(no subject)

[yagathai]

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.

Comments

[phonoirlex.livejournal.com]

The approaching man could more easily warn potential partners, "Hey, just so you know, I'm transphobic," and thus avoid tricking women into sleeping with a bigot.

Also, a fundamentally good person would not say, "no, ew, get away!" when told that one woman has had a different life experience from many other women. Emotional abuse is still abuse.