Cotton Ceiling Receipts
Trans activists misrepresent what the “cotton ceiling” is, so I decided to compile a list of descriptions given by pro-trans sources. There are lists compiling receipts from anonymous social media accounts (for example), but I haven’t seen lists compiling more reputable sources on it on it.
As I was putting this together, one thing that struck me was how important it is to distinguish between traditional homophobia, which pressures homosexual people be heterosexual, and a different type of homophobia which pressures homosexual people to be bisexual. Condemning a gay person for not experiencing opposite-sex attraction is homophobic; redefining “homosexuality” and “same-sex” to include attraction to the opposite sex so that you can claim to support homosexuality (but only as long as it also includes opposite-sex attraction) is homophobic.
I stopped at about 31 reputable sources and then about 9 of a more casual blogging variety. I’ve tried to limit my commentary on what I quote.
Cotton Ceiling From Reputable Sources
Article from Curve Magazine (2020) by a male-sex trans person. Curve Magazine is a lesbian magazine dating back to 1991.
The term “cotton ceiling” has been viewed as quite the incendiary phrase. It was coined by porn actress and trans activist Drew DeVeaux in 2015. It’s been used to refer to the tendency by cisgender lesbians to outwardly include and support trans women, but draw the line at considering ever having sex with them.
[…]
The point of such discussion is not, EVER, to exhort anyone to have grudging sex without enthusiastic consent. The point of such discussion is to exhort folks to examine their inherent bigotry. We change, we grow, we learn through familiarity and exposure. We can challenge and re-examine our prejudices and fixed ideas.
Here a lesbian magazine exhorts lesbians that being friendly with male-sex trans people isn’t sufficient, lesbians should “examine” and “change” their “inherent bigotry” (the absence of opposite sex attraction) to learn how to be both-sexes attracted (the correct orientation).
It pays lip service to consent (”we would never want anyone to have unwanted sex!”) while arguing that not wanting straight sex is bad and you should fix that about yourself ("but you should learn to want sex you don’t want currently”). If you don’t want lesbians to have unwanted sex, then you should support and encourage them to double down and defend their boundaries when those boundaries are challenged or undermined—not instruct them that they have a responsibility to "grow” their boundaries. The author seems unaware that rightwing activists who want lesbians to be straight are also assuming lesbians will “learn” to LIKE dick and aren’t expecting lesbians to be miserable in straight relationships.
The author also links to Riley Dennis’s “genital preferences are unfair discrimination” video, which appears further down this list.
Article from The TransAdvocate (2013) by a same-sex attracted woman. The TransAdvocate is an independent nonprofit that was selected by the US Library of Congress to be in its collection of LGBTQ+ writing in 2019.
The question of whether or not to include trans women in women’s sexuality-based events is old and tiresome, but it still comes up with some regularity. I recently responded to a discussion on this topic and I realized that it might be useful to post my thoughts here, as I don’t know that I’ve ever done so in full.
[…]
Assumption 9. The “cotton ceiling” is a way for trans women to bully cis women into having sex with them.
The idea of the “cotton ceiling” is intended to draw attention to how even in spaces that are politically and socially welcoming of trans women, transphobia often retains its influence on how we understand who is sexually desirable and who isn’t. It’s no different from other politicized criteria for desirability—people who are, for instance, fat or disabled are also often welcomed into queer women’s space but not seen as desirable compared to those hot slim, muscular, able-bodied sorts. This isn’t our fault—our entire culture tells us what’s sexy and what’s not, 24 hours a day, and that definition is terribly narrow. But it is really easy to forget how much influence advertising propaganda and social pressure can exert on what gets us wet and hard, and to let the mainstream’s terms dictate our desires.
It is possible to read the idea of the cotton ceiling as being about pressuring people to change who and what they desire. And that pressure can feel unwelcome. With that in mind, I would challenge those who feel it that way to look very carefully at the message that’s being delivered. Is it actually about you being told you need to go out and fuck people you’re not attracted to? Or is it about someone asking you to think about how much of your attractions are based on an underlying assumption of cissexism?
The author argues it’s a problem for women to be “welcoming” of male-sex trans people while drawing the line at sleeping with them (aka, friendzoning). She goes on to compare homosexuality to refusing to sleep with overweight people, arguing that lacking opposite-sex desire is not a natural sexual orientation, it’s actually just a product of society’s prejudices.
So: lesbians are brainwashed by society into being gay. Got it.
The kicker is when she compares the discomfort a homosexual woman feels from (1) being shamed for being homosexual, and (2) being pressured to be bisexual, to the discomfort a person with privilege feels when confronted with their privilege. It should suffice to say that “lacking opposite-sex desire” is not a socially dominant position to be in. Lesbians don’t lightly come to the conclusion that they lack opposite sex attraction, and no lesbian benefits from being lectured about how she needs to reflect more and think more on her sexuality until she reaches the “correct” conclusion: opposite-sex attraction. By the time she comes out of the closet and is rejecting male-sex trans people, she’s already reflected and thought on her sexuality.
This is trans-typical conversion therapy rhetoric, which a lesbian debunked well in this unconnected screenshot:
Because though the author tries to obscure it, there is a causal link between attraction and sexual relations, and when male-sex trans people criticize lesbians for not being attracted to male-sex trans people, they’re upset about lesbians rejecting sexual relations. They would not be upset with lesbians if lesbians were fucking them, and fucking them is the “social justice” outcome they’re seeking.
No matter how friendly, how "welcoming,” of male-sex trans people a woman is, if that welcome doesn't extend into her bedroom, she’s a transphobe.
Article from PinkNews (2022). Wikipedia says PinkNews is a British LGBT news outlet founded in 2005.
The “cotton ceiling” is a concept coined by porn star and trans activist Drew DeVeaux, and describes the inherent prejudice that many cisgender lesbians have against trans women, reducing them to their genitals, even if they are outwardly accepting. It is not about an individual’s sexual decisions, which should only ever be made freely and with full, enthusiastic consent.
It’s pointless to include a disclaimer about consent when you’ve just argued it’s not enough for lesbians to be “outwardly accepting,” that lesbians HAVE to be open to sleeping with male-sex trans people in order to truly respect them. The “cotton ceiling” is the transgender version of men complaining about being friendzoned by lesbians.
Scholarly book Does anyone have the right to sex? (2018) by Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books
The difficulties I have been discussing are currently posed in the most vexed form within feminism by the experience of trans women. Trans women often face sexual exclusion from lesbian cis women who at the same time claim to take them seriously as women. This phenomenon was named the ‘cotton ceiling’ – ‘cotton’ as in underwear – by the trans porn actress and activist Drew DeVeaux. The phenomenon is real, but, as many trans women have noted, the phrase itself is unfortunate. While the ‘glass ceiling’ implies the violation of a woman’s right to advance on the basis of her work, the ‘cotton ceiling’ describes a lack of access to what no one is obligated to give (though DeVeaux has since claimed that the ‘cotton’ refers to the trans woman’s underwear, not the underwear of the cis lesbian who doesn’t want to have sex with her). Yet simply to say to a trans woman, or a disabled woman, or an Asian man, ‘No one is required to have sex with you,’ is to skate over something crucial. There is no entitlement to sex, and everyone is entitled to want what they want, but personal preferences – no dicks, no fems, no fats, no blacks, no arabs, no rice no spice, masc-for-masc – are never just personal.
[…]
…a feminism that totally abjures the political critique of desire is a feminism with little to say about the injustices of exclusion and misrecognition suffered by the women who arguably need feminism the most.
Another author who argues lesbians need to be willing to have sex with male-sex trans people in order to take them seriously as women. Having sex with someone is not evidence you respect them “as women” or otherwise, and refusing sex with someone is not evidence you disrespect them.
Notice that the author’s compared homosexuality to refusing to sleep with disabled people or people of certain races. The goal of the comparison is to argue homosexuality is an unnatural orientation: nobody is biologically wired to be exclusively attracted to people of certain ability or skin color the way gay people are biologically wired to experience exclusively same-sex attraction. It’s not the same thing, and it’s homophobic (and scientifically inaccurate) to argue homosexuality is unnatural.
Also notice that she listed “no dicks” as if it’s analogous to “no blacks.” Rejecting sexual relations with someone because he has a penis is not remotely the same as rejecting someone for their skin color.
During court case, British lawyer compares cotton ceiling workshop to racially integrating South Africa after Apartheid (2021)
During the Allison Bailey trial, a lawyer from the law group Garden Court Chambers compared Planned Parenthood’s cotton ceiling workshop to South Africa’s workshops to racially integrate in order to argue Planned Parenthood’s workshop was good. This lawyer compared lesbians who won’t let male-sex trans people get in their pants to white supremacists enforcing society-wide apartheid.
Here is a more detailed description of this moment in the trial.
If you’ve never read about the OG Planned Parenthood workshop (2012) by Morgan Page and Sarah Hobbs in Toronto…
Planned Parenthood gives a full-throated defense for hosting a workshop called “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women,” stating that trans women “are denied full participation in queer women’s communities.” But what do they mean by “full participation”? It was a workshop by male-sex trans people upset that they couldn’t get laid with lesbians and bisexual women.
That passive construction, “trans women are denied full participation,” is a euphemism for sexual relations. When Planned Parenthood says “we strongly stand behind queer trans women’ right to participate as full members of LGBTQ communities,” the ~right to participation~ they reference is sexual relations with women who don’t want to sleep with them (if these women wanted to sleep with them, there would be no workshop).
No cookie-cutter disclaimer about oooh consent is so important can change the fact that the core principle underlying this workshop (and the cotton ceiling in general) was that female homosexuality is unfair and oppressive to the male sex.
Planned Parenthood also couldn’t help but imply that the reason lesbians aren’t interested in male-sex trans people is because of how “transphobia and transmisogyny impact sexual desire.” They do not view lesbians’ rejection of male-sex trans people as a natural consequence of their natural sexual orientation. They view lesbians’ homosexuality as a “sexual barrier” to “inclusion” that should be overcome.
Tweets from Drew DeVeaux, male-sex trans person.
I’ve included him in the “reputable” sources section because DeVeaux is widely credited with coining the term “cotton ceiling,” so what he says about it has particular weight.
Excerpt from 2014 speech
These threads are read from the bottom up:
Thread 2:
Thread 3:
Email from Morgan Page (2012), who organized the Planned Parenthood workshop and is currently employed by the British LGBT organization Stonewall (as far as I know)
Article in AutoStraddle (2013) by a male-sex trans person. AutoStraddle is a lesbian publication.
I have written previously about some of the alienation I have experienced as a trans woman dating in the queer women’s community. Now, I want to emphasize here again that no one is obligated to touch a woman’s penis if they aren’t into that. However it’s also important to emphasize:
1) Not every trans woman has a penis. 2) No general means exist to distinguish trans women from cis women.
The implications of these two points together are that statements such as “I am attracted to cis women but not trans women” simply do not make sense and are rooted in social prejudice.
(As a side comment, before moving on let me briefly address something that appears in the previous piece that I linked above. My article from about a year ago contains a reference to the concept of the so-called “cotton ceiling,” which deserves a brief comment here. While several trans woman-hating “radical feminists” have intentionally misconstrued this concept in rather bizarre ways, there are also a few trans people who have made statements in relation to this idea that I think are problematic. Hence, after having some time to reflect on the previous debates about this I have come to the conclusion that the “cotton ceiling” should be considered an unhelpful concept for this type of discussion and should be set aside by trans activists moving forward.)
Sexual attraction is heavily dependent on being compatible in the bedroom. For example: remember a time where you were interested in someone, got with them, it was bad, and you lost all attraction.
Gay people are incompatible in the bedroom with the opposite sex. They might think opposite-sex trans people look good and fantasize about what the bedroom might be like if they were same-sex, but that sexual attraction evaporates when you realize real life sex with this person would suck. Because of your aforementioned incompatibility with the opposite sex.
Notice he specifically suggests strategically setting aside the term cotton ceiling while continuing the same homophobic tripe, so, changing the dressing without changing the content. The term cotton ceiling is unhelpful to the cause of getting more lesbians to learn opposite sex attraction.
I address the “you don’t know who’s trans so how can you be attracted to only women” argument further under the Katy Montgomerie tweets.
A second article from TransAdvocate (2014)
If a small group wanted to talk about how ableism affected cultural notions of beauty and/or desirability, would feminist circles tolerate TERFs going on a yearlong campaign, claiming that those who aren’t able-bodied want to force lesbians to have sex with them?
In a culture that devalues and oppresses trans people, why is it not appropriate to discuss how these cisnormative beauty standards impact notions of desirability, how these biases relate to the fetishization of trans people and how all of this impacts the perception of trans people in queer spaces?
The main point of this article is that the cotton ceiling is a conspiracy cooked up by transphobes: male-sex trans people never promote homophobia towards lesbians and anyone who says so is either stupid or scheming. This article is soundly debunked by looking at this list, or looking at any of the collections of social media receipts (for example), or just plain looking at what the article eventually settles on for the definition of the cotton ceiling (seen above: defining homosexuality as “cisnormative beauty standards” 🤔 gee, what cisnormative beauty standards could trick lesbians into finding the opposite sex undesirable? What cisnormative beauty standards could brainwash lesbians into finding only their same sex attractive?).
It’s written almost entirely using rhetorical questions in order to avoid taking responsibility for anything it proposes.
This article also contains rude and profane receipts from radfems to try to make the fuss about those nasty women who aren’t being good women, instead of tackling the homophobic rape culture inherent in insisting that it’s oppressive and abusive for female homosexuality to draw a boundary excluding the male sex (and for female homosexuality to have a name to use to describe that boundary).
Article from QueerFeminism.com (2012) by a bisexual female-sex trans person. This article was endorsed by an MSNBC journalist (homosexual male-sex trans person) who was recently nominated by GLAAD for an award. It was also linked in the Curve Magazine article cited first on this list.
The blogosphere is fired up over the cotton ceiling today, a term porn actress Drew DeVaux and other queer trans women are using to challenge cis lesbians’ tendency to support trans causes generally but draw the line at sleeping with trans women or including trans lesbians in their sexual communities.
[…]
The narcissism in the radfem community is somewhat hilarious. Why would a trans woman WANT to sleep with you? How boring it must be to have sex with someone who reduces your body, your sexual creativity, and your capacity to a penis.
[…]
Radfems, you’re not just missing out on great sex. You’re confused about what it means to be a lesbian, or a woman. I don’t care what your physical preferences are or what gender identity you prefer. I do care that you confuse those two things, and thereby insult trans women. I care that you don’t bother to interrogate the origins of your phallus-based distaste for trans women, and think about whether it’s actually a dislike of the organ that’s happening here or whether transphobia and a refusal to view trans women as women is involved. I care that you assume describing yourself as a lesbian tells others that you prefer what you call a pussy, as if everyone has the same definition of lesbian, woman, or pussy.
THAT is privilege. Assuming that you speak the same language, rather than consensually sharing vocabulary. Using lesbian as a proxy term that tells a whole group of women that they are not real, and not seeing anything wrong with that. I find your appropriation of the language of oppression disgusting.
Another author who helpfully specifies that the cotton ceiling is about “lesbians’ tendency to support trans causes generally but draw the line at sleeping with trans women.” As I said earlier, no matter how welcoming of male-sex trans people lesbians are, if that welcome doesn’t extend into the bedroom, it’s not enough.
The author here spends a good portion of the post writing about how a lack of willingness to engage in opposite-sex relations makes a person’s sex life deficient. She contradicts herself a couple times—she makes an unusually sincere-sounding disclaimer at the beginning about how not wanting to touch a penis is a valid sexual “preference,” and later says she doesn’t care what women’s “physical preferences” are, but also she mocks women who don’t want to have sexual relations with the opposite sex and says she hopes women come to feel shame for not “examining” their disinterest in sexual relations with the opposite sex.
My impression reading it was that since sexual relations don’t need to involve touching your partner’s penis, the author believes that even if you have an aversion to touching penises, that’s not a “good enough” reason to refuse sex with male-sex trans people because sexual relations doesn’t necessitate penis contact. In the end, as we all know, there is no “good enough” reason for lesbians to lack interest in the opposite sex.
Blog post (2012) by Roz Kaveney, a male-sex trans writer with his own Wikipedia page. He has 22.8K twitter followers. I wasn’t going to include him, but he’s cited by the next source, so here’s the full quote:
Essentially, the Cotton Ceiling - with reference to knickers - is the term parts of the trans community have inventively adopted for the way that, however theoretically accepting of trans people a lot of progressives may be, when it comes to actually having sex with us, they vote with their ...um...feet.
This is not - to jump straight in and answer a crude debating point that has been made by the usual 'radfem' suspects - a matter of the trans community demanding access to cis people's vulnerable and reluctant bodies. It's a matter of asking the question 'how can you say you accept us and still have - as many people do - a blanket assumption that you would never ever sleep with someone trans?' I say 'people' in that sentence because the assumptions that create the cotton ceiling are not peculiar to cis, or if you prefer 'non-trans', people. It's an issue to do with internalised transphobia as well, and something that a lot of trans people have to face up to in themselves. I've not always been as good on this as I might have been.
[…]
So, in the end, my substantive point is this - the cotton ceiling exists and it's an issue for all trans people, women, men and non-binary. It's a matter of transpobia, including internalized transphobia. Given the fact that access to surgery or even HRT is already in the US, and may become in the UK, an economic issue and quite often a racial one too.
To pretend the cotton ceiling does not exist is to deny an important component in transphobia.
Wanting to bang people is respect and not wanting to bang people is an important component of disrespect! Stop disrespecting us, which means, stop being so gay and start banging us!
Notice he employs the common conflation between using “trans” as a euphemism for a certain sex (typically, the male sex, such as by accusing feminists of being “trans-exclusive” if they include female-sex trans people but not male-sex trans people) with the use of trans to describe trans people of both sexes.
Kaveney and DeVeaux were both cited by the scholarly book Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality (2017)
A major step forward came when Drew Deveaux, a model and porn actress, won the Feminist Porn Awards ‘Heartthrob of 2011’. Deveaux, an androgynous trans woman from Toronto, writes that ‘Through performing in porn, I’ve been able to take the world’s fucked up notions about trans women and fuck them into blissful oblivion’ (Deveaux, 2010). She nevertheless experienced feeling isolated in queer sex culture as a trans woman with a vagina. In 2012 she coined the term ‘the cotton ceiling’ to describe the feeling of being invisible as a sexual, queer woman. The cotton ceiling, like the glass ceiling for women in the workplace, is a barrier that limits access to power, recognition and respect. It refers literally to the panties of (cisgender) dykes, suggesting a social barrier to being recognised in queer sex cultures by cisdykes. As trans writer and activist Roz Kaveney sees it, this obstacle is present because, ‘however theoretically accepting of trans people a lot of progressives may be, when it comes to actually having sex with us, they vote with their … um … feet’ (2012).
The cotton ceiling … is a barrier that limits access to power, recognition, and respect. Nothing rape culture about that.
From the scholarly conference NWSA Feminist Transgressions: Too Damn Straight to Kick It with a Science Fiction Girlfriend: Dark Angel as a Symptom of the Feminist and LGBTQ Marginalization of Translesbianism (2014)
The television series Dark Angel is widely read as a cultural artifact of third-wave feminism. In the series, a cislesbian befriends a trans* heterosexual woman but derisively rejects a translesbian who sexually propositions her. This representation invokes feminist dialogue about translesbianism, such as the heated debate about whether the combination of ciswomen’s social acceptance and sexual rejection of transwomen constitutes a “cotton ceiling.” This paper argues that Dark Angel’s representation of trans lesbianism is symptomatic of the broader marginalization of the intersection of trans* identity and lesbianism within feminist and LGBTQ communities.
I couldn’t find more quotes from this source, but considering its argument is that “trans lesbians are marginalized by the LGBTQ community” I think we can safely conclude it comes down on the male sexual rights override female homosexuality side.
From the scholarly book Lesbian Feminism: Essays Opposing Global Heteropatriarchies (2019)
The sexuality of trans women is being policed to such a degree that any conversation that seeks to investigate their place in lesbian communities is twisted into an unpleasant caricature, unrecognizable as mature discourse. I’d like to think it would not be necessary for me to utterly condemn any form of sexual coercion between individuals based on any form of ideology whatsoever, but hey, this might be on the internet – and where the ‘cotton ceiling’ is concerned, woe betide anyone who enters the conversation who doesn’t want to be accused of being rapey’.
[…]
Fear is being used to convince us that the progression of trans rights threaten our safety. We are familiar with the old trope, of painting the ‘enemy’ as a threat of sexual violence against women – it is used to justify war, it is used to justify racism and it is being used here to justify transphobia.
The author compares lesbians who speak up against the pressure to “learn” opposite sex attraction to people who propagate racism to justify war. She avoids defining the cotton ceiling explicitly and just endorses the TransAdvocate article proclaiming that there is a conspiracy among lesbians to slander male-sex trans people.
Excerpt from essay from scholarly book Feminist Perspectives on Orange Is The New Black (alternative link) (2016)
We can think of this as an example of what trans activist and porn star Drew DeVeaux has termed the “cotton ceiling.” Blogger and National Center for Transgender Equality staffer Natalie Reed (2012) provides a good synopsis of the term, writing that the “cotton ceiling” has to do with how trans women are perceived and represented. For example, trans men are often openly regarded as being sexy and hot within queer communities, being the subject of things like calendars and pin-ups and erotica. Trans women, on the other hand, are almost never permitted acknowledgment or representation in such communities as sexual beings. We carry a sort of image of being stuffy, boring, slightly icky, and ultimately eunuch-like things. We’re allowed into the parties, but we sit quiet and lonely in the corner. This ends up being a problem not in that we’re desperately eager to be sexually objectified (we get enough of that from the straight cis male world), but that this act of conceptualizing us as de-sexed and unfuckable is directly attached to larger systems of oppression, dehumanization and invalidation we face.
The “cotton ceiling”—referring to cotton underwear—is a way of shorthanding the phenomenon of desexualizing transwomen in queer spaces.
He’s complaining that lesbians will buy sexy calendars of female-sex trans people but not male-sex trans people because lesbians consider male-sex trans people “unfuckable” because larger systems of oppression dehumanization invalidation. Not because of homosexuality? Could a natural lack of opposite-sex attraction be a significant variable here?
I’ve never seen Orange is the New Black, so I can’t really evaluate the analysis the author presents. But the author talks about how the trans character’s wife begged him not to get a penile inversion, because his wife is no longer sexually interested in him afterwards. The author also complains that the writers didn’t give the trans character any “lesbian” crushes/affairs, remaining loyal to his wife, and says that proves the bigotry of the writers.
I give the full quote from Natalie Reed further down the list.
Article from Hunger (2019), a fashion and culture magazine with 227K followers on instagram
As you may or may not know, lesbians have gathered a bit of a bad reputation in recent years. We’ve got TERFs uniting under the “lesbian” banner to hijack London Pride with their messed-up views; unchecked biphobia running rampant in our dating circles and convoluted in-fighting around the concept that butch people supposedly possess “masculine privilege” (btw, not a thing). As lesbianism increasingly becomes associated with transphobia and the “cotton ceiling” (the romantic and sexual exclusion of trans women and transfeminine people from lesbian circles) it’s a time when many of us are identifying with the wider, more inclusive “queer”.
Lesbians are so un-inclusive! Why should they have sexual boundaries against the opposite sex?
Cotton Ceiling By Any Other Name
As it dawns on trans rights activists what a sticky corner they’ve backed themselves into, they sometimes talk about the cotton ceiling without using the searchable term “cotton ceiling.” Here are some examples from reputable sources.
Quote from Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley to the BBC (2021)
Kelley gave this quote to BBC when they asked her for a comment on their article about male-sex trans people pressuring lesbians for sex.
Given the subject matter, notice her strategic conflation between male-sex trans people and female-sex trans people, and her presumption that dating only one sex is unnatural, comparable to racism.
Tweet from Ash Sarkar, journalist responding to the BBC’s cotton ceiling article (linked above) (Wikipedia)
Nobody should be pressured into sex with anybody, for any reason.
I wouldn't want someone to feel they had to have sex with me out of social pressure, but it'd be fair to ask whether racism plays a part in announcing every 5mins that they'd never sleep with a woman of colour!
Homosexuality ≠ racism! Same sex attraction – opposite sex attraction = natural sexual orientation, not a conspiracy.
NBC article responds to the BBC cotton ceiling article.
BBC responds to complaints about its cotton ceiling article.
Article from VICE by a male-sex trans person (2018). Wikipedia says VICE is a news outlet that’s won a number of prizes.
Let me repeat: I am not saying that it is imperative to be attracted to trans women. I am arguing that your attraction is shaped by preconceived notions and stereotypes of transgender folks. So, no, I am not shaming you because of your sexual orientation. I am merely asking you to critically reflect on the factors that might shape your attractions.
[…]
This doesn’t mean that you have individual control or agency over your sexuality or gender, but that the meanings and perceptions that inform our sexuality and gender are relative to your culture and history. This also doesn’t mean there’s no biological influence, but how we interpret our biological impulses do not exist in a vacuum empty of ideological takes on the world.
[…]
Sexuality and gender aren’t simply something that comes from some biological imperative. They are phenomena that are developed through a messy brew of social, cultural, historical, and psychological factors. They can also prove to be lightly malleable if we try to dig into the foundations of how those oppressive structures influence the ways we see and understand the world.
He spends most of the article detailing harassment against trans people, which is ipso facto horrid. The point of the article is to rebut and explain what’s wrong with gay people not dating opposite-sex trans people, which he flunks at. He argues that society brainwashed gay people into being gay, that sexual orientations are “lightly malleable” (meaning, the jump from homosexual to bisexual is possible for every gay person, yay!), and urging gay people to “critically reflect on” their orientation with the obvious goal of converting them to be both-sex attracted.
Julia Serano in The Daily Beast (2017). In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s a prominent transgender activist. Wikipedia
Sexual attraction is a complex phenomenon, and of course there is lots of individual variation. I certainly do not expect every cis queer woman to swoon over me. And if it were only a small percentage of cis dykes who were not interested in trans women at all, I would write it off as simply a matter of personal preference. But this not a minor problem—it is systemic; it is a predominant sentiment in queer women’s communities. And when the overwhelming majority of cis dykes date and fuck cis women, but are not open to, or are even turned off by, the idea of dating or fucking trans women, how is that not transphobic? And to those cis women who claim a dyke identity, yet consider trans men, but not trans women, to be a part of your dating pool, let me ask you this: How are you not a hypocrite?
The kicker here is that Serano isn’t responding to any individual, he’s just looking at the big picture and noticing that lesbians want to be in same-sex relationships…which is a problem for him. You can tell there’s transphobia afoot when not enough lesbians are having opposite-sex relations. Lesbians, be more equal! Have fewer same-sex relationships and more opposite-sex relationships!
Peer-reviewed scholarly paper Transgender exclusion from the world of dating (alternative link) (2018)
In an ideal world, free of cisgenderism and transprejudice, an individual’s gender identity (transgender vs. cisgender) would not factor into whether they were viewed as a viable dating partner. […] In other words, a heterosexual man or lesbian woman, usually attracted to women, would also indicate a willingness to date trans women.
Scholarly article casually says that in an ideal world, homosexuality wouldn’t exist. Both-sex attraction only.
Tweets from Veronica Ivy, aka Rachel McKinnon, the male-sex trans person who won the 2018 women’s world championships in cycling. Wikipedia says Ivy is also a tenured professor at a university in South Carolina, US.
Stop comparing homosexuality to something unnatural challenge.
Second transcript of video from EverydayFeminism.com by Riley Dennis (2017), a male-sex trans person.
So what’s been happening is that some people are making the argument that it’s not cissexist at all to only be attracted to people with one kind of genitals. For example, these people might argue that being attracted to only women with vaginas in no way negatively affects trans people.
[…]
1. ‘You’re Being Homophobic!’
In this argument, I often get accused of homophobia, lesbophobia, or lesbian erasure by lesbians who believe that I’m trying to change their sexual orientation or identity. They say that my language sounds a lot like a dude who tried to turn them straight or like conversion therapy.
Those responses are rooted in cissexism.
This is because I’m not telling lesbians that they can’t be lesbians. If you’re a woman who only likes women, go ahead, identify as a lesbian! But some women have penises. And if the fact that some lesbians might be attracted to those women offends you, it’s because you don’t think trans women are real women.
That’s because these accusations of homophobia make it sound like I’m trying to convince lesbians to like men, but I’m not. I’m trying to show that preferences for women with vaginas over women with penises might be partially informed by the influence of a cissexist society.
[…]
2. ‘You’re Upholding Rape Culture’
[…] Suggesting that trans women are rapists for wanting to be fully recognized as women is extremely harmful.
And I should note that I’m not saying you have to do anything without consent. I’m a big of fan of affirmative consent, and you should never feel pressured to have sex with somebody. This isn’t about an individual.
This is not saying, “You have to have sex with a trans woman, or you’re cissexist.” It’s saying that you should examine the societal influences on your preferences. There’s a massive difference between honing in on individual scenarios and considering wider societal issues and attitudes.
[editor’s note: RD is using “fully recognized as women” as a euphemism for sexual relations. Believing that attraction to or sex with you is necessary for your “recognition” IS rape culture.]
3. ‘I’m Allowed to Have My Preferences!’
Technically, you’re right. […]
So if we look a little deeper into this issue, there’s the possibility of your genital preferences being at least somewhat partially informed by growing up in a cissexist society. There’s also the fact that a preference is different than saying you would never do something. [editor’s note: well spotted!]
Like, having a preference for tall girls is fine, but refusing to date anyone under 5’7″ is ridiculous. And obviously that’s not a perfect analogy because short girls as a group don’t face the societal marginalization that trans women do.
But I’m interested in having a conversation about labels and implicit bias and trans-inclusive language. Simply saying “It’s my preference, end of discussion” is a good way of sidelining all of those issues and, instead, centering the feelings of cis people in a discussion that’s about trans people. [editor’s note: dismissing the person who’s rejecting sexual activity and prioritizing the feelings of the person being rejected isn’t helping his argument re: not upholding rape culture]
[…]
And the last thing I want to say about this is that if you’d rather not have sex with a woman who has a penis, maybe just don’t make such a huge deal of it. Trans women are often afraid of not being found attractive or desirable after coming out, and you’re not helping.
If you really want to be an ally to trans people, you could just not talk about it. And by that, I’m not trying to censor you, okay, so don’t pretend this is censorship. You have the freedom to say whatever you want – I’m just asking you to consider if it’s necessary to say those things when they reflect harmful or violent rhetoric.
Because if you have an opinion that you know is only gonna make people feel bad about themselves, why constantly share it with the world?
It’s fine to not find people attractive, but it’s mean to constantly yell about how unattractive you find those people, especially when those people are oppressed. For another imperfect analogy, it’d be like if you weren’t attracted to girls with short hair.
That would fine, but you probably wouldn’t write articles and make videos defending why it’s okay for you to not like girls with short hair. You could do that, but sometimes it’s just best to be polite.
[editor’s note: so lesbians should shut up about being gay bc it hurts the opposite sex’s feelings.]
First transcript of video from EverdayFeminism.com by Riley Dennis (2016). Archive link.
I think the main concern that people have in regards to dating a trans person is that they won’t have the genitals that they expect. Because we associate penises with men and vaginas with women, some people think they could never date a trans man with a vagina or a trans woman with a penis.
But I think that people are more than their genitals. I think that you could feel attraction to someone without knowing what’s between their legs. And if you were to say that you’re only attracted to people with vaginas or people with penises, it really feels like you’re reducing people just to their genitals. You’re kind of objectifying them – but you’re thinking of them more as genitals than objects. So I guess you’re kinda genitalifying them?
Anyway, my point is, we have implicit biases that we were raised with or that we developed over time, and they can be hard to get rid of. And I think this can be especially prominent within the queer community.
Gay men often pride themselves on being disgusted by vaginas, and the same goes for lesbian women with penises. It’s difficult because some queer people have built their sexual identities on these repulsions, but I don’t think they’re innate at all. If you met someone who was extremely attractive, had a great personality, but didn’t have the genitals that you wanted, you might be surprised to find that it isn’t a dealbreaker.
[…]
But we know that sexual orientations are more innate than learned – they’re more nature and less nurture. Gay “conversion therapy” has been proven not to work. But you can unlearn your own prejudices; it just takes time and conscious effort.
Gee, arguing that a gay man’s disinterest in vaginas or a lesbian’s disinterest in penises is unnatural? Accusing gay people of being superficial perverts incapable of real love? Urging gay people to “unlearn” their "prejudice” to stop being gay? Who’da thunk?
A rant from the site Feministing.com (2012) from a male-sex trans person (an Executive Director of the site). Co-founded by Jessica Valenti, Feministing.com merited attention from the New York Times when it shut down in 2019. It had more than a million unique monthly visitors at its peak.
“I date women and trans men” is the definition of cissexism. It’s basing your frame for sexuality on the gender coercively assigned to a person by their doctor at birth, not on that person’s actual identity. In this case, we’re talking about folks who were assigned female. Of course, “women” means cis women – trans women totally drop off the map.
[…]
It’s incredibly undermining to frame sexuality in a way that lumps these men in with all female assigned folks instead of with cis men. It’s a failure, in the realm of sexuality, to recognize that trans men’s male identities are just as legitimate as cis men’s. If you’re going to base sexuality on gender, better base it on people’s actual genders.
I get why a lot of female assigned folks exist in this frame for reasons that aren’t overtly about undermining trans identities. There’s a ton of gender based trauma out there, and I understand that folks associate this with cis men, and not with trans men. But that’s not a reality-based approach to gender. A lot of that trauma gets easily linked to genitals, but this isn’t about bodies, it’s about patriarchy. I think this sexuality frame is a big part of why so many trans men get away with (and are sometimes even encouraged to practice) unchecked misogyny and male privilege (remember, power is complicated. You can experience both male privilege and cissexist oppression).
My trans brothers deserve better than sex in a frame that undermines their identities. This doesn’t mean queer cis women and gender non-conforming female assigned folks can’t fuck trans men, but then they owe it to these guys to reframe their sexuality in a way that’s not undermining – to recognize that they sleep with men, and to question why they’re OK with sleeping with trans men and not cis men.
[…]
I do put a little more responsibility on trans men for letting this frame push their trans sisters out. This approach to sexuality totally erases trans women by excluding us from the group of sexually existing queer women. Yes, it’s also incredibly undermining of trans women’s identities by moving us out of the category “women” when it comes to sexuality. Ultimately, this frame goes back to the gender coercively assigned at birth for trans women as well. It’s a way for transmisogyny to advance unchecked, because trans women totally drop out of the conversation.
Obviously, claiming that people should be allowed to define their own sexualities without judgment goes out the window. Certain sexualities (*cough* homosexuality in particular *cough*) aren’t allowed.
Advice column from Xtra* Magazine responding to a question from a older woman who calls herself “Ornery Lesbian Dissident” (OLD) by a male-sex trans person (2020)
But what about trans people like [Riley] Dennis and writer Brynne Tannehill, who suggest that it is transphobic for cis people to not want to date trans people?
First, I would suggest spending some time with Dennis and Tannehill’s work, because they present their perspectives with intelligence and nuance. They point out that all sexual and romantic preferences are in some way shaped by cultural and political forces. We are taught, for example, that thin is attractive and fat is ugly; that young people are deserving of sex while elders are not; that white skin is more beautiful than dark skin. While we shouldn’t let this observation dictate our sexual behaviour by immediately (and tokenistically) seeking out “diverse” sexual partners in the name of political correctness, it’s worth thinking about in the long term.
[…]
So when we talk about sexual preference, I believe that it is both possible and preferable to work towards healing our erotic selves by entering into a more mindful and intentional relationship with desire. This is decidedly not about forcing ourselves into sex with someone we aren’t attracted to, but rather about making empowered choices to experiment and expand our desire at a pace and direction that feels right.
You mention, OLD, that you are not attracted to penises or “the way that trans women look,” which I think is fair in the sense that you know your own feelings best. Yet I have to point out that not all trans women have penises, and not all trans women look the same. You also identify as someone who loves women, and I imagine that you love more than their genitalia and their outward appearance. So what does this mean for your assertion that you are not attracted to trans women?
Choosing to stay open to new possibilities while also staying grounded in empowered choice offers us a third way forward in a world where clashing ideals tell us that we can only have love for trans women or consent for cis women, not both. Yet of course, love and consent can only thrive in the presence of one another. Reclaiming control over our own bodies can sometimes open new pathways to erotic joy—throughout history, a great many cis people have discovered a deep and powerful attraction to trans people despite being taught to revile us.
I thought this author was pretty reasonable the first time I read the article; my second time through, I spotted the guilt-tripping and manipulative sexist tactics. He starts off by appealing to the desire to “just get along” (because of course lesbians getting along with male-sex trans people has to include being closeted or open to sexual activity), he regurgitates the typical trans homophobia by comparing it to unnatural things like racism etc, and implies lesbians are shallow genital-obsessed perverts who aren’t appreciating a person’s true self if they are homosexual. (“…I imagine you love more than their genitalia and their outward appearance. So what does this mean for your assertion that you are not attracted to [the opposite sex]?”) You can say the exact same thing about lesbian not being attracted to men.
Throughout he emphasizes over and over the idea of “choosing to stay open to the possibility,” “regarding each other through the eyes of possibility,” “it is possible and preferable to work towards […] making empowered choices to experiment and expand our desire at a pace and direction that feels right”—unless what feels right is being homosexual and rejecting the requirement to keep the door open to possibly someday be opposite-sex attracted.
Arguing that rejecting homosexuality “empowers” lesbian is pretty bad. Plus the “sex positive” conviction that sexual boundaries and limits are meant to be overcome, that they’re something to let go of or go beyond (and if you don’t want to go beyond them…you’re not getting along! Be nice!).
In a nutshell: “All” he’s asking for is for lesbians to get along with male-sex trans people by holding onto the just the possibility that someday they’ll desire sexual activity with male-sex trans people! Yet male-sex trans people are not expected to make room for the possibility that female homosexuality is in fact natural, not an arbitrary construct they can identify into. Lesbians are expected to do the work of getting along.
Also the way he says this ~openness to the possibilities~ is the only way to avoid a world where “we can only have love for trans women or consent for lesbians”…as if male-sex trans people can’t get love anywhere else except from lesbians? What?? It has a manipulative, abusive “nobody will love me if you don’t” vibe. Why is lesbians’ disinterest in the opposite sex a problem to solve?
Article from The Daily Beast (2021) by a male-sex trans person, responding to the BBC’s article about the cotton ceiling
Through selective sourcing and questionable quotes, Lowbridge uses phrases like “biological female” and “biological male” to frame cisgender lesbians as defenseless maidens and equate trans women with aggressive, cisgender male sexual predators. Perhaps not so coincidentally.
Here are the basic points of Lowbridge’s 3,850-word screed, to which the BBC attached a warning to readers about “strong language”:
• Using anecdotal accounts of assholish behavior, the author reveals there are lesbians who don’t want to have sex with transgender women yet were “pressured,” “coerced” and at least one said they were raped.
That’s horrible, but as Canadian jurist and bioethicist Florence Ashley told The Daily Beast: “It’s absolutely insidious to transform discussions of how cisnormativity shapes desire into claims of ‘coercion’ which play into the long-standing demonization of trans women as ‘rapists’ and ‘perverts.’”
• Claiming an aversion to sex with a trans woman is “transphobic” and will result in loss of relationships, damage to reputation and in at least one case could potentially cost a lesbian her career.
The truth, cis bisexual and human resources director Jenn Kelley of Connecticut told The Daily Beast, is that people have preferences. “Some lesbians do not like penetration. And to some the mere idea of fellatio literally makes them gag. Therefore, they don’t have sex with people with penises,” Kelley said. “I honestly don’t think that makes them transphobic. They simply choose to engage in sex with persons without penises. Is that a fetish? No! It’s knowing what you like/don’t like and choosing that. It doesn’t diminish another because their gender or body parts aren’t what you prefer.” [Editor’s note: I wish the author had included more quotes from this source, because source doesn’t use the word “preference” to describe homosexuality ("preference” is inserted by the author), but it’s not clear what her opinion is of people being openly homosexual or declining to date post-op male-sex trans people]
[…]
Penis. Penis. Penis. Penis. Penis. Penis. Penis. Although there are trans women, many of them who identify as lesbians, who undergo bottom surgery to transform male genitalia into a neovagina—which appears and functions in almost every way like female genitalia—this is barely referenced in favor of repeating the fallacy that all trans women have penises.
[…]
“This BBC article is just the latest biased and factually inaccurate story about transgender people to appear in British mainstream media,” a spokesperson for GLAAD told The Daily Beast. “It's frankly bad journalism to have a reporter and news outlet reinforce lies and spread hate about a group of people that is already profoundly marginalized. Mainstream media in the UK should immediately give transgender people and their allies platforms to share stories about what it really means to be a trans person in the UK today.”
“The idea that trans women need to pressure anyone into sex is so laughably absurd,” tweeted actor, producer and activist Jen Richards, who happens to be trans. “Don’t fall for stupid op-ed’s written with little to no basis in lived experience and by people who want to erase trans people from public life. If you don’t want us, we don’t want you either. All we ask is that you leave us and our partners the fuck alone.”
“I’m a proud woman, a proud trans person, and a proud lesbian,” writer and trans activist Charlotte Clymer told The Daily Beast. “I don’t know any trans or nonbinary person, let alone any activists, who would claim that cis lesbians are obligated to be attracted to trans women. I don’t know anyone in the trans community who would claim there’s an imperative for any person, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, to be attracted to someone because they’re trans or non-binary. No person is ever obligated to be attracted to another person. That completely goes against the concept of autonomy and consent that is so central to the trans and nonbinary community.” [editor’s note: lol]
This is not a new topic, and there are many great sources one could consult if only Lowbridge had tried: Ana Valens wrote a guide for queer women who want to have sex with trans women in Allure in 2019. She called communication “the lifeblood of good sex.” Mey Rude wrote “How to Have Lesbian Sex with a Trans Woman” for Autostraddle in 2018. In response to a cis lesbian backlash in the comments section, CEO and editor in chief Marie Lyn “Riese” Bernard wrote:
“There is nothing coercive in this post. It’s just information for people who want it. But it is mean that trans women can’t just talk about having sex without hundreds of people showing up to announce I’M NOT ATTRACTED TO YOU OR PEOPLE LIKE YOU! I don’t feel like that would happen on a post about fat women or masculine women or femme women or whatever type of woman if that happens to not be your thing, you know?”
Although Lowbridge wrote that she consulted trans women on both sides of this issue including YouTubers, she overlooked one trans lesbian YouTube personality who has tackled lesbian sex quite frequently: Melody Maia Monet.
“The goal seems to be to create an outsized moral panic over a ‘problem’ that even the anti-trans activists admit is marginal at best,” Monet told The Daily Beast. “Judging from how often I have been propositioned by lesbians who don’t care that I’m trans, framing cis and trans lesbian sexual relationships as forced does not reflect reality.”
Author and public speaker Stephanie Battaglino had this to say: “By focusing on one’s anatomy, the author is missing the bigger—and more inclusive—picture: my being trans is not the only way I present myself to the world. My personality, my interests, my sense of humor, my intelligence and a thousand other things, define who I am as a person. Unfortunately, there seems to be no mention of any of those qualities—that we all possess—in this piece. Do you think this was ghost written by JK Rowling?”
My reality: Since coming out 8 years ago I’ve been propositioned by both women and men. As a queer woman, I’ve been romantic with both women and men. And I don’t claim to be like every other woman, because no woman is. But listen to me, BBC: In publishing this drivel, you’re providing ammunition to those who want to see me excluded, oppressed, beaten, or worse, dead.
The bottom line: I am not my vagina. I was never my penis. But my body, as is every body, is worthy of love, and only from those with whom I consent to share it.
The author’s main argument is that This Doesn’t Happen and if it does happen, it’s not a big deal, and the women probably made up all up anyway. He cites one “expert” who euphemistically refers to homosexuality as “cisnormativity,” then quotes a woman who supports homosexuality as long as you Don’t Say Gay, and then follows up with a quote from GLAAD about how it’s “factually inaccurate” that some male-sex trans people sexually harass lesbians.
He then quotes a ton of trans people, and ends with a dose of homophobia, using the modern politically correct terminology to accuse gay people of being shallow genital obsessed perverts who can’t love a person for who they are on account of their unfortunate homosexuality (the “too bad for you”/“I feel sorry for you”/“I’m so much better than you” refrain).
This article is an example of how transgender activists have zero interest in addressing sexual harassment committed by trans people when the option to condemn lesbian victims and publicly shame lesbians for being homosexual is on the table. Literally! There’s no point to making a cookie-cutter disclaimer about how you’re totally against rape culture, definitely, and then spend the rest of the article doing what he did.
Video of Owen Jones (2022), a same-sex attracted British journalist (Wikipedia)
Some random person on twitter accused Jones of being a hypocrite for only dating men while condoning the homophobia directed at lesbians and gay men for only dating their own sex. There’s no evidence Jones dates only his own sex…but Jones provided evidence of his own homophobia in the video he filmed in response.
The rando says that Jones can disprove his accusation by saying right now that he supports the right for women who are exclusively same-sex attracted to openly announce their orientation (as opposed to being closeted, pretending to have both-sex desire). Jones says…
Skip to 2:20
“You can prove it if you unequivocally state that lesbians are not transphobic for being vocal or nice about exclusive attraction to the same sex.” You can see he’s shifted the goalposts here, he doesn’t have any evidence for his claim, so he’s abandoned that. And he doesn’t know anything about my own dating history, either, incidentally. The original hypocrisy as he claims I only dated people he considered to be men without me saying anything. [mumbles something in his British accent, saying that the goalposts have shifted].
2:49 But what does he even mean here? Well, he means the right of people to publicly say that trans women are men and trans men are women, just to rampantly misgender them, and the way I’ve put it there, frankly, is even more toned down than the way lots of them misgender trans people, which is just aggressive and hateful and all the rest of it. That’s got nothing to do with who you date, whatsoever, it’s completely irrelevant to that point.
3:13 My response was clear: why do you feel the need to tell the world that you think trans women are men and trans men are women? It objectively makes the lives of trans people harder and more miserable. The basis of hate crimes and violence and abuse and discrimination against trans people, is that they are impostors, that they’re not really who they say they are, that they’re either entitled and aggressive men or fallen women. That’s the basis of abuse. Going around misgendering them is just obviously just whipping up hatred and bigotry to them.
3:44 So you make their lives harder, but how does it make your life happier or contented to do that? What benefit is it to you?
Here’s the key: What does it mean to unequivocally state that lesbians are not transphobic for being vocal or (not) nice about exclusive attraction to the same sex? According to Jones, what it means is, the right of people to publicly say that male-sex trans people are men. Aka, transphobia/bigotry. In other words, he says ok, FINE, if lesbians don’t want to sleep with male-sex trans people they don’t have to, but they ought to be ashamed of their bigoted sexual orientation. No pride for them. Only shame.
After all, if you announce you’re exclusively same-sex attracted, that means you’re telling the world you think male-sex trans people are men! So shut up and keep it to yourself, because what reason could a lesbian ever have to want to be out of the closet? What benefit or happiness does it ever bring a gay person to be out of the closet? The only reason is to hurt the feelings of trans people, apparently.
And for bonus, he says they should be ashamed because lesbians are to blame for hate crimes and violence (note: there is no data to support the claim that trans people have an unusually high murder rate) against trans people. Yup.
Tweet by Ashton Pittman (2022), an award-winning same-sex attracted American journalist
The only women permitted at Pride are the ones who like dick.
Article from Slate (2015) by a female-sex trans person and a male-sex trans person about tensions between lesbians and male-sex trans people
For cis lesbians, it can also be difficult to tell the difference between an honest lack of attraction and feelings of fear or disgust at the idea of a partner who they perceive as “really” a man—feelings that are rooted in transphobic cultural conditioning. While trans lesbians seeking romantic connections in the lesbian community are often frustrated by the knee-jerk resistance many cis lesbians have to dating trans women, hearing that one’s individual reluctance to date someone may be based in transphobia can feel unfair and accusatory.
Rumors of trans women who attempt to pressure lesbians to date them by insisting that it would be transphobic to do otherwise don’t help matters—these stories may be apocryphal, but the fear of being pressured into a romantic relationship is hardly conducive to relaxed getting-to-know-yous. Rumors of predatory or pressuring behavior by trans women have been fanned by TERFs in order to paint trans women as violent and coercive.
These two want a job as mindreaders: “you think you’re not attracted to the opposite sex, but you are! Because I say so!”
Literally the authors spend the whole article blaming lesbians for this or that and then squeeze in one paragraph at the end saying “and maybe trans people are mean to butches.”
Cotton Ceiling From Not-As Respectable Sources
Wiktionary
A social barrier to consideration (by cisgender women) of transgender women as viable sexual partners
How about, instead of a “social barrier,” a homosexual fact?
Article on Medium (2018) from smalltime male-sex trans journalist who has been published in HuffPost, i News, and PinkNews one time each.
The author, who says he’s bisexual, has also outright stated he personally wouldn’t date a trans person. (He doesn’t say why.)
The cotton ceiling, in short, makes the point that there are certain cis lesbians who are using their sexuality as a way to deny trans women’s womanhood. It’s not about coercing them, it’s not about saying you can’t have sex with only people you want to have sex with, its not about corrective rape or conversion therapy. It’s literally just a name for the concept of using your sexuality as a way of denying trans women’s womanhood; ie “I would never have sex with a trans woman, I’m a lesbian and don’t like men”.
And this happens an awful lot in the anti-trans community. It’s their ultimate GOTCHA! because sexual preferences are kind of seen as a little sacred. I get why, LGB people have fought really bloody hard in our societies to get to where they are now and I don’t want to at all take that away from them. I get the fiery passion behind defending your right to love who you want to love — and as a bisexual woman in a lesbian relationship, I’m super down for that cause. (Yes, this does make me a BLT)
[…]
Like seriously… all trans people want in this regard is that if we’re going to use this straight/gay/bi system— that we get to decide which label to use ourselves and have that respected. Like that’s literally it. But every single time a trans woman calls herself lesbian you can guarantee an anti-trans activist will show up to disagree and shout her down and call her a heterosexual male.
Personally, I suggest dropping the idea of rigid and strict labels like lesbian, gay, bi and straight. You don’t need a label, just tell people what you’re into… ie “I like vaginas and/or dicks” if genitals are absolutely important to you, or in my case “I like it when you orgasm, I like it when I orgasm, I like orgasms.”
To summarise, the cotton ceiling isn’t about corrective rape or an entitlement to vaginas. It’s about the use of sexual preferences as a weapon against the womanhood of trans women.
So he says lesbians can refuse sex with male-sex trans people as long as they don’t say WHY, or if they do say why, they shouldn’t use a label like “gay/bi/lesbian” #DontSayGay. If only there was a label that meant “I’m biologically female and I want someone who’s biologically female.”
Twitter activist Katy Montgomerie (2022), a same-sex attracted male-sex trans person. Montgomerie has given at least one radio interview (2023) about transgender topics, and he gave a presentation at Edinburgh University where he called “same-sex attraction” a transphobic dogwhistle (while pretending the argument is over whether gay men are attracted to male-sex trans people, instead of the real meat of the argument, which is the lack of sexual attraction that gay people have for the opposite sex and the lack of attraction straight people have for their same sex).
Montgomerie’s argument here is that homosexuality is a product of brainwashing—gay people only think they’re exclusively same-sex attracted, but actually some of the people you’re “attracted” to are the opposite sex mimicking your common sex traits to greater or lesser extents, which means Gotcha(TM). It’s a reference to the cotton ceiling because he’s saying lesbians are actually attracted to (some) male-sex trans people, therefore lesbians are attracted to the male sex.
Contrary to his claim, it’s easy to correct.
A lesbian on reddit explained it this way: (VERY loosely from memory, ngl I made most of this up bc I couldn’t find it again) If you saw a cake and were like “that looks delicious! I want to eat this!” and then someone told you the cake is peanut butter flavored, and you said, “oh, I don’t like peanut butter, never mind!” and that person says “but you just said you wanted to eat this cake! obviously you like peanut butter cake! why are you pretending not to like peanut butter cake? you’re only refusing to eat peanut butter cake to hurt the feelings of the person who made it!” would you take that person seriously or are they a moron?
You can also compare his argument to this old meme:
According to Montgomerie’s TRA logic, this guy is sexually attracted to laundry machines. After all, it doesn’t matter he didn’t know the laundry machine was a laundry machine! He was turned on by it, which means he’s attracted to it.
In conclusion, if you have to woo someone by deceiving them about what’s in your pants, it doesn’t make homosexuality unnatural, and it doesn’t mean someone’s ~in denial~ that they want to have sex with you.
“But you were turned on when you thought the laundry machine was a person!” Yes…because some things are so intuitively fundamental to attraction that the attraction is founded on them. And if that foundation isn’t there, neither is the attraction.
“But you were interested when you thought the cake wasn’t peanut butter flavored!” Yes…because some people only like cakes that don’t have peanut butter.
In order to want something, you have to have an idea of what you want, and if that idea turns out to be mismatched with reality, it doesn’t mean you suddenly like peanut butter cakes just because you wanted a cake before you knew it had peanut butter.
FFS.
From the FreeThoughtBlog (2012) by Natalie Reed, a homosexual male-sex trans person trashing on homosexual women. The author also wrote this post on EverydayFeminism.com, and apparently worked as a staffer for the National Center for Transgender Equality.
The term “Cotton Ceiling” was originally coined by the intensely awesome Canadian trans-activist and porn star Drew DeVeaux, in which she referred (quite specifically) to the tendency within feminist and queer women’s spaces for trans women to be, while nominally accepted as women and supported in their pursuit for rights and equality, regarded and treated as essentially de-sexed, unfuckable, and sometimes a bit repulsive, with this becoming highly politicized in regards to its implications for things like what a lesbian sexuality really means, how much of sexuality is “orientation” and something we can’t be held accountable for and how much is mediated by our perceptions, how sexuality can reveal that biases and lack of respecting gender identity continue to exist on visceral levels despite being intellectually (or superficially) rejected, etc.
[…]
For example, the idea of us as de-sexed relates directly to the whole “cutting off your penis” myth through which transsexuality is often viewed. It imagines a male-to-female transition (but tellingly NOT a female-to-male transition) as being a loss, a reduction, giving something of oneself up and becoming a lesser being, [editor’s note: lmao is he literally claiming lesbians are more interested in male-sex trans people who have dicks than who don’t?] rather than conceiving it (much more accurately), as a growth, a reconfiguration, an expansion of self and possibilities, gaining new confidence and sexuality and empowerment and self-realization. The idea of us as being fundamentally unattractive relates into the way that cisgender standards of beauty are positioned as the only possible standards, that “passability” and “beauty” are, for trans women, directly equated, and we can ONLY be seen as beautiful, attractive or sexy in so far as we do NOT appear to be trans and instead appear to be cis (which is, you know, really fucked up). The refusal of lesbians to consider us viable sexual partners, or their seeing intimacy with us as somehow a threat to their lesbian identification (I had a #FunWithSearchTerms the other day asking “what do you call a lesbian who’s attracted to both women and trans women?”) is to ultimately, when it comes to staking your own identification upon how you conceive of our gender, to walk your talk, assert that beneath whatever lip-service you’ve paid to the legitimacy of our identity you simply don’t really regard us as women. At least not fully so.
The trouble, though, is that in the painfully typical manner that cis people will consistently view trans issues primarily or only in relation to themselves, they see this notion that how trans women are sexualized (or more accurately, desexualized) within their community is somehow all about us trying to force our way into their pants, to trick our way past their “natural” disinclination to sleeping with our “naturally” less attractive selves. [editor’s note: natural disinclination to sleep with the opposite sex] The conversation was quickly twisted into being about how “nobody needs to be obliged to sleep with someone we don’t regard as attractive! It doesn’t make me a transphobe just because I’m not interested in sleeping with trans women!”
[…]
And to be honest, saying as a blanket statement that you have no interest in sleeping with any trans women ever IS a transphobic statement. As I’ve talked about before, there really isn’t any universal or consistent outward trait common to all trans women. Logically, one can’t possibly experience a basic sexual attraction to cis women but not trans women, at least not while claiming that supposed lack of attraction has anything to do with trans women and trans bodies. It’s about how you perceive trans women. What you’re “not attracted to” is women you KNOW are trans, the IDEA of trans women, the CONCEPT. Which is inherently tied into cultural perceptions. You’d have the same reaction to a cis woman claiming to be trans as you would to an actual trans woman. It’s about your perceptions, not our bodies.
[…]
Sexuality does not occur in a vacuum. Imagine a circumstance where an enormous number of people were saying that latina women just plain weren’t attractive or sexy, and that the only way they COULD be would be to look as little like latina women as possible. And let’s say when this issue is broached, the response is “I just don’t find latinas attractive. I’m not racist! It’s just my sexual interests, which I have a right to define. Trying to force me into having sex with latinas by guilt-tripping me is a form of rape”. Wouldn’t it be justified to explore how racism, and cultural attitudes towards hispanic people, are influencing those attitudes and sexuality? Wouldn’t the women so targeted as “innately” less attractive be justified in their anger and hurt?
[…]
Some aspects of sexuality probably are innate, “Born This Way”. But a whole lot more of it is socio-culturally mediated. How cultural attitudes play out in sexuality is not something that needs to be protected from discussion, and given the fact that this often has real, actual consequences (such as perpetuating the oppression, alienation and dehumanization of trans women), it is something that needs to discussed.
The fact that simply trying to broach the subject of “the cotton ceiling” is something met with such a considerable degree of hostility and opposition is itself pretty strong proof that it is in fact a real phenomenon that is actually limiting how trans women are conceived and talked about in the queer community. It makes sense, of course… there’s a whole lot of important things tied to these issues. The stability of gender, the stability (or even validity) of sexual orientations in a world where gender is not a stable, binary, fixed thing. The importance of what a lesbian identity is and means, where it begins and ends. How much of sexuality is fixed and how much is mutable. How much of our attractions, and sexual orientations, are connected to actual bodies and actual pleasure and how much is all just in our heads and how we think of those bodies and pleasures. The presence of trans women as sexual beings poses considerable threats to understandings of gender and sexuality, both of which are things that carry deeply personal significance to everyone, perhaps especially to queer women.
But this is a discussion that needs to happen. And needs to NOT be made all about cis people. It needs to be focused on us, on trans women, and our representation. To shut down this dialogue simply because it’s a bit scary is to forfeit the right to consider oneself trans-friendly or accepting. It’s to forfeit the right to claim membership in a unified queer community.
Something remarkable about this rant is that the author himself is gay, but he’s this riled up over imagining lesbians rejecting him if he were straight. During the article, he heavily implies that he would only sleep with “cisgender” men, and when someone in the comment section called it out, the author conceded that if he and a female-sex trans person had chemistry…he would be able to make himself have sex with her. It reeked of hypocrisy.
It’s also remarkable that it’s evident he’s a thoughtful person. I thought it was interesting when he proposed the hypothetical of a woman posing as a male-sex trans person. But he invests all of his thought into obsessing over how it’s unfair for lesbians to have a natural sexual orientation that doesn’t change to convenience heterosexual male-sex trans people, without recognizing it takes two to tango, so this idea that the cotton ceiling could ever be about just trans people or trans representation, and not an attack on homosexuality, is a convenient falsehood.
Video from Ira Gray (2013), female-sex trans person who was apparently big on Tumblr back in the day
This is mostly to the ones that identify as queer or lesbian, refusing to date trans women but being ok with dating trans men and cisgender women is super, super cissexist. And I know what you’re thinking, you’re probably thinking like well it’s just my preference, so you can’t tell me what to like or what I don’t like. No, I can’t tell you want to like or to not like, but I can implore you to question why you like those things in the first place. […]
You’re basically lumping people into their gender designation markers and segregating people over something they have no control over. So instead of being like, I like people with these features, you’re saying I like people who have these things on their birth certificate […] and that seems really weird to me. […]
Basically what you’re saying is that trans men and cisgender women are alike. […] And likewise, saying you won’t date trans women and cisgender men basically lumps them into the same category as well […] basically it goes through the process of undermining someone’s identity. […]
Just question why you’re into something, and then refusing to do so is really fucked up too. I’ll admit I used to be transmisogynistic in regard to my sexual attraction, I didn’t want to date trans women, because I didn’t want to date someone with a penis. […]
Any form of logic you use to justify only dating trans men and not dating trans women and dating cisgender women and not dating cisgender men is going to be cissexist. Because you have to […] use super stereotypical arguments that are anti-trans in order to justify them.
This article on Medium (2020) from a straight British male-sex trans person: its author argues that it’s not really a problem that lesbians are “transphobic” when choosing who to date. So, still homophobic, but he expends effort debunking some of your typical trans cotton ceiling arguments.
[…] To put it in a more direct way; is it transphobic that this woman did not want to go on a date with me? Is it transphobic that she didn’t want to sleep with me?
Not to sound like I am avoiding giving an answer to my own questions but, to both: yes, and no. The point where the transphobia was taking place was in the fact that she saw transness as a deal-breaker. [editor’s note: transness is a euphemism for being biologically male]
[…]
Where I might be saying something more contentious, however, is that her being transphobic does not mean she is wrong for not wanting to sleep with me (stick with me here, okay). There are all sorts of reasons that a cis lesbian may not wish to sleep with a trans woman. […] People can quite simply not be attracted to my body, to a penis and small breasts.
[…] They might just not want to sleep with us. It’s a transphobic prejudice, sure, but they are not necessarily a transphobe, and we cannot demand that someone sleep with us to prove they are not a transphobe. I do not think that many, if any at all, trans people would actually do that when it comes down to it.
[…]
I’m a big proponent of violent resistance to fascism, to racism, both institutional and personal. I am not a fan of violent resistance to transphobic feminists. I mean, there’s a reason I’m using that phrase, rather than TERF, even if I obviously think TERF is an accurate descriptor and not a slur. But when I see phrases like KILL ALL TERFS or similar, I can’t really relate to that mindset: a TERF is not a fascist, not exactly (I do think a lot of their thinking is fascist). And most TERFs are women. It’s not helpful for us to scream that we are going to kill them, because, more than anything else, it just fulfils what they already think about us: that we are violent males (even if the people shouting that are cis women). I get why we might jump to violent resistance to this problem, because it has been effective against other forms of bigotry, but different forms of bigotry function in different ways, come from different places, and so on.
Post on the blog Cuntext (2012)
Reframing a specific experience of cissexism and transphobia—not being considered datable or fuckable by the majority of one’s queer community—as simply women treating each other badly is not only delusional, it’s exclusive.
[…]
At risk of sounding repetitive, because this is becoming a bit of a catchphrase for me these days: QUESTION YOUR DESIRE. If you have spent any time thinking about how damaging and fucked up it is that every women’s magazine photoshops models to be skinnier, whiter, and less wrinkled, then you’ve already started. Standards of beauty, aesthetics of fuckability, are not created in a vacuum. They come out of real societies, and they are built on that society’s sexism and racism and ableism and fat negativity and, yes, cissexism and transphobia. Furthermore, desire is not static or permanent. Do you think the same things are hot now as you did when you were fourteen, or has your desire evolved and expanded?
Desire is malleable. Desire changes, and it changes based on many things, including our understandings of what’s hot, who’s a woman, and what lesbian and/or queer sex is. We become less transphobic by learning to see our cis privilege and recognizing instances of cissexism, transphobia, and transmisogyny when they occur. The more we do that, the more “real” trans women become to us, the more legitimately women they become to us—NOT that they need our approval. We do not do this because they need our approval as women; they are women whether we are able to see it and whether we act like it or not. We do this because we recognize that our perceptions are warped and incorrect, and because we want to see clearly. We do this because we are giant assholes when we can’t recognize all women as such, and we’d rather not be assholes. Therefore, what is being asked of us is that we take apart our desire, see its transphobia and transmisogyny, and then we remake it. For me, this is actually a core element of queerness, and don’t fucking tell me it’s impossible, because I do it all the time and so do tons of people out there. Once again: question your desire. Do more. See more. And hey, date more and fuck more, too.
More conversion therapy rhetoric about desire being malleable, asserting lesbians have a moral obligation to remake their sexual orientation to be both-sex attracted, and actually the gayest thing of them all is remaking yourself in order to stop being too homosexual.
Blog post (2015) on Transgender Forum by a male-sex trans person in San Francisco.
Long, detailed reddit post (2013) about lesbians who won’t date male-sex trans people.
Also, would you rule someone out because she had six toes? Whenever I hear a straight man ask how sex works in the absence of a penis, I feel sorry for his girlfriends/wife, because he clearly doesn't understand how sexytimes work; when I hear a lesbian rule out trans women because of the presence of a hidden penis I feel sorry for her partner, because how superficial is that?
BONUS: Occasionally a TRA recognizes the rape culture inherent in bashing people for not experiencing sexual attraction. (They almost never acknowledge the homophobia.) See:
Tumblr post “Should the cotton ceiling be overcome?”
Medium post “On Dating, Lesbians, Trans Women, and Gender Critical Feminism” (archive)
Changing the Definition to Win the Argument
Sometimes TRAs recognize the “cotton ceiling” is problematic and pretend it means something else in order to justify calling lesbians bigots. I’ve supplied abundant evidence here for what it means. Here are some sources that try to change the definition to win the argument:
SJ Wiki gives multiple “complementing” definitions, the primary definition being that male-sex trans people are excluded from the “higher echelons” of same-sex attracted women (and then quoting multiple sources I already quoted here clarifying that “higher echelons” means sexual activities) (also claims the “cotton” in cotton ceiling refers to the underwear of male-sex trans people, which…does not make it better)
In The Ugly Argument of the Cotton Ceiling the author claims it means men “pretending” to be male-sex trans people to sleep with lesbians
Blog post arguing that cotton ceiling refers to how lesbians are scared of how people will react if they date male-sex trans people (which ofc they’re dying to do!)
Blog post trotting out the claim that the cotton ceiling has nothing to do with banging lesbians or with lesbians at all and it’s all about male-sex trans people’s feelings
Essay from a male-sex trans person who appears to identify as a radical feminist, repeatedly cites Dworkin etc. He alludes to the cotton ceiling as a “privilege gradient” between lesbians and male-sex trans people. His essay is only readable because women in the comments convinced him to change his wording to be less rapey. In the comments of a different essay, a commenter references the cotton ceiling by name.
I’ve also seen them use the terms “genital preference” or “sexual exclusion” to talk about the cotton ceiling without using the searchable term.
