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Aug. 6th, 2010 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yagathaiRecent 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Person or Lifelike Blowup Doll?
Date: 2010-08-07 11:20 pm (UTC)Then I asked someone I care about, who is as hetro as they come, the following question, "If you had sex with a woman and she later told you that she'd been born a man, how would you feel?"
He first asked, "She'd had the operation?"
I nodded.
"Then it wouldn't affect me having wanted to have sex with her. If I'd wanted to have sex with her before, the fact that she'd had an operation wouldn't change that."
And that's what this issue comes down to.
Are you having sex with a person or a lifelike blow-up doll? Under what circumstances is the sex occurring? In the case of the Family Guy episode, they had sex after a hookup in a bar. They liked each other, had a sexual attraction and hooked up.
When I saw the episode, I thought that Brian's reaction was over-the-top, but still in some ways reasonable. And your arguments all sound very reasonable on their face. Again, I came here to agree with you and it took some deep thought for me to determine where we've gone wrong with our idea that a trans person not revealing their genitalia at birth is wrong.
First of all, a trans person IS the gender that they are living as. A trans woman IS a woman. She feels feminine and to her, her penis is something that someone born with an extra finger would see that as: a birth defect.
If a man has sex with a trans woman, he's having sex with a woman. Period. He found her attractive enough to have sex with before he knew that she'd had unwanted appendages at birth - why does that change when he finds out her chromosomes?
If procreation is not the goal and attraction is present, getting upset after the fact may be something that's "reasonable" in our old-fashioned, misogynistic society, but it's not rape.
Unless Joe Millionaire is also a rapist? He misled women into thinking that he was a millionaire and you won't convince me that none of them had sex with him. Is he now a rapist for the lie? No court would say yes because it's assumed that you're supposed to be having sex with someone because of what sort of person they are, not how much money they have.
It's only rape if who the person is doesn't matter. It's only rape if every lie to get someone into bed is rape. And I would also argue that a lie of omission (i.e. not telling someone whom you're just hooking up with that you're Arab or trans) is far less than lying about marital status or yearly income or any of the other things that people lie about to get other people to have sex with them.
Your arguments that this is rape are based upon a flawed premise. The premise is that one casual sexual partner owes the other anything more than courtesy and safety.
To me, courtesy is caring for he other person's pleasure and not telling everyone later how good or bad they were in bed. Courtesy is NOT telling someone you've just met about the mostly difficult and painful thing you've ever done, whatever that may be. Would you tell a random hookup in a bar that you'd once attempted suicide or something else equally painful?
As for safety, STD disclosure is a MUST because the life of the partner may be changed forever. Having sex with a trans person will only change your life forever if you're ignorant and closed-minded about what being trans really is.
So I ask again - are you having sex with a person or a blow-up doll? And if it's the latter, which lie is the deal-breaker? Makeup to cover scars? Bottle blond hair? Fake breasts?
You have a decision to make here.
Do you care for the person or is every sexual partner you've had merely an extension of your own masculinity, an affirmation that you're a heterosexual male, or a convenient opening to deposit semen in?
Are you willing to really take a look at yourself and figure out precisely why you think that non-disclosure is rape?
Or are you just going to stay secure in the idea that you're right because thousands of years of hetro-normative thinking says that you are?
Re: Person or Lifelike Blowup Doll?
Date: 2010-08-08 10:14 am (UTC)Yes.
And the understanding of informed consent. Informed consent is supposed to mean that the person consenting is adequately capable of reasoning at the time, and in possession of all the relevant facts.
yagathai is presuming that the fact that a person has a hang up about trans people makes someone's trans-ness a relevant fact, and supports this impression of relevance by pointing out that lots of people have hang ups about trans people.
I don't think this works.
It makes the hypothetical passing-for-white bi-racial person a rapist in 1967 because it's 'reasonable' to suppose that partners might have a hang up about it then, but less than twenty years later the same act isn't rape because by then we're expected to have gotten over that shit. It'd mean that I'd have to tell anybody I picked up in a bar here, where people are often religious bigots, that I'm an atheist, or I'm likely to commit a rape. But I don't need to worry about that if I drive for an hour to the more liberal city down the highway, where there it'd be even more absurd for people to suppose that everybody they meet is Christian.
Bad craziness.
Speaking of, the stickin' it in the crazy analogy is really pretty good, because "I am schizophrenic," is a disclosure not so unlike "I am trans." It's personal and probably painful, it's not actually relevant in a consequences way where casual sex is concerned, it freaks people out, and revealing it can have very bad consequences. Trans people have fewer protections in terms of jobs and housing than the crazy, and both may suffer serious social consequences.
yagathai wouldn't trust most people not to steal $20, but does trust them not to beat up trans women? I'd trust more people not to steal $20 than I'd trust not to gossip. I wouldn't give my ATM-card and PIN to a one-night stand. I wouldn't tell her my mental health history or my trans status either. Those things are more powerful than my PIN when it comes to allowing somebody to hurt me and fuck up my life, and I can't call the bank and have them change that stuff, and in this grand old age of information I probably couldn't even undo that harm by moving.
So, this 'For me, trans is a dealbreaker so it's wrong of you not to tell' thing which sounds so reasonable ends up in the practical meaning that you expect people to give you a huge amount of power over them before you'll even consider sex with them to not be a horrible crime against you. You demand they restrict their sexual activities to those they'd trust with their super-whole-life-PIN, because respecting your personal hangups is a moral obligation that ought to limit other people's lives. That's not fair.
(And respecting that hangup is, in itself, a problem. Trans people are put in a really absurd position about disclosure -- don't tell people unless you trust them, because it's dangerous and they can fuck you up and it's just TMI. But don't take too long to tell, because they're liable to be furiously upset that you didn't give them a chance to reject you for the freak that you are before they became attached to you. What's a monster to do?)
Re: Person or Lifelike Blowup Doll?
Date: 2010-08-08 10:34 pm (UTC)