(no subject)
Aug. 6th, 2010 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
I got into a bit of an ugly scrum over at
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-07 05:24 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-07 07:14 pm (UTC)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).
no subject
Date: 2010-08-07 07:32 pm (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2010-08-07 09:13 pm (UTC)