#tldr trans women are women but trans exclusion alone is not enough for me to disregard EVERYTHING a woman has said about feminism

[thehours2002]

https://www.tumblr.com/thehours2002/756728210905088000?source=share

op of this post is a pretty obvious terf from just a casual glance at their blog, and Julie Bindel is one of the most outspoken and visible opponents of trans rights in the UK right now

Listen, I appreciate your intent here, but I don't find it productive to immediately and completely dismiss all the ideas of people who I have political or ideological disagreements with. If this is how we went about things then we wouldn't read a lot of important feminist thinkers who made both important contributions to feminist discourse and major missteps.

Bindel's advocacy against trans rights, of course, gives me pause, but if your intention in telling me this was to get me to delete the excerpt I posted, I'm not going to do that just because I disagree with Bindel on other issues.

I know I don't have to justify myself to this extent, but people are very quick to write off anyone who doesn't block and move on as transphobic. So, I hope followers and mutuals who have been following me for a while are familiar enough with my convictions to recognize that just because I leave up a passage that is sex work critical (because i agree with it, or find it worth reflecting on) doesn't mean that i endorse every viewpoint the author expresses in the book it comes from or that i condone her trans exclusive radical feminism.

You actually prompted me to seek out some reviews of the book in academic journals and I am interested in what she has to say about the oppression and violence that "women (as a sex class)" experience. However, some of the violence that she claims is directly tied to "female" biology—like rape, for example—is actually very likely to be experienced by trans women. It seems like one of Bindel's main priorities is the reduction of male violence, but I would argue that cis women and trans women are united in their susceptibility to male violence. one could argue that vulnerability to male violence is a precondition of womanhood, and by that rubric both cis women and trans women necessarily fall under the category of "woman."

[koncreates]

this is a real question and not trying to be mocking, feel free to not post if u dont want and discourse ((if this counts as it)) but is it transphobic to not want to date//have a sexual relationship a, lets say a transwomen, while being a lesbian because youre not... attracted to dick? if that makes sense? not that youre denying shes a women, but u dont like dick? im sorry if this is wrong. im just wondering

I am extremely not an authority on this since I neither have a penis nor am a lesbian, and I will be honest that this ask sounds a fuckton like bait to get me to say something transphobic or lesbophobic.  But, like a fool hoping that it is a genuine question and giving you the benefit of the doubt, I’m going to do my level best to answer it for you!

Just to set the record straight: i’m a transmasc dude who does not experience sexual attraction or desire, in a relationship with a nonbinary person who DOES experience sexual attraction and desire.  While that’s... almost the exact opposite of what you’re asking about, I think there’s potential that i can offer a little insight.  

First of all: People should be romantically (i.e. wanting to date, if you experience romantic attraction) people to you first and foremost, not genitals.  Personality traits and hobbies and quirks and favorite colors and the sound of a laugh and the look of a smile, not a penis or vagina.

If you meet a girl and you like to hang out with her, and want to date her, but learn she is transgender and immediately recoil and lose all the attraction or positive feeling you had for her based on her personality, looks, interests, ect before knowing intimate details such as her genitalia or medical history, then yes, I would say that is transphobic. (Bolded for ease of TLDR)  

She wasn’t fooling you with being trans.  You were attracted to her just the same way you would be attracted to a cis person.  The fact that she didn’t start a conversation with “Hello, I have a penis actually” is exactly the same as how you don’t start conversations with “Hello, I don’t shave my pubic hair actually” or “Hello, I have a genetic predisposition to strokes from my mother’s side of the family.”  It is intimate information that you don’t usually share unless you are close with someone and believe you can trust them.  

HOWEVER.  The act alone of not wanting to have sex with a penis does not make you transphobic.  I will talk more on this a bit further down.

Now here’s a pitfall I think people fall in to a lot: If you find someone unattractive because of their looks, personality, politics, or whatever reason you are not attracted to them, you aren’t required to date them.  You don’t have to give a reason why you don’t want to date them, and it’s generally seen as the right thing to do that if someone who does not fit your standards of attractive asks you out, you politely turn them down.  You should never feel pressured into any relationship, and if anyone hounds you for an answer as to why you don’t want to date, that’s on them.  If you don’t know someone/don’t like their personality/don’t feel romantically attracted to them, you are not required to date them!  

Nobody is required to find any one thing attractive, but boiling a person’s entire identity down to what is in their pants is in essence dehumanizing.  An intersex girl might have a dick as well, would you feel the same way when you found out, or is it the transgender title that gets to you?  I’m not trying to be accusatory, but it’s a very important factor to think about.

If your only reason to not date someone is “she’s trans” it does still make you transphobic.  If this is the case, I really encourage you to think about why exactly you believe this.  If, according to all your other standards, you would date her, why does her being transgender matter to you?

From the letter of your ask, it sounds like you would be fine dating a girl if she had bottom surgery.  That’s intimate knowledge that you would probably only learn after dating her for a while or at the very least being friends with her for longer.  Would her status of having had surgery or not having had surgery affect your feelings for her?  I’m not saying that she would or should keep being trans a secret from you for a long time during dating, but the main takeaway here is “Would you feel revolted immediately just by hearing her say she was trans?  Would you be constantly wondering about if she had or hadn’t gotten surgery?”

I Hope this next section will be very helpful to answering your question and hopefully easing some of your fears about dating a trans person.

There is a lot more to dating than having sex, and there’s a lot more to sex than genital on genital contact!  You can go on dates and can enjoy each other’s company, you can have long talks and get sentimental, you can go out to dinner and watch lights on the water by the beach.  There is plenty to a relationship that is not sexual, and even without being asexual I think it’s an important thing to make sure you don’t form a relationship souly on the basis of sexual actions.

With that being said, there are plenty of sexual things you can do that don’t require penis-in-vagina contact?  If her penis makes you uncomfortable by existing (and if she’s dysphoric, she might feel similarly), it’s a conversation that you should have when you get to that point in your relationship.  If after dating her for a while yall decide to have sex, you should discuss ways that don’t involve penetration and don’t involve you giving her oral and, just like in any other relationship, it’s important to express boundaries.  You can figure out toys that you enjoy using on her, you can find toys you enjoy when she uses on you.  You can figure out plenty of ways to satisfy each other that do not involve touching her penis and either making you uncomfortable or her dysphoric.  It just takes communication.  

Most trans people (including myself) are ready and open for conversations like this from our significant others.  We want happy relationships, and we know that requires communication.  I don’t think your girlfriend is going to react to you saying “I’m uncomfortable with the idea of penetration/touching your penis” with rage and vitriol.  She shouldn’t, in fact.  It’s the same as if I said to my partner “I’m uncomfortable with the idea of you eating me out”.  It’s a boundary that you should share and that she should listen to.  

If you’ve been together for (however long it takes you to want to sleep with someone you date) you should both be comfortable enough with each other to act like the adults you are and have a conversation with one another.  

If any transwomen following me have something to add on or correct me on, please feel free.  Like I said, I’m a transman, and my experiences are vastly different from what theirs might be.  I am absolutely not a scholarly source to get information from.  I’m just, quite literally, some guy.  These are just my opinions based on what I’ve seen said by transwomen and lesbians.  To get a better perspective on this, you should really find a transwoman to ask off anon.

I tried to be general and think about this from the perspective of if it were “My boyfriend is uncomfortable with me having a vagina”, but there is a lot of room for error there as well.  So again, transwomen and NB people with dicks and trans lesbians and cis lesbians with trans girlfriends please feel free to add on your take and personal perspective!!

Also TERFs/SWERFs/RADFEM/Transphobes do NOT fucking touch this post or get blocked on sight.

Trumeds should also watch their step because i do not take kindly to your exclusion.

[zvezdanaaaaaaaaa]

Pan lesbian here! The twitter post Ill link after this is pretty thorough and a good explanation, but as a tldr: Lesbian was originally an umbrella term for wlw/wlnb/nblw/nblnb, whether or not theyre exclusively attracted to women/"feminine-aligned" nonbinary people. Just like how a bi/pan/etc man could call himself gay to focus on that aspect of his attraction. Lesbian only stopped being usually understood as an umbrella term because of political lesbians, terfs, gold star lesbians, etc. wanting to remove trans and mspec people from the community. A lot of older queer people would definitely be familiar with the term bi lesbian.

There are a lot of reasons someone could identify as a bi/pan/etc lesbian. They could be using the split attraction model and shortening (bi/pan/etc)romantic homosexual or homoromantic (bi/pan/etc)sexual. They could be bi/pan/etc with a preference. They could also just want a more specific label, because bi and a lot of other mspec labels alone could mean a man whos not attracted to women at all, and pan still doesnt say anything about the individuals gender. Bi lesbian could also be someone attracted to women and also enbies who arent included in lesbian, who still wants to make the women-attracted part of their identity known, but also doesnt misgender people. I might be leaving some possible meanings out, sorry if I did. Its hard to make a comprehensive list!

If this isnt clear enough, Im willing to explain it to you more! As long as youre not intentionally rude to me or anything (which Im mostly worried about because its so bad on twitter), I dont mind explaining at all.

https://twitter.com/sayoantilessep/status/1268581873988644865?s=21

(When the post says terve or terves, thats referring to terfs, the term just isnt a good idea to use spelled normally on twitter)

can someone tell me what a pan or bi lesbian is without being like “ahsbebdkdi now everyone is an attack helicopter. stupid kids making up identities ahsjsnsndndkf.”

is it just someone who is romantically attracted to people who aren’t women but only sexually attracted to women?