I was recently watching a YouTube video about Flock Cameras (fuck them) when I came across a clip of the Mayor of Denver claiming that Flock cameras helped to solve the murder of a trans woman. Intrigued, I looked into it.
By the way, her name was Jax Gratton, and she was a beautiful young woman who, by all accounts, was the light of many people’s lives.
Of course, the Mayor was lying. At the time he was speaking, her murder had not been solved. And when it was, eventually solved, the Flock cameras had nothing to do with it. Instead, the cops relied upon the old reliable method of finding out who she was dating, looking into him, and finding enough evidence to arrest him.
So, for those of you who know me, you know I’m a leftist, LGBTQ+-positive ally. Some who know me a bit better know that I actually fit into the alphabet mafia myself, albeit on the fringes, under the nebulous ‘queer’ umbrella. And those who know me best, or who have encountered me on those handful of occasions when revealing this helps me make a point someone really should (but probably won’t) listen to, know that I’m dating a trans woman, and she isn’t the first (though most of my past partners have been cisgender women).
Just a heads up to any young man liable to ask me the same exact question most young men ask upon learning that: Her anatomy is none of your business. I will, however, say that bottom surgery has never been a factor in my decision to date or hook up with any trans person. I used to announce my views on transgender people as “I don’t care what’s in anyone’s pants unless they want me to play with it.” In the past few years, I’ve taken that “…unless they want me to play with it,” clause out, because I realized that I simply don’t care, full stop.
Though, to be fair, I’ve never encountered a princess wand bigger than ole Jormugandr, and there’s a slight possibility that it might bother me a bit if I did. But I digress.
Despite being on the fringes of the Ljibitiquah, the best way for me to describe my sexuality that most people will understand is ‘straight’. I’m attracted to women, predominantly. I’m attracted to femininity, full stop. The technical term for my sexuality, as best as I could discern, is ‘gynosexual’. I find the female form pleasing, and I enjoy the contrast in personalities and experiences in conversations with a woman. In fact, I generally prefer women over men even in platonic relationships, though that’s not to say I haven’t been close with a few bros over the years.
And of course, my gender identity is that of a man. I’ve asked myself if I was transgender, and to be frank, the thought of being a woman fills me with anxiety and discomfort (not just about the societal dangers of being trans, but also in terms of how I would feel about my body), whereas the thought of being a man just feels natural in a way that’s hard to describe. In other words, I’d rather grow more muscles than grow boobs, and I’d rather be seen as strong than beautiful.
As a cis- and straight man, dating a trans woman puts me in a tiny little minority. There aren’t any statistics on this I can find, but anecdotally, the vast majority of trans people I know mostly have relationships with other trans people. Most of the straight trans women I know have spent a lot of time single, unfortunately. (The lesbians do fine, naturally, and I don’t know enough trans men to really speak on the topic.) There just aren’t a lot of straight men willing to give up the chance to have children with their partner, or take on the social stigma associated with dating someone who has mostly been outcast by broader society. Which is both a shame, and pretty fucking un-masculine, if you ask me. A real man doesn’t give a shit whether people are bigoted against his partner and he does what’s right (for himself and others) above all. I would go so far as to say that any younger man who won’t date a trans woman because his friends might call him a ‘fag’ is still a fucking boy, and could stand to man up and grow a fucking pair.
I will allow that genital preferences are valid, however. I used to think I had genital preferences, and I’ve unfortunately seen some genitals (of both varieties) that are nothing but a complete turn off. And wanting to have children of one’s own is also perfectly valid. I have two myself, and they are the best thing in my life.
And here we get to addressing the title. I’m a cis-het man dating a trans woman. But cis-het men dating trans women have a horrible habit of inflicting violence upon them and even of killing them. And it’s not a minor blip, either. A trans person has a 4.8% chance of being murdered. That’s twelve times more likely than a person in the general population. Think about that for a minute. One in twenty trans people will be murdered.
And it’s not limited to murder. A trans woman is almost eight times more likely to be physically assaulted than a cis woman. More than a quarter of trans people report being sexually assaulted in the past year.
And the fact is, the people committing most of this violence are straight men who are in a sexual relationship with their victims. In other words, guys like me.
What in the actual fuck is this?
I mean, I have a few ideas on why this is. For one thing, trans people are heavily objectified by society. Trans women, especially, are treated like sexual objects. For those of you in Gen-X or possibly some elder millennials, think about the only times you ever heard anything about trans women prior to 2020. Maybe as a gag in some TV show or movie, where a cis-het male character inadvertently sleeps with one.
Even the current right-wing outrage over the existence of trans women treats them as sexual objects, telling them to stay away from children and using the old “I don’t care what you do in your bedroom but don’t shove it in my face!” argument to respond to trans women merely existing.
When you reduce something to an object, you don’t have to feel guilty about damaging it. If it’s malfunctioning, you smack it until it works, unless you’re a tinkerer, in which case you manipulate it into working, and only smack it when you get frustrated. And when you’re done with it, you dispose of it.
That’s how a lot of cis-het men treat trans women. They want the vicarious thrill of experiencing their gender euphoria, or just want to fuck someone with a dick or even suck a dick without feeling gay, and they see trans women as that. A warm hole with a stiff prick that just happens to have a woman attached to it. So they treat them the same way they’d treat a vibrating fleshlight. Knock it around some when it doesn’t want to do what they want it to do or when changing the batteries (read; buying her a nice dinner or taking her to a club) doesn’t fix it. And when they get bored of it or want to ‘upgrade’ to a ‘real woman’, they dispose of it, sometimes with violence.
And the dehumanization, the reduction to a sexual object, isn’t even the whole story. In fact, that’s not the story the men who do these sorts of things tell when asked why. It can’t be, because, let’s face it, the world is chock full of men who treat cis women the exact same way. And that’s where we get into the taboos.
It’s taboo to be gay. Gay rights movement be damned, in most of the US, there is still a certain amount of stigma associated with being any flavor of queer. We’ve made progress, but we haven’t won that war. In recent years, we’ve even been losing ground, almost entirely among Republicans. That stigma gets stronger for those who remain in the closet (unless they’re Republican congressmen and vocal supporters of maga, that is), and there’s nothing quite so in the closet as a man who wants to have gay sex with a woman.
I participate in debates over trans issues with some regularity, and the number of young men (boys, really) who claim it’s ‘gay’ to sleep with a trans woman is astonishing. It’s not even a belief that’s unique to conservatives and trolls (whose Venn diagram is rapidly becoming a circle). I know leftist, LGBTQ+ positive people who have said “it’s a little too gay for me.” Hell, a surprising number of the straight or bisexual trans people I know have said that I’m a “little gay” for being attracted to trans women.
For a lot of men, the thought of society perceiving them as gay is a horrible thing. When men who’ve murdered trans women are interviewed, they talk about how she ‘deceived’ them (this includes men who had long-term sexual relationships with their victim, where there’s zero chance he didn’t know she was trans). They talk about how others would perceive them. They talk about they ‘can’t be gay’.
For the record, I reject that out of hand. It’s not even a little gay for a man to be attracted to trans women. My own lack of strict heterosexuality is a result of realizations I’ve had over the years about myself, not something I attribute to anything I’ve ever felt for or done with a trans woman. Men being attracted to women is straight, full stop.
So there are the two main reasons (in my opinion, which is, to be fair, informed by a lot of scholarship on the topic) why men hurt their trans partners. I can understand the pressures and views those reasons create.
What I don’t understand is how anyone calling themselves a man thinks it’s ever okay to do that.
Chivalry is famously dead, but spending some time with the most traditionally-masculine I’ve ever known, you wouldn’t know it. You find a guy whose fought in a war and then come home to do his own autowork, go hunting on the weekends, knows his way around a central air conditioning system and his home’s electrical wiring, who’s big enough to be called ‘big guy’ from time to time, and smart and brave enough to question his own views and try to keep improving himself, and you’re virtually guaranteed to find a man who believes that it’s never okay to harm a woman, unless you have no other choice.
How can a person who thinks of himself as a good man ever justify hurting someone else to avoid being called a name? How can they think that friends who would abandon them over something so ultimately meaningless as the shape of their girlfriend’s genitals are worth keeping? I get that some people build their lives around their friendships, and to these people, the thought of being rejected is an apocalyptic scenario.
But these people chose to get into a relationship with their victim. They were the ones who ‘did gay shit’. How can some asshole convince himself that committing murder and then living a lie, not just about the murder, but about who he is, for the rest of his life is a better choice than redefining who he is? There’s an entire community of LGBTQ+ people who are perfectly willing to accept someone who says “I slept with a trans woman and realized I was gay.” And there are masculine gay men out there, plenty of them in fact. There’s no law of the universe that says you have to turn into a lisping fruit the moment you come out of the closet. That’s ridiculous!
And it’s infuriating, as well. As a man who spent a good chunk of my adult life fighting to defend values that we all supposedly share (but which, more and more, are being outright rejected by the political right), as a man who’s become exposed to the queer and trans communities and seen what they have to offer, as a man who thinks of himself as a man, and not a fucking monster, the urge to get my hands on these guys and beat them to death with my bare hands is overpowering at times.
Like most people, I have about 30-50 people in my circle of relationships. Most are friends, the rest are immediate family. That extends out to about 100-150 for your typical person when you include coworkers and distant relations and casual acquaintances, and that seems to be true of me as well. Among those 30-50 people in my circle, there are about two dozen trans people whom I consider a friend, or family (love you, Jade, Jophi and Charlotte). Do you know what the odds are that all of them will die of natural or accidental causes? Or, to phrase this better, do you know what the odds that one of them will be murdered will be?
70.8%.
There is a 70.8% chance that one of the people I consider a friend or family will end up murdered, and about an 80% chance that they will die at the hands of their romantic partner.
It’s infuriating, humbling and a fucking tragedy to know that, more likely than not, I’m going to have to say goodbye to someone I care about because some dipshit, self-centered asshole could handle the thought of his buddy calling him a fag.
Of course, all that is assuming that they investigate the crime. And if they do, they find the guy who did it.
And even then, that’s still assuming justice gets done. Because the guy that murdered Jax? He’s actually only on trial for tampering with her body. Because the justice system sees trans women as being just as disposable as these worthless sacks of shit masquerading as men do.