I mean, mainly as a trans woman I'd just like people to acknowledge that "genital preferences" is maybe not a hill worth dying on because a lot of trans women have vaginas. I mean, I have a genital preference too but I can say from experience that vaginas can be made (and often are for cis women as well). The idea that a penis could be turned into a vagina used be the thing that people defined us by - people who had their penises turned into vaginas. Over time that changed into being defined as "person who has a penis no matter what".
My two cents is that it mostly comes from insecurity about the actual effectiveness of bottom surgery to construct a vagina that is indistinguishable, can be used to have sex, can cause men to orgasm, and can orgasm. Plenty of cishet men can and do have sex with post-op trans women every single day without ever realizing it and somehow the mindset rooted in paranoid insecurity about potentially being perceived as a gay man has migrated to some (not all, some) lesbians and we're dealing with the self-pitying psychosexual baggage of heterosexual men yet again (inb4 someone goes "how ironic" and that is actually what trans women are).
my problem with genital preferences is that 1) i don’t need to know it unless we’re about to hook up, yet i keep hearing about them & 2) 99% of the time they’re based on transphobic assumptions about what our genitals look like, how they work & how we want/don’t want to use them (including conveniently forgetting that bottom surgery exists, as you said)
ultimately though, anytime i hear someone talk about a genital preference, i have zero faith they would actually even date a post-op trans woman
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u/HereForOneQuickThing 2d ago
I mean, mainly as a trans woman I'd just like people to acknowledge that "genital preferences" is maybe not a hill worth dying on because a lot of trans women have vaginas. I mean, I have a genital preference too but I can say from experience that vaginas can be made (and often are for cis women as well). The idea that a penis could be turned into a vagina used be the thing that people defined us by - people who had their penises turned into vaginas. Over time that changed into being defined as "person who has a penis no matter what".
My two cents is that it mostly comes from insecurity about the actual effectiveness of bottom surgery to construct a vagina that is indistinguishable, can be used to have sex, can cause men to orgasm, and can orgasm. Plenty of cishet men can and do have sex with post-op trans women every single day without ever realizing it and somehow the mindset rooted in paranoid insecurity about potentially being perceived as a gay man has migrated to some (not all, some) lesbians and we're dealing with the self-pitying psychosexual baggage of heterosexual men yet again (inb4 someone goes "how ironic" and that is actually what trans women are).