it's definitely more transphobic to reduce trans people to their genitals than it is for someone who is otherwise attracted to a trans person to have a genital preference that they decide makes them incompatible. why is this discussion happening again?

the reason people who say (for instance) that they'd "never sleep with a trans woman" are transphobic is because they essentialize trans people as whatever genitals they have and conflate genitals with gender, not because genital preferences are in and of themselves transphobic.

so when a terf says "genital preferences aren't transphobic" they're using a paradoxical argument, sometimes known as the ship of theseus. the idea is that they start from something most people agree to be true and use it to "prove" something else that is demonstrably false.

people on the left sometimes fall for the ploy and try to argue by defying the original truism rather than dismantling the claim that the other side is actually trying to push. this legitimizes the anti-trans argument, because leftists can't actually defy it using sound logic.

the best you can do is "genital preferences are inherently transphobic because a lot of trans people have different genitals than the cis people that other cis people are also attracted to" which ignores a lot of nonbinary people and also every single trans person who's had GCS

the best argument you could come up with for explaining why you can dismiss those people is probably just "that means they're more privileged than all the other trans people so basically they don't count" which assigns a value to transness based on how badly a person has suffered

sometimes this is being pushed by people who genuinely think that any trans person who passes in any circumstance is "basically cis" and therefore should be totally ignored by the trans community, but most often i think people just aren't thinking through the logical progression.

to me the root of this argument seems reminiscent to that "being cishet is inherently immoral and queerphobic" take. we can all agree that's goofy as hell, right?

a genital preference, while socially influenced, is not really something people can decide. they might have a kneejerk aversion that stems from trauma or internalized prejudice and can be worked through, but that's not the same thing.

in a similar vein, refusing to date other men wouldn't actually make a bisexual man straight, despite any outward appearance.

the aforementioned goofy take is based on the idea that a portion of your identity that you cannot control makes you automatically irredeemable or otherwise morally corrupted (which might imply that all straight or cis people are really just self-hating LGBTQ+ people in denial??)

the flipside to this is that if you can decide who's already immoral and evil based on their identity, you can also decide who are the paragons of virtue who can do no wrong by calculating the furthest thing from the "immoral" identity and assigning pure moral integrity to it.

this is nothing more than a lazy attempt to internally invert an already low section of the current external social order. at best it's ineffectual, and at worst it allows some vulnerable people to erase the oppression of other vulnerable people along their own prejudicial lines.

calling genital preferences transphobic is saying that something a person has little to no say in makes them anti-trans, with no way of redeeming themselves from their apparent transphobia.

what i'm saying is that we should all try to avoid the reduction of identity - any identity at all - to the level of a superficial political decision and a social performance.

try naming a single identity that exists where doing this and then honestly following it all the way to its logical conclusion wouldn't have utterly disastrous consequences for that group (and any other groups it defined itself in relation to). i don't think there is one.

and fwiw, i think xanderhal acted transphobic in other ways, in case anyone connects that video with this thread. i just don't think that this specific point holds up to scrutiny and i thought the discourse around it was over at this point but nope, discourse never ever ends. lol