Question for the heterosexual men of AF

[Edwardo Piet]

I disagree that a trans male to female person never had a penis.  Just for the simple fact that they did

WOW! What an incredible argument /sarcasm

The point is "they", their identity, is not the same thing as their body. The self is the personality, and their personality didn't match a penis, nor did their personality "have a penis", the body that inhabited their personality did. And there was a sense in which it wasn't a body that was truly theirs, it was merely a body they inhabited. They felt like a stranger in that body, and that is the dysphoria that transpeople experience that you do not seem to grasp.

If you're talking about raw primitive sexual attraction in my opinion it's safe to say there's some subconscious level of attraction between any straight people who have ovaries and sperm, and even beyond that sexual attraction towards any representation that there's a possibility of the ovaries and sperm being around.  
A straight man will have some level of attraction towards a rubber vagina, a cartoon drawing of one, pixels on a screen, whatever it is. Even if the sexual attraction is as low level as eyes being drawn to look at it due to primitive sexual interest.   

Again though, we're not talking about rubber vaginas or poor imitations of vaginas. We're talking about artifical vaginas so convincing and attached to people so convincing that you literally wouldn't know the difference if you were ever told that there was one.

You could be more attracted to them than any other ciswoman, simply because they look like a very attractive ciswoman and you're unable to tell the difference. The fact you'd start thinking about what they were rather than what they are (or as I said, it wasn't really them that was that way before, it was the body they felt like a stranger inside).... and what has that got to do with anything? If you continue to look at the transwoman and find their personality and body to be just as attractive as before you knew they were trans.... the fact that you can't stop thinking about penises and the penis that is no longer relevant.... says nothing about your repulsion to them and everything about your repulsion to your obsession with penises and thinking about a specific penis you've never seen outside your own imagination, and has absolutely nothing to do with the person you're still attracted to, but pretending not to be, because you can't stop thinking about penises. If a repulsion to penis gets away with your being mindful of a person you're still attracted to for all the exact same reasons as before, then that's not the same thing as actually no longer being attracted to them.

When people are talking about their expressed level of sexual attraction and their romantic relationships on the other hand, then conscious ideas have to be taken into consideration.

Into consideration, exactly. Rather than treated as an absolute authority. It's perfectly possible for us to be wrong about our likes, dislikes, urges and desires. Or, to be more clear, to think that we like or dislike or have different urges to we in fact do. It's perfectly possible to be driven by X and think we're driven by Y. Or to be repulsed by X and think we're replulsed by Y. In my argument, someone is repulsed by X where X is penises, and they think that means they are repulsed by Y, and Y is the transperson that they are attracted to, and has absolutely nothing to with X. The fact they can't stop thinking about X because some sort of repulsion has been triggered in them (and my suspicion is that the reasons it's been triggered are transphobic. However natural. Hell, racism and homophobia are natural too)... has nothing to do with Y.

At this level you can say people are un attracted to someone based on some kind of information, there's no pretending involved, but the conscious repulsion has mitigated subconscious desires so there's no longer any real expression of sexual attraction anymore.

What makes you think there's no pretending involved, if we're talking about someone being attracted to Y and then getting turned off by X and then drawing an non-sequtitur that that means they don't like Y, when X has nothing to do with Y (hence the non-sequitur)?

Now, pretending might be the wrong word, because like I said, I reckon people often genuinely believe they are no longer attracted, but they are mistaken about that and they still are, because the very thing they aren't attracted to has absolutely nothing to do with the person they are attracted to.

But often if someone searches deeply enough with a truly open mind they are able to discover their own self-deceptions, so that's why I sometimes use the word "pretending" because there's a difference between something being completely unconscious and something being subconscious, something being conscious on such a low level that they're still aware of it but to a very very little extent. I mean, in many cases they were fully conscious of it a very long time ago, and then it became a habit and automatic and their awareness of it became buried. For example... people often have a homophobic or transphobic unbringing and then later in life learn that those things are wrong, but that doesn't mean that they don't still have homophobic and transphobic habits left over that they're no longer aware of.

And in many cases, even when people were originally aware of it, they weren't aware that it was wrong, or WHY it was wrong, which is why they had to learn why it was long later on. But that doesn't mean their isn't a bigoted residue hanging around down there able to be analysed.