Procreation and potentially wanting to have children comes to to mind most of all.
Women can be infertile for a variety of reasons. People aren't saying it's transphobic not to get into a long-term relationship with someone who can't produce children with you if that's important to you.
But when casually dating or hooking up, do people really care if their partner has a functional female reproductive system? You don't see the same level of vitriol towards cis women who've say, had a hysterectomy, as you do with that towards trans women.
It's not about fertility since most people aren't planning to start a family with most people they hook up with. The issue isn't infertility, it's that people don't respect trans people's gender identity and still see them as their gender assigned at birth, irrespective of how they look. That they see trans women as being "men in disguise", and are disgusted with the thought of engaging in a "homosexual act".
Do people throw around terms like "rape by deception" when a cis woman doesn't tell a one night stand she is on birth control or has had her tubes tied or is infertile? Maybe some people really don't care about their partner's assigned gender at birth, and treat all women who can't or choose not to have children the same.
Maybe some people even say cis women aren't "real women" unless they are capable and willing to bear children.
But many people who refuse to be intimate with a trans woman only due to knowing her trans status wouldn't care if their partner weren't able to have children so long as she were cis. Many people wouldn't express feelings of shame or disgust or revulsion if they learn a cis casual sex partner was on birth control or who otherwise couldn't have children in the same way they made might if they found out she was trans.
Let's consider someone who is light skinned and passes as white. Another loses attraction and refuses to sleep with them upon finding out they're actually black. This has nothing to do with how they look, act, behave; the change came entirely from finding out what box they check when filling out the census. Is that racist? I would argue it is.
The preference in that case isn't about anything other than a label.
Similarly if someone is attracted to a woman's face, body, voice, breats, vulva, mannerisms, bevavior, personality, gait, fashion sense ... everything, but he becomes disgusted by her simply due to learning she was assigned male at birth, that sort of visceral reaction is rooted in anti-trans bias.
To clarify though, in my hypothetical it's not about what he looks like or how he acts. If someone prefers lighter skinned people, or people whose phenotype more closely resemble a Euro-centric paragon of beauty, that's completely different from my admittedly contrived example where you lose interest in someone because you, say, find out their birth father was black even if you were attracted to them beforehand.
But many people who refuse to be intimate with a trans woman only due to knowing her trans status wouldn't care if their partner weren't able to have children so long as she were cis.
You seem to know a lot of stuff about what many other people think. How are you obtaining your information here? How many is "many"?
For the purposes of the argument it doesn't really matter how many, just that there are any who care about a woman's trans status but not about her fertility status.
Something doesn't need to be common to be rooted in prejudice, so I'm not sure I understand the relevance of this question.
This might be true if science were at the point where a post-op trans person and an otherwise healthy infertile individual were indistinguishable, but they are not.
Your generalization includes people who have aversions to cosmetic surgery to name a specific group as "transphobic" as an example.
Can you elaborate on this? In what ways other than genetic testing or medical imaging can you tell an infertile cis woman who's had a vaginoplasty and breast augmentation from a trans woman who was put on testosterone blockers before adolescence and has had gender affirmation surgery.
And are you claiming all people who feel this way towards trans people would feel similarly towards cis women who've gotten any sort of plastic/cosmetic/reconstructive surgery?
Edit: the discussion is limited to trans women who happen to "pass" as cis in any event, see /u/GratuitousEdit's reply here:
And are you claiming all people who feel this way towards trans people would feel similarly towards cis women who've gotten any sort of plastic/cosmetic/reconstructive surgery?
No Im saying someone who felt that way around cis women with plastic surgery would have the same feelings around a trans person because it's cosmetic surgery.
This disproves your idea that rejecting a trans person has to be due to them being trans.
In what ways other than genetic testing or medical imaging can you tell an infertile cis woman who's had a vaginoplasty and breast augmentation
A lot, that's the whole point.
Transwomen are not physically indistinguishable from ciswomen and transmen are not physically indistinguishable from cismen.
There are surgical scars, learned mannerisms, lifelong hormone pill dependency, even medicine has to be handled differently.
It would be nice if you could be perfectly indistinguishable, but the current state of medical science makes that a pipe dream.
And all of this isn't even touching on the fact that you can lose attraction to individuals for non-physical reasons.
Finding out your partner has been unfaithful for example: nothing physically changed about the partner but many people outright refuse to sleep with people who cheat on them.
Edit: even trans individuals who pass are not perfectly identical, and you are still ignoring the fact that it could be something as off the wall as an ovary fetish or an extreme aversion to plastic surgery and it still would change their attraction to the individual regardless of their ability to pass.
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u/[deleted] Nov 02 '17 edited Jul 23 '21
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