A Clean Dirty Act; Consent After Operation

A Himalayan cultural goods fair trade shop in Glencoe, Scotland.

One useful aspect of these “Scottish Sonderings” is that they never have to be relegated to just the promontory, be mental or physical, of Scotland or my trips.

Today’s thoughts start with a short story:

A man goes to a bar, gets inebriated, then spends the night with a woman. In the preceding days he finds out that this woman was a trans woman, posts to reddit, gets called a transphobe, feels violated, and has precipitating mental issues from the discussion.

Some vocabulary for how I will use these terms:

Cis – non trans person

Trans woman – a person who was assigned as male at birth and has fully transitioned, including having sex reassignment surgery performed on them.  

Some clarifications on the story: the man could not tell via touch, sight, or otherwise that the trans woman was in fact trans during the night. Attraction was not the issue.

For the sake of charity, I’m going to assume that the trans woman was as inebriated as the man, therefore simplifying the problems of consent, distilling the situation to a finer issue revealing a discussion of ‘transness’ inherently. For now, we’re also going to strip away any possibility of venereal diseases, another measure to distill this issue. These will come up later, but now we must parse and understand – not lump everything together and get overwhelmed in a flit of emotion.

Going forward, most of these words will be in the pursuit of demarking a valid ‘dmz’ for discussing informed consent in context of trans woman, or more specifically when and where attitudes of preference are different than transphobia in a greater context.

i.e. in what spaces are preferences, or internal microcosms of transphobia, ‘okay’ when compared to politically powered systems that affect trans people and their issues?

This will also be primarily written from the perspective of a cis-gendered heterosexual man in relations to trans woman because, well, I am a cis-gendered heterosexual man. 

Let’s propose a situation:

A man will not have sex with a trans woman. For what reason? The simplest, most common, and relatively bullet-proof reason is that he only has sex for the purpose of procreation, and she cannot bear children, so sex is not desired.

However, sex is rarely had for the pure reason of procreation. Enjoyment, intimacy, and so much more go into that process.

Another relevant question:

If casual sex is to be had, what things or information do each partner ‘deserve’ to know of the other partner for informed consent to be valid? Venereal diseases are obviously in this category, as distinct and measurable harm can come from not knowing these things. It’s important to note however, that if a civil suit is brought in regards to the knowing of spreading venereal diseases, the sex is still considered ‘consensual.’ I.E. If you have sex with somebody and they knowingly give you an STD/STI, it is still not rape.

Or in other words, what mechanics are in play to define and ratify ‘informed consent’ from both partners to allow for consensual, casual, and safe sex acts?

It wouldn’t be expected to have both partners disclose a full medical history, as either partner might have scars from any number of surgeries. For example, if somebody has a scar from a kidney transplant, is that information owed to their prospective partner? Most likely not. That has no bearing on the partner.

So, going back to the original situation:

Just because his partner may have surgeries from any sort of sex-reaffirming-surgery (srs), those scars in themselves are not a reason to inform the other partner. A woman might have genital scars for any number of operations unrelated to her gender. A man may have similar scars, perhaps an adult circumcision stemming from a complication.

So, the poster is not owed an explanation, nor shouldn’t feel betrayed or violated, because of said scars. Moreover, it wouldn’t be considered rape in any sense simply due to not knowing the existent of a scar or set of scars.

Now to cosmetics, does the cosmetics of a person’s genitalia warrant informing a potential sexual partner? Probably not, within most situations. The only exception could, perhaps, be made in regards to disfigurement, maybe. Complications of circumcision do affect men for a lifetime, or if a woman has labioplasty, it still wouldn’t be expected for a woman to disclose and say “hey, just so you know, I’ve had cosmetic surgery on my vagina.” It may be a good idea depending on the severity of the situation, but to include this cosmetic category as ‘relevant’ to the discussion of ‘informed consent’ is positively ridiculous.

Applying this back to the original reddit story. The man shouldn’t (ideally) have an issue with certain ‘cosmetic’ of his partner’s genitalia, especially since both parties were inebriated and probably wouldn’t have cared otherwise.

However, this comes with the knowledge that vaginoplasty can be indistinguishable from cis vagina in terms of cosmetics. My understanding of this comes from Dr. Natalia P Zhikhareva, a licensed psychologist in California, New York, and Texas. Her description on different types of vaginoplasty is fascinating and really sheds light on a hot-button issue currently coursing through our political sphere.

Notably, she says that “… surgeons are able to achieve exterior aesthetics indistinguishable from a cis woman’s vagina…”

Alright, so we’ve covered cosmetic, scars, and now the conversation leads to experience: does the experience of intercourse differ fundamentally from cis to non-cis persons?

Unfortunately, I am not totally sure about this. My gut tells me that it would be hard to recreate a muscular system (in terms of the female), or a vascular system (in terms of the male) that represents a like-for-like penis and vagina respectively.

But here’s an interesting question: what if sex reassignment surgery actually led to more pleasurable sexual experiences? If (hu)man-made vaginas or penises performed better than their home-grown counterparts, would that change the responsibility of the trans person to disclose their surgery? Moreover, should sex with a trans person be a different category altogether different than sex with a cis person?

Is their partner owed an explanation due to that possibility, the possibility that the quality of intercourse is fundamentally altered by trans operations? Probably not, just in the same way that if a woman is unable to produce natural lubricant it would be ridiculous to require her to disclose this before consensual sex could occur. Nor is a man required to disclose if he has a micropenis, as that may or may not directly affect the quality of intercourse. It would probably be a good idea, but to call a man’s failure to disclose his ‘stature’ rape or anything of the sort is absolutely ridiculous.

Or, in better terms, informed consent doesn’t establish an expectation on quality of intercourse.

Quality, in this sense, is referring to ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of the experience. Not the inherent qualia of different types of sexual activity (vanilla, sub/dom, or any other altering framework thereof).

Moreover, if a trans woman’s vagina can feel the same as a cis woman’s vagina, that necessarily entails that both types of sex are within the same category.

Just to really nail home the point: it is really hard to believe there doesn’t exist a single trans woman’s vagina that is similar (enough) to one of the 3.5 billion vaginas on the planet Earth as to be indistinguishable.

That being said, the statement “yes, but generally speaking, sex with a trans woman would feel different than sex with most cis woman” is still valid. But that ‘difference’ still doesn’t require disclosure for informed consent because, as said above, informed consent is still not referring to the quality. This is not a difference of categories. As such, trans people don’t have to disclose their transness in order to have consensual sex. It is on the other party to filter out anything against their preferences.

“Great. But I still feel ‘icky’ thinking about sleeping with somebody who was once a man.”

This is (honestly speaking, my own) internal microcosm of transphobia. This is different from instruments of political force bearing down on sex-affirming drugs or other practices.

Here is where I would ask for a de-militarized zone. Or, if you will, a safe space. In instances lacking systemic change, bigotry is simply a necessary part of the process to change. It sucks, truly, but it is worth the sacrifice. I hope to future generations this will all seem silly; for now, it is where we, I, am.