• apotheotic (she/her)@beehaw.org
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    5 months ago

    You’re perfectly entitled to not want to have sex with anyone based on any criteria you choose. Your body, your choice.

    You are not entitled to filter transgender wo/men out of a “wo/men” category, as to do so fundamentally implies that they are not wo/men.

    Now, if we’re talking about allowing people using dating apps to filter based on finer grained criteria, I’m all on board. If you choose to match with women, then trans women and cis women should all be captured by that filter. But if they add the ability to filter down to “women AND afab people” where all criteria must be met, then you can have your desired category.

    But if we are going to do that, then I’d ask to also have a category to filter out people who have filtered out transgender people, because as a transgender person that’s obviously not gonna work. And many non-trans queer folk may want to also filter out people who filter out trans people, since queer folk tend to have a much more open approach to gender in dating in my experience and that’s not so compatible with someone who doesn’t.

    Buuuuuuut… Dating apps don’t care about letting users filter down to such a granular level, because a large portion of their business model relies on people swiping for ages to find people that meet their criteria (or! Buy our premium package and unlock better filters! Which won’t work very well because people haven’t filled their profiles in to that degree!). So you’re probably stuck with trans folk in your feed, and they’re stuck with you. Lose lose.

    Also, no human being is obligated to share what their assigned gender at birth was with any dating app. So even if we had these filters, a bunch of cis folk are probably just going to mark themselves as their gender, and a bunch of trans folk are gonna do the same(especially as outing yourself as trans can be horrendously dangerous in some situations), and neither will mark down their assigned gender at birth. And then the “assigned gender at birth” filter is gonna be somewhat worthless to the people who want to use it.

    So maybe the best option is just to keep swiping past people who you think are unattractive (which might include some trans people).