Is It Transphobic to Deny Attraction to Transgender People?

Whether or not it’s bigoted to claim a complete lack of attraction to transgender people sparks has been a hotly debated topic ever since it first sprung up. This is a basic rundown on why I believe the answer is yes, and why saying “it’s just a preference” isn’t an adequate justification (and usually just a lie).

Starting with the obvious, a cisgender wo/man and a transgender wo/man are the same gender. Cisgender gay men in relationships with transgender men are still gay, cisgender lesbians in relationships with transgender women are still lesbians, and cisgender bisexuals in relationships with transgender people of any gender are still bisexual. To disagree is to misgender us.

Something many people should ask themselves is, “what, exactly, does ‘not being attracted to transgender people’ mean?” What are we meant to understand from that? Transgender people can be any gender and have any physical characteristics. “Transgender person” isn’t synonymous with “man with a vagina,” “woman with a ‘masculine’ body type,” or whatever else people tend to imply when making these generalizations.

Similarly, statements like “I’m not attracted to Asians” are virtually meaningless unless we understand “Asian” to mean certain stereotypes or at least one specific ethnic background. Asia is the largest continent in the world, its inhabitants comprising the majority of the world’s population, and it’s not like you can always tell if someone’s Asian. One should ask themself what’s so repulsive about being from Asia — or being transgender — that makes it a deal-breaker.

Many cisgender people hold assumptions about transgender bodies and use them to justify their aversion towards us, but again, there’s no way to tell if someone is transgender unless they come out. Even if someone tries defending their repulsion by saying “I only like penises,” some transgender men have penises. Some of us are indistinguishable from our cisgender counterparts. There’s a chance you’ve fancied a transgender person without knowing it; denying attraction doesn’t stop it from happening.

There’s also a difference between being attracted to someone and being willing to date them. Attraction is a subconscious — albeit also socialized — response to stimuli. Someone who claims to not be categorically attracted to transgender men, for instance, is more saying that they’ve decided not to act on any attraction to transgender men. Essentially, they’ll look at a cute guy, feel that spark of attraction, but if they find out he’s transgender, they’ll exclude him intellectually as someone they “should” be attracted to.

As commenter Michelle Paquette vouches:

I have had someone chat me up, dive into conversation, ask about family, activities, and suggest going out for coffee. A few minutes later, someone whispers in their ear, and there are many sideways glances in my direction. I never hear from them again. Some folks do find me attractive, and are interested in me, but only until they find I am a transgender person. Then I seem to fall off the face of the earth, an utter stranger to them. They clearly were attracted to me until they found out I am a transgender woman.

Of course, sometimes attraction fades after finding something out about another person, whether it be that they drink, they have certain opinions that are deal-breakers, or they don’t respect personal space. There isn’t much wrong with conditional desire. Still, it may be useful to determine what it is about one’s idea of transgender people that cancels out the attraction they felt beforehand.

Some cisgender people say that they aren’ t attracted to transgender people because they haven’t been able to form an emotional connection with any they’ve met. Though, considering that you can’t know for sure that someone is transgender unless they tell you or otherwise indicate it (e.g., by wearing a transgender pride accessory), this conclusion seems about as reasonable as me saying I’m not attracted to metalheads just because I haven’t had a good relationship with one (or any, really). Who’s to say the reason for those relationships not working out was their taste in music? Does it make sense to act like I’m no longer capable of fancying any person in the future who just so happens to listen to Venom Prison?

While people downplay attraction as solely individual and innate, markers of desirability are deeply political, shaped by our environments, cultures, and dominant society. The fact that society upholds the thin, feminine, able-bodied, cisgender white woman as the epitome of beauty is not a coincidence. These standards are put in place to enforce and “naturalize” oppressive beliefs. It’s perfectly fine to prefer tall men over short ones or refuse to date a slob, but when it comes to oppressed groups (except for women — it’s not misogynistic to be a gay man or straight woman), one’s alleged lack of attraction to them is rarely coincidental.

We’re all taught how to view certain groups of people, whether it be through media, literature, how that group is treated in society, what have you. Such instructions influence how we go about the world, even if we claim they haven’t affected us and don’t think we believe any negative things about a group. I can vehemently support homeless people’s right to shelter, but there are still many beliefs people are expected to have (e.g., “they’re creepy,” “they’re dirty,” “they’re drunkards,” etc.) that can be difficult to unlearn. Even as I do work towards unlearning them, sometimes I’ll still flinch when asked for change. That isn’t the homeless person’s fault, it’s my brain’s, and I need to hold myself accountable and continue making an effort towards increased empathy.

Keep in mind that the desired change in opinion from “I’m not attracted to transgender people” is not necessarily “I am attracted to transgender people” (which is different than simply saying “I find this transgender individual attractive”). You don’t need to actively find transness itself hot or cute or whathaveyou — that’s not at all what transgender people are asking from cisgender folks (or necessarily experience ourselves, either). In fact, it creeps many of us out when someone describes themselves as “trans-attracted” or “transamorous.”

We don’t expect (or really want) cisgender people to actively seek out transgender partners. I’m not even saying you aren’t allowed to prefer dating other cisgender people. Nobody can really stop you. We simply hope that more cisgender people try unlearning the pattern of viewing transness as inherently undesirable.

“What if I just have a genital preference?”

Whenever the topic of attraction to transgender people comes up, so do our genitals. It’s as if that’s all people think we bring to the relationship table. Generally, basing sexual attraction or orientation solely around genitals is rather invasive, dehumanizing, and a bit unrealistic. Nobody needs to see their perspective first date in the nude to figure out if they’re cute or not.

As someone who has actually has a genital preference when it comes to sexual activity, most people who declare “preferences” here don’t actually do that — they instead deem one set of genitals mandatory for them to maintain attraction. A preference implies an openness to multiple options. However, most people who say they “prefer” people with vaginas wouldn’t ever consider dating someone with a penis. There’s a significant difference between people like that and people who would be fine with any set, but simply like one better.

Considering most people’s conceptions of gender assign a set of genitals to each binary gender, genital “preferences” (though people so often treat them as requirements) arguably socially taught as well. People frequently employ them to “explain” their repulsion to transgender people, even though some transgender women have vaginas and some transgender men have penises.

Even if genital “requirements” were never problematic (in fairness, there are some reasons for “genital repulsion,” but they’re typically trauma-related and thus should probably be worked through with a therapist), one still couldn’t rule out transgender people as a whole solely based on genitals. To use such genital preference to say one only finds cisgender wo/men attractive is arguably inaccurate — it’s not merely the body they care about, but the fact that their objects of affection in question are cisgender specifically. Perhaps they should consider why this may be. It likely stems from preconceptions of transgender people or genitals in relation to gender.

Some explain genital preferences in terms of combinations; one may like W+X and Y+Z together, but not W+Z. In other words, the person in question fancies men with penises and women with vaginas, but not men with vaginas. In this case, I’d find it useful for them to think about why only the socially acceptable combinations feel right to them.

We’ve all been taught since birth that men have “Z” and women have “X,” a mindset that encourages people to misgender transgender people if we don’t have the “right” genitals. The dominant construction of gender necessitates one’s identity matching the general body type assigned to that identity. This is why people seem unsettled by things not “matching up.” Society deems people with a “mismatch,” as it were (i.e., one’s gender or appearance not fitting the pre-conceived notion of their assigned gender), morally wrong, confused, pathological, ugly, perverted, and repulsive to the point where it’s only acceptable to be attracted to us if one has a fetish for us.

Society paints transgender people as unattractive because our notions of sexuality were based on the gender binary. One crucial element of the binary is that it treats physical traits and birth assignments as determinants of gender. Sexuality continues to be extremely cisnormative, which is why people associate attraction to a certain gender with attraction to a certain set of genitals (even though, as many straight women will tell you, penises usually aren’t that appealing) and especially why cisgender straight men kill transgender female partners because they worry that such proximity with penises makes them gay. Transgender people become essentially “incomprehensible” in the realm of sexuality.

No one is saying that people have to engage in sexual acts with any set of genitals, whether they belong to a transgender person or not. Once more, nobody can make you engage with anybody. Still, people should consider if their proclaimed lack of willingness to involve themself with someone with a certain set of genitalia has something to do with the idea that woman = vagina and penis = man. It often does.

Conclusion

We live in a world that equates gender to genitals and insists that transgender people either have the wrong body or the wrong identity. Automatically removing all transgender people from one’s pool of attraction routinely stems from (transphobic) societal expectations of what being transgender means, what we look like, and how we function. It’s prejudiced as it often requires viewing us as internalized stereotypes instead of individuals. It isn’t possible to completely separate these mindsets from their political realities and implications.

We all should rethink our views on certain people and challenge our attractions to include oppressed groups which society teaches us to view as inherently repulsive. Again, no one on this side of the debate is demanding that everyone must enter relationships with members of any particular oppressed group lest they reveal that they’re actually a raging bigot — simply that they should examine the lens through which they determine desirability. Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell what is just a natural preference and what we’ve learned, what’s benign and what’s not. Nobody has to try to make themselves find people attractive. Nonetheless, sometimes we benefit from being a little open-minded.

For more on the issues with denying attraction to transgender people as a whole, click here and here.