Under any rational understanding of informed consent what happened in the account I share below constitutes sexual assault. If there is no law regulating this where this occurred, there ought to be. The victim in this case is a heterosexual man who thought he was going to have intimate relations with a woman. At no point did the man representing himself as a woman tell the man that he was actually a man. The man discovered this man’s penis during the process. What is being described here is sexual assault. The perpetrator is presenting himself as the victim. If you are tempted to rationalize this by saying it didn’t happen, you’re missing the point. The scenario is real world.
However you feel about gendered presentations (as a libertarian, I don’t really care except where it is used to gain access to spaces reserved for the opposite gender or in cases like the present one), if you believe that it’s ever appropriate for a man or a woman to initiate sexual relations under false pretenses then you have become so submerged in slogans that you have lost your moral compass.
Maybe it would help to flip roles around. Imagine this is trans woman identifying as a lesbian going home with a lesbian and getting to the stage of intimacy where the lesbian discovers he has a penis. The lesbian draws back and asks if it is a penis. The trans woman pretends as if he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This is after kissing her. This is after groping her body. This is sexual assault. It’s no different the other way around. It would be no different if a gay man went home with a trans man to discover that the trans man had a vagina or had phalloplasty. If a trans man penetrated a woman with his pseudo-penis it would be rape. You don’t get to sexually assault or rape another person because you’re trans identifying.
We need to be very clear about what’s going on here. I just lectured on criminal categories in my criminology class, which I have been teaching now for a quarter of a century, and lately, every time I go through the material, and in taking questions from students, I am reminded about how changing our language puts people at risk of criminal victimization. This is the revised definition of rape under the model statute the FBI uses to categorize these offenses: Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim. Sexual assault is sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim. This broad category includes attempted rape, fondling, or unwanted sexual touching.
A lesbian does not want to be touched by a man. It matters not at all that she believes the man is a woman—or that the man believes he is a woman. A trans woman is not a woman. A trans woman is a man. Apply the principle all around. This is not about judging people by their genitals. This is about the reality of gender and sexual orientation. Reality is not mix-and-match.
The victim in this case was far too forgiving in the situation and should have reported this assault to the police. We have to force the hand of law enforcement to make sure we maintain a legal and normative culture in which it is never appropriate to deceive people into sexual relations they would not otherwise consent to given sexual preference. Clearly the man is not gay and did not intend to have sex with another man. Sexual orientation is the only objective factor in this case. As such, it is the overriding factor. Gender identity is entirely subjective. A man cannot justify raping a lesbian because he identifies as one, etc.
All the trans identifying man had to do was to tell the other man what he was so the man could make a decision about whether he wanted to go home with him. That’s it. But honesty is being destroyed because the truth is being upended by ideology. It’s not just truth that’s under assault here. The falsehood that a man is a woman because he says he is puts others at risk. Even if this case is fictional, the account is entirely possible, and moreover probable.
If this ever happens to you, please report the matter to the police. The time to prevent the dissimulation of rape and sexual assault is before the new culture being stood up robs us of our capacity to understand what is happening to us. Moreover, while some might have the courage to object, a lot of people are afraid and will allow the scene to unfold. They will leave the encounter having been sexually assaulted because they were too afraid to say no. They were too afraid to say no because they feared being condemned as a bigot.
freedom and reason 