Also, generally, "healthy" can have several meanings "beneficial to your health" is one.

"Not harmful/a perfectly normal thing that most people actually do" is another meaning of the word healthy. So when a child psychologist says "no no, it's perfectly healthy for him to be curious about his genitals at this age" they don't mean it's improving his health, they don't mean it's making his heart stronger or boosting his immune system. They just mean it's a perfectly ordinary stage of development.

redhouse, don't read so much into what I'm writing. I wrote that we should teach kids about different sexual preferences and gender identities, because I think that there's a real lack of education at an early age. People learn about it from the worst possible sources. And anyone who puts shame into a child when it comes to sexuality should be electrocuted.

Okay thanks sorry for the misunderstanding.

Should a transgender person reveal their status to their cisgender partner / potential cisgender partner?

If the feelings of the potential partner are irrelevant to the discussion the answer is no.
If the feelings of the potential partner matter then yes.

I have an analogy:
I don't draw a distinction between plants and animals. Yes I realize that genetically their is a distinction, but as far I am concerned their is no cultural distinction for me (and other people who think like me) - I have redefined the terms so that animals are in fact plants (in a culinary sense).

My girlfriend is a vegetarian. If I serve her soup which contains stock made from meat and I don't tell her and I am being unethical? After all if she doesn't agree with my definitions she is a bigot right?

typo... If I serve her soup which contains stock made from meat and I don't tell her, am being unethical?

Not gonna read 6 pages of bile but thanks for the post orthaic

spyman, I think that your analogy doesn't take into account the almost complete lack of discriminated meat wanting desperately to be treated like a real vegetable. The whole point is to not only concentrate on the needs of the cisgendered partner but to consider the needs of the transgendered partner. They are both valid, and can be at odds. But what the article is trying to do is acknowledge the latter.

The anti-trans folk gave away the game when they said they've leave their partner in disgust if they found out their partner was transgendered. So, this idea that the transgendered partner is being "dishonest" falls flat because you just acknowledged the consequences of a culture that buys into these bogus gender binaries.

Putin perhaps some people are less interested in the gender of their potential partners, and more interested in their actual biological sex. Is this wrong and if so why?
Chosing a partner is a discrimitory act. We choose people we find attractive over people we don't find attractive. And there are a huge number of factors that feed into that notion of attractiveness (including not just looks but music preferences, movies and tv, fashion sense, political opinions, sense of humour, sport, occupation, income, social power etc). And there are issues which are not related to attractiveness. Other cultural/social expectations. For example i have a friend who will only date Jewish girls. An Indian girl i know will only (officially) date boys her parent choose for her - her parents expectations are more important to her than her own sexual desires. Etc etc. For some people actual biological sex matters. Now you can say that this is wrong but you are imposing your own views on other peoples free choice (and in many respects our desires are not really choices, we are who we are and we like what we like). And if you say this makes them a bigot, I think that is like people who say that same-oriented people are degenerate.
Choosing a partner is a huge emotional investment. Btw there are many things that people expect to be told by prospective partners apart from biological sex (you are already married, children from previous marriages, the fact you are on Interpols most wanted list). Sometimes we would prefer to make a decision before that emotional investment than after we are involved.

typo... same-*sex oriented

Really all the emotional investment would be thrown out the window because of genitalia and you don't think that's just horseshit social engineering that has conditioned a good percentage of the public to overemphasize genitalia?

I think it's up to the individual to decide not academics who write papers about "gender issues" and coin words like "cisgender". Most people know what they like not necessarily why they like it, and don't really have time to realize that their preference for people whose biological sex is the same as their gender is out of fashion in some academic circles.

Oh spare me the anti-intellectual bs. If you want to pretend that it's only "academics" who are concerned about the brutality and harsh treatment of transgendered people then, please, carry on pretending. We wouldn't want to inconvenience people who have a reflexive defensiveness everytime anybody wants to stop being treated like shit.

Yes they don't really have time, they spend 10 hours a day watching stupid beer & fast food commercials that make people think that eating a BMT and drinking shitty beer will get bros multiple women to hang on their arm.

"spare me the anti-intellectual bs"

Its not anti-intellectual. The fact that we can invent terms which may serve a useful purpose in an academic paper doesn't mean that ordinary biological sex is a redundant concept, and that ordinary people who still prefer to view sex as biological when it comes to their own sexual preferences are persecuting a minority.

"If you want to pretend that it's only "academics" who are concerned about the brutality and harsh treatment of transgendered people then, please, carry on pretending"

brutality and harsh treatment? Non sequitur. Nothing I have said touches on the treatment of transgender people.

"Yes they don't really have time, they spend 10 hours a day watching stupid beer & fast food commercials that make people think that eating a BMT and drinking shitty beer will get bros multiple women to hang on their arm."

You can be such an elitist sometimes Putin. Do you really have that much contempt for the human race?

spyman. This isn't about academic theories or fashion or anything theoretical. This is about real people, real human beings, who feel that they were born in the wrong body. Those who go through a sex change face an extremely difficult process, not only physically, but also emotionally, psychologically and socially. I and you live in a heteronormative society that constantly beat binary gender and biological sex into us. These people need an enormous amount of courage to go through the ostracising, the ridicule and the lack of understanding from some parts of society. After this long and difficult process, those who manage to get through it finally feel that their bodies correspond with their minds. And after all that, you expect them to STILL be forced into viewing themselves as their original biological sex when it matters the most, when they reach out for emotional and physical connection?

Of course sexual preferences need to be respected, no matter how stupid and bigoted they are. But try to understand what you're asking of them. The reason I have such a hard time sympathising with heterosexual men feeling betrayed is that they already have a whole fucking world of power and possibilities and rights that LGBT people can only dream about. Especially transgendered people. Gays and lesbians are very visible and their issues have received a lot of attention, but the T in LGBT is underrepresentated, misunderstood and frankly, treated like shit. People can't even seem to grasp the basic concept that gender identity has nothing to do with sexual preferences. And a huge amount of people, either directly or implicitly, reject the notion of non-biological gender without a second thought, or dismiss it as an intellectual construct, or a freak of popular culture or whatever bullshit they can come up with to excuse themselves. Fuck them. I'm tired of being afraid of being disrespectful to those with all the power, for fear of alienating them further. It makes me sick.

"Of course sexual preferences need to be respected, no matter how stupid and bigoted they are."

So prefering the opposite biological sex is stupid and bigotted? Is that what you are saying?
I think it is okay that we have this concept of "gender" as it applies to transgender, and this concept serves a useful purpose. Thus it is okay for a man to live as if they were a woman. Change their name etc. But this is not a fact of reality. It's a made up class. For example we could define animals that swims in the sea that look a bit like fish as "fish" and thus say that dolphins are fish. And then by extension, if you are Catholic, say that it is okay to eat dolphins on Friday because they really are "fish" but this does not mean that dolphins actually are fish. There are differences between women and men who believe they are women, even if there are similarities. So just because a man chooses to live as a woman doesn't mean that everyone else should be complelled to view that person as a woman for all purposes - the relevent context in this discussion being a sexual relationship.

I think there might be a few assumptions that we need to figure out here. Are trangender people really women (or men)? Has this been proved. It is generally accepted as a fact, at least amongst academics? What does it mean to be a woman? Are the differences between men and women really only a matter of a minor physical difference (easily changed by surgery) and cultural indoctrination? Or are there differences which are more fundamental?

I should add, just in case i have not been clear,if a man decides that they are okay with accepting a transgender person as a woman and wants to get married, that's fine.

Calling physical, romantic or sexual attraction "bigoted" is the most ridiculous assertion I've seen in a long time. Bigotry requires a choice. Attraction isn't a choice. Thus attraction or non-attraction to anyone cannot be bigoted. I understand issues are rarely this simple, but it really is.

Now, do societal norms subconsciously influence attraction? Certainly. Can those norms be bigoted? Absolutely. Should these norms be challenged and changed so as no longer to be bigoted? Absolutely.

But stop fucking vilifying people for something they aren't choosing (which people/characteristics they find attractive). You're no better than anti-trans bigots yourselves when you degrade to that level.

That's addressed to no one in particular but a response to the assertion that not finding trans people attractive is bigoted. Come on, man.

Sorry about misusing that term. I shouldn't have called preferences bigoted. I got carried away. I shouldn't even call it stupid, because it's really not, it just feels like that to me. I wrote a previous post about how it's not evil or horrible to not find trans people attractive, but of course it's ridiculous to assume that it is implicit in what I'm writing now. I'm surprised I even remember it. My main point is still that the need for trans people to respect cisgendered people's preferences is not the only concern. The other one is the transgendered person's view that she/he is no longer his/her biological sex. Who is more right? What is gender? Whose needs are most important? These are all completely different questions, more complex than I have energy for. What is a fact is that trans people are often treated like their views on gender matter less, and this provokes me into angry rants.

No doubt, and I don't mean to attack the larger point, because I do agree with it. Transgender people are very wrongfully treated in modern society and their half of the equation is all too frequently and wrongfully ignored. I do feel, in the broader scenario (that is, in any question of attraction), that if a certain characteristic is, for whatever reason, a dealbreaker for the person in question, that person has the responsibility of asking about the characteristic. If a woman being married is a dealbreaker, it's the man's job to make sure he's not seeing a married woman. If a woman doesn't want to date a guy with a mental disorder, it's on the woman to ask if her new boyfriend has one. And if someone finds transgender people a turnoff for whatever reason (truthfully I have trouble understanding this, it certainly isn't for me), then it's the job of that someone to ask. After all, the problem lies not with the transgender person for being transgender, but rather the prospective partner for not wanting to be with a transgender person, and so the action to correct this problem ought be taken by the prospective partner.

I stand by the rest of my rant though. It's only my ideological standpoint, but I strongly believe that those with power and privileges have a duty to try to understand, respect and help those without power and privilege. I'm privileged in many ways myself. I'm a white, cisgendered male with a high standard of living in the richest part of the world. Understanding feminism for me meant that I had to realise that I, as a male, am part of the patriarchy whenever I reinforce it, whether by choice or passive consent, and that the fight against patriarchal power structures needs to begin in myself, by reading, thinking and hopefully internalising different point of views. This brought out a lot of ugly things in myself that I considered natural and unchangeable, but that realisation changed it fundamentally. It was also extremely scary to let go of the power those "fundamental truths" gave me. I ask everyone who has a point of view on gender to do the same thing. Challenge yourself. Read, think, see what happens. And remember that if you are heterosexual and cisgendered, you are in a position of power, so don't be quick to dismiss other points of view, because dismissing the less powerful is a tacit form of oppression. No, I don't mean that you oppress MtF trans people by not sleeping with them. But hanging on to ideas of biological gender can be a tool of domination.

Jesus, I'm a lefty, aren't I?

Clarifying question because I agree with everything else in there...

"because dismissing the less powerful is a tacit form of oppression"

What if on honest evaluation I conclude that I disagree with the idea? Naturally, oppression of people (as what comes to mind when I think of oppression, anyway) is wrong and unjustifiable - but is it "oppression" to disagree with someone who got the short end of the stick when it comes to power distribution in society? And if so, how far does that conclusion reach, and what does it mean for the moral wrongness of oppression?

The key word there was "dismiss". What I meant was to dismiss something without careful study of it, not disagreeing. The thought that something is valid because it's generally assumed to be true has been used as a tool of oppression in more cases than can be counted.

Ah, okay. I'm not being careful enough in my reading of your definitions. I definitely agree with you, then.

Maybe people are attracted to sex, not gender?

I have to admit, I find sex a very attractive prospect.

Myself, I'm only attracted to osmosis. Man, those sexy cells can suck some water!

They go with the flow better than anyone I've ever been with...