[Clampower]

I’m a homosexual man. I’ve been called out by woke friends because I’ve said that generally gay men are not attracted to vaginas. I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.

I have to keep these opinions quiet now because of the negative social backlash I’ve gotten.

I can’t believe we live in times where we have people in the lgbt community who criticize homosexual men as being “genital fetishists” for being attracted to only men of the same sex.

[konogasa]

OK, but I'm trans and I'd say your "woke" friends are talking nonsense and I hope that they will all actually wake up and realise what inane nonsense they're talking.

Now what? Are trans people not allowed to have different opinions and ideas about anything? As a gay man, would you say that all gay men see everything in the same way? For example, if I ask 100 gay men their opinion on gay marriage, will I get 100 identical answers, or...?

What I'm trying to say is, whenever someone says something stupid to you, remember that they are just one person expressing one opinion and that this opinion may well change as time goes by. Don't assume that all of society, or all of one particular segment of society, has the exact same, or even similar, view.

Also to be blunt, I doubt this "negative social backlash" you've gotten is as bad as that, or even that it's the kind of backlash you get outside of Twitter. But maybe I'm old. I transitioned in the 90's when most transwomen I knew identified as gay men. Try that one for a woke debate, some day. Anyway we didn't have Twitter back then so you wouldn't be called a "genital fetishist" to your face for not liking vag else most transwomen would have been decried as "genital fetishists". Eeew, fish and all that.

My point is I think that people will come up with all sorts of dumb ways of thinking when something becomes an "issue". We're still at the point in the curve, with trans issues, where they are "issues" whereas being gay has more or less been assimilated in mainstream culture (and that's part of why gay men are being attacked by "woke" folk). Wait it out. In a few years people will be reading all those woke tweets and blogs and tumblrs and laughing, mostly good-heartedly.

[nobodyandproud]

Where’s the strong backlash against the nonsense?

[konogasa]

What kind of backlash do you want to see? If we're talking about arguing with idiots on twitter 24/7 then I don't think most people are prepared to do that.

And why does there need to be a "backlash" even? Do we absolutely need to have a big old culture war everytime somebody says something stupid?

[sascha_sl]

I can guarantee that the backlash you got was less about your personal opinion, but for calling a relationship between a cis men and a trans man straight.

It's just a really shitty thing to do, and it's not even accurate. Attraction models do not solely work based on genitals, there's a lot of other characteristics that go into that.

[PoignardAzur]

I don't like what GP is saying either; it's sneaking some very judgmental opinions under the umbrella of "they want to force me to have sex with X", which is bad faith.

But you don't know how his argument with his friends went, so it's a little arrogant to tell him "they were probably mad at you because you said X".

[sascha_sl]

The problem is with the generalization, which is present in the entire comment. I can't imagine the original conversation was significantly less abrasive.

[bob33212]

Generalization is the problem. It is not accurate to say that all gay relationships require two penises.

It is also wrong to call a lesbian transphobic because she finds testicles unattractive and vaginas attractive. She is entitled to be honest about her sexuality.

[sascha_sl]

I can't believe I need to say this, but there are trans women with vaginas and without testes.

Nobody says you're not allowed to have genital preferences. Chromosome preferences (with everything else equal) however seem legitimately transphobic to me. They're more a rejection of trans people than stemming from a preference in attraction.

[PoignardAzur]

> I’ve been called closed minded and a right wing asshole for saying that I would not date trans men, and that heterosexual intercourse will never be gay.

You're conflating two very different things here: "I would not do this", and "If someone does this they're not really gay".

It feels like a motte-and-bailey fallacy to me.