Why Not Dating Trans People IS NEVER Transphobic | Skeptic TaraElla 2020.5

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Today, I am going to respond to yet another video that claimed that not dating trans people is somehow transphobic. I truly thought we were over and done with this topic. Yet it refuses to go away. It is my view that, should this idea be allowed to continue to spread unchecked, it will only bring hostility from others to us trans people. Therefore, let's start debunking this all over again. This time, in the form of a video from trans BreadTuber Gutian.

Basically, Gutian asserts that, if you are initially attracted to someone, then you find out they are trans, and this one fact makes you no longer willing to date that person, then you are transphobic. And when I watched it, it had a like-to-dislike ratio of 592-69, which means that, sadly, 90% of people who watched the video were buying this argument. Of course, it's completely unreasonable.

Why? Because attraction is ultimately biological, and not sociological. Transphobia is a sociological concept, not a biological one, because it is something people do socially rather than having anything to do with biology. Therefore, the concept of transphobia cannot apply to anything that is purely biological, like attraction. Explaining this more in layman's terms, people don't generally have a choice over their biological reflexes, like who they are attracted to, and under what circumstances. On the other hand, transphobia is an attitude that people can choose to have or not have. Attraction is scientific fact that generally cannot be altered by human will, but tranphobia is a social relational condition that can indeed be altered by human will.

I guess this confusion ultimately stems from the postmodern and postmodern-adjacent theory that is popular in some circles. In those theories, the biological and the sociological are often confused, and the sociological is sometimes mistakenly thought of as having powers over the biological, as in for example how gender is mistakenly viewed as a social construct that can be altered or even abolished. This is probably because the people who came up with those theories didn't have any college-level biological training, and because of the distrust of the neutrality of empirical science that is the hallmark of the work of postmodernists like Foucault. However, there is no reason to doubt the neutrality of empirical biological science or to see any sociological bias in that science; to do so would indeed be paranoid. In fact, this paranoia comes not from any scientific perspective, but rather it comes entirely from the sociological tradition of critical theory, which strongly upholds Karl Marx's idea that the dominant ideas of every era are the ideas that serve the ruling class. But to apply this idea to scientific facts is just hopelessly paranoid.

The fact is, if somebody isn't attracted to trans people, then they are just not attracted to trans people, period. There's nothing they can do about it, and there's nothing more to examine. Making people feel guilty over something that is biological and hence outside their control is the worst form of cultural totalitarianism.

Finally, just some extra comments on Gutian's video. She also sort of dealt with the argument around fertility, unconvincingly in my opinion, and she ended up limiting her argument to hook-ups, which I find offensive because it could be seen as painting a picture of trans people settling for hook-ups if they can't have permanent relationships, and I'm morally against hook-ups personally. Anyway, my point is that, this was what she argued, and my view is that, even if I accept her conditions, the argument is still inherently wrong.