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[–]puffball 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's thought provoking, even if the question is quite rhetorical. It is so blindingly obvious why they won't cast a TIM in a leading lady role in any movie where they hope to attract the male demographic as anything other than the stereotypical man "dragged along by his girlfriend to a chic flic", but lets still take it apart and look at the pieces for shits and giggles:

Straight men, in general, are homophobic as fuck once you even hint at them, personally, having any sexual or romantic interest whatsoever in someone who is in any way, shape or form coded male.

No amounts of chanting "trans women are women", makeup, or "gender affirming surgery" is going to convince the vast majority of straight men that a relationship between them and a TIM, no matter how "passing" they are, is heterosexual and that having such a relationship isn't homosexual (likely phrased as "isn't gay"). And he knows that it most assuredly won't convince his straight male friends that it isn't.

If passing well enough, a TIM may fool such a man, and his friends, that he's really a woman and have them go along as if he were, but that's different. Once the subterfuge is revealed, and it'd be hard to keep up the pretense for any extended period of time even with fairly oblivious and dense guys, the relationship will definitely be over, no matter how "well" things had been going thus far.

Once revealed, I also suspect that the TIM would find himself in significant danger of physical harm and even death, both from the victim of her ruse, as well as from his friends, as to many men such a situation would deeply wound their self-image and "masculinity", and many would feel a need to demonstrate to their peers how hard they reject the implications/accusations of homosexuality that the situation would raise, at least in their own mind.

Same thing with having a TIM leading lady - none of these men would want to identify with the "hero" if he's having a relationship with another man, nor fantasize about being in such a relationship themselves, no matter how dolled up that man is to look like a woman. So there, already, you've lost much of the draw of this type of movie.

It goes further, however, and for a large number of them, just being "caught" watching a movie where such a relationship is prominent is bad enough. Why would you want to see such a movie, if a relationship like that is not something you personally would be interested in? What would other men think about him if a supposedly straight male went and watched the movie? How could he not be at least somewhat interested in same-sex relationships, how could he not have at least some homosexual attraction?

Not only will this kill interest in seeing the movie among this group - which is also the main audience for that genre of movie - but while a man might go along with being "dragged" into watching a "chick flic", this is a movie he'd very actively resist going to see under any circumstances. So even in the much smaller demographic of women interested in watching this genre of movie, many won't end up watching it since many of their spouses, boyfriends and even straight male friends, will resist joining them to watch it and instead diverting them to other, "safer", movies to jointly watch.

So, in the end, it's pretty damn obvious that casting a TIM as leading lady in such a movie would be economic suicide for the studio, and any money spent on it may as well have been put in a pile, doused with gasoline, and set on fire.

I think even the dumbest of TRA realizes that trying this route, or any other route that pit them head-to-head against straight men, will not only fail miserably, but also backfire on them in a huge way. If you look a bit closer at trans activism, it quickly becomes very clear that not only aren't they targeting straight males, they're actively excluding and avoiding anything that might make this group take notice and start seeing this as an issue impacting them and their lives.

The most vocal advocates are TIMs, and they are naturally focused mostly on female spaces, female rights, female protections, etc. I doubt many straight men really think this through, but every new TIM created, is one less man competing for straight women. They either go for other men, or for lesbians, and even the ones going for other men don't tend to bug regular straight men very much, but rather men that are already on the fringes.

Really, the only threat to straight men from TIMs is in potentially triggering their homophobia. Which, again, is a good reason not to try to slip any TIMs in as James Bond's love interest in the latest movie.

And as for women? Who cares about women and their problems? TIMs don't, few straight or homosexual men really do, and there's even a large chunk of women (including most libfems) who care less about other women than they do about what men think about them. Hell, even a fair number of lesbian women seem willing to go along with the insanity rather than speak up and admit that a man, with or without a penis, just cannot be a woman and certainly not a lesbian.