GO011C - Transphobia: The Great Debate (UNCENSORED‪)‬ Geometric Octopus Podcast

Download Trigger Warnings: Homophobia Transphobia TERRIBLE THINGS ~Please be a responsible listener.~ We continue our conversation on fetishization and whether a boyfriend in a hypothetical scenario is transphobic. This was what we began in episode 11a and will continue on for one more episode after this. We also makes points about sexual attraction, sex education, neurobiological sexism, the non-binary nature of intersex people’s genitalia, and how a trans woman is a woman regardless of her genitalia. We make commentary about ancient Greek culture and how it is largely our culture in the present day that has shaped our thoughts about what is considered masculine and what is considered feminine. Here, have some quotes from this episode in case you want to jump directly into a particular sub-conversation (the numbers are the approximate times where they appear in the episode): “I was talking about the ways of viewing sex, but I realize there’s multiples ways of viewing sex and valuing certain things in sex… I remember earlier, Tracy, you said people should value sexual relationships differently from romantic relationships, or that sex is something that’s extractable from a relationship as it’s own entity--same as the romantic quality to it.” — Cosmo, 4:00 “A trans woman’s body is a woman’s body because she is a woman, and that’s what makes it a woman’s body. There is a difference between genitalia and gender, particularly because genitalia are not quite so clear-cut as they’re made out to be by a lot of the general population… I can’t necessarily speak to that because I’m not intersex, but there’s actually a much larger percentage of the population that is intersex than one would think just by how they’re represented… By my memory, there are about as many people who are intersex as there are people who are ginger.” — Jackie, 12:00 “But if you leave someone because they have a penis, but they’re a woman and you’re a man… and you’re attracted to women… It’s really, I think, a convenience issue rather than a sexual attraction thing… ‘cause I’ve read some stories where these guys who are with trans women are like, ‘Oh, I get tired of sucking dick.’ … If you’re not okay with that, why don’t you work it out with your partner rather than getting pissed off and getting angry about it and building up this weird hostile situation because there’s a lot of violence within trans relationships… This goes for a lot of other things, too… such as how a lesbian couple may go under the radar for domestic abuse because people are like, ‘Oh, it’s two women. There couldn’t possibly be any physical violence between them.’ And while one partner is abusing the other physically and mentally, there’s still that thing like, ‘Oh, you can’t possibly get harmed by another woman--you’re in a lesbian relationship.’ It’s still just as bad." — Cosmo, 16:00 “... everybody deserves to be in a relationship that they want to be in… I feel like entitlement doesn’t even come into it. " — Tracy, 19:00 “The concept of something being hard-wired into your brain really leads into a lot of other issues--excuses for other things… When you’re talking on the level of say, sexuality--just what genders you’re attracted to--I can understand that argument, but when you’re talking about your brain being hard-wired [with] anything else, particularly in the sexual realm… that leads into a whole different can of worms. … The differences in the human brain are not that big… They’re not large enough to actually be able to determine things like that… That’s not how the human brain works. The human brain is not that different--the difference between a ‘man’s brain’ and a ‘woman’s brain’ is so miniscule. Again, gender and sexuality are not binaries--they are a spectrum, and therefore you don’t have that clear distinction between ‘this is a