CW: transphobic violence

When people get killed for disclosing and people get killed for not disclosing what the fuck are you supposed to do, dating is hard enough as it is imagine your life is literally on the line when you hook up or start seeing someone romantically.

As someone attracted to and has dated both trans women and cis women idk about this one. People can not help who they are attracted to

I remember in 2013ish tumblr culture it was like, social justice dogma that genital preferences were transphobic, without much room for nuance. And I bought into it, hard, and never had it challenged for years. Then I got into discord servers with a lot of trans people and started noticing that many trans people themselves have genital preferences. Especially common seemed to trans women who strongly preferred dicks, and further in particular transbians who were only interested in dating other trans women. I don’t want to go off listing examples because there are a ton of different people with a ton of different aspects to the minutiae of their attraction, but yeah meeting trans people with genital preferences, some stricter than others, made me realize that policing genital preference isn’t actually good. Actually my initial reaction when I first started meeting like, transbians who only want to date transwomen who haven’t had bottom surgery was to say “isn’t that bad because it reinforces the transphobic idea that there’s a difference?” But after a while of discussing it and self-examining I realized how problematic that is.

Of course, “I won’t date trans people” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with genital preference because trans people might have had bottom surgery. So a, say, straight man categorically dismissing trans women because they’re not into dicks doesn’t make sense because not all trans women have dicks.

But I kind of wonder what angle the tweet being linked here is coming at it from. Like the specifically mention the word “preference”, which makes me wonder if this person is in fact drawing on 2013 tumblr social justice dogma that genital preferences are transphobic. I have no idea, and don’t have the energy to read through the replies to see what in particular is going on.

Post-op, sure. But as for pre-op, some people just don’t like dick. It’s a sad reality :transshork-sad:, but people are allowed to have preferences. The good news is that it seems to have gotten easier over the last decade. As a side note, this tweet is a great example of everything that makes Twitter toxic.

not dating post-op trans women? sure, that’s pretty shitty

but not dating pre-op/non-op trans women isn’t transphobia, you can’t pick your sexuality

i hate this struggle session so much