If his next girlfriend is a cis woman
Huh? What? What have women done wrong this time?
Diana Tourjée@DianaTourjeeDear cis women, Your boyfriend & your brother like trans girls. When you find that out, I hope you remember what happened to these men after women in their lives shamed & rejected them. The stories in this piece are devastating, & sickeningly normal.
“This piece” was written by none other than Diana Tourjée.
It’s the story of Owen, whose girlfriend got so mad at him when she found out he lusted after trans women.
He’d love to have a healthy, public relationship with a trans woman. But it feels unlikely. He doesn’t really know where to meet trans women, and if his next girlfriend is a cis woman, he expects to keep this secret from her. The trauma of being shamed by his ex has marked him with paranoia. If found out again, he’s afraid he’d be ostracized completely, “scarlet letter style.”
Poor sad Owen! Mean Owen’s cis ex, who shamed him.
Owen is one of countless men who are attracted to trans women but are too afraid to say so publicly. I’ve reported on this for years, but the coverage rarely draws these men out of hiding. In July, though, an interview I conducted with four straight guys inspired many such men to speak up, across the internet, onto countless social media timelines, and in emails to me. Their reasons for hiding may seem obvious, a blend of homophobia and a fear of being stripped of their masculinity.
Countless, eh? That’s a convenient number.
Anyway, the point is, everybody is doing everything wrong, except for trans women.
Let me see if I have this straight. Owen mused to his girlfriend about wanting other people, other people who were male by the by, and expected that to go down well with her?
Also, Owen, just admit that you are bisexual, jesus fucking christ dude.
I hate to be That Guy, but you’re wrong here. Look at the opening of the article: this post is directed solely at women. I find that quite telling; according to the author, women are doing everything wrong.
Yes, but there’s some blame dished out to men in that last bit I quoted. Nobody truly catches on except sacred amazing trans women, who are like literal magic.
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh “your wrong”
Oops sorry I noticed that but somehow forgot I could fix it. Usually I fix what I notice.
… but.. but… trans women are 100%, totally and completely the same as those people-formerly-known-as-women.
So, if we accept that, as Tourjee presumably does, then what this says is that men who have wives or girlfriends may lust after other women.
I’m not sure anyone’s going to be up for a Nobel for that observation.
And, as Holms points out, telling your significant other you have the serious hots for a third party is very unlikely to go down well. So… was it that she objected to him telling her he was getting tight trousers over someone other than her? OK, even in the most committed relationships that happens – in a casual-not-going-to-do-anything way. Married not dead etc – but one might expect a degree of discretion, courtesy and respect towards a current partner, especially if he/she is sensitive to this kind of thing.
Or was it that he seems to be fetishising an entire group of people in a not-very-healthy way? Imagine saying you fantasized regularly about black women. Or Latino men. Or amputees. Dude, that’s a paraphilia. It’s very common, and is the reason for the category menu on sites like Youporn. You’re not supposed to transport that to real life.
Does anybody else think that this guy just went on and on about this specific fantasy? Was that why she kiicked him to the kerb?
And, yes, maybe time to own that bisexuality.
Plus “doesn’t know where/how to meet trans women?” Puh-leeze, do me a favour! I’m sure he’s quite capable of logging on to Google and finding meetups and other social events organised by the trans community. He can find lists of of lgbt friendly bars, and check reviews to see which ones are attended by trans people. This is not exactly rocket science.
Oh, and it’s interesting how much this resembles the “mighty whitey” story telling trope. White Dude joins another culture and becomes the absolute bestest at their way of life – “Avatar” being one of the more famous modern examples. Then there are the subset of trans women (not all, but certainly overrepresented in transactivism) who decide that they are the ultimate expression of womanhood. They are so much better at being women than those other people-formerly-known-as-women. So, it’s totes obvs that all the men will fancy them.
If transwomen are indistinguishable from nontrans women, how can someone be attracted specifically to transwomen? How could they identify that attraction?
I doubt many people, man or woman, would respond well to discovering that their partner lusted after other people, particularly lusting with intent. Why being pissed at your partner for you showing such disregard for their feelings and disrespect for the relationship is shaming, I don’t know.
The Avatar analogy is PERFECT.
Ha ha…no.
True in rare cases, sure. Something the average women will ever encounter? Nope.
The plural of anecdote is not data. I believe this study has been mentioned here before:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265407518779139
This is not the first case I have ever heard of where a man was either a closeted homosexual or bisexual and tried to hide this fact from the female partner for reasons whatever. Another big yawn from the trans cult.
Ehhhhh, I’m willing to acknowledge a bit of linguistic tension. We have three categories, generally (hetero-, bi-, homo-). When applied to a man:
Hetero—Attracted to Scarlett Johanssen not Ryan Gosling
Bi—Attracted to Scarlett Johanssen and Ryan Gosling
Homo—Attracted to Ryan Gosling not Scarlett Johanssen
But what of someone who would be attracted to, say, [*google search for transgender models*] Victoria Volkova and Scarlett Johanssen, but not Ryan Gosling?
I mean, we could set genitalia/reproductive function as the sole criterion for the standard categories. In this view, the person would be bisexual, and the “this not that” between Volkova and Gosling would be, I suppose, akin to any other preference for appearance. I don’t know that it feels intuitively satisfying, though. Maybe that’s because common use for sexual orientation terminology refers to the romantic impulse. Secondary sexual characteristics seem to drive people’s romantic attraction most of the time.
I’m just rambling at this point, and the dog needs a walk, so …
Nullius, sounds like we need another category. (One thing we don’t need is more categories, but…your point is well taken).
I’m pretty confident neither my husband nor my brother are interested in trans women (or trans men, for that matter). I almost wish my brother were; it would have been better for the women out there to have him out of the dating pool.
Speculating about your next girlfriend to your current girlfriend may turn your current girlfriend into your ex-girlfriend. Poor Owen, how was he to know?
Owen might just be what is commonly termed a ‘chaser’, someone who fetishizes trans women to the point that it disrupts their relationships. Trans people usually don’t give those kinds of men glowing reviews and recommendations.
Well exactly. The use of language by transactivists (and increasingly other left groups unrelated to trans issues) is positively Orwellian.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
***
You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
I agree. I have a very honest relationship with my partner – neither of us has ever believed that our relationship means we don’t or won’t feel an attraction to other people. We may even talk about it in a casual way (So-and-so is pretty sexy, especially in that outfit/that makeup etc), but there is a basic understanding between us that this is just part of being a human being. Neither of us can help looking and appreciating, but that’s where it stops. Maybe in the privacy of our own minds there might be the odd fantasy – but if so, that’s where it stays. We do *not* get extremely enthusiastic about a third party (or group thereof) and talk repeatedly to each other about them. A slap upside the head would be a mild response to such disrespect.
My partner is 54, and is a lecturer in nursing at one of the UK’s top red bricks. He spends a great deal of his working life with 18-20 year olds. He say that, yes, he can see they are mostly attractive young women, and that every so often one comes along who he finds very attractive – but he is able to compartmentalise that: to admit it on a theoretical level, but to maintain a disconnect between that and reality. It’s not part of his physical reality because, as he puts it, 54 and 18 – yuck, lecturer and student – yuck, and also gets him fired, and, hey grown-ass man here, not a slave to every sexual impulse that shows up.
Mighty Whitey is a very old trope – it was extensively used in the days of pulp fiction, and in the age of Empire. It’s significant because in it’s original form it was used to express and maintain feelings of white European supremacy, colonialism and, very often, British supremacy – well, British aristocratic English supremacy, anyway. You did get the odd Irish, Scottish, Welsh or working class dude, but they were generally a bit inferior to the well bred Hero, existed to support him, and were frequently the comic relief.
In the trope, a white man usually of aristocratic lineage, chooses, or is forced, to live with a non-European culture that is considered inferior to the European one, which is obviously God’s Own Chosen Way To Live. He may well come to admire certain of ther ways – more natural, more honest, less corrupt/decadent than Euro society etc (Noble Savage). He will adopt most of their ways, and pass their savage manhood rituals. Almost inevitably, he will not only learn and master a fighting style that the men of that culture have trained in since childhood, he will do it in a matter of months, or a couple of years at most. He will become the greatest in the tribe/village/nation. Most members of that community will then laud him, look up to him, and admit his overall superiority which the text, implicitly or explicitly, will attribute to his aristicratic European blood. White blood is just better than non-white, which, totes obvs, means that white colonialism is the natural order and all those darkies should shut up and be grateful.
It’s a poisonous trope, but it has produced some great stories of the Ripping Yarns variety. Tarzan is another example (Burroughs text states specifically it is his white blood, not his simian upbringing that makes him superior to the local black tribes). John Carter of Mars (another Burroughs), Natty Bumpo, Allan Quatermain and Sir Henry Curtis, the Tom Cruise character in “The Last Samurai”, Jign Dunbar from “Dances with Wolves” – the list goes on and on.
This is already essay length, so I leave it as an exercise for the reader, to consider how clearly the trans narrative maps onto this, if we consider biological women as the inferior culture being colonised…
Nullius, #11, I don’t think another category is necessary for men who fantasize/lust after transwomen but not over other men. It seems to me that such men are most likely bi-curious but for whatever reason (probably old-fashioned prejudices about homosexuality) don’t think of themselves as men who would sleep with men. I’d hypothesize that for those men, transwomen would – in the mens’ minds at least – remove the spectre of homosexuality that haunts them and stops them from acting out their fantasies with another man. By regarding transwomen as women with a difference, or ‘chicks with dicks’ rather than gender-switched men, they believe they can fulfil their bisexual yearnings without actually having to admit to themselves that they are indeed bisexual.
AoS, I think you may underestimate the effect of input confusion.
For example, let’s say Joe fancies women. So when he meets a beautiful Spanish woman at a cocktail party, he might imagine staring into her eyes over a candlelit table on a warm, Madrid evening in midsummer. He chats her up through the evening and is flooded with dopamine and adrenaline whenever she smiles. All that happens without any thought to genitalia. His brain does all this based on observable features that he’s put in the category [woman] and the subcategory [attractive]. Crucially, this categorization is not volitional. (At least, I don’t see how it could be. You may be a doxastic voluntarist.) Later, he finds that she is actually a he. He is now stuck feeling romantic attraction to someone with genitalia that genuinely squick, The strong attraction he feels otherwise may make him wonder whether he can get over the genitalia thing in just this case.
How many (and which) [woman] features have to be swapped for ones in [man] before the brain stops categorizing a person as [attractive]%[woman]? That’s really an honest question, because I don’t know, and I suspect that the answer would be different for different people.
Does this mean I think we need new categories? No. What I actually think is that this degree of body alteration is not something our primate brains are equipped for.
Nullius, we’re talking about different situations. Your example has the man become sexually attracted to a person he believes to be a woman and having to decide what to do when the truth is revealed. That’s not what Owen is doing. He is fantasizing about having sex with people he knows in advance are transwomen. An analogy would be the difference between discovering that the woman a man has hooked up with is bald when her wig comes off during foreplay, and a man having a fetish for bald women.
Not knowing what you’re getting until you get it is not the same as specifically wanting a thing.
While they’re not the same, they also aren’t obviously incomparable.
Here’s my thing. On a normal understanding of bisexual, the proposition “if P finds cis women and transwomen attractive, P is bisexual” fails in the case that P finds neither transmen nor cis men attractive. You’re apparently of the view that P does find transmen and cis men attractive, but he represses that attraction because of social pressure and conditioning.
I find explanations involving that sort of mind reading deeply unsatisfying. My cocktail party example was trying to demonstrate what I consider a rather uncontroversial point: The majority of our attraction processing is based on features other than what’s between someone’s legs. More often, it’s the shape of those legs that increases heart rate. If there are enough features like shapely legs, it is plausible that they could overwhelm any other input for some proportion of the population.
I agree with your point, but still think we’re talking about different things. Your example is about being attracted to a specific person based on visual stimulii. That’s a different scenario to a person fantasizing about people he’s never met, much less seen; it’s the concept of sex with a male-bodied person in the guise of a woman that’s attractive to him. Maybe he really doesn’t find men attractive; maybe he does but doesn’t want to admit it. Either way, his goal is clearly to have a same-sex experience that he can convince himself isn’t a same-sex experience.