Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ophelia783
Just to clarify, Gilda's sister is transgendered, which would lead me to believe that she does indeed have a point of reference, since she's exposed to delicate issues like these as her sister's guardian.
|
ophelia, I'm well aware. And I'll amend that to say that she does have a point of reference, but not the correct one to understand how such a thing would be important to these boys.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by martinguerre
as i suggested earlier, i think we need to take ownership of these reactions, and acknowledge our participation in shaping them. Living in a homophobic culture makes it harder to assert a heterosexual idenity. Practicing the thoughts of anger, imagining a reaction of shock, horror, rage...all of these things work to help produce our frame of mind. there is nothing about seeing a penis that biologically causes rage in heterosexual males. what does that say about our culture? it might suggest that our society has come to believe that hetero orientations are quite fragile, to the point where they need to be defended with violence. i don't know if that's how people *want* to think about hetero orientations.
|
Allow me to reiterate that I'm not condoning the reaction here. What I'm ultimately getting at is that I know why they reacted as they did, at least initially. This makes it all the more reprehensible to me, because I understand the situation and their emotional response to it and I still don't think it justifies anything.
I have never and will never intentionally kill another human being unless it is in defense of myself or my loved ones and I have no other recourse, which in itself is a very improbable scenario. I know that I can get violent, but that's not due to distress and I wouldn't see myself reacting violently in this situation. Can I say with absolute certainty that I wouldn't slap someone if I found out that I'd been deceived in the manner these boys were? No, I can't. Can I say with certainty that I wouldn't beat her with a frying pan? Yes. They went far past the level of a reasonable reaction on this and deserve what they get.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by martinguerre
Is it a moral demand upon men that they inquire as to the natal gender of their potential sexual partners?
|
This is sort of like 'I never told you because you never asked.' If I see a girl I find attractive, the first thought in my head isn't whether or not she was born with a penis. The transgendered girl is a special case and one most men aren't going to think about under normal circumstances. While it's important and certainly a wise idea to inquire as to someone's sexual history before becoming intimate with them, I don't think it's a moral obligation under most conditions. A transgendered girl who does not reveal the nature of her sexual history, however, is engaging in an implicit deception which I believe is morally wrong. Once more, I don't think it justifies this sort of response, but that doesn't mean she was in the right by any means.
We (collectively) have a habit of reducing things to black and white when the reality is that there are all manner of shades of grey. 'What those boys did was wrong, which means that what she did was okay.' I truly hope I don't need to point out the flaw in this logic to anyone.