brightquietude:

lesbian-lizards:

transgender-harms-women: absent-elk: can someone please point out to me where any trans activist has ever said that cis lesbians should have penetrative sex involving a penis?

somehow transwomen asking to not be misgendered and to actually be treated as human beings=sex with penis

you know you can date someone or respect them without having sex right?

you can have sex without using a penis?

dysphoria is a thing for trans people so what makes you think they’d even want their body parts anywhere near you? no one is demanding you have sex with anyone

so stop using it as some poor fucking excuse to misgender and discriminate against trans people. Here is a workshop held by trans women called “Overcoming the cotton ceiling” the cotton ceiling refers to lesbians underwear.

The Cotton Ceiling was coined because a lesbian porn actress refused to do a scene with a trans woman porn actress. The entire discourse surrounding the cotton ceiling is about this idea that a lesbian should have the ‘audacity’ to deny a trans woman sexually. This is also the root of a lot of the “penis is female” and “biological sex doesn’t exist” discourse that has come about in the subsequent months.

From this post by Avery Edison, a trans woman:

“Look, it’s not like I require the women I date to be cool with having my dick inside them. In fact, I’m fine if that never happens. But being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts. It’s such tiny slight that I wish I could get over it, and not let it fester into something I feel the need to write an essay about, but apparently I can’t.”

(For transparency: the linked post was not talking about the cotton ceiling; the situation which spurred that remark was a woman whose arrangement with her boyfriend allowed her to have sex with women, but no PIV, which meant that she did not want to have PIV intercourse with Edison.)

From this article by Julia Serrano, another trans woman:



“And when the overwhelming majority of cis dykes date and fuck cis women, but are not open to, or are even turned off by, the idea of dating or fucking trans women, how is that not transphobic?”

(Note: Serrano is not a lesbian; however, as a bisexual woman, it would appear she feels she has the right to refer to lesbians as “dykes.”)

And from this blog post by Natalie Reed, another trans woman:

“The refusal of lesbians to consider us viable sexual partners, or their seeing intimacy with us as somehow a threat to their lesbian identification… is to ultimately, when it comes to staking your own identification upon how you conceive of our gender, to walk your talk, assert that beneath whatever lip-service you’ve paid to the legitimacy of our identity you simply don’t really regard us as women. At least not fully so.”



(Reed did later update the post with “I did not coin the term ‘Cotton Ceiling’ myself, nor do I at present support this particular term or the admittedly creepy, rape-culture connotations it possesses. I was primarily using this term for the sake of referencing a very particular conversation that was occurring in the trans-feminist community at a very particular point in time. Frankly, I’d prefer if we all moved on from that term, its connotations, its limitations, and its unduly narrow focus on one particular space and context in which trans women’s sexual agency is denied or subverted. Such issues are much broader than what occurs in queer women’s spaces, and we can talk about it in ways that don’t demand self-defeating terminologies like ‘Cotton Ceiling’.”)

There are, in fact, people who are saying that lesbians are morally obligated to be open to sex with people who possess male genitalia. And some of them, whatever dysphoria they may have, do desire and enjoy PIV. Acting like all trans women have dysphoria to the extent that they would never want to penetrate their partner is simply ignorant.

You can absolutely respect someone without having sex with them. But as it says in the original description of the Cotton Ceiling workshop, above:

“…no matter how much basic, nominal acceptance a trans woman can receive in feminist or queer or women’s spaces, we’re still always ultimately rejected when it comes to breaking the sexual barrier, and being accepted as women to such a full extent that we are accepted sexually as women.”



In other words, in the minds of some people, mere respect is not enough. Lesbians must be willing to have sex with male-bodied women in order to be truly accepting. (And people born with the body-type associated with the production of the smaller of the two types of human gametes [i.e. sperm] are male. That is what the term means. It is not misgendering to accurately name biological sex, as sex is different from gender.)

In other words, it’s sex-as-identity-validation. Lesbians are apparently supposed to prove they accept trans women as real women by drawing no distinction between female-bodied and male-bodied women, and by being equally willing to engage in intercourse with both. They are not permitted to have a sexual orientation that excludes male-bodied people; apparently, some people believe that everyone is inherently attracted to both sexes, and that it’s only cultural conditioning that causes some people to be gay (or, at the very least, that lesbians should examine their sexualities to be sure that they’re really not attracted to any male-bodied people, or if they only think they’re not due to cultural conditioning.)

It is deeply screwed up to suggest that a gay woman not not being willing to engage in intercourse with a member of the other sex is somehow denying trans women full acceptance–that they must be willing to have physically male partners in order to not be bigots.

Sex–both the act, and the biological category–is the issue, here.

I know that the majority trans women don’t promote this idea. But there are some who absolutely do think that it is bigoted and wrong for lesbians not to want male-bodied partners. And there are many, many self-appointed allies who, in their zeal to support trans women, are all too eager to try and attack and guilt-trip lesbians for their disinterest in male-bodied partners.