British cops investigating “hate crime” after trans actress denied porn role for having a penis

Britain’s youngest person to have transitioned, at the age of 15, Ria Cooper, now 25, was recently denied a role in a pornographic film because she is trans. After sending out her new glamour shots and portfolio to her fan base on social media, Cooper was contacted by a photographer who wanted to take saucy photos, engage in sex with her, and film that for distribution. Cooper’s portfolio is in hopes to get just this kind of work.

Hailing from Hull, Cooper reported this incident to the Humberside Police, who are investigating the incident as a hate crime. Hopefully, nothing will come of it, but even so, the fact that being denied sex on camera was reported as a hate crime may increase the statistics for number of hate crimes reported. And of course, that’s just silly.

“I am reporting this as a hate crime,” Cooper said in the Hull Daily Mail, “It’s like calling someone who is black the ‘N’ word. It doesn’t matter if I have c*** or not. The pictures should be judged as they are… It says on my social media profile that I am a ladyboy, I didn’t ever say that I wasn’t and I thought he knew… I want to be a glamour model and a porn star – that’s what I want to do. I don’t think I should be treated like this.”

There’s been some significant social media chatter of late as to whether refusal to engage in the act of sex with a trans person should be considered hateful, transphobic, bigotted, or prejudice, or if it’s okay for a person, trans or otherwise, to have a preference for who they’d like to have sex with. Prominent among the voices who say no, preference for what kind of genitals a person wants to engage in sex with is actually super transphobic, is cyclist Rachel McKinnnon.

McKinnon made headlines when she won a women’s cycling championship in 2008, and continues to be in the news for saying things like lesbians who don’t want to sleep with transwomen lesbians aren’t lesbians but are transphobic. This opinion raises the question of exactly what a lesbian is, whether it’s a woman who is romantically attracted to other women or a person who is attracted to anyone who says they are a woman despite their anatomical make-up.

Her latest diatribe syncs up with Cooper’s ideas that genitals do not make the man. McKinnon feels that her femaleness goes beyond genitals, hormones, or any physicality. She believes that trans women, who were born with male bodies, should use those male bodies to compete in women’s sports without the caveat of having to keep their testosterone levels under a certain threshold for at least a year prior to team play, as the International Association of Athletics Federations and International Olympic Committee mandate.

Cooper would have the same feeling. A photographer who wants to take pictures of naked ladies, to have sex with them, and to video record that, is undoubtedly wrong when he imagines that a woman is a person with a vagina. For him to not want to to take pornographic pictures of Cooper and her penis, or to have sex with Cooper, is, per Cooper and McKinnon’s way of thinking, unbeleivably transphobic and bias.

Trans individuals, like all of us, should live as they choose, but their determination as to what that way is does not give them dictates over how other people should live, conduct themselves, or with whom they should engage in sex.

Not wanting to have sex with a male bodied trans woman cannot be a hate crime. Choosing sexual partners must remain an entirely personal, consensual act. Cooper and McKinnon would have us  intentionally police our own minds to try and force ourselves to have sexual preferences and attractions for specific individuals for whom we have neither preference nor attraction. However, this is exactly what opponents of homosexual conversion therapy have argued against, as have women, who routinely put off the advances of men with whom they do not want to engage with in sex.

If Cooper and McKinnon were really looking at this from the woman’s point of view, they would know that consent is the most important thing in choosing a partner, and that if there’s no consent, that’s just not sexy. In fact, it’s rapey.