And for the hundredth time no one is saying you have to date or have sex with trans women.In fact, if you’re that repulsed by our bodies, then please stay far, far away from us. Just stop pretending that “attracted to everyone except trans women” is a legitimate sexual preference that isn’t influenced by transmisogyny at all.
yes, exactly. and just wanna address one more common response -
“if you aren’t trying to force people to date trans women, then why would you even talk about this”?
Because those same underlying transmisogynist attitudes are inevitably going to poison every interaction with trans women. They’re rooted in dehumanizing, hypersexualizing, objectifying attitudes about us. They enforce and perpetuate transmisogyny and violence against trans women.
they’re also identical to the attitudes that produce chasers, the only difference is the specific levels of that fascination/repulsion with trans women’s bodies.
challenging our hypersexualization/desexualization is not about producing more chasers. if anyone DID “change their mind” as a result of what we’re saying, and did develop attraction to trans women, then ideally imho they’d continue to never touch a trans woman; maybe that’s overkill but idc really.
the real crux of this is that people don’t just HAVE these ‘preferences’ that’re shaped by oppressive values or some other reason (eg trauma), but they also then go on to announce to the world that they find trans women (or other oppressed classes, eg fat people, and/or people of color, and/or people with disabilities…) categorically repulsive and unattractive or unfuckable - like there’s literally no reason to do that that’s not rooted in animus, in putting people in their place, in publicly shaming and vilifying already shamed and vilified groups.
like hey, white women with bad perms resemble an emotional abuser of mine enough that I just couldn’t be with them. but (barring using it as an example here), I don’t feel a need to announce that to the world or act like it’s super core to my sexuality. if someone with those features hit on me, I’d just turn them down without naming a reason, and call them a creep if they pushed for one. and ofc ‘white + bad perm’ isn’t a marginalized class.
but when it comes to marginalized classes like trans women, people feel this need to shout it out to the world, and there’s a reason for that, and it’s not innocent. It’s transmisogyny.