My first, Nov. 1, 2020, article on Transmen. Gay is homosexual not homogender. Article which got me banned from Medium.
Commentary by Yukio Mishima on Mutsu Takahashi.
Subscriptions are free.
Why I am republishing this Nov. 1, 2020 article.
With the BBC trying to push transmen onto the Gay community, I thought of this article. I think a lot of the Gay pushback doesn’t consider many important issues.There is also the arrogance of transmen who have no knowledge of the Gay experience and history in their pronouncements on the Gay community.
By the way, no one owes anyone sex.
I moved to Substack since they don’t censor nor cave into pressure for censorship. One of the “boys” is a women.
This is the BBC page for the show. The 4th from the left is a trans man. His name is Lars. They have a short bio on the same webpage.
https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/mediapacks/i-kissed-a-boy-series-2
This is the article as it was written then without editing.
It likely needs editing, but I think you will get the point. If you don’t want to read it all, at least read the section about Yukio Mishima commenting on Mutsuo Takahashi.
Reviewing it, I can see that there was a lot of poisonous content that I didn’t point out, but the article is long enough.
Anti-Gay Attacks by Transmen and Their Allies — Introduction and Chapter 1.
Anti-Gay Attacks by Transmen and Their Allies
Transmen, A New Reality in Gay Spaces
Transmen are a new reality where there are now hormonal treatments and even facial reconstruction surgeries to make transmen look more like men who were born that way. Don’t assume that you can readily recognize a transman. They will be in the environment of cis-gender gay men and should always be treated with respect and humanity.
There will be a series of chapters, at least three as I have time to write them. The link to the next chapter will be at the end of the chapter previous to it.
Chapter 2 will be on how to interact with Transmen. Link doesn’t work anymore.
https://edwardsebesta.medium.com/courtesy-and-response-to-transmen-chapter-2-47888a1b99d9
Medium Essay of Nov. 1, 2020 starts here.
Gay Community Under Attack
Before I get into the topic, I am not asserting that all transmen or even a sizable fraction or even a significant fraction of transmen are attacking the gay community. It might be just a vocal few.
I got interested in this topic when a Facebook friend posted a cartoon where a transman was ill-treated in a rather contrived story line by two gay men in a criticism of the gay community. So I thought I would do a little Googling and it seems there is this whole movement of hostility against the gay community because gay men are mostly not interest in sexual relations with transmen and transmen seem to find gay men’s sexuality alienating.
It seems that some transmen had the expectation that generally or a significant fraction of gay men would want to have sexual relations with them and since they had discovered that gay men generally don’t want to have sexual relations with transmen some transmen have been very vocally upset and they and their allies have written angry tirades and vicious attack against gay men.
Though these hostile transmen might be few, these vocal attacks are just that, vocal, and occupy a presence in the public discourse and as a consequence the gay community is under very public attack.
Some type of adjustment or accommodation will happen, but it should not be, will not be done unilaterally and with screaming attacks directed at the gay community. A new group of people are entering the gay spaces and feels entitled to dictate to the gay community who and what they are. The gay community like any community has a right to define itself and a right to self-determination.
CHAPTER ONE — ACADEMIC ATTACKS THE GAY COMMUNITY FOR NON-COMPLIANCE WITH GENDER IDEOLOGY
With Friends Like This You Don’t Need Enemies
I would direct the reader to an essay on Medium titled, “Why (Some) Gay Men Won’t Date Transmen,” by M.J. Murphy who is an Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. It is a vicious hit piece against the gay community. This article is intended by the author as a defense of gay men, but as the old adage goes, “With friends like these you don’t need enemies.”
https://emjaymurphee.medium.com/why-gay-men-wont-date-trans-men-a6daf1bbd51a
First the title is misleading. Early on in the article he reports a study in which “only about 12% of gay men …say they’d be willing to date a transgender partner.”
It is not “some,” it is 88%. The title should be “Why Most Gay Men Won’t Date Transmen,” or even more accurately “Why only a few Gay Men Would Date Transmen,” since from these reported statistics only one in eight gay men would date FTM Transgendered persons.
If as a gay man you aren’t sexually interested in a transmen, you aren’t a minority who isn’t with the mainstream of the Gay community, who perhaps is somewhat not keeping up with the times, or slow, or aberrant, you are the mainstream. Saying “some” is an attempt to subtly apply pressure on gay men who don’t want to date transmen by insinuating that they are a wayward minority.
Further Murphy stigmatizes gay preference as “dismal,” stating, “Even with those dismal numbers, transmen were seen more favorably than transwomen.” [Italics in the original.] Dismal for whom? Murphy might state that it is dismal for transmen, but he leaves it undefined, free floating in meaning, where assumptions can be made. By itself it can be argued about what precisely Murphy means. However, considering what Murphy writes later it becomes clear that it is gay desire that is “dismal.”
Interestingly Murphy doesn’t have statistics on what percent of transmen would date transmen or more importantly have dated transmen. What people say can be different than what they do, actual practice would likely be more accurate as to the willingness of transmen to date transmen and accept them as being gay men.
Who is the Victim?
Murphy wrote that his essay was in response to a comment by a Kraig Lightner, a transman, in response to one of Murphy’s earlier essays. Lightner quotes from Murphy’s earlier essay as follows:
I am also not suggesting there is no discrimination against transgender people among gay men or that no gay men are transphobic.
And Lightner responds with an experience he had:
While dancing with a gay man at a night club I decided I better tell him I’m trans before he found out the hard way. No pun intended. I had to specifically tell him I don’t have a penis. He looked appalled. He walked away.
This comment was in response to Murphy’s essay. Are Gay Men Cisgender? In which M.J. Murphy questions whether gay men are biologically truly entirely men. This is the link.
https://emjaymurphee.medium.com/are-gay-men-cisgender-36c7f7883226
Again, with friends like this, who needs enemies?
Lightner wants to present his victimization. Of course what this gay guy who left Lightner expressed as he was blindsided by this revelation or had the stool kicked out from under him we don’t really know. We don’t have his side of the story. However, Lightner has decided he himself was victim. The person might have been disgusted at having been deceived. Or upset that the rug had been pulled out from under him.
Also, why did Lightner wait until they were on the dance floor and it had gotten to the point in which there was a possibility of sex? There was the possibility of a revelation “the hard way”? Informing the person early on could have easily avoided this whole episode and the victimization of this gay guy. Lightner doesn’t appear to have any strategy to navigate an environment of non-transmen who are mostly, nearly all, expecting to meet non-transmen and instead chooses a path which will likely involve a discordant end with no concern for the other person.
Let’s look at it through the eyes of the real victim, the guy who was surprised.
It is the weekend and he can go out and stay out late. Maybe he will meet someone for a hot evening and who knows maybe a relationship will come of it. He showered, he carefully chose what he was going to wear, perhaps elegant or fashionable, perhaps beat up jeans, combed his hair carefully if only to make sure it looked careless. Maybe or maybe not a cologne is used. He drives or takes public transportation to the dance club, likely pays a cover and enters. He will likely purchase two drinks which might be expensive. The cost for lower-income gays may represent a significant amount of his disposable income.
He has a drink and sees someone he is interested in. He spends maybe 5 to 30 minutes watching to see if there is mutual interest and in getting courage to go talk to that person and ask them to dance.
Then in the middle of dancing the whole effort to meet a gay man as he defines it collapses. His hopes suddenly are crashed with something he completely didn’t expect.
Yes, he is probably not happy that Lightner wasn’t upfront about who he was in a place where gay men go to meet gay men as gay men generally understand gay men to be. Being misled is never well received.
Further, this is valuable time used up, it is now getting late. It isn’t like gay men outside of bars or baths can just go casually talk to men and see they are interested. Outside the gay bar in the rest of the world the men generally in most places are mostly straight. The gay person may not be out at work. A conversation with a person of interest has to be conducted with care to first establish sexual orientation because a mistake in identifying a person’s sexual orientation can result in hostility or even violence.
In a gay bar you can reasonably expect everyone to be gay and if they aren’t gay, for example, if they are straight, the straight guy has to understand that he is in a gay bar and gay men might approach him. If not, he can be kicked out of the bar.
That is why Grindr and other like apps are revolutionary. Gay men have an avenue to meet gay men outside of bars and bath houses. The social spaces in which gay men can meet partners are small.
Assuming that this gay guy arrived at club at 10 pm and the bar closed at 2 am. These are the 4 hours during a week when he has real prospects of meeting someone, when he can walk up to someone assuming they are gay and not a straight person and not have to worry about a homophobic and unpleasant response.
As anyone who goes to clubs to cruise, it takes a while to get acclimated and focused on meeting someone and you don’t want to be making a decision when it getting close to closure. So, it is actually about 3 hours a week, and if you go out two nights or go out Saturday night and Sunday afternoon it is 6 hours.
One of the great concerns of gay men is meeting someone and the struggles to do so. The gay establishments are places to meet gay men. Lightner appropriates the places of the gay community for his own goals, makes no provisions to accommodate his goals to fit into the practices of a community which he is entering, and if it detonates the evening plans of a gay man, he still sees himself as the victim.
Disrespecting Gay Identity and Dictating Gay Identity
Murphy’s assessment on what happened is revealing. Murphy writes:
“… the sudden revelation of his [Lightner’s] transgender identity was likely profoundly disorienting for his dance partner, who walked away rather than attempt to re-evaluate his sexual identity and relationship to his own community in the middle of a nightclub dance floor.”
The gay guy is portrayed as failing by Murphy, though because of extenuating circumstances. Since when are we, gay people, obligated to “re-evaluate” or justify our sexual identities? Probably in the process of coming out, in a homophobic society, we have already fairly intensively evaluated our sexual identities. The use of our bodies and our self-identification is our personal business. We don’t have to justify it to others.
Note the condescending, “was likely profoundly disorienting for his dance partner,” which was given as the reason the gay guy didn’t “re-evaluate his sexual identity.” Very likely the gay guy knew his sexual identity and immediately realized that the situation was a no go and his time has been wasted.
What “relationship to his own community” seems a little vague. Does Murphy mean that this gay guy needs to adopt some set of correct views of transmen being part of the gay community and interchangeable with cis-gender gay men? Again, Murphy is attempting to dictate the gay community a certain ideological framework in which the gay community will identify itself. Murphy is framing the refusal to accept his ideology as a personal failing of the gay guy in this case.
Instead of “re-evaluating” his sexuality, a homework assignment for which no one asked, maybe the gay guy understands that there will be transmen now in bars, but he simply isn’t interested and has told himself that he needs to be more observant in the future.
Slandering Gay Men as Woman Haters
Murphy then drags out the old homophobic attack that gay men are women haters and the stereotype that men fear or are horrified by female bodies. He states:
We also need to be honest: some of the rejection of transgender gay men is rooted in misogyny, often expressed as fear or revulsion towards female bodies, especially female genitals.
This is a sly slander here in that if you reject this accusation you must be a liar. It is a character assassination of those who disagree with Murphy. As proof Murphy brings out the term “gold star gay” for a gay man who has never had sex with a woman.
The seizing on the term “gold star gay” shows a slavishness of Murphy toward ideology in that he fails to recognize real gay life.
A gold star is something that way back when teachers used to put on the test or papers of a student who did well. It obviously reflects a humorous attitude towards a past history. It isn’t in profiles on gay apps.
The gay community has the phrase, “eight before seven” to describe a gay person who realized they were gay at an early age. They aren’t attacking arithmetic.
Gay people are interested in how their life’s trajectories compare to other gay men. Did they come out early or rather late? When under what circumstances was their first time having sex and with whom? How did they come out? Have they told family members? Are they out at work? Did they have to wrestle with internalized homophobia or not? There is a process in which gay men come to self-realization and connect with the gay community. Sometimes it is emotionally wrenching and sometimes it goes smoothly. Sometimes a person is running away from home or is beaten or has had internalized homophobia to fight.
One major issue that gay men deal with is the pressure of society to conform and act heterosexually.
Gay men face struggles in terms of self-realization of their identity.
Some gay men convince themselves that maybe if they sex with a woman they actually might change. Other gay men internalizing societies expectations of heterosexuality had girl friends and had sex with them and even get married. Some cases they think getting married will make them straight. Other cases they are under social pressure to get married and do think that somehow it will work out, though in many cases women realize that something isn’t there and divorce ensues. In some cases they get married and think they can pray the gay away.
So gays in comparing do note that in some cases they have circumvented societies pressure to get them to heterosexually behave and in other cases haven’t. Gay lives are of interest to gay people.
Further, almost every gay man has heard multiple times someone state, “How do you know if you haven’t tried it?” It really is annoying. The other stupid thing straight people ask is, “Which of you plays the woman and which plays the man.”
The straight person doesn’t accept that the gay man knows his own sexual identity. The straight person is sure that if the gay man had sex with a woman, he would discover how wonderful and better it is than being gay and the gay person’s orientation would be changed. Another statement that is sometimes heard is, “You just haven’t met the right woman.”
Further society in dramas about “rites of passage” or “coming of age” for men often involve the male protagonist having sex with a woman.
When a man hasn’t had sex with a woman by a certain age he is the object of comedy. The movie, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” is about a straight man who hasn’t had sex with a woman and of course he must be dysfunctional and saved. Saved by inserting his penis into a vagina.
Gay men are conscious of these ideas. They don’t feel that because they haven’t had sex with a woman that they are objects of ridicule or haven’t become adults.
The awareness of these heteronormative ideas as a context that gay men live within is likely global. The Japanese gay novelist Yukio Mishima in his review of Japanese gay poet Mutsuo Takahashi’s book, “Poems of a Penisist,” ridicules these heteronormative ideas when he writes:
“Mr. Takahashi was exempted from the human principle that every young boy grows up to be a young man … He did not have to go down to the bottom of the sea, down to the bottom of the female genitalia, which many a young man mistakes for a philosophy, mistakes for profundity.”
Movies having as their topic gay men being pressured to get married or having married and then breaking up is in almost every major and many minor East Asian languages as well in English and Spanish. Likely it is a theme in other languages, but the author hasn’t viewed many movies in other linguistic groups.
Oppressed groups adopt strategies of resistance involving linguistic strategies and strategies of ridicule. They aren’t “40-year-old virgins” they are “gold-star gays.” The term, “gold-star,” derived from school days, should also inform a person that it is a ridicule of the whole heteronormative pressure for gay men to have sex with a woman and the heteronormative idea that it is the great transition in life. We are thumbing our noses at heteronormative society.
Also, like the phrase, “eight before seven,” it is an acknowledgement of the different trajectories of gay men lives.
Its humorous name also tells gay men that being a “gold-star gay” isn’t something to take seriously as a great accomplishment. They realize that perhaps in different circumstances they might have had sex with a woman due to the pressures of heteronormative society.
In reaction to the idea that a vagina has such irresistible powers that it would magically change gay men, some gay men express that they are horrified by its sight. Again, a tactic to subvert heteronormative pressure. We really don’t have occasion to think about vaginas that often. Maybe when gay men stop frequently hearing the question, “How do you know if you haven’t tried it,” this tactic of subversion and the “gold-star” term will drop out of use, but gay people don’t live in hypothetical worlds, they aren’t living in Neverneverland, they live in the hear and now, they have strategies of resistance.
Finally, Murphy might consider that gay men living in a society that is constantly pressuring gay men to have sex with women, or who had sex with women as part of ill-advised marriages or attempts to go straight, that the offer to have sex with a biological woman could engender a lot of negative feelings, revive unpleasant memories.
Slandering Gay Men as Crypto-Supporters of Patriarchy
Prior to Murphy’s assertion that the phrase “gold-star gays” is evidence of wide spread misogyny in the gay community, he sets up this slander with another sly slander. Gay men are crypto-supporters of patriarchy. Murphy states:
Though anal sex is undoubtedly the quintessential Gay Sex Act in the ‘straight imaginary,’ the penis is actually a much more potent sexual symbol in gay male culture. The mythical presence of a large, attractive, fully functioning male sex organ that can become erect, penetrate orifices, and project copious amounts of semen upon orgasm is central to gay male sexual desire, sexual behavior, and cultural representations. In this, gay culture is intensely phallocentric. It’s a culture oriented around the penis and its cultural representations.
“Phallocentric” is a loaded word. In the Oxford online dictionary the definition is, “related to men, male power, or the phallus as a symbol of male power.”
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/phallocentric
Murphy is trying to assert that gay men are part of the patriarchy by their fundamental natures. He is doing a slight of hand with the meaning of “phallocentric.”
Also, his statement about anal sex is to assert that it is seen as important by uninformed straight people, but it really isn’t important. Anal sex is however one of the primary sexual activities in the gay community and even a reason for subclassification in the gay community as bottoms, tops, and versatile regarding penetrating or being penetrated.
Gay culture has had drag shows going far back in time. Hardly phallocentric. Camp, a type of gay cultural phenomenon is hardly phallocentric. It is in the gay community that heterosexual presentations of masculinity are first seen as a form of drag by straight people. Hardly phallocentric.
More directly to Murphy’s statement, he is just making an assertion. A penis is involved when two men have sex, but it is also the case when a man and a woman have sex. In reproduction, excepting in some cases of artificial insemination, a penis is involved in penetrating a vagina. In fact “phallocentric” was invented to describe a heteronormative society and male dominance in it as the penetrator of women. Are straight women “phallocentric”?
However, gay men unlike straight men both penetrate other men and are penetrated by men and sexually enjoy it. They have erotic desires for the whole body. To desire to fuck a man involves desire for his buttock and to be inside a man to merge with him. A large part of gay male desire is for hot butts. Murphy just wishes away anal sex because it doesn’t fit in his representation of gay men as phallocentric.
Foreplay involves extensive parts of the body and multiple activities. Even a cursory familiarity with gay porn will show that generally the whole body is the subject of desire. A gay person who doesn’t engage in foreplay is generally not well thought of as a good sex partner.
Further being gay is accepting that you might chose being fucked, hardly the exemplar of phallocracy, the male domination of women.
Freud wrote that “Biology is destiny” and evidently Murphy thinks this is the case also. As feminists have proclaimed “biology is not destiny” and I think gay men can claim this also. Oddly Murphy thinks that biology isn’t destiny for transmen but it is for gay men.
Murphy attempts to define what gay sexual desire is on the basis that he says so to stigmatize gay male desire.
Gay Male Desire is Reactionary
Prior to the insinuation that gay men are crypto-patriarchal reactionaries he sets up that assertion with this previous statement.
What binds gay men together as ‘a people’ is shared sexual attraction and desire for other men. Though some speak of “same-gender loving men,” rather than gay men or male homosexuals, it is undeniable that, while gay men’s gender presentations are varied, there is still an unspoken expectation by gay-identifying men that other gay men are biologically male. More specifically, there is an expectation that gay men possess male-typical genitals — a penis and testicles — and some presence of male-typical secondary sex characteristics. At least in this one sense, gay male culture is deeply conservative. It presumes a correspondence between (gay men’s) gender presentations and their biological sex.
Murphy cuts up the body of gay men and their genitals are reduced to “male typical” sex-toys which were attached to them at birth. It is a strategy that instead of recognizing that these are genitals which over 99+% of men with XY chromosomes are born with, men who represent over 99+% of mean, these genitals are repositioned as just a variant that has been in fashion or popular. Murphy’s strategy is to escape biological reality. The saying that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts is evidently unknown to Murphy. How gay men might imagine themselves as whole entities, spiritually, metaphysically, sexually, and otherwise is just feed into the meat grinder of gender ideology. This is a continuation of a certain negative attitude from the past that used to reduce gay men to medical cases rather than individuals with multiple dimensions.
Also, Murphy is making a major and important assertion in this paragraph in a round about way. “[G]ay-identifying men” instead of “gay men,” as well as “expectations that gay men possess male-typical genitals,” is an indirect way of saying that transmen and biological male gay men are really the same thing, are equivalents, with different sets of biological sex toys built into them. The fact that gay desire differentiates arouses the ire of gender ideologues and the condescension of Murphy. Gay identity, as nearly most gay men comprehend it, biological men attracted to biological men is rendered illegitimate. Gay men are “deeply conservative,” very much a loaded terminology, and their desires in error with presumptions and they are failing to conform their desires to advanced gender ideology. Who needs Christian homophobes when you have Murphy and others like him?
Murphy states that at gay bars and other gay social venues gay men generally expect that other gay men are biologically so. This is largely because transmen is largely
What is interesting is that Murphy has assumed the right to tell the gay community what their identity is, how their identity is constructed and who they are. Gay autonomy and self-direction is crushed. I wonder what other community would allow someone to dictate who they are.
As I just stated, it is likely that soon biological gay men will realize that there are people in the bars who look like men, but biologically aren’t. It is a new phenomenon and lots of biological men don’t subscribe to the New York Times or go to a university gender studies course so it might take a while. Or maybe not as more and more gay men have their evenings detonated on the dance floor, or even learn, how does Lightner say it, “the hard way,” and tell their friends.
The Step by Step of Condemning Gay Men
I have reviewed Murphy essay in reverse order to show first what it was leading up to, when you see what he is trying to assert in the end you can see how the earlier parts of his essay are building up to the final condemnation of his essay.
1. Gay men are failures for not considering adopting new sexualities.
2. Deeply conservative and backward for not recognizing biological women can be transmen gays.
3. Crypto-supporters of patriarchy with their phallocentric sexuality.
4. Women haters.
There is this whole disparagement of biological gay men throughout the essay as being backward. However, he concludes this essay with one parting shot.
“But given the casual cruelty that so often characterizes gay men’s treatment of those they don’t view as potential partners, I’m not holding my breath.”
So, we are besides being backward conservative women haters, we are also additionally a cruel people. Does Murphy have a study supporting this? How does the gay community compare to comparable heterosexual groups? Yes, there are people that are cruel, there are people who are cruel in all matter of human activity, but generally I have found gay people to be polite and careful of people’s feelings when they reject them and I have always tried to be as gentle as I can. However, it is the practice of gay people to get to the point and be direct so the time of both parties isn’t wasted and expectations aren’t built up.
Murphy is advocating a stereotype of gay men.
Hostile to Sexual Diversity
A progressive view of sexuality is that people have different sexual desires and it is an individual choice. We are supposed to accept the great diversity of sexual expression and desire. However, with Murphy gay male desire doesn’t follow a certain gender ideology and so it is to be condemned.
A Self-Directed Gay Community.
This is what happens when the gay community isn’t autocephalous, that is doesn’t think for itself, but leaves its self-definition and ideas to others. As a consequence, we have our gay desire and gay identity under attack.
What is outrageous is that others have decided to dictate to the gay community who we are and what we should be doing with our bodies. These are our bodies, we will define ourselves.
A Chapter Two. Courtesy in dealing with transgender.
This link no longer works, since I was banned from Medium.
Courtesy and response to transmen Chapter 2.
You will meet transgender people in daily life. I find that there is behavior that is needlessly annoying or offensive…edwardsebesta.medium.com
Essay ends here.
love this, very interesting read. ✨