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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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AskTransgender
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I had SRS, and it was great for me, but it's obviously a very personal thing. And it's certainly not cheap, easy, or without the risk of complications. People latch onto it because many people just fundamentally believe that genitals=sex=gender. And genital configuration is the traditional definition of "sex." Some contexts still work this way. In most of the US, prisons operate based on genitalia, not personal identity, secondary sex characteristics, or legal sex. In most of the US, if you were to end up in jail, you would be sent to a men's prison.
It's just a deeply, deeply rooted cultural thing. Genetics and chromosomes weren't even discovered until the mid 20th century, and even chromosomes aren't really all there is to a person's sex. But for centuries prior, your sex was simply your genitals, your gender was your sex, and you genitals were unchangeable. That centuries of cultural inertia is what is being resisted when someone with typically-male genitalia adopts a female gender. Even if you are on HRT and gain female secondary sex characteristics, you still have the primary sex characteristics that were traditionally one-and-the-same with the male gender. It obviously isn't that simple, but for centuries of western history, it was.
Among some, both cis and trans, there's also a sense of needing to prove that a person "really is" trans. Most of the effects of hormones are reversible. Genital surgery isn't. Some people will always be more comfortable accepting someone's gender identity if they "really commit to it." And permanently turning a penis into a vulva is a pretty obvious sign of commitment. Some women just invariably see "penis=threat," and some men see "penis=competitor." There's a lot of cis women who would be more comfortable accepting and treating a trans woman as valid if they know she couldn't force herself on them even if she wanted to. (At least in terms of penetration.)
I know this isn't how things should be. I don't think you need to have bottom surgery to valid in your gender. But genital configuration is something that is burned into the very core of the psyche of how most people interact with each other. It's a fundamental component of standard cis-hetero gender relations. And it's just always going to be a much greater reach for a lot of people to accept a trans person as valid with their original equipment than without their original equipment.
Hell, gender is assigned at birth almost 100% based on genitalia. You were (I assume) assigned male at birth, and unless you were born with ambiguous genitalia, it's extremely unlikely anyone ever tested your karyotype. And for 99% of cis people out there, they've simply stuck with the gender they were assigned at birth, have put zero thought into it, and were simply assigned that gender based on their genitals. The vast majority don't even know their own karyotype; they just assume it. For most people, their gender, their sex, and their genitalia are all indistinguishable. And it's really hard for a lot of people to get past that.
I see, that makes a lot of sense. Honestly though the idea of being more comfortable around us because we can't "force ourselves on them" is really dumb. Like ignoring the fact that there's more ways to force oneself onto someone else, most of us who are non-op can't even penetrate if we wanted to, I can still get hard enough to do it but the last time I tried, it hurt really bad and became very irritated and swollen afterwards, but others I've known and dated can't even get hard anymore at all, for them it's physically impossible to penetrate someone else, surgery or not. I feel like many people out there just don't understand this aspect and the fact that penis atrophy is a real thing, and even if you use it regularly the changes still very often make that type of activity impossible or extremely unpleasant.
Also yeah I was assigned male at birth. I don't look it bc I'm lucky to have been able to get blockers and HRT when I was young :)
I agree. There are of course a lot more ways that one can SA someone else than simply PIV. But again, we're dealing with a lot of deep cultural memory here. Up until a few decades ago, in most areas only PIV intercourse even counted as rape. Legally in many countries, it isn't even possible for a woman to commit rape against another woman. A lot of historical anti-rape law wasn't even really about sexual assault. It was a more patriarchal thing. When you raped a woman you took the most valuable thing she had - her virginity. It was almost more of a property crime than a violation of personhood and bodily autonomy. We've mostly left these extremely outdated legal traditions behind, but a lot of the cultural memory persists. There are still plenty of people out there who don't even consider cis lesbian sex to BE sex. There's a lot of backwards beliefs out there.
And yeah, asking people with such archaic beliefs about sex to understand the subtleties of anatomy changes on HRT? Well good luck with that! Obviously I know from experience things change a ton, but most cis people don't even know what trans HRT is. Most just assume everything trans people do is from surgeries of various sorts. If you polled random cis people about the effects of trans HRT on genitalia, less than 5 percent would probably be able to accurately answer questions on it. If cis people do have any exposure to trans bits, it's mostly through trans porn. And the actresses that do that all usually have to go off HRT for a period to do those shots. Most cis people are just hopelessly ignorant about all things trans.