Between folks within our community
Even Adrian Harrop can see it.
I‘ve stayed out of a certain discussion today — if you know, you know. However, what I will say is that it’s so disappointing to see such disrespect & division between folks within our community. I hope that folks will, in the fullness of time, try to find some common ground.
There is always room for debate and disagreement. Everyone sees things through the prism of their own life experience, and often our individual “takes” will come into conflict with one another. But please — for want of a better expression — let’s try to keep it above the belt.
When folks make things personal, & make disparaging or disrespectful remarks about each other, it does nothing to serve the needs of the wider community. Indeed, doing so tends to feed ammunition to our shared enemies, who’ll have been gleefully observing this whole thing unfold.
Above which belt? McKinnon explains the belt:
No preferences are inherent and immutable.
Here’s the thing I think some of people’s opposition to this is about sexual orientation. I don’t think sexual orientation is inherent or immutable either.
Hear me out.
No seriously.
But it sounds like what homophobes have been saying to same-sex attracted people for decades…a small improvement on throwing them into prison, but still a long way from Not Telling Them Which Genitals To Desire.
But ok, let’s hear McKinnon out:
I think people bristle & boch at this because they think saying this means that non-heterosexual orientation arr not valid. No. That does not follow at all. That is not an implication of what I just said. It’s a mistake to think that it is.
Uncareful people I think that this is the same thing as homophobic people saying that non hetero sexual orientations are unnatural and so you should just change to being hetero. I’m not saying that at all. Kind of literally the opposite.
I actually think any sexual orientation other than pan is immoral because sexual genital preferences immoral. But that means I think hetero people are just as bad off.
In other words…everyone on the planet should get rid of genital preferences entirely, and that way trans people will no longer have such difficulty finding people willing to have sex with them. Seems fair.
I’m just thinking about all the gay people who’ve felt pressured to be attracted to their opposite gender but simply don’t, and have been bullied, ostracized, and killed for it. To then imply that their complete lack of opposite sex attraction is immoral feels like further harm.
Right? It’s fine to do that to “cis” women…but anyone else? Hey now!
That’s where Harrop comes in.
Same. I feel like I’m being labelled here — as a gay man — as being somewhat problematic or “immoral” for being exclusively attracted to other men. I feel like I deal with enough of that kind of oppressive & invalidating rhetoric already, & I feel somewhat attacked by it tbh [feeling attacked emojis not included]
Do you think it’s wrong for someone, who is sexually orientated to include men, not to date a trans man because he has a vagina?
If no, then we can stop there for now. If yes, why?
tbh, a guy’s genitals *are* a factor in whether I find them sexually attractive or not – in the same way that many other aspects of a guy’s physicality type are. I’d theoretically be open to challenging these “preferences”, but I’m not going to pretend it wouldn’t be difficult…
… the idea that this gets me labelled as immoral or transphobic is frankly, ridiculous. And let’s face it, if you’re making someone like me feel this way & start to doubt himself, god knows how folks less familiar with this discourse would feel looking in from the outside.
Or…women? How women would feel looking in from the outside? Is that relevant at all? Or nah?
Nah, of course. There was an attempt:
So now you know how Lesbians have been feeling all along. Congratulations.
But naturally it was ignored.
Yes, this may be the tipping point. The gay community has been singing hurrahs for trans advocates; now the trans advocates are telling them they have to have sex with people who have genitals in which they are uninterested, because otherwise they are transphobic bigots. Is the honeymoon over? Let’s hope so. I only wish it could have happened earlier, when it became obvious how the trans community was treating women – both straight women and lesbians.
I’m actually pretty close to the McKinnonian ideal in terms of my personal attraction, and I actually do suspect that homophobic social pressure keeps a great number of people from exploring their preferences, or perhaps even realizing that their preferences can be more plastic and varied than their upbringing has brought them to conclude. I think it should be uncontroversial around these parts to posit an ideal world where everyone felt free to discover for themselves what sort and how many partners and in which manner they might like to pass their private time, and where they would not be judged or pressured or injured for the tastes they might discover, develop, or repudiate. And I’m fairly confident that, in such a world, many more people would be bisexual (or, if you insist, ‘pansexual’).
However, it’s also been obvious to me that such a world cannot be built by shaming people into adopting a narrow, counterintuitive, and spiritual dogma. (Narrow, counterintuitive, often spiritual dogmas are often what keep that great body of potential bisexuals and potential non-manogamists from exploring these experiences in the first place). It’s putting the cart before the horse, if you will; attempting to build the ideal world by forcing people to adopt (a few of) the potential outcomes of the ideal, rather than getting the outcomes by building the world.
It was in fact this question which nudged me off the default slide into trans activism that so many people of of my general political and personal persuasions have taken. Is it transphobic for a homosexual to decline to have sex with a transgender person whose ‘gender identity’ purportedly aligns with your preferences, but whose body simply does not. As a bisexual, I do not personally face this dilemma, and so it might have been easy for me to simply answer the question in the affirmative and move on.
But I could not, and indeed cannot; homosexuals have suffered too much and for too long for young people to tar them with the brush of bigotry for simply being homosexuals. It was a splinter in my mind, which I could not work out, and which eventually led me to understand the narcissism and the nihilism at the core of trans activism. I can only hope that, at some point, that splinter will catch in enough other people’s minds that the fever will break.
Nicely said.
I don’t insist on “pansexual,” I just used it to cover every possibility.
Sorry for the implication; I meant it as the rhetorical ‘you’, though my style is pretentious enough that I should have just used ‘one’ instead ;)
snerk. The amount of time I waste vacillating between “you” and “one”…
I can’t see pansexual in my future. I have never once felt sexually attracted to a pan. Sorry, but if that makes me panphobic, well, I’ll just have to live with it, and continue using pans for the purposes I always have – cooking my food. Making me sandwiches, you know.
I’m not at all sure you aren’t being gold-prospector-phobic, there, Iknklast. You might need to check your assumptions about the many joys pans can bring you, if only you’d open your heart to the new experience.
Not the point of course, but “bristle and boch”?
Is that how the philosophical are spelling balk now?
Ben, that’s nothing, they spell ‘people’ folks (or maybe that’s the new word for the super-special-fabulous woke peo…oops…folk).
Two things.
1) This only further cements my hypothesis that the core of queer thought (which forms the basis of trans ideology, of course) is rooted in a default assumption of bisexuality. Bisexuality is the norm, and homo- and heterosexuality are discursively constructed. Those who have attained enlightenment can see that “any sexual orientation other than pan is immoral because sexual genital preferences immoral. But that means I think hetero people are just as bad off.”
It’s the same sort of moralizing that heterosexual people engaged in before. It all sprung from an inability to accept that another’s internal reaction to the world can be fundamentally different. They could not comprehend how anyone could naturally be attracted to someone of the same sex, so they concluded that such attraction was immoral, unnatural, and (crucially) volitional. So homosexual (and bisexual) people had to be corrected.
The only difference is a shift in default orientation. Now we have trans people like McKinnon with the same reaction. They don’t comprehend how anyone could be naturally attracted to only one sex, so such attraction is immoral, unnatural, and volitional. So straight and gay people need to be corrected.
2) I refuse to use pansexual. Qua term, it’s either useless or not at all what people want to say. If it is synonymous with bisexual, then there’s no need for it. If it is meaningfully different from bisexual, then either there are more than two sexes or we including nonhumans in our sexual menus. As humans only have two sexes, the latter is more plausible, but I doubt that pansexuals would admit to having chickens on their dating apps.
PANS BELONG IN THE KITCHEN
Hey, I only said what everyone is thinking.
Nomenclature: sex / gender – the body of redialc-trans arguments, focuses on blurring the difference between a “spectrum” and a simple biological dichotomy? Certain people are leveraging the decay of language, and the growing inability for people to reach cognitive coherence, in order to promote political agendas – political agendas are always about gaining power over others.
The problematic idea that society owes you something – even if you refuse to acknowledge your inability to contribute to society in a meaningful, positive way. The idea that others are guilty because you have not achieved something they have achieved.
The confusion of erotic “love” with “filial” love aka “sex is for children” (The Roches have a tune by that name that lifted lyrics from A. A. Milne, the effect is worth considering). On a less subtle note – how can anyone have the right to demand that others conform to their concepts of the appropriate danglieness/non-dangliness/tumescence /whatever of the bits relevant to anyone else’s erotic pursuits?
Maybe it all just comes down to the ever more prevalent misanthropic narcissi sm, or just plain old misogyny.
Me – Me – ME!
Wait: if it’s immoral for anyone to have “genital preferences,” then how come the wokest and purest folk (trans) are allowed to be “lesbians”? Why isn’t McKinnon calling trans-women-“lesbians” immoral for wanting to put their lady-dicks exclusively into biological vagina-havers who don’t want penis sex?
‘Now we have trans people like McKinnon with the same reaction. They don’t comprehend how anyone could be naturally attracted to only one sex’ I think in McKinnon’s case he comprehends it just fine; he’s a heterosexual man.
Is anyone out there trying to browbeat gay MEN into dating trans men? Trying to make them feel that they OWE a token boff to any such who might hit on them? Is McKinnon really just whining about being brushed off by a woman?
John @15 – I suspect McKinnon is whining himself, but that he is more than willing to use transmen as leverage when it suits him – just as PZ does. When PZ talks about the bathroom issue (this may have changed; I haven’t read him since he attacked OB), he uses transmen as his talking point, and puts up transmen who are very masculine looking, including beard. I suspect he finds cognitive dissonance when putting up a picture of an enormous male bodied person insisting on using the restroom alongside young women.