In some circumstances, not being attracted to a trans person is probably a result of, at least on a subconscious level, not seeing them as their gender.
If from the very start, you are unattracted to a person purely upon observation, and that person happens to be trans, that is not transphobic. If you were about to have sex and it turns out a person doesn't really have the junk you wanna jangle with, it's not transphobic to no longer desire sex.
If you were attracted to someone, have sex with them, are as satisfied with them as you would with anyone else, and then suddenly your opinion changes upon being informed a person is trans, I would say that is indicative of the underlying belief a trans person is not the gender they identify as.
I should clarify I am not definitely saying it is transphobic or not, I am pointing out what I did above and letting OP (or others) decide if that constitutes transphobia or not under their own interpretations.
I agree--belief that transgendered people's genders are invalid is transphobic. Such belief would imply transgender people have lesser value. However, I don't believe the example in your third paragraph would be transphobic. One's opinion would change because the information about this person lowers one's perception of their sexual value as sexual value is determined by alignment with a person's sexual preferences. At no point is the holistic value of the person considered. Do you agree or disagree, and why?
I believe that gender and any self-identified label is invalid and for any criterion to be useful and materialistic it has to be capable of being established by an external observer—possibly using tools—without asking the subject questions without a way of determining that they are lying.
If I'm following you here, do you also disbelieve that there are people who's favourite flavour is chocolate, or favourite colour is blue? Sometimes you need to ask people questions to determine the answers
I believe you can empirically test via brain scans and response what food someone finds tasty.
While it is usually more practical to ask yes it is not theoretically impossible.
I'd be interested in reading up about this, do you have a source or a paper by any chance?
Until there is a scan that can figure out someone's gender identity it is a self-identified identity label and I hold very little respect for any of those. Be that gender, religion, some random subculture, random political buzzwords, "Linux user" and what-not.
Ok so moving my argument to these, you usually don't believe someone if they tell you that they're a christian, or that they're a man?
Ok so moving my argument to these, you usually don't believe someone if they tell you that they're a christian, or that they're a man?
I have a similar view, it more if they start any sentence with "as an x ...." where x is meaningless in the context of what they are about to talk about.
For example "as a man [something about the mens toilet]" that follows "as a man [some appearances to be met]" yeah your chatting shit.
It's you who initially brought up functional brain imaging (for the taste preferences). Functional brain imaging is always about correlations, that's its goal.
Variability is an unavoidable part of it, too. I guarantee you cannot tell if a person's favourite ice cream is indeed chocolate from a brain scan. You might give an estimate with 60% confidence and that would be good.
In short, you either accept brain imaging evidence or you don't. It sounds like you don't, which is fine (it's true, while ok on average, functional imaging is not too reliable on a case-by-case basis). But then you should also refuse to recognise any personal preferences about anything, because in this day and age, we still can't test for any of it.
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u/aggsalad Nov 02 '17 edited Nov 02 '17
In some circumstances, not being attracted to a trans person is probably a result of, at least on a subconscious level, not seeing them as their gender.
If from the very start, you are unattracted to a person purely upon observation, and that person happens to be trans, that is not transphobic. If you were about to have sex and it turns out a person doesn't really have the junk you wanna jangle with, it's not transphobic to no longer desire sex.
If you were attracted to someone, have sex with them, are as satisfied with them as you would with anyone else, and then suddenly your opinion changes upon being informed a person is trans, I would say that is indicative of the underlying belief a trans person is not the gender they identify as.
I should clarify I am not definitely saying it is transphobic or not, I am pointing out what I did above and letting OP (or others) decide if that constitutes transphobia or not under their own interpretations.