Lonewolfm16 said:
snowfi6916 said:
Lonewolfm16 said:
snowfi6916 said:
I usually enjoy Yahtzee's videos, but his joke about transgender people really fucking bothered me.
Why? Because my girlfriend is trans.
I've told her how much I love her on many occasions. I had to have an honest heart-to-heart with myself, because I want to have sex with her and make her happy, but it will be a while before she can have her surgery (she wants everything, the HRT therapy and the SRS surgery).
So yeah, I decided that right now, her penis is part of who she is, and I want to make her happy. So yes, I would be willing to do that for her.
Obviously, I would prefer vaginal sex (I mean hell, she told me she not only wants a vagina for herself, but because she wants to "ride me so fucking badly", which made me blush). But it's funny... I don't like dudes. I like women. And even though my girlfriend wasn't born one, I see her as one, because she acts like one and sees herself as one.
So, I look at it like I'm sucking my girlfriend's penis. =)
Now, none of this has happened yet, because we are also long distance, so we have only talked over the Internet. But holy hell, every time I talk to her I get that warm tingly love feeling. Not just sexually aroused... it's more than that.
So yeah, I know this is the Escapist, and I know people will come out and call me gay for wanting to make my girlfriend happy because I love her. Don't care. I just wanted to say why Yahtzee's joke upset me.
Its not really a insult. More a observation. Sexual orientation is determined by attraction to certain genders. Heterosexual/straight=attraction to the opposite gender, homosexual/gay=attraction to the same gender, bisexual=attracted to both genders, pansexual means pretty much the same thing, but is more inclusive. If you are sexually attracted to a penis and male then you are gay/bi. Not a insult, not a judgement, simply how it is. I do question something though, would you be willing to date someone physically male, who also identified as male? If not, do you consider gender to be something more than physical, and are only attracted to people with a "female" personality or mannerism? Isn't that a little arbitrary?
Gender isn't physical. Sex is. When you refer to someones sex, you are referring to their physical parts. When you are referring to gender, you are referring to the non-physical.
Cisgendered means you see yourself as the gender you were born as. Transgender means you see yourself as the opposite gender.
Like I said, I'm not attracted to cis-males. I know this because one of my friends who I met at Bronycon is really handsome, but I wasn't attracted to him because he is strongly cis. And no, I don't think it's arbitrary.
Let me ask you, once my girlfriend gets her vagina, would that make me less gay in your eyes?
Who you are attracted to is based on gender, not sex. Therefore, I am attracted to the female gender, regardless of what physical parts they have. It's just that most of the time the person's gender matches their sex. In my case it doesn't.
Look, I honestly love her more than anything in the world. I know that she will never be able to have a uterus or ovaries even after her surgery, and we won't be able to have children together unless we adopt. But that's okay. As long as I'm with her.
Like I said, think what you want. =)
So, are you not attracted to people until you hear what they identify as? If you see someone naked, you have so sexual stimulation until you have heard whether the person likes being called he or she? If I was to show you a picture of a naked woman (or someone physically female, to be clear) and then asked you if you found the picture sexually arousing, then revealed that the person in the picture actually considered themselves male, would you stop being attractive? If it was later revealed that I lied about that, and she was actually cis, would you start finding her attractive again? What if someone identified as female, despite being physically male, and then later decided they were actually wrong about it and were actually male? It has happened before. If your girlfriend announced tomorrow that she was wrong about her gender, and was actually male, would you stop being attracted to her? This all seems really really arbitrary to me. If someone asks you if you are interested in sex with them, and your answer is "that depends, do you think of yourself as being male or female?" then your sexuality is really really bizarre to me. This is why I think orientation should be determined by biological sex, not gender. Gender is intangible, sex is very real and determinable, and I think this fits better with how sexuality works. Sexual arousal is largely physical, more concerned with certain signs of attractiveness that trigger arousal.
As to your question, yes, that would make you less gay in my eyes (though it seems to me that your sexuality is best described as pansexual, gay would be exclusively attracted to the same gender). I believe I have fairly solid logic behind that. Plenty of people are able to be aroused by paintings of attractive, naked women. And hentai/draw porn exists, and is fairly popular. Why is that? Doesn't our ability to be aroused by inanimate things disprove gender being a part of sexual attraction? No, of course not. If I look at a drawing of a attractive woman, and am aroused, its because I am straight. I see something that looks like a attractive woman and the parts of my brain responsible for arousal respond. I am not aroused by porn on a computer because I am attracted to pixels. As such, if you find someone attractive when they look just like a woman (cis woman that is) that is because you are straight. Or bi/pansexual.
Finally, I would like to make a point about gender. I understand that gender dysphoria is a very real mental disorder. There is some research to suggest those who have it possess brains more like the gender they identify as than the gender they physically are. But I find the idea of gender being separate from sex as odd. Sex is physical, determined by chromosomes and expressed as actual physical differences between the respective sex. But what is gender? Seems to me to be entirely a social construct, more useful for determining things like what pronoun is used, or how one is expected to dress than a unbiased observation of physical reality. I am genuinely curious, what is gender, if it is unrelated to physical sex?
Finally, I would like to apologize if I have offended you, as it was never my intention. I wish you, and your girlfriend, the best.
I guess I should give you a little history. When I first met my girlfriend, she wasn't trans. But she was really conflicted by feelings she's had since she was 10 years old. But she was afraid of what that meant, so she tried to convince herself she was cis.
We met each other on one of the FiM forums, and on those forums we have a LGBT thread, which she started reading. She saw that I was helping other people in the thread along with either coming to terms with who they are, or better understanding LGBT people.
She sent me a few PMs, asking about how religion views trans people, how she was Baptist and knew her church wouldn't like it. I told her I was Catholic so I understood, and told her my personal view on it. She sent me a PM confessing that she thought she was transphobic (which in retrospect was a result of her being afraid of who she was). I told her you can't force yourself to be attracted to people you're not attracted to.
What clinched it though was another trans girl on the forums who was posting pictures of herself going through HRT. She looked amazing, and I told her so. I also said that if she lived closer to me, I'd ask her out. So this was based on physical appearance mostly.
This got my girlfriend thinking. What she was afraid of was not finding someone who could love her even when she's trans. But I just proved that a cis guy could love a transwoman.
She told me in a PM how much I meant to her, and that she considered me her best friend. I told her she was my best friend too. I really meant that. Our chats felt like we knew each other for years, even though it was only a month.
She then posted in the LGBT thread about fantasizing about giving her friend oral sex. And how she never saw them face to face. Yeah, I was able to put two and two together. Her fantasy about me made her realize she was trans, and she came out after that. She confessed her love for me, and I told her how it felt to have her fantasize about me.
One thing that made me fall in love with her so much was because I have Crohn's, and I didn't think another woman could love me with that going on. But here was a girl doing just that. So I told her I loved her too. =)
So yeah, that's how it happened. She's a lot happier now, and not depressed as much (except when she's feeling dysphoric).
And no, you didn't offend me. But please understand, gender and physical sex are two different things. Basically, anything that is considered female but is not a vagina, breasts, etc. is part of the female gender. Same with being male.
If you got testicular cancer, or you lost your penis in an accident, and no longer had it... would you consider yourself any less of a guy because of that?
One of my female friends (not my girlfriend) is 21 and wants to have her tubes tied, because the thought of pregnancy scares her to death. Is she any less of a woman because she wants to be infertile and not reproduce?
It's the same thing here. My girlfriend views herself as female. I view her as female. So no matter what she has or doesn't have between her legs, that means she is female. I know it's weird to describe, but I can't think of sucking anyone else's dick but hers. Because it is still a part of her, and I love HER, not just her physical parts. I will enjoy sex with her more once she has her vagina like I said, but more than anything, I want to pleasure her and see her happy with me. So, if I have to swallow some of my masculinity, I will gladly do that for her.
So yeah, that's pretty much it. I probably didn't make it any clearer, but I tried. =)