A recent Daily Beast column expressed shock and horror at a survey showing that few Americans would ever consider dating a transgendered individual.

“Anti-transgender sentiment runs as deep as we always feared it did,” Samantha Allen laments, noting that more than 80 percent of poll respondents rule out the transgendered for a romantic relationship.

This reaction actually reflects common sense and realism more than bigotry: there would be some painful challenges in any intimate connection with someone lacking the personal equipment of the gender he or she professes.

For most people, the deepest possible expression of love involves a long-term relationship that produces offspring–an impossibility if your partner won’t accept the biology that nature has provided.

It may defy political correctness to say so, but most Americans recognize the unbridgeable difference between transgendered individuals–however sympathetic and admirable they may be–and natural women or men.