Lee Hurley’s having a bit of a tough time.
In an op-ed for Vice, she waxes philosophic on the difficulties of trying to get on with a dating life in this crazy world.
At the heart of Lee’s struggle is the narrow-mindedness of the modern meat market.
As noted by The Daily Wire, in the piece, she laments that so many women “have such a limited view of how gender and sexuality works.”
Things were easier back when she was a professed lesbian — before she made the decision to identify as a man.
According to Lee, people can’t tell she’s a girl. That means she has to decisively let the cat out of the bag at some point. And upon that reveal, people perplexingly take off:
As a trans guy, the majority don’t seem to know what to make of me, so they run away. I’ve played around with the big reveal and I know the two are linked. It’s hard not to see a connection when you arrange a second date, drop the T bomb and then she cancels in the next breath.
She wants to know why some women aren’t interested: Her article’s titled “I Asked Reddit Why Trans Guys Like Me Keep Getting Ghosted.”
I asked Reddit why people online ghost trans people and then wrote about it for Vice https://t.co/X04zSfvMZj
— Lee Hurley (@HLeeHurley) November 5, 2019
In the write-up, Lee recounts an experiment: She set up three dating profiles online, only one of which listed her as transgender.
The result:
Things were significantly slower on OKCupid where I had stated that I was trans.
And the whole thing cut deep:
I won’t lie. It got to me for a while. I’d be chatting with a woman, making her laugh and seemingly getting on well. Then I’d tell her and she’d vanish. Over and over and over. Before dates, during dates, after dates, it didn’t matter. The result was almost always the same.
So Lee wanted to know: Why do some women only want to date men?
Or, as she worded it, “Why do women vanish when I tell them I’m a trans guy?”
She posted the question on an advice forum with over a million readers.
In the end, she “found it all quite cathartic.”
Here’s her recollection of two responses:
One of my personal favourites was the person who told me they would ghost me because I seemed too insensitive to people being “squicked out” before revealing “that kind of thing squicks me out”. (By “thing”, I assume she meant me.)
Another said: “A woman born a woman is always a woman, no matter what. The women on the dating apps are not interested in dating other women so they vanish because they are interested in me.”
She was also floored that genitals were an issue:
What also struck me was how a lot of the replies were penis-centric: “It’s probably the genital issue,” replied more than one. Another answered: “I would assume it’s the thought that you don’t have a penis that puts them off.”
She goes on to explain things that are largely unprintable here. But let’s just say she assures the reader of her prosthetic means by which to compensate for any perceived male insufficiency.
Speaking of, some on Reddit recommended she go back to lesbianism, but that’s a hairy situation:
The suggestions on how to address this “problem” were varied. One helpful user informed me I should find some lesbians to date, presumably because of their well-known love of hairy men like myself, as they assumed (wrongly) that I hadn’t had lower surgery.
Amid her disappointment in society, she asks if men are only worth the contents of their britches.
She also blasts the idea that she should declare her sexual identity from the get-go, as that’s a personal medical condition:
More than one accused me of trying to trick potential mates by not declaring my transness upfront. I didn’t check their dating profiles but I assume they’ve listed every medical condition they have on theirs. I noted how they didn’t seem to expect a man who’d lost a testicle to cancer, for instance, to declare that upfront on his profile, nor a woman who might have lost breasts to the same disease.
Also, what’s fertility got to do with it:
Women obviously want a “real” man, I was told – one born that way. As I was born a woman, I’d always remain one I was told by someone else. Perhaps these potential dates wanted children, I was informed. Yet we don’t require anyone else declare their fertility status on their profiles, so I doubt that’s the real reason either.
In the end, it all boils down to ignorance:
The overriding sense I got from the replies was one of ignorance about trans people and while most of the offensive and ridiculous replies are now gone, there was some hope in the others that remained.
And absurdity:
I can’t think of any other bedroom issue that is seen as having to be discussed that early on.
Bottom line: It just isn’t fair.
That, really, is the whole issue in a nutshell. We hold trans people to a higher standard than anyone else when it comes to dating. We require of them more than we ask of others, all while constantly sending the message that trans people are somehow ‘less than’.
The dating landscape sure has changed.
Just a few years ago, Mel Gibson delivered a blockbuster called What Women Want. These days, that movie might meet protest, as there’s no such thing as women (here and here). Hollywood could re-christen it “What Owners of Cervixes Want,” but it’d still be stereotyping, which may be a product of the social-construct treachery of the patriarchy.
Nowadays — the Vice article seems to indicate — if you’re a guy and you meet Mrs. Right, you’ll just have to wait and see what the fertility fairy brings. It may deliver a package that’s…a package.
And if you’re a woman who thinks she’s finally found her Romeo, cut him some slack in his slacks — he may not be ready to reveal his medical conditions.
-ALEX
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