person is trans because the second you say “you know she’s trans, right?” suddenly it becomes very obvious to them, to the point if you say “actually she’s not” they won’t believe you because of traits A, B, and C.
Look, on average trans people look different from cis people of the same gender, but like… not necessarily enough to clock even if you know what you’re looking for. At least not without a large number of false positives. I had to go to the ER two days ago and had to explain to about 6 different people that the reason I was in pain could not, in fact, have been me being pregnant because I do not have those parts. When I told the PA I was trans he thought I meant I was a pre-hormones trans man (which doesn’t even make sense considering I was explaining why I wasn’t pregnant or on my period).
Now, there are a great number of non-passing or moderately different looking trans people who are just as valid, but there’s this notion you can always unambiguously pick a trans person out which is just not the case.
Like, trust me, you don’t have to say everyone is just being nice and humoring me. I’ve said that to myself enough. But I feel like there’s a critical mass of people asking me things that only would make a lick of sense if I were a cis woman (oh, are you naturally a soprano or alto? Have you ever gotten an IUD? Are you on birth control? etc etc) where you kinda have to accept people legitimately see you as a cis woman.
I didn’t really want to engage with the wider topic here because I’m kinda mentally tired rn, but now that I’m here I’ll give a short comment.
So the problem with a marking yourself as trans on dating sites opens a lot of problems. For one, it can out you to potential employers or people in your community who may discriminate against you. Secondly, it opens you to harassment on the platform itself. Many trans people have been banned from apps like Tindr for “deception” by an automated system because people (usually men) mass-reported them for “deception” for marking themselves as men/women even when they put they were trans in their description.
Finally, online dating is already fraught. People make snap judgments based on seconds of profile reading and a head shot. There have already been studies about how this relates to bias outside of the dating context (e.g. there have been studies on racial bias by having people rate pictures as attractive/unattractive by showing them an image for a second and not letting them think much before judging). People putting trans in their profile, unless the person has a specific biased attraction towards trans people, can honestly be setting themselves up for a snap judgment from someone who is otherwise in the rest of their life open to trans people. Hell, they may even say they’re “okay with trans people” but then the little snap judgment part of their brain kicks in. Honestly, I don’t know any trans people in happy relationships with cis people unless they already knew each other/were dating before transition, or they didn’t reveal they were trans until date 3 or 4. That’s anecdotal, but there you go. (I don’t use dating apps personally, they break my brain and I get obsessive and spend hours on them every day and then burn out in 3 days).
Yes, trans people should tell people their they’re trans before the relationship gets too involved and definitely before anyone goes to anyone’s place for sex, for their own safety as much as being courteous, but I don’t think immediate disclosure is needed. As mentioned, it’s no more lying more than “I’m in financial ruin” or “I’m infertile” or “I will judge you if you like Harry Potter” or whatever is.
And, overall, when people say that they should consider trans people of their preferred gender when dating like… look. If you hate trans people trans people don’t fucking want to date you. What trans people are directing that at is people who may not realize how their biases affect them, and if they’re really unattracted to penises/vaginas, which is reasonable, or don’t find a specific trans person attractive due to physical features, or if they’re averse to trans people because they’re culturally conditioned to think of them as their assigned gender at birth (combined with internalized homophobia “oh no am I gay if I date a trans person???”), or consider them otherwise “tainted” just for being trans even if they’re otherwise attractive to them. I.E. people who agree (at least somewhat) with “trans women/men are women/men” and “trans women/men can be beautiful/handsome” … but I’d never date one or anything…
More or less, but to clarify: EVERYONE gets hormones at puberty, the difference is which group of hormones. The key to becoming a “passable” trans woman is to avoid the androgenic “male” hormones, or rather, hormone profile because in reality everyone generates both estrogen and testosterone, it’s the proportions that are key.
Once you go through a “male puberty” - doesn’t matter what age, although the greatest effect is during the teen years - you get permanent changes that never go away, changes that the rest of humanity tends to think of as “male”. In addition to the trans gender people, you can see these effects in female body builders that abuse steroids.
If a trans woman can avoid experiencing a male hormone profile in puberty she will NOT develop male hair patterns or a beard, NOT get a deeper voice, NOT develop an Adam’s apple, not develop a male jawline or browline, or other such features that typically “out” a trans woman who transitions later in life. Changes that are permanent and only somewhat changeable via surgery.
I’m not sure about height - my very limited and probably biased experience is that trans women tend to be taller than ciswomen, but is that genetics or hormones? Or could it be a result of being on puberty blockers? (I think that might extend the growth time before the ends of the long bones completely ossify and stop growing longer) I’m not sure how much puberty blockers followed by a female hormone profile will affect hip size, either. But height is such a variable anyway, with some cis women exceeding average male height on their own, and there’s quite a range of hip size as well I’m not sure those are going to be obvious tip-offs in trans women in future generations.
For trans men, going through a female puberty then a later transition means they’ll tend to be shorter than the average man (but, again, there’s such a range of male height they’re not going to be that obvious) with wider hips, but hormones alone will make for enough changes they they’ll be able to pass (with clothes on) because they’ll develop male hair patterns, deeper voices, etc. Trans men pass easier, even if they have later transitions. A downside for them is that, so far as I know, there really isn’t a great way to make an artificial penis for them that actually works.
But (again, in my very limited experience and knowledge) for a lot of trans people it’s NOT so much about the genitals as being able to live as their identified gender and be treated as a woman (or man) socially. Which is not to say they don’t care about genitals - they do - but the cis society all too often seems obsessed with what’s going on in their crotch rather than treating them as people. Plenty of trans people who have looked far more deeply than I ever will into what surgery can and *can’t *do for them, and the risks, have opted to go through life with the “wrong” genitals even while changing the rest of their bodies as a compromise they can live with. There’s a lot to be said for fully functional body parts - even if you are not entirely happy with them - as opposed to running the risks involved with surgery which can be quite serious.
So yeah, I get it when a trans woman will do everything BUT genital surgery - uro-genital surgery is serious stuff. And I’ll call her a woman and use female pronouns and treat her as a woman because what’s going on in her pants or under her skirt is none of my business unless we’re bumping bits. Which is highly unlikely given that I’m not sexually attracted to women of any sort. I’d rather her be healthy than undergo surgery because other people think that’s something she should do.
And I think I’ve gone far enough away from the question at the top of this post that I will stop here.
Very good post IMHO, says it all. We must be tolerant of people who are different and have different preferences but when they ram it down others throats and are downright bullyish about it, I have a problem with that.
It would go wherever the patient wants it to go. I’m imagining most would select the area between their legs where a vagina already exists or where you’d expect one to be. But that’s a WAG.
Obviously, nobody and nothing. A lot of cishet guys just get butthurt about the fact that many people no longer consider it funny when they try to mock transgender people.
It’s not enough for them to be constantly reassured that no, they don’t actually have to date transgender women if they don’t want to. If they aren’t getting approving laughter when they snigger about “chicks with dicks” or denounce transgender women as “not real women”, then oh noes and woe, they’re being unfairly oppressed by the PC police. :rolleyes:
Mallard, your smarmy homophobic and transphobic “jokes” are not actually distracting anybody from the fact that you’re whining about being “bullied” and insulted when nobody is actually bullying or insulting you. Nobody is in any way criticizing your preference for not dating women who happen to be transgender.
Your bigoted jokes about “transylvanians” and so forth are deservedly getting insulted as unfunny and offensive, but that doesn’t mean that you’re being bullied or treated unfairly. If it were possible for you somehow to simply express the fact that you prefer not to date transgender women without taking the opportunity to unpleasantly mock transgender women, you’d find that nobody here would be giving you any pushback about it at all.
So the only things that connect these men as a group are the facts that they are cisgender and heterosexual? Is there something about the possession of these qualities, either individually or in combination, that causes such truly despicable, seemingly narcissistic behavior?
IMHO, it seems a bit unfair to refer to these men simply as “some cishet guys”. By doing that, some people might associate “cishet” with inherently negative qualities.
Well, they’re cisgender, heterosexual, and bigoted against transgender people. I’m certainly not claiming, nor have I ever claimed, that being a cisgender heterosexual male person automatically makes you bigoted against transgender people. A lot of cisgender heterosexual male people are not bigoted in that way.
Well, I’m certainly willing to acknowledge that a lot of people who aren’t cishet guys, such as some self-described “gender critical feminists” aka TERFs, are also bigoted against transgender people.
But it’s the cishet-guy subset of the transphobes who seem to be most focused on this delusion that being rebuked for offensively mocking transgender women is somehow equivalent to being forced to date them, or “bullied” for not wanting to date them. Why is that?
