Where was I policing someone's preferences? At no point did I say anyone was obligated to ignore their preferences, nor did I say that having preferences was some horrible thing. All I said was that people should be more contemplative about their own preferences. I didn't even say that wholesale re-evaluating someone as a viable romance option was a bad thing. If you're attracted to someone, and then they turn out to be a jerk, yes, absolutely you should move them from the "people I want to date" to "people I don't want to date" category. If someone has radically different beliefs from you, and it's irreconcilable, it doesn't matter how attracted you are to them, you're probably not a good fit.

Something like differing political beliefs is fair game, because it's saying "this person and I disagree on many fundamental levels about the way the world should look and be run." Age certainly can be, if it's a case of "this person has experience and power in the relationship that I don't have, and I think that's unhealthy." Height is... not a good reason not to date someone, and I think that's kind of shallow, yes, but again, the point I was making was about systemic discrimination and societal attitudes, and while short men and tall women have gotten the stick at times, height is not comparable to race or sexuality or gender identity.

It's fine to re-evaluate someone as a romantic partner. It's fine to change your mind. It's fine to decide that, despite your surface-level physical attraction, you're not interested. Usually, though, those thoughts are rooted in a specific conflict. If you hit it off with someone in a chatroom, and were invested and interested in them, and then learned months later that they were a different ethnicity from you and that was enough to cool your interest... I have an interest in where that comes from. It doesn't naturally follow the way that "this person is extreme about their religion, and I won't convert" does, or "this person holds their political beliefs strongly and refuses to listen to opposing opinions" does. If you knew someone casually, thought they were cool and interesting and attractive, and then learned they were trans and decided that you weren't interested in them anymore, I'm interested in that.

@Liquor Box

No, I wasn't saying attraction was a decision, I was saying the opposite, that it isn't, but one's action in response to attraction is. If you change your action when your attraction hasn't changed, then there must be a reason for it, and something like "they're trans" doesn't adequately explain the reason for that change (in my opinion)... unless it's paired with transphobic viewpoints, like seeing trans people as their assigned-at-birth gender, or fearing being gay or something.

My core argument, in as clear a way as I can make it (and also in a way that's gonna get me flamed by someone or other, I'm sure) is that broader society is discriminatory against people who do not fall in line with the norm, and that societal thought gets distilled down into individual people by way of participating in society. Not every straight person is homophobic, but every straight person exists in a society that contains homophobic elements, and subconsciously picks up on those elements, and has to learn to unlearn them. Homophobic, transphobic, sexist, racist, ableist, classist thought permeates through society, and if it doesn't directly affect you, you might not immediately think to go against it.

This is not a condemnation of straight people, or white people, or men, or whoever. It's not saying they're bad people, or do bad things. It's just pointing out that homophobia, for example, is harder to see when you're straight. Many a well-meaning straight person has expressed a viewpoint like "I am fine with gay people, I just don't want to see two men kiss," or something like that. That doesn't mean they're necessarily homophobic, but that they experience a society where two men kissing is not normalized. It's othered. It's aberrant. It's even dangerous. And those are homophobic things that society as a whole has perpetuated, and an individual straight person may experience discomfort due to. If they think about it, however, they might realize that it's not strange or gross or weird, and that their discomfort was unwarranted.

Obviously, there are fashion trends and trendsetters trying to make money off of specific looks, which can include things like hair or eye color, but those things are fleeting. You may be influenced by a societal preference for a certain standard of beauty like blonde hair, but the pendulum is just as likely to swing back the other way, and the people who try to push those agendas are all in competition and trying to set the trends themselves anyway. Even if there is some current "dominant" model for hair and eye color, there are so many visible attractive people that the pressure is well-distributed. If you have a personal preference for green eyes, I'm not going to argue with you. It's a quirk of yours. You think they look nice. Whatever the reason, you like green eyes, but that is your preference. It hasn't really been forced upon you by society (or at least, not necessarily any stronger than any other preference).

When it comes to marginalized groups, my core point is that the things a person might claim as their personal preference, as it relates to race and gender, very often line up with the negative social understandings of those things. If you claim to not be interested in black people, is it because you aren't aesthetically attracted to an individual black person, or is it because you've unconsciously absorbed certain negative cultural beliefs and opinions about blackness, that black people are uneducated, that black people are poor, that black people are bad partners, that they're criminals, that they're lazy, that they're dangerous? If you wouldn't date a trans person, is it because you don't find an individual trans person attractive, or is it because you've been influenced by decades of media showing trans women as men in dresses, as punchlines, as devious rapists out to "trick" men, as the villain in Silence of the Lambs, as campy villains in all sorts of films, as mentally ill, etc. while not showing trans men at all (to the point that many people seem to forget they exist)? Even if you don't hold those strong, prejudiced beliefs, you're influenced by having grown up and lived around them, and that might be affecting your "preference" without you realizing.

Of course, no one can say that for sure on your behalf. I can't say "you're racist for not dating black people," because I can't know something like that. However, my belief is that the visceral repulsion that some people experience when the idea is floated of romance or intimacy with a member of a marginalized group, and the fact that those same marginalized groups that are the ones that are consistently historically discriminated against, are not coincidental. This unconscious biases are countered by introspection, and by trying to understand other viewpoints, and also simply experiencing more of the world, and meeting different kinds of people. 100 years ago, the amount of white people who would claim to find black people attractive was almost assuredly far less, as a proportion. I don't think there has been some evolutionary shift in that century, where now somehow non-black people are suddenly way more attracted to black people. Rather, I think some (though certainly not all) of the social attitudes and conditioning (in white society) that made black people seem unattractive to white people, has begun to erode. Black people didn't change, and white attraction didn't change (as history will tell us, white people often found black people very attractive, while at the same time abusing them and denying them rights). Instead, as racist thought and ideology became somewhat less pervasive, fewer people were influenced by it.

If I have a thesis statement, this is basically it. Social norms and conventions promoting the aesthetic value of things like hair color, eye color, hair style, clothing style, etc. are usually weak enough and often cyclical enough that a person's individual preference regarding these attributes can be almost wholly attributed to their personal tastes. Social pressure regarding the value (aesthetic or otherwise) of marginalized people is much stronger, so much so that its influence over people's tastes and preferences can't be ignored. For this reason, one should question one's individual preferences when they conform to society's historical hierarchies, as the preferences may be at least partially the result of those hierarchies, rather than a truly random individual variance in taste.

And that's all I think I'm going to say on the matter.