I just have to remind myself sometimes that no matter what anyone else says, the way a piece of media makes me feel and the positive impact it has had on my queer identity is valid, and that tearing myself apart thinking I have to defend it or questioning my own place within queer communities is not at all important when compared to the almost tangible sense of 'rightness' that piece of media helped me to feel about myself.

I know this has been talked about to death but I recently came across it again and I cannot help but be simultaneously amused and appalled by this particular section:

Surprisingly, among the 127 participants open to dating a trans person, almost half selected a trans person of a gender incongruent with their stated sexual orientation. For example, 50% of the trans-inclusive straight women and 28% of the trans-inclusive gay men were willing to date a trans woman, even though one wouldn’t expect either straight women or gay men to be attracted to women. Similarly, 50% of trans-inclusive straight men and 69% of trans-inclusive lesbians said they’d date a trans man, even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women. And 33% of the trans-inclusive bisexual/queer participants said they would only date a trans person of one gender but not the other, even though one may expect this group to be attracted to multiple genders.

Surprisingly. Surprisingly. Are the people who push transgender rhetoric truly so disconnected from reality (this article is only two years old, so I don’t expect that this has changed recently) that they think people's sexual orientation and attraction dies as soon as someone cosmetically alters their body?

I was confused about this wording, and I figured this was just the way the writers of this report had decided to present the findings. Surely, no serious researcher would arbitrarily choose to ignore the fact that dating same-sex trans people - gay men dating trans women, and lesbian women dating trans men - is not uncommon. But lo-and-behold, from the mouth of the authors (I know it’s paywalled, DM me if you want the PDF, I might be able to arrange it):

In an ideal world, free of cisgenderism and transprejudice, an individual’s gender identity (transgender vs. cisgender) would not factor into whether they were viewed as a viable dating partner. In such a world, dating decisions would be premised on preexisting desires, such that an individual interested in women would be interested in trans women and cisgender women.

Ooooo boy, we’re starting strong. Three pages in and they’re already waxing poetics about a world where the gays and the straights have been moralized into fucking the sex they’re not naturally attracted to. Yeah. To these people, in an ideal world, gender identity exists, but not sexual orientation. And then they say transgender ideology isn’t inherently a homophobic movement. But I digress.

When a participant says that they would be willing to date a trans person of the same biological sex, the authors classified this naively as an ‘incongruent response’. Lesbians who claimed to be willing to date trans people were the most likely to fall in this category, and at least, the authors had a sensible explanation for this:

While one may be tempted to explain the high rate of incongruent responses among the lesbians in the current sample as cissexist, we caution against such an interpretation of these data. Such a conclusion would be overly simplistic and ignorant of the realities of lesbian herstories and the complexities of gender (e.g., Meir et al., 2013). While biologically determinist views of gender likely play a role in some, or all instances of incongruence, another likely contributor is the lived experience of having dated partners assigned female at birth who have transitioned either during or after the relationship, thereby providing some lesbian women with the experience of having initially begun a same-sex relationship that ultimately turned into a mixed-sex relationship with a trans man (Pfeffer, 2008). This experience or, perhaps just the awareness of the potential for this experience based on the experience of peers, may have led some lesbian participants to indicate openness to dating trans men but not trans women. In other words, the lesbian women in the sample who responded in an incongruent manner may have lived experience with having had a past (or current) partner undergo a gender affirmative transition, demonstrating how intimate bonds can often move beyond boundaries of identity (Canoy, 2015; McDermott, 2010). Indeed, past research has examined the experiences of lesbian women whose partners pursue a gender affirming transition while in the midst of a relationship, often resulting in the lesbian partner reconfiguring her own understanding of her sexuality and lesbian identity in an attempt to continue the relationship with her now trans masculine partner (Pfeffer, 2008; Riggs et al., 2015).

This, to me, is the most interesting, and saddening, part of this study. Not the fact that trans people aren’t getting laid. Not even the fact that the authors of this study calls a cis lesbian x trans man relationship a ‘mixed-sex relationship’.

To me, it’s how lesbians are the most likely of all single-sex-attracted sexual orientations (gay men, gay women, het men, het women) to overall an entire part of their core identity just to ensure their partner feels good about themselves. In other words, lesbians are far more likely to relent and call themselves ‘bisexual’ or ‘pansexual’ or ‘queer’, to renounce their identities as lesbians, just for the sake of their partner’s ego. Our love is so filled with self-denial and self-effacement, it’s astonishing.

And what’s most disheartening about this, to me, is that the rest of the world inevitably views this as a good thing. People praise lesbians, and also straight women, who choose to stay with their transitioning partners. Lesbians have a long history of gender non-conformity, so one could hypothesize that the reason we’re less likely to be fazed by a change of pronouns and some cosmetic alterations is that many of us find masculine females attractive anyway. Straight women who love feminine men are not nearly as ubiquitous as lesbian women who love masculine women.

But at the end of the day, my issue isn’t that lesbians stay after their partner decides to become a trans man. It’s that they’re expected by these partners and by their social groups to renounce their lesbianism as a result. This reeks of homophobia to me, and the fact that ‘reconfiguring  her own understanding of her sexuality and lesbian identity in an attempt to continue the relationship with her now trans masculine partner’ is not seen as goddamn horrific and wrong.

There is SO much more batshit insanity in this study, ranging from talks of masculine privilege. Turns out the report I first linked is pretty close to the original content. Academia is truly completely disconnected from the real world and the people that inhabit it.