Update: I have made some edits to the text to remove some of the more aggressive and pejorative remarks towards those who misinterpreted Zinnia’s tweets, at least up until a certain point. Misunderstanding things is to be expected and is something that everyone will do, and I do hope to clear some of that up with this article. However, there are some people who just actively WANT to be offended or are just close minded, and once someone reaches that point, I’m done being nice.

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Trigger Warning: Transphobia, homophobia.

So, trans activist, Youtube user, and porn actress Zinnia Jones has been experiencing a recent flood of hate from chuds over being told that maybe you shouldn’t base your entire decision on whether you date someone on whether or not you think being attracted to them makes you gay. Of course, most of them didn’t bother to read Zinnia’s entire tweet chain before rushing to defend their straightness with trite accusations that Zinnia can’t get laid (She’s a fucking porn actress) or find a man (she’s also a lesbian) instead of realizing that she’s merely implying that the reason so many straight men and lesbian women reject trans women is due to insecurity of being considered gay or the belief that trans women are men.

Let’s look at this piece by piece.

“Nobody has to date anyone they don’t want, AND it’s okay to have a baseline social norm of treating trans women the way they are.”

See, literally the first line is “nobody has to date anyone they don’t want.” Additionally, note the wording. “Treating trans women the way they are,” and nothing about dating them. Almost as if she’s saying it’s possible to not want to date a trans woman without being an enormous asshole about it. How is this interpreted as “date me or you’re a bigot?” Do straight man have no standards and date any cis woman who wants them?

Being exclusionary of trans woman partners should be an outlier and marginal position for straight men, not some commonplace expectation”

So this one does sound more forceful. She technically is not saying that they should be made to feel ashamed of themselves for their preference, but she IS saying that said preference shouldn’t be seen as expected and should be a minority. I think the common misinterpretation begins here. Her haters are interpreting her statement against it being a commonplace expectation as “we should feel obligated to date trans women out of shame” because a lot of these people legitimately follow the belief that no straight man or lesbian wants to date a trans woman, which there will be more on later.

These angry declarations that they have some absolute right to not want to be with trans women are just misplaced and inappropriate.

Looks pretty damning at first, but note the words “misplaced and inappropriate.” She doesn’t say that they are wrong. Those two words are saying that the accusations do not fit the situation they are used in response to; IE she’s saying they’re missing the point!

You have the right to be a rude asshole, to refuse to examine your own beliefs at all, but that’s not something to be proud of

This directly confirms her previous statment. She confirms that, yes, the angry declarations that they have an absolute right to not be with trans women are correct, but that just cause they “have the right” does not mean they should. Note that if your only argument in defense of something is “they have the right to do it” then that’s setting the bar very low. Technically, people can do a lot of things that are typically seen as scummy and immoral. For example, there is no law against adultery (in my country at least) yet people who cheat on their spouses are still seen as shitty people. Once again, I am also going to draw attention to the specific wording used. First would be the words “rude asshole” which indicate that most of this is out of a matter of common courtesy and respect. Second would be the emphasis on” examining your own beliefs” and not “change your beliefs” or “work through your beliefs.” Re examining your beliefs does not necessarily mean to change them. What she’s saying is to consider the reason WHY you hold them.

There’s some baseline rate for that as an actual true preference, but it’s artificially inflated by social stigmas and biases.

“There’s a baseline rate” as in some people do legitimately just not like dick without prejudice or bias playing into effect. Rather what she is saying is that plenty of people refuse to date trans women because of homophobia. Yes, I said homophobia, and not transphobia (although it is that as well). It is a recurring problem among straight men that they simply cannot afford to look gay or they are “less of a man.” Yes, such a standard is childish and sophomoric, but that has never stopped anyone before now has it? Furthermore, a lot of these people also believe that trans women are men, or at the very least that sexual attraction to trans women makes you gay, because that’s totally how it works. After all, I’m sure that any straight man would rather fuck Buck Angel than Baily Jay.

Translation: She is talking about straight people who DO in fact like trans women, but are too afraid to admit it because they think it will make them gay, so they convince themselves they don’t like us. It is NOT “Suck my dick or you’re a bigot” like these troglodytes claim. Hell I will give Zinnia credit in that she expressed this infinitely better than Riley J Dennis did and has even made me reconsider my opinions on Riley. I initially assumed the worst about Riley and assumed that she was merely claiming that repulsion towards penises was a result of transphobia and that it can “be worked on” while ignoring that there are people who do legitimately respect trans people and even enter relationships with them despite not being attracted to their genitals, and also ignoring that women with CAIS exist meaning that women having dicks isn’t solely a trans issue. Of course, I still am not fond of those videos or what I have seen of Riley’s content, but knowing that she was likely trying to say what Zinnia did makes me feel a bit better about her.

But of course, queue clueless, anti-feminists who spend days dog pilling Zinnia because they can’t bring themselves to read a full tweet chain, or because they did and were offended by the mere implication that liking trans women isn’t gay.

Of course, the fact that this many people believe this is the case does in fact speak volumes about why it exists in the first place. The fact that so many people are uttering the “trannies are gay” slogan shows that these idiots are using their heterosexuality as an excuse to avoid us. There isn’t anything wrong with them, it’s just that every straight man who is attracted to them is a closet fag! Of course, the more people who become okay with trans women, the less justification these people have for avoiding us, which is a decent indicator that there is some latent guilt. After all, even if repulsion to penises is based entirely on societal bias and standards, that shit isn’t going to just go away.

Now here is the important part: If you just can’t help what you are and are not attracted to, then that’s okay. There’s nothing to feel guilty about if you are turned off by our genitalia. After all, most trans women resent their own genitalia even more than that. There are those who will say “but what about such & such who called me a bigot for rejecting her?” While it is inevitable that there will be overly insecure and sensitive trans women who will interpret this type of rejection as transphobia, I can guarantee that a sizeable amount of  these interpretations come from the WAY they are rejected or turned down, rather than just because they are.

Regardless of context, most trans women are going to get pissed off if you imply they are a man. IE, if you claim that you being a straight man/ lesbian means they should know exactly why they are being rejected or that you are rejecting them for being trans in stead of because their genitalia. Yes, there IS a distinction between the latter two.

One is simply a result of sexual tastes that one can’t help, while the other is something that stems from a prejudiced belief towards trans people. The one factor that I almost never hear brought up in these conversations is quite obvious; some trans women will get genital reassignment surgery, and afterwards, they will have a vagina that is indistinguishable from that of a cis woman’s, unless of course you’re special  (you aren’t) and can totally tell the difference cause you know everything there is to know about trans people (you don’t).

At that point, if you’re still refusing to date them solely on the premise that it makes you gay or you think it’s disgusting, then that’s pretty fucking prejudiced. Hell even in cases where someone still has a dick, if you’re reaction is to completely freak out in disgust like in a bad comedy movie, you’re probably overreacting a bit and are doing so in a way that is hard to not come across as prejudiced. I have written about this a while back for a piece on Oprainfall about the Pillars of Eternity joke that pissed a lot of trans people off. The line was a joke about a joke tombstone about Sir Firedorn, a playboy who slept with a trans woman and felt so ashamed that he killed himself.

it is very easy for a cisgender person to not think much of it. In context, it is just a player who overreacts to realizing that the person he bedded had a penis, and runs off a cliff.

However, with a trans woman, all this does is remind them that they will never be considered real women by the outside population. That they can never really express themselves as women because that one part of them will always define them. The reason for this is because they see themselves as the woman in that line. The woman who causes a man to kill himself in shame from bedding her; and be put on an epitaph AS A JOKE! The joke there is that trans women are freaks and deserve to have their entire identity mocked for the purpose of an out-of-the-way line in a fantasy role playing game.

While this was obviously referring to an in game joke, the real life reaction is not far off. The only difference is that instead of killing themselves, they assault, or in some cases even kill, the trans woman they slept with. It is common enough that there is even a name for when it’s used as a legal defense. This shitty “trannies are gay” attitude literally gets people killed, and if you use it, then being called prejudiced is getting off easy. This isn’t saying that you have to date trans women or find them sexually attractive, but then again, none of us were saying that; it was what you all assumed.

And really, the fact that people have freaked out this much over it speaks volumes. The fact that most people felt the need to respond to Zinnia’s claims with increasingly personal and transphobic attacks only proves her point further, or at least proves that they lack basic reading comprehension. Let me just show you the clip that Tucker Carlson used on Fox News.

Within the first 15 seconds, he already invokes “muh high school biology” while somehow not being able to grasp that science makes new discoveries and that there is still a lot of stuff to learn. Hell, it’s an entire field that people are still making discoveries about. Citing “high school biology” as your source is the equivalent of doing a book report after only reading the first chapter or reviewing an anime series after only watching the shitty Hollywood adaptation.

45 seconds in, he goes “muh trans agenda” (or more appropriately, “muh transgenda”) by bitching about trans people wanting to be called by the right pronouns and to use the restroom. If you think this guy is a reputable source in the slightest you’re even dumber than he is. Afterwords, he calls trans women “biological men”and says that Zinnia is somehow forcing them to date trans women.

Furthermore, notice how he doesn’t actually let you hear Zinnia speak during this segments and he shows silent footage. He takes two of the above tweets and grossly misrepresents them, and declares that they no longer have the right to date who they want because this one chick supposedly said they didn’t. He then goes on to say how it will be a cause for the left to campaign for if they don’t “stand up for it.” Which once again, shows a lot about how he views this situation.

He isn’t asking for the right to not date trans women; he’s asking for the right to not be shamed for not doing so; to have his cake and eat it to.  That’s the thing though, if a lot of people are telling you that you’re a douchebag, you won’t get them to stop unless you stop doing what makes them call you one. Chances are, if you ARE doing something that gets you called a douchebag a lot, you should look into what you are doing that is causing it, and then decide whether what you are doing is worth the consequences. You don’t get to change how everyone else thinks just so you can feel better about yourself.

If you read through this and still think that Zinnia was saying “suck my cock or you’re a bigot” then you probably are. You are willing to completely ignore what your opponents say yet you get butthurt when they do the same to you. If you keep treating trans people as intolerant bigots for criticizing the society that has marginalized them for literal millennia without trying to understand why they are doing so, you don’t get to complain when they call you intolerant bigots without trying to understand you.

All we really want is to just be treated like regular human beings. To one day, not even need to call ourselves “trans women” or “trans men” and instead just be “women” or “men” respectively. This may never be never fully come true as long as there are any differences at all, but the goal is to lessen the emphasis on those differences. One day, maybe trans women will be seen as different from cis women, but no different then red headed women are to blonde women, or that black women are to Mexican.

And the thing is, in any circumstance, if you call us men, we aren’t going to be happy. It doesn’t matter whether you aren’t sexually attracted to us or if you don’t want to date us, there are ways to turn us down without being an asshole. If you simply don’t know how to do that, well then maybe you need to work through that to.

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