Your penis is not a dowsing rod for uteri.

I bring this up because some douchebags who presume to write fiction will include woman characters who successfully disguise themselves as men, and then man characters will be Inexplicably Attracted, causing them to have a breakdown and wonder if they're really teh ghey!omgz. But of course they aren't! Because even though they couldn't tell at all, the person they are attracted to had a Really Real Uterus buried deep down underneath all those clothes, and that makes it heterosexual.

This is bullshit.

Dear "Straight" Man: Your sex drive does not magically know the True Sex of whoever you're looking at. If a woman is successfully passing as a man, albeit a pretty one, to the point where you would never ever question her sex, and you're attracted to her, then you're attracted to her as a feminine man. Period. If you're not attracted to her normally, but when she gets in a certain light she looks a whole lot like a woman and suddenly you're into her, then you're attracted to her as a woman. Otherwise, that inexplicable feeling you're getting is - as much as I hate to say it - just a little bit gay. But hey, good news! Being gay, bisexual, straight-with-exceptions or whatever you are is not a bad thing. It's not! It doesn't make you less of a man. It doesn't make you less of a human being. It just means that you sometimes like dudes.

Dear writers: See above.

In addition to the fact that you are essentially assigning psychic uterus-detecting powers to men's penises, this trope is deeply offensive because it implies that someone's biological sex is their "true sex" and always trumps the way they're presenting. This effectively de-genders all transgender individuals and undermines the validity of those who are attracted to them as their true gender.

Oh, and in honor of my asswipe family: no, the answer is not "pheremones." Pheremones play a role in attraction; they are not a fucking panacea. How do we know this? Because trans women whose bodies are currently fueled by testosterone have successfully attracted the attentions of heterosexual men who, upon finding out that the woman in question does not actually possess a vagina, throw a fit and kill her because she threatens their heterosexuality and masculinity.

Which is, in part, because assholes like you keep writing stories that perpetuate the "true sex" myth.

Quote of the Day

A comment on the Womanist Musings post "There Are More Sites Of Oppression Than Gender":

I'm a WOC, and when I look at gender in movies,I don;t get to neatly parse out where gender ends or race begins. Cos they exist simultaneoulsy. Cos yknow, WOC EXIST.

Intersectionality. It's a tough one. It's easy to get it into our heads that we can break down the ways that we are oppressed into easy-to-categorize boxes, but you can't. Just like I couldn't leave a comment (on a post about class privilege) about my class disadvantages without mentioning all of the non-class factors (religious beliefs, education, gender identity, etc.) that have a very real impact on how desperately I need the money for my own safety as well as how much money I will have to spend for it.

Intersectionality means that we are more than the sum of our parts. A black woman is not just black + woman; she is a unique individual that suffers a unique set of stigmas and stereotypes. For instance, she may be expected to erase her race from her hair for the sake of beauty - something that neither white women nor black men are expected to do. Likewise, a trans gay man is not just gay + man + trans. People may assume of him, if he has a vagina, that he wants to be the "bottom" in a sexual relationship. This isn't something that happens to cis gay men OR to trans straight men (though it happens frequently to trans and cis women).

Intersectionality is one of the hardest facets of oppression to learn, because you can't just learn the rules for each category of oppressed persons and then stack them up like Dominos to figure out what each person is suffering from. Which I think is the point - an identity isn't just a list of labels. It's a melting pot that uses all of the ingredients put into it to create a person, and a set of stigmas for that person, that will taste similar in some ways to those who share ingredients but also has a taste of its own.

That may or may not make any sense.