I don’t really know enough about or feel comfortable with this topic to comment on it, sorry.
neither a lesbian or trans woman but I’ve seen this question (which almost immediately turns into a nasty fight) spring up multiple times and every time the answer is the same –
if you are repulsed because of trauma specifically, that’s neither your fault nor something you can help, and is, therefore, not transphobia.
I’m also neither a lesbian nor a trans woman. Here is what I understand from what I’ve heard trans women say: The issue with saying you wouldn’t have sex with a trans woman because you are penis-repulsed is the assumption being made about trans women’s genitals. Not all trans women have penises. It’s okay to not want to do things with penises, it’s not okay to not want to be with trans women because you assume they have penises.
If you are a trans woman and you disagree with me, please don’t hesitate to speak up here or message me privately if that’s what you prefer. I’m always happy to be corrected and appreciate any and all input.
Adding onto this, there’s a certain entitlement displayed in such statements of “I’d never have sex with trans women, I’m penis-repulsed”.
Like, people have sexual boundaries, and that’s important to recognize, and sometimes those boundaries are over certain parts of their body and what kind of, if any, sexual acts will be involved there. I know plenty of people absolutely unwilling to partake in anal sex. I’ve known a number of people who were disgusted at the thought of giving oral to folks with vaginas and vulvas.
And in the above sort of statement, there’s a bit of entitlement that can be interpreted in at least two ways: “I’m going to have to interact with a penis”, or “If we’re to have sex, a penis will obviously have to be involved”. It’s a prediction that trans women will feel entitled in using their penises on this woman, or that the woman feels entitled to the whole of their sexual partner’s body in a sexual manner, and the fact that there’s a penis taints that all-access entitlement.
And the fact is, we’re NOT entitled to every inch of our partner’s bodies by default, and we shouldn’t expect that. Just like our partners aren’t entitled to do whatever they want to us without our consent. Did consent politics fly out the fucking window when I wasn’t looking, or something?
Additionally, there’s the expectation/assumption that trans women’s hypothetical penises are the exact same in function and form as cis men’s penises (I wonder where they got that from…the trans porn world, or the media-delivered assertion that trans women are really just cis men at their core…or maybe both!). Which, often enough, is laughably wrong. I could honestly go on for hours about this specific point, but I’ll save time and assert that those who DO hold firm that all penises are the same…they’re transphobic, and certainly transmisogynistic as well.
Not to mention that repulsion is disgust, which is almost wholly socialized into us. Which means it can, with enough effort, be unlearned. And while I’d never want any penis-repulsed person to have to interact with a penis, I would bet that a good chunk of them have transmisogyny tied into their repulsion of penises, and that it’d be important to make sure that goes away too if the person eventually does work at overcoming their trauma.
All of this, AND the fact that we may not control all our tastes or traumas, but our prejudices definitely shape them and we can definitely work towards unlearning them.
It has been pointed out before: if you get mugged by a top-hat wearing black man with a red shirt, blue sneakers, and a ‘I love NY’ tattoo, and afterwards you do not get triggered by tophats, red shirts, blue sneakers or NY, but you do get triggered by black men, that’s because racism has taught your head to make the link between mugging and black men. It doesn’t magically make the trigger go away, but admitting that racism build that trigger is necessary, as is working to unlearn it in order to not be racist.
The same is true when someone has suffered sexual violence from a man and as a result gets the trigger ‘penis’ no matter who own that penis. It means cissexism has taught your head to make the link between penis and rape, without considering that penisses also belong to women, in fact, to a group of women extremely likely to suffer sexual violence themselves. The link your head made when it set up that trigger is transmisogynistic. You may not have wanted it that way, you had no control over it, but it was shaped by transmisogyny none the less. And while you should NOT jump in bed with a trans woman to fix that (spare trans woman your issues, they deserve people who love them), you should defenitely acknowledge that transmisogyny shaped your trigger and that you can probably work to unlearn this.
Perfection isn’t the goal. Having sex with trans women isn’t the goal. The goal is not presenting triggers and tastes as beyond criticism when they were very much shaped by the society we live in. The goal is not spreading transphobia by using a word like ‘penis-repulsed’ or acting like all trans women have penisses or that when they do they are anything like male penisses.
This is a backup of Queeranarchism.Tumblr.com. —- Due to the back-up process this site currently includes almost everything I have ever reblogged, so click the text 'posts by queeranarchism tumblr' in the menu option if you want to go directly to posts I have written myself.
QueerAnarchism 