As you are

A little McKinnon for refreshment after all that Trump on crack.

 

You: “I like dick”

Girl with dick says ‘Hey, wanna date?’
“Oh…no…I only like dick on guys”

Guy responds to date ad: ‘Sup girl’ …guy has a vagina
“Oh, sorry, I only like guys with dicks”

Both cases trans people are left in the cold. ‘Genital preferences’ are transphobic.

But not wanting to have sex with X isn’t phobia of X. We’re not obliged to want to have sex with anyone and everyone, with no preferences of any kind. McKinnon’s assertion makes nonsense of both heterosexual and homosexual – it asserts that we all have to be omnisexual. But we don’t have to. We don’t have to stop having preferences, and we don’t have to have sex with “Rachel” McKinnon. “Rachel” may be left out in the cold but that doesn’t translate to we are all obliged to have sex with him if he asks.

I don’t think there’s a principled distinction between:

1. “I like dick, not vaginas,” and
2. “I like ‘real’ vaginas, not trans women’s vaginas”

If you think (1) is okay but (2) isn’t, I don’t think you can draw a principled reason, it’ll have to be ad hoc.

But 2. contains a lie. Trans women don’t have vaginas. They have inverted penises. Fun fact: an inverted penis is not like a vagina. This apparently comes as a nasty surprise to many people, but it’s true. Trans women don’t have vaginas, and what they do have doesn’t function like a vagina, so there are plenty of reasons to prefer a vagina to an inverted penis if vaginas are your sexual preference.

Y’all, I think many of you have let the transphobes condition trans women to vehemently reject this for fear of looking ‘rapey’ (which is NOT what the cotton ceiling is about).

You have a right to be loved and appreciated as you are, and people who don’t are transphobic.

No. You don’t. Nobody does. I daresay that formula sounds right and “inclusive” if you don’t think about it at all, but it’s complete nonsense. We don’t have a “right” to be loved. (Children have a right to parental love, or a damn good simulacrum of it, I think, but that’s a special case because the parents make those children, so they owe them.) If we did, what would follow from that? How would we police it? How would we monitor it?

We don’t have a right to be loved at all, and we doubly don’t have a right to be loved as we are. What if we’re smelly and bad-tempered and selfish? No. Love isn’t a right or a duty (except for parents), it has to have reasons. Different people have different reasons, so different kinds of people can find love, but that’s not because anyone has a right to it “as they are.”

I’m not sure I think McKinnon is a very good philosopher.

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