It Takes Two People to Go On a First Date
You may want info before a first date, but that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to have it
Today, I read someone’s argument that “freedom” means that everyone gets to be whoever they are, and also that some people might not want to date them because they might categorize their dating preferences along certain identity groups and that too is part of “freedom.” If it had stopped there, I would have shrugged at it. But the writer’s more specific conclusion was that transgender people should be socially obligated to identify their birth sex (“male” or “female”) and never update that particular sex-based label so that people whose sexual preferences drive off birth sex can avoid dating trans people. This I am not going to agree with.
Here, I don’t care to argue about what sexual orientation “really is” or “ought to be” (gender presentation? physical sex?) and whether cisgender people should be open to dating trans people. Those things could be discussed, but I am not interested in discussing them right now. Instead, I’m taking a different line of argument.
What I want to point out is that many cis people believe they are entitled to information about who is trans, and they often present their demand as applying to just this one very limited situation, which they claim…
