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Comment by shtps | Hacker News Reader

If I say I'm hetero and only date biologically born women, wouldn't I be considered transphobic and be ostracized by the woke community?

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I doubt that. Resonable people recognice that there is a diffrence between a personal preference of who to fuck, and telling others who they should prefer to fuck.

"Reasonable people" seems awfully "no true Scotsman"-y to me

But I don't know that it actually is. There's no “everyone will be fine with this” – implied is a “most people are reasonable”, so it isn't the right form of argument to be a No True Scotsman.

No, it's a simple inital assumption about good faith actors. In my opinion, this is a strategy that often pays off.

Some people would consider that transphobic:

https://medium.com/@QSE/when-you-say-i-would-never-date-a-tr...

Others would say they're not saying that, but that your preference is influenced by transphobic culture:

https://www.curvemag.com/blog/transgender/the-often-misunder...

I'm sure others would be fine with it.

I'm trans and I'd be fine with it and I think of the arguments that it's transphobic as misguided at best, malicious at worst. There seems to be a vocal contigent of transwomen who identify as lesbians who try to argue that a lesbian who is not trans and doesn't want to have sex with a transwoman (even one with male genitalia) is transphobic. This sounds to me like a kind of very, very bad pickup line.

On the other hand, I'd like to know what the OP, shtps, would think if they dated a transwoman without knowing she was trans and later found out about it. People have committed violent crimes because they didn't know, or at least claimed they didn't know as a defense.

So there is something there that needs clearing up. If you're attracted to someone and then later find something about them and decide you're not attracted to them after all, that's not the fault of the person you initially found atttractive. Agreed?

I want to start a family in the traditional sense like my parents and grandparents have done before me, so I would be disappointed to find out I was dating a transwoman. Similarly I'd be disappointed to find out if a woman didn't want children or wanted to live a lifestyle incompatible with my own. It isn't going to work out and I'd have to ultimately call it off.

It's not about 'who's at fault' really. It will sooner or later come up and it is better sooner than later for both parties. If I'm dating a woman and she doesn't mention that she already has children, which is a big deal for me, then we're both just wasting our times because that's something I can't compromise on.

I don't know why this even needs to be stated, but violence is not an option in either of these cases.

If you have these preferences then the onus is on you to disclose them. As long as you say "I would like to be in a relationship with someone who can have children with me" on your first date, and not discriminate between e.g. trans women and cis women who can't give birth, it's ok.

I have no problems with disclosing that.

I'm a little bit confused. At first you talked about "dating" someone, now you're talking about starting a family. These seem to be different, not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not necessarily identical, goals. Can you explain?

It needs to be stated that violence is not an option because many times violence has been used against trans women and the defense of the perpetrator was "I didn't know she was trans".

Sure. Dating is essentially the way we assess a suitable potential partner. The end goal in (hetero) dating essentially boils down to starting a family and this is also implied and assumed unless stated otherwise.

I guess nowadays people also informally call "having casual sex" dating. I'm also not sexually attracted to trans women if that's what you're getting at. We would not even be able to have sex.

Ok, we're on the same page regarding the violence.

I think I’m woke, but it seems obvious to me that everybody has sexual preferences that go way beyond the gender of their partner. Some prefer tall and dark, some prefer petite blondes. Some people prefer big black and beautiful. How can we make moral judgement about people’s sexual preferences?

I guess the alternative would be that you have to be willing to have sex with everybody of your preferred sex? Are there people who actually think this?

Well there's definitely some people who think that, they say as much on their videos. One I watched claimed the only way to get rid of transphobia was for straight people to understand that you don't get to care about what kind of genitals your date has. You ll find out in bed.

And that implies that gay people do not exist. A lesbian who says testicles are gross does not actually have a genetic sexual desire for biological women.

Interesting! Do I lose the ability to chose based on other things, then? Like, I prefer brunettes, would that be permitted, or should I be hair-color blind and just take what I’m given? I know you’re not an advocate for it, just interesting that some people hold this conviction!

I mean, you can decide if it ever goes that far, but trans people do not owe you disclosure about their genitals just like you do not owe your partners your entire medical history.

It's probably still the right thing to do, purely because the trans panic defense is still a thing and it would be unsafe, but I see no moral obligation here.

Do we not owe disclosure of certain things as part of our social contract? I would expect a partner to disclose certain things that are non-obvious, but potentially relevant to a relationship/hookup. But maybe I’m wrong, or painfully backwards. I would like to know, though, if you believe we owe no disclosure at all, prior to an engagement?

If you are not into trans women, the onus is on you to disclose that, not on the trans woman. This is because there is a long history of violence against trans women who disclose it, so as a cis man you need to do your part.

I think you might be right! I never thought of it like that.

If someone starts a conversation with you and then asks you on a date, you have no obligation to tell them anything.

However if a person driving a Ferrari wearing a 5k suit and a 50k watch asks someone on a date, that person may be under the impression that they are going on a date with a rich person and that they will not be going to McDonald's.

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with taking your date to McDonald's. Plenty of people love McDonald's. But it is not the same thing and that date may not go well.

Depends why you're saying it. Context matters.

If you're saying it to prove a point I mean yeah people see through that

No. One of my friend is lesbian and active LGBTQ+ member (pro-bono doctor for the one who needs it in her community now, that's what i mean by active), and she knows i only date biologically born women, her friends knows it, never had any issue with them.

I’m a homosexual man. I’ve been called out by woke friends because I’ve said that generally gay men are not attracted to vaginas. I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.

I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.

I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.

OK, but I'm trans and I'd say your "woke" friends are talking nonsense and I hope that they will all actually wake up and realise what inane nonsense they're talking.

Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?

What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.

Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.

My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.

Where’s the strong backlash against the nonsense?

What kind of backlash do you want to see? If we're talking about arguing with idiots on twitter 24/7 then I don't think most people are prepared to do that.

And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?

I can guarantee that the backlash you got was less about your personal opinion, but for calling a relationship between a cis men and a trans man straight.

It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.

I don't like what GP is saying either; it's sneaking some very judgmental opinions under the umbrella of "they want to force me to have sex with X", which is bad faith.

But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".

The problem is with the generalization, which is present in the entire comment. I can't imagine the original conversation was significantly less abrasive.

Generalization is the problem. It is not accurate to say that all gay relationships require two penises.

It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.

I can't believe I need to say this, but there are trans women with vaginas and without testes.

Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.

> I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.

You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".

It feels like a motte-and-bailey fallacy to me.

Attraction doesn't work like this. You're not attracted to chromosomes, you're attracted to femininity.

I could understand if you'd find some to most trans women not attractive, but a categorical exclusion seems transphobic to me.

There are trans women where you really can not tell, even if you're in an intimate relationship. At that point it moves from being a genuine preference to bigotry.

But I can see what you're actually asking: Is anyone going to yell at you because you're not dating them. The answer is no.

Unless you real question was not a question, but more of an implication that something that literally never happens must happen on a grand scale. Damn the woke mob forcing me to fuck trannies!

Trans women are "biologically born women".

As a trans person I do not believe in a firm sex/gender distinction. The evidence clearly suggests gender identity (unlike race) has a major biological component.

I'm a trans woman. What evidence is that you are citing?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/is-gender-identity-biologi... and https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/the-biological-roots-of-gen... are good overviews.

Case studies like David Reimer are pretty definitive, in my opinion.

The David Reimer case is not really "evidence" of anything. At best it's more like a hint or a suggestion. "Evidence" should mean there is a scientific theory and someone conducted an experiment to prove or disprove it and, hey, look at the evidence, it tells us something about the theory. The Reimer case was a complete destruction of a person's life, but it was not perpetrated as an experiment of any kind. Although if I remember correctly the perpetrator did claim he was testing a theory, the unethical and haphazard, disorganised way in which he went about it completely discredits any pretense to science.

So, other, actual evidence, please? A citation in a journal would do. E.g. Yu & Yu 2017 "Gender identity has a biological component" or something of the sort. Something we can accept is "evidence" in a mainstream, standard sense, not in the sense given to "evidence" by the internet, like "I know of something that agrees with my personal beliefs so it's evidence that I'm right".

Refusing to date the whole group due to a choice made in principle is obviously transphobic, by definition.

Not being attracted to this or that person is perfectly natural. Reminder: a lot of trans people "pass" perfectly.

"ostracized by the woke community" in another strawman.

Perhaps you want to date a women to find a partner you want to eventually have children with?

Yes but even then it’s not “I don’t date trans women” it’s “I don’t taste women who can’t give birth”

Then you should rule out the large number of women who either do not want or cannot have children.

Perhaps there's something else going on?

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