yagathai | (no subject)

Recent comments by Seth McFarlane, creator and writer of Family Guy, have caused controversy in circles where such controversy is wont to occur. You can read about it in more detail here, but the short of it is that one of his straight male characters threw up after he learned that he'd had sex with a post-op male-to-female transsexual. McFarlane was criticized for saying that he didn't think that this was an out-of-the-ordinary reaction for your average straight dude.

I got into a bit of an ugly scrum over at

redstapler's LJ, where what I thought was a productive discussion with

redstapler quickly got derailed by your usual-type flailers and shriekers accusing me of being the devil, so I was hoping maybe we could have a more civil discussion of the topic here.

It remains to be seen if that's possible.

My points, briefly, are that:

It is not unreasonable for a straight male in modern Western culture to be distressed upon learning that someone he thought was a ciswoman, that is to say a woman that was born a woman, with woman bits, who was acculturated as a woman was actually a transwoman, that is to say a woman that was born a man, with man parts, acculturated as a man who later got top and bottom surgery and is now a woman*.

It is, further, wrong for a transperson not to notify their partner that they are in fact trans, and not cis, if they can reasonably assume that the fact that they're trans might affect their partner's decision to consent to sex. In other words, their partner has to be given an opportunity for informed consent. Without such a notification, their partner is incapable of informed consent and that's wrong, because sex without informed consent is a form of rape -- in fact, it's one of the primary definitions of rape.

The arguments against me, as best I can understand them, are:

A transperson should never have to reveal their trans status because they are constantly in danger of being transbashed, that is to say, violently assaulted because of their transsexual status. Concern for their personal safety overrides any other considerations, including their obligation to inform a potential sexual partner.

If you have sex with a transperson and you can't tell that they're trans, then what difference does it make? You never need to know, and they never need to tell you. No harm, no foul.

yagathai is a racist and a transphobe and a homophobe and a terrible human being**.

Discuss.

*Yes, there may be ways to be a transwoman that don't involve getting a whole bunch of surgery, but this was the scenario as presented in the TV show and it's the one I'm going with here.
**For the record, I think you could make a legitimate case for only one of those four things.

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I would not necessarily say "revolted", but I would say that in this day and age most straight people in Western culture might not be turned on by, or might not want to have sex with, a trans person. It's an upsetting view, but I certainly think it's a realistic one as the culture currently stands. Do you disagree?

Let's take a look at it from the point of blondes and brunettes, right? You may have some guys that prefer natural blondes, but very very rarely will you have a guy that absolutely, positively refuses to sleep with a brunette, and if he learns you were born a brunette but you dye your hair he will kick you out of his bed (I actually know one of those guys, but I have to assume that he's the extreme exception). So in that case, the blonde has very little onus to check to make sure he's aware she's a bottle blonde, and the responsibility is much more with the guy, who knows that a lot of women dye their hair in our current beauty culture. Now if the woman in that scenario knows the guy's got such restrictions, I feel like the onus shifts.

But what if a guy is married to a woman's sister, but she doesn't know it? In that case, there's only one guy on the planet married to her sister, so all other things being equal she's got very little reason to assume that this guy might be that one human. Further, any reasonable adult male will know that a woman may have serious second thoughts about sleeping with her sister's husband. In that case, the onus is all on him -- in that circumstance, he knows that she'd want to know, and she's got no real reason to ask. If he's reasonably certain that she wouldn't give a damn either way, in that case he's home free -- but what are the odds of that?

The Jew/Arab thing is tricky because it's hard to know on what side of that threshhold the situation fell. Did he know she had a serious, serious problem with Arabs? Should she have had a reasonable suspicion that could be an Arab? I mean, if she met him in synagogue, wearing a yarmulka, maybe not. If she met him on the street in an ethnically mixed town, perhaps she should have been more diligent.

The thing with transpeople is that there aren't enough of them yet that it becomes something that most people would want to check for. If there was a one in five chance (for sake of example, and I'm not saying 20% is a threshhold figure) that your potential sexual partner would be a transperson, then maybe you could say that the onus is not upon the transperson to volunteer -- the "if you want to know you should have asked" defense holds water in that case. But that isn't the case. It's not a common enough scenario that most people would think to ask. Further, I think it's reasonable to assume that most people would weigh whether their partner is a transperson in their decision whether or not to have sex. Consequently, I don't think that it falls under the blondes-and-brunettes scenario.

Here via someone else; I have no idea who you are but you seem genuinely engaged enough to suspend normal rules about talking to strangers on the internet.

I would not necessarily say "revolted", but I would say that in this day and age most straight people in Western culture might not be turned on by, or might not want to have sex with, a trans person. It's an upsetting view, but I certainly think it's a realistic one as the culture currently stands. Do you disagree?

A decent number of straight-identified men prefer trans women, at least for casual sexual encounters, for a myriad of reasons. Julia Serano's said this in Whipping Girl, the patterns of consumption of porn featuring trans women suggest this, and creepy men have told me this, sotto vocce, on airplanes.

The thing with transpeople is that there aren't enough of them yet that it becomes something that most people would want to check for.

I don't know, I bet you've interacted with at least five hundred women in your life (http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html).

This is not to say that your argument is entirely without merit (although I disagree with you) or that I don't grapple with these questions of disclosure every time I accept an invitation to coffee. But you don't need to rely on empty thought experiments; we have data about incidence and reactions and related cultural artifacts.

A decent number of straight-identified men prefer trans women, at least for casual sexual encounters, for a myriad of reasons.

I think "decent number" needs to be quantified to be in any way useful for the discussion. Are we talking 20% of the population? 5%? Less?

the patterns of consumption of porn featuring trans women suggest this

Transsexual porn is very much a minority of all porn produced, though. There'd be a lot more of it if there were a much more sizable population of consumers.

I don't know, I bet you've interacted with at least five hundred women in your life.

1 in 500 is just .2 percent. There's a lot of extremely small groups of people that fit that sort of number, and which are so small a group that you'd probably never think to ask if a person is a member of such a group. Like, I wouldn't think to ask every woman I met if she was a Mary Kay consultant (there are about 600,000 Mary Kay consultants, which is about .2% of the American population).

I think "decent number" needs to be quantified to be in any way useful for the discussion. Are we talking 20% of the population? 5%? Less?

I don't know. I think some studies exist, but I don't have good numbers. (If the category "men who have sex with men but identify as straight" includes "men who have sex with trans women," I believe it's in the neighborhood of 5-10%, but that's the only one I remember numbers on.)

Transsexual porn is very much a minority of all porn produced, though. There'd be a lot more of it if there were a much more sizable population of consumers.

I could ask you to quantify this, too. :)

Like, I wouldn't think to ask every woman I met if she was a Mary Kay consultant (there are about 600,000 Mary Kay consultants, which is about .2% of the American population).

You also wouldn't be astonished if you met one, especially in contexts you would expect to disproportionately contain Mary Kay consultants. My point isn't that trans people are half the population and everyone wants to sleep with us; if that were the case we wouldn't have this problem. My point is just that this isn't as rare as

yagathai and others might think.

I think Yags might be one of the last people to have any illusions about how rare it is, but I could of course be wrong about that.

Pre-sex disclosure is unquestionably a tricky moral issue, and not just for trans people. If I'm in an open relationship, should I have to disclose that to every one-night stand? If I'm separated but not technically divorced, should I have to disclose that, in case the person has a moral qualm about it? Honesty is always good, but some of these conversations are definitely mood-killers.

But in this particular scenario, well, it's more than just a mood-killer. I agree that realistically, the vast majority of straight males are (at least) going to be weirded out by the idea that they unknowingly slept with a post-op transsexual, and that this has to be taken into account. But while acknowledging that, there is another angle to look at the issue from, and that is the perspective of the trans person (obviously).

If you're going to say to trans people that they must warn every prospective sexual partner they might have, while that might be a view based on our perceptions as straight males of what's realistic, we do need to at least explicitly recognise that it's not without consequence for the trans person. Not just the 'trans-bashing' risk, either. It must come out as somewhat psychologically tricky - there must be self-esteem issues, for one, in essentially having to warn people about who you are all the time.

I dunno. It's a tricky one. The only thing I'm sure of is that Family Guy really isn't that funny. ;)