In 2024, American Communist Party (ACP) top figure Haz Al-Din made the point that a man was being raped by a trans woman if the latter didn’t disclose their gender transition status beforehand, which some leftists found to be controversial:
https://xcancel.com/secondbyfarce/status/1852772181073445357Some here may find Haz’s position to be disconcerting and triggering, but within the context of consent in sexual intimacy, he is right since he is merely applying the logic of rape-as-lack-of-consent to its logical conclusion.
Because let’s face it: Consent, as pointed out by figures such as Harry Hay and Michel Foucault, is just liberal contract theory as applied to sex, and a contract is made void if you enter under it under false pretenses, and let’s not pretend that contracts are made in a vacuum, as whether a contract is or isn’t valid isn’t a neutral judgement made by an impartial figure, as much as being done by the powers that be (e.g., the state) under dominant or bourgeois cultural diktats.
So unless you think consent shouldn’t be absolute when it comes to sexual relations, then a trans woman having sex with a cishet man without disclosing “her” pre-transition gender is rape as much as sex by deception is rape, and neither are criminalised even in the most feminist countries like Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, and France. So what does it say about consent theory if not even the most feminist countries on Earth criminalised sex by deception as rape?
Then of course, there’s the issue of the AoC, a draconian and absolutist bourgeois piece of legislation used by the capitalist bourgeoisie to morally discipline the working class into anti-proletarian bourgeois morality since the days of William T Stead’s infamous yellow press journalism. In this case, a person under the magic age line cannot (legally) consent to sex with someone above the magic age line. Common idealist talking points often allude to an inconsistent and arbitrary notion of “mental maturity” that is heavily subjective depending on who uses it, whilst obfuscating the meat of the issue: It’s not that people below the magic age line are incapable of being willing sexual and/or romantic partners, it’s just that the state decided that the magic age line makes the willingness of the person below the magic age line (ranging from 12 in Cuba to 21 in Bahrain) to be void, ergo it’s “statutory rape”. But if it’s “statutory rape”, how come the person below the magic age line was a willing partner? Idealist copes range from thought-terminating cliches like “grooming” (a.k.a., seduction and attraction) to elaborate myth-making on the supposed neurological nature of the brain, but all of them ignore that culturally-contingent reasons and deep money interests are the main drivers as much of today’s censorship and prison industrial complex depend on the stigma caused by the AoC. This shows how not only is “statutory rape” and “CSA” legal fiction, but also that what determines which contract is void or not isn’t determined by an impartial entity such as the modern bourgeois state, and the same goes for who is and isn’t allowed to sign a contract.
In fact, going back to transwomen, while one could argue that the cishet men who refuse to have sex with them are transphobic and merry react violently due to them seeing it as an affront on their sexuality, that still wouldn’t address the issue of entering a contract under false pretenses in the case of transwomen lying about being AFAB to have sex with cishet men, nor the fact that the pain of rape is primarily psychological as opposed to being physical (moreso for people in their 20s to their 40s) which makes the dismissal pf cishet men’s concerns here inconsistent unless you think sex by deception isn’t rape. Same goes with the Weinstein scandal, where one can only deem ol’ Harvey a “rapist” if you think withdrawing from a contract after the deal is done makes the contract void, considering how many of those actresses did sexual favors for movie roles even if they could have refused and had may choices at the time and only deemed it as rape years after the events. Even in this case, unless you treat consent as the absolute yardstick for which is and isn’t rape, then Weinstein technically is no “rapist” under the public understanding as he never sexually forced himself on anyone per court evidence.
This ultimately goes to the issue of treating a context-dependent and simple activity like sex as a contractual affair, as well as how normies here and beyond this board haven’t really thought through the implications of rape as being lack of consent. If every heterosexual relationship can be deemed as rape on the basis of one of the partners rejecting or withdrawing from the contract altogether, if some technicality deemed by one or all of the partners as being trivial is seen as being a factor for making the contract void by the state, what does it say about liberal contract theory as a way to regulate sexuality, heterosexual or not?