If it turned out your partner was transsexual...

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This. I strongly disagree with the transgender thing. I'll leave it at that, since my beliefs (which have absolutely nothing to do with religion) seem to be the exception these days.

"Treat" in this context is questionable. No matter what someone goes through to "be" the sex they feel, they can never really reach that goal. True acceptance is only ever found in the company of other transsexuals. Well that's mission failed.

No harm? When the alternative is being taught and learning to accept who they are as they are (something everyone should do) and building on that, a truckload of false hope and gender reassignment surgery all in the name of obtaining the unobtainable is extremely f*****g harmful in comparison.



Oh come on, there is a world of difference between sleeping with someone and saying "By the way I'm autistic" vs "By the way I was born male/female". In some countries the latter might be considered rape by deception. (Not advocating the way the R word has been distorted in recent decades, just making a point)



I didn't label anyone a loony, it was a poor choice of example to retort the notion that someone presenting as a woman IS a woman. A better (sillier) example would be if I believed I was a cat trapped in a humans body. I could get prosthetic ears, stick on fur, a fake tail, whiskers, communicate in meows, attend conventions. At no point would I ever BE a cat.

Fortunately, this is untrue.


Why shouldn't an informed adult spend their own money and time on hormone treatment and/or gender reassignment surgery? What's it got to do with you?

Well trans F to M are a bit harder to pull off lookwise. So majority of the time I can tell they used to be female. Well Id hope they'd be straightfoward with me after we had been dating for some times. I would really depend, Id like to think Id be unaffected but I cant say for sure.

I will have to defer to the experience of others here, but my gut says that most straight folk are tolerant enough to consider a friendship and wouldn't cross the road to avoid a transsexual. However the idea of having "relations" with them is repulsive (just look at the responses to this thread). A cognitive dissonance forms in their minds, they can never really see a transsexual as the woman/man they want to be seen as, knowledge of who they really are lurks in the back of their minds. This is what I was getting at when I said "true acceptance" - they may well find acceptance *as transsexuals* but not as their desired gender.



Informed is relative, I very much doubt a doctor (who has $_$ for eyes) has ever told a would-be patient "look this surgery isn't going to fool anyone, any happiness it gives would be fleeting - in the long run you'd find much more acceptance as a quirky effeminate man or a quirky masculine woman".

You're right that it doesn't really have anything to do with me, I wouldn't stop someone who was dead set on it, but I still care when someone is sold BS. I feel the same way when women put themselves through plastic surgery, risking death and disfigurement for a temporary fix that doesn't address the underlying issues.

My ex boyfriend has been cross dressing since he was a child and at one point, it was his gut instinct that he ought to get a sex change operation...but then he lost his hair. He prefers the company of women, though does not seek it out very easily. Um...he is most likely better off having the "best of both words" as a genderqueer person, than he would be if he had had a permenant operation.

I don't even know where to begin with this, but I'm pretty astonished that you find nothing wrong with saying something so infinitely offensive. No transsexual asks to be a transsexual. We all wish we could have been born the way we wanted to, but unfortunately that isn't an option for us. The only thing we can do is have hormone treatment and therapy and try to go through life as smoothly as possible. I don't think that you understand that there is no other option. A lot of transsexuals who don't get the benefit of being able to go through a medical transition end up killing themselves due to the sheer anguish of having a body that they didn't want, and before you ask, therapy to try to make them feel 'at ease' with themselves or to 'cure' them has not worked.

I'll refer back to people who're born intersex for a moment. Some intersex people are unable to go through puberty, so they are given a particular hormone (either testosterone or oestrogen). They may also opt to have surgery to remove any genital ambiguity. They may choose to remove the vagina and take testosterone, or remove the phallus and take oestrogen. Should they be forced to keep being intersex, even though they may want to be either a man or a woman?


In the UK, gender reassignment therapy & surgeries are done on the NHS, so there's nothing in it for the doctors, really. They get just as much money as they always have done.

Physically speaking there is another option -- live in the body you were born in.

Psychologically this may not be an option. But you should understand that for many, many people, sexual contact with a transsexual is also psychologically impossible.

The right time to ask someone if they're comfortable with this isn't after the formation of a romantic relationship. It may not be the postman's or your coworker's business what sex you were born as. It is a girlfriend's or boyfriend's business, because they may care a great deal about it.


I don't get this. I get it intellectually, but I have no gut feel for why you would feel this way.

I'm a man that was born a man, and I'm fine with it. But I can't imagine not being fine with it if I was born a woman.

It isn't really important that I have a gut feel for it, since I know that transsexuals feel this way. Whether or not you have a gut feel for why someone would be uncomfortable with having sex with a transsexual isn't important. But you should know that quite a few people do feel that way. Surprising someone like that with this in the middle of an established romantic relationship would be cruel.

I wouldn't mind. But I really hate fake boobs, it look gross.

That is my answer...

Mine are real and growing quite well.

I find the notion that gender (not sex, but gender, look up the definitions) is supposedly determined by the genitals rather than the mind, soul and spirit of the individual. I have been and continue to be really good at predicting who will transition based on their personalities and world views. Body has nothing to do with it. I would expect aspies, having an inherent disconnect from their bodies would understand that basic idea?

...

April

As much as people say this, I am not going to live my life as a transsexual. I am going to live it as a man. As soon as I've got the transitioning business out of the way, I will no longer be a transsexual. This is the same for many people. And I should potentially put my life or chance of being raped at risk because some people would feel a bit 'icky' about going out with a transsexual? In that case, all men with small penises should reveal that to their partners too because some people might feel a bit 'icky' about that.


So treating transsexuals as some sort of undateable species of untermensch isn't at all cruel? All I've gathered from this thread is that we are:

-Deceitful
-Repulsive
-Impossible to form a relationship with (especially a sexual one)

Perhaps I should live a life of celibacy if no other human being thinks I'm worthy of a date. No wonder so many transsexuals kill themselves when they're faced with this sort of mass rejection.

If my partner was transexual I wouldn't mind. I've had a crush on a transman in past. I think I might be attracted to trans people but it's not something I've ever explored. I find FtMs I've seen beautiful to look at.

I'm generally okay in my female body (though I do sometimes wish I was sexless), but gender annoys me and I never want biological kids. The fact that an FtMs willy is sterile is a bonus for me.

Last edited by puddingmouse on 07 Aug 2011, 2:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I have no idea what you mean here.


Yes, they certainly should.


Point out where I said anything like that.


That's not what people have said. They said that someone who would hide the fact that they are transsexual from a serious romantic partner would be deceitful.


This was not how I said it.


Impossible for some people, not for others. There have been plenty of people in this thread who said they'd have no problem with it.

Is it impossible for gay men to form relationships merely because straight men exist?

Transsexuals are at a much higher risk of being murdered or raped.


Before they've even begun a relationship?


I never said you did, but you seem to be valuing the opinion of the 'oppressors' over that of the 'victims'. Say a person had African ancestry which wasn't immediately obvious, and when their partner found out about it, it caused them to be repulsed. Would you side with the racist...?


That's basically the same thing. Quite a few people go 'stealth', which basically means they want to be treated as the gender they feel that they are, rather than a transsexual.


Others in this thread have called us repulsive.


If you're a gay man and you go out with a man, chances are that man won't call you repulsive for being gay. It isn't quite the same for a transsexual person, unless your partner happens to be a transsexual.

Your original sentence had to do with you taking some sort of risk and asking why you should.


By the time it turns serious, at least.


If a person was revealed to be a transsexual in the middle of a serious relationship with someone who was definitely not ok with it, there would be a victim, but it would not be the transsexual.

You seem to think that people can be divided into categories of 'oppressor' and 'victim' by observing some inconsequential aspect having nothing to do with whether they actually oppress or are victimized.


If someone lies to a serious romantic partner but calls it 'stealth' rather than 'lying', they are still lying. I don't care if people 'go stealth' with the postman. A serious romantic partner is someone who deserves to know that information.

It's the sort of thing that I would expect to be told before a relationship became serious, just as I'd expect the person to tell me if they were autistic and just like I've always told boyfriends about my AS before things go too far. There are some things that the world doesn't always need to know about but a partner does.