As a trans person just one for one showing the exact depiction a conservative would use for us in your meme is not helpful and deeply offensive.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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It's not yours but you're still accountable for promoting it by posting it here. It's ultimately up to you whether or not you personally find it offensive. However, I do think being open to community feedback and understanding why other people might be offended by it is important.
I think deep down they're afraid of "actual trans people" as displayed in this image because they're terrified of "accidentally" hitting on them and finding out they're trans. :/
I mean isn't that valid?
If I was hooking up with a girl and she didn't disclose that and she took off her clothes I would feel so violated
I doubt this ever really happens though
That's one thing, but I was referring to steps before that part. I think these people are horrified of the prospect of being attracted to someone and then finding out they were once biologically male so they simply push to make that prospect impossible. Everyone else suffers so they don't have to suffer any introspection. :/
I know you're probably not intending this but biological is so damn transphobic. I'm biologically a trans women. I was born this way.
I'm not sure that in a society that isn't homophobic and transphobic that this would be as much of a problem as we think. Would it be acceptable to be upset if the girl you were hooking up with took off her clothes and you find out she had some other kind of situation she didn't disclose? I can imagine many different situations, like:
- breasts are smaller than expected because the bra was padded
- one or more breasts were removed due to cancer
- ambiguous or otherwise "not normal" genitalia for whatever reason (e.g. there are women with multiple vaginas, for example, or women with very large clits, etc.)
- scars, burns, or other marks on the body that you didn't expect
You can think of more examples I'm sure. If you really think a trans woman is a woman, I don't think their genitals being in one configuration is that different than these sorts of examples - it's just another unexpected thing.
I think part of what makes it feel like a violation, esp. to so many cis straight men, is that the attitudes about genitals are so essentialized, it's often hard for a cis straight man (and people in general) to think the penis isn't "male" at least in some sense, and so on a trans woman a penis requires special consent and disclosure that we might not demand of other conditions.
Should someone feel violated if anything else is not what they expected on a woman's body? Why is being trans special or different?
All that said, we do live in a society - so disclosing seems like a good idea for so many reasons. My questions aren't meant to lead people to take risks, but to create clarity about why these practices of disclosure are necessary in the first place.
I wouldn’t feel violated if the person I was hitting on turned out to have a dick, but I wouldn’t have interest in having sex with that person because well I don’t fancy having sex with a person who has a dick.
Am I wrong in thinking this?
Personally I don't think it's a good approach to ask whether you personally are wrong or right for the way you feel, from my perspective it's a bit of a weird way to approach moral responsibility.
It's probably better to acknowledge the causes for why you or anyone else would discriminate that way, but to be honest this is not the only kind of preference that we could examine or think has problematic roots.
Are people wrong for not wanting to have sex with someone considered conventionally unattractive? Or what about my example with the amputated breast - would it be wrong to not want to have sex with that person upon realizing they are an amputee?
Even if we acknowledge there is some unfairness or problem with the way we feel, it doesn't make us not feel those things. Overriding our feelings and carrying through with something we are uncomfortable with seems wrong to me, for example. Especially in the context of sex where consent is so important.
So, I'm not inclined to condemn the individual for their feelings even if they are problematic in some way - we all have problematic feelings, but I am inclined to think we should examine where feelings come from and how society reinforces some feelings and not others, if that makes sense.
The responsibility does not fall 100% on the individual for the way they feel, since individuals do not have perfect control over the way they feel or how their feelings form - they don't exist in a vacuum where every decision they make is wholly their responsibility.
Instead if we think that discriminating on some basis or another is wrong, we live in a situation where we have to pragmatically acknowledge that people feel this way, and that those feelings aren't going to go away even if someone acknowledges the feelings are problematic. I also don't think it's useful to shout down someone with those feelings even if the feeling comes from a bad place or is wrong in some way.
That said, it's obvious that some people are more overt in their discriminatory attitudes than others - someone like Andrew Tate who is proudly misogynistic is someone worth individually denouncing since they embrace their discriminatory feelings and promote them in society. But again this is more about the influence on the social norms that are adopted by people - the focus should be on improving social attitudes, rather than policing every individual who is a product of those social attitudes.
there's also misogynist incels who think women have an easier life and therefore becoming one is cheating.
If that isn't true then why are 80 percent of suicides men
I don't care if they look like the person on the left. A person is a person, actions that affect others without their consent is inexcusable. That it includes a lack of acknowledgment because you don't "pass". All I'm saying is, please don't depict people who don't pass, as criminals. They suffer enough, as is. especially now.
I mean we can take exception with someone holding a bag that is tagged, "candy for luring kids." I can't think of a time when that could be a good thing.
Is it telling about my childhood trauma that I immediately imagined a priest holding that bag?
I also think the point here is considerably more nuanced than non-passing=bad.
I read it as a critique of how trans people are stereotyped as non-passing. The fact of the matter is, a lot of us do pass and go about our daily lives, and the average cis person doesn't even realize. We assimilate more often than most would admit.
So while I don't think there should be moral value to passing per se, I also think it's pretty fucked up the way we're all sort of stereotyped as being the most visible until proven otherwise...
I don't know how to say this without sounding insane, but I've never met a trans person who didn't pass.
This isn't because they're all beautiful. It's because there's a wide variety of women in the world and I've said this before, and I'll say it again- I think there's a lot of internalized misogyny in trans spaces, where there's this idea that you have to conform to some idea of 'beauty' in order to be femme.
A lot of cis women are invisible. That's not because they 'pass'. It's because they aren't remarkable. One of my oldest friends, who passed away recently, was a woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome. It's a condition that tends to make women grow more hair than "average," it tends to be coupled with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, which makes for a rounder body in some ways, and it's an extremely common condition. I'm not even 40 and I've had 5 different friends who all had it! It's super common! And there's this thing that cis women deal with which is, if you aren't pretty, you're straight up ignored.
So what I see, and I hope that this comes across as gender affirming, is that trans women are women, and they don't realize that they pass a lot easier than they think they do. Because you don't have to be like the woman on the right in the comic to be a woman. You can look like the person on the left, and still look like a woman, because there's lots of ciswomen who look imperfect in a lot of ways. It's just that trans women are harder on themselves than they should be, because they've been taught "women look like X and sound like Y and do like Z." And the truth is, we're half the damn population! We look like and sound like and do like everything! We just aren't on TV, on the radio, in the news.
I've said in the past that I have the bodytype of Danny Devito and it's true. And I definitely am not trying to downplay the extreme difficulty that trans women face, and there are some very obviously masculine things that concern them (such as facial hair, omg, the struggle) but my point is, it's easier to pass than most people think. Give me 12 hours with Danny Devito (and a talented cosmetologist to do something with his hair) and we can make him pass. He'd probably let us. He probably wouldn't even make a joke out of it, because he's a class act.