There’s nothing wrong with not dating a trans person, which might be motivated by transphobia but is completely your prerogative. What’s wrong is generalizing about trans people. Trans people of the same gender don’t all have the same “parts,” for one thing. If you’re so prejudiced against trans people please don’t date any trans person ever, they don’t want you. What’s wrong is your transphobia, not the fact that you won’t date them.
And like, this idea that trans people are desperate to date cis people and are trying to use social justice rhetoric to make it happen is not only laughably off base, it is a dangerous and violent form of transphobia, especially transmisogyny.
To cis people who say this shit: You’re not all that. You could be the most attractive person to ever live, and spewing this kind of bigotry will turn any self-respecting trans person right off, not to mention most decent cis people. There are no hordes of trans people breaking down your doors trying make you date them. There’s just you, fancying yourself this amazing catch and trying to silence criticism of transphobia by getting super fragile and positioning trans people as would-be rapists–rhetoric that makes trans people acceptable targets of violence, that you KNOW puts them in danger and yet you do it anyway.
Because that’s the goal, isn’t it? The goal is to divert attention from your disgusting bigotry to making trans people even more unsafe, to make them too afraid to date or be sexual or to discuss the hatred of them and their bodies.
I see you. So please, by all means continue to be openly transphobic so the rest of us know whom to avoid.
Signed,
A cis woman.
if trans ppl weren’t desperate to date cis ppl, then trans women would’ve never invented the cotton ceiling or wasted so much time calling us genital fetishists for only being attracted to the same sex.
it’s weird how you guys always go for the argument that trans ppl don’t have the same genital configuration instead of explaining that ppl who aren’t bisexual will still date trans and nb ppl of the sex they’re attracted to. rejecting trans ppl of the sex they’ve never been attracted to isn’t the same as never dating a trans person. lesbians date trans men. het women stay with their mtf spouses. that shit is common.
The cotton ceiling is literally about this exact phenomenon of trans women being excluded as dating prospects because of transphobia. And no doubt there are abusive dipshits who use that to pressure/guilt cis women, but to generalize that to all trans women? Remember how I said what’s wrong is not deciding you won’t date a trans person but generalizing about trans ppl? You’re doing that right here. You’re also disregarding the fact that trans activists themselves have criticized the cotton ceiling and the term no longer has currency, exposing your contention that trans women are inherently rapists for the hateful lie it is.
How each person chooses to identify their sexuality is their business, and if a lesbian dating a trans man continues to identify as a lesbian and a straight woman who stays married to her trans wife still identifies as straight, that’s between them and their partners. Furthermore, straight women have in fact left their marriages after their spouses came out as trans women, so it’s not universally true that straight women stay with their transgender wives–there’s an article where a bisexual woman talks about her wife’s transition and the range of responses to a spouse coming out and transitioning (link). Even women who have always known they were bi and choose to continue the relationship do not have an easy time of it, as she discusses. I have also read of a trans guy’s struggle with his straight boyfriend increasingly losing attraction to him as he presented and passed as more male, a difficult situation for both of them because they love each other very much.
So it’s just not true that all relationships adjust seamlessly to a partner’s transition. Everyone in this situation makes adjustments in their own way, and they are not rhetorical props to use in your facile and false assertion that sexual orientation is always determined by sex assigned at birth.
L.J.'s Obsessions 