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 (
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.