By David Futrelle
It can be hard to date when your hate gets in the way — and even more so when the people you’re most attracted to turn out to be the very same people you spend your life hating the most.
Consider a recent thread in the so-called Gender Critical subreddit — Reddit’s main hub for TERFs — in which lesbians and straight women alike confessed their love for “gender benders” of all sorts, from “cute” enbys (non-binary people) to literal men in dresses. It’s almost as if they have some sort of — dare I say it? — fetish?
“It feels like half the lesbians i find cute identify as some flavor of trans,” laments a commenter called leifteim.
it’s so annoying because it’s hard enough to date as a lesbian as it is without nonsense politics eroding our community
Someone called mouse-and-mouse agrees:
Every time I see a cute girl on a dating app she ends up being an “enby”
“Same here,” agrees –backdrifter.
So many of the lesbians I find attractive in my age group turn out to have a “gender identity” or “they/them” pronouns. It’s definitely discouraging when our dating pool is already so small, like you’re saying. It feels like there’s just so much bullshit to wade through when trying to date now.
The world’s smallest violin strikes up a tune.
Meanwhile, assorted straight GenderCrit women confess their love and, perhaps more to the point, their lust for gender bending guys rocking “guyliner” and sometimes even dresses. Just so long as they identify as men. There are mentions of glammy musicians from David Bowie to Trent Reznor to the guys in Motley Crue. There are several mentions of Irish actor Robert Sheehan, of whom one commenter writes, “I want him to fuck me in eyeliner and a dress lmfao”
“My bf wears eyeliner, glitter, sparkly tank tops, and and colorful leggings to parties,” writes mouse_and_mouse,
and I think it’s super hot and awesome. And he … very much identifies as a man (he finds the whole trans thing too weird to even contemplate).
GCnewb feels the same way about her crossdressing Nigel:
I love it when my husband wears dresses and other clothes that are flattering on him. (We’re a couple of goths.) If he started wearing fake boobs, acting like a male stereotype of a “woman” or trying to get in women’s spaces I would be revolted.
“I’m bi,” writes crustdrunk.
and both sexes gender bending is a hard swoon from me, especially if they have the confidence required to do so without inventing magical genders.
And so what if they do “invent a magical gender?” I mean, if you’re attracted to them, you’re attracted to them. What does it matter whether they call themselves male, female, or something else? What does it matter if their self-identification matches the gender they were assigned at birth or not? What difference does it make to you if a person you call a “man in a dress” calls themselves a man or a woman or neither?
What would be the problem if one of GenderCrit Reddit’s proud lesbians were to date one of those “cute girls” who identifies as nonbinary? Or if GCnewb’s dress-wearing hubby were to come out as trans?
Might it inspire some GenderCrits to reexamine their views of gender — and possibly even of their own sexuality? Or would they refuse this sort of self-examination, much like the (fictional) gentleman who wrote the famous Onion article “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?“
For now, it looks like the GenderCrits are going to continue to traverse this second route. Shame.
H/T — r/GenderCynical
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Not to mention many of the comic book heroes got their starts fighting fascists. Captain America and Wonder Woman, for starters.
Sorta O/T: In her new Netflix special, comedian Hannah Gadsby called Hermione from Harry Potter a TERF. Internet TERFs are very mad about this and wrote an open letter to Hannah (and are also not-very-subtly calling her a man).
I haven’t seen the special yet, but I’ve enjoyed Hannah’s other shows so I look forward to checking it out.
@Naglfar
Mr. Parasol and I watched that earlier this week. It’s enjoyable. Much less heavy than her Nanette show, and I geeked out over the structure.
I am still agog about TERFs insisting that trans* women are straight men who want to jump their irresistible lesbonic bones, while cisgender heterosexual men insist that they’re gay men who want to jump their irresistible manly-man bones.
It must be a trial and a tribulation being such an object of objectionable lust.
@Robert
You have no idea….
There is a fraction of a good point buried in all that trash.
Various gender identities are defined largely in their relationship to the most common genders.
If people just forgot about all the social constructs and just “let it happen” people would just do what they do without over-analyzing or arguing about genre like a bunch of metalheads arguing over whether a song is Death Metal, Doom Metal or Sludge Metal.
Years ago, when I was a Yahoo Answers wiseass conservative trolls would post questions like “Hey Libtards, how many genders are there?”
I would answer, in wiseass fashion.
“There are two genders. We can refer to them as Gender A and Gender B.
Gender A can love, have sex with or have any number of possible relationships with Gender A or Gender B. Gender A can freely dress as, act like, imitate or attempt to become Gender B to the extent of their desires.
Meanwhile Gender B can love, have sex with or have any number of possible relationships with Gender A or Gender B. Gender B can freely dress as, act like, imitate or attempt to become Gender A to the extent of their desires.
How many genders do YOU think there are?”
Yes, the answer was engineered to screw with conservative trolls and bigots, but there is a certain efficient elegance in such a context.
@Fenton
I feel like that answer lacks the truth that many people aren’t either 100% A or B and are neither, both, or change between them. Instead of framing it as a fixed number of genders (which seems to be the fallacy of many conservatives) I would answer by saying gender is a complex interaction of social factors and ideas and people can identify and present in virtually unlimited ways. The precise number of genders is not important, any more than the precise number of colors or shapes.
Uh yeah, the idea of only two genders is almost as historically recent as the idea of transness. Multiple genders are prolific in human history and in modern cultures outside whiteness, and also importantly are not the same as “trans masc”, “trans fem”, “nonbinary”, “agender” etc.
Gender is even more variable and complicated than biological sex. Which is saying something.
@Cyborgette
Of note is that the idea of 2 immutable genders assigned at birth is very much a white European idea and its imposition on other cultures is an example of colonialism. This is why it especially rubs me the wrong way when white TERFs say that trans* women are “colonizing” womanhood: because a forced gender binary is a white supremacist colonialist idea.