Okay. I guess these things are subjective and not subject to challenge… but boy, does it open a big can of worms.
Though I’m not getting my hopes up that such statistics exist, it would be cool to see the percentage of transgendered men attracted to men/women/both/neither, and transgendered women attracted to men/women/both/neither.
I agree with the OP that it’s somewhat counterintuitive that a transgendered woman would be attracted to other women. I think the (noted frequently wrong) assumption is that being attracted to men is a central part of female identity, which transgendered women ostensibly want to adopt. The “I love women so much I want to be one” sort of mindframe mentioned upthread is interesting.
I think you may have misunderstood what Ethilrist was saying. While most people are genetically either XX or XY, there are unquestionably individuals who are not. Some people have cells that are something other than XX or XY (e.g. a single X in the case of Turner syndrome, or XXY in the case of Klinefelter syndrome), and there are even people who have a form of mosaicism where some of their cells are XX and others are XY. So even at the genetic level, physical sex isn’t truly binary. Most of us are either XX or XY, but there are a whole lot of ways for someone to be different even when they’re still just a zygote.
Last time I checked, there was hard scientific evidence that the termina strialis of the human brains was sexually dimorphic. (I’ll link to cites tomorrow when I’m not falling asleep) That little bit of brain determined whether we feel male or female. In transwomen (even those who have never undergone hormone replacement therapy) the termina strialis is female. So it’s entirely possible to have XY chromosomes, a penis, and a female brain.
One critical thing you must keep in mind is our gender identity is mostly independent from our sexual preference. Just because I changed genders doesn’t mean that I necessarily changed my sexual preference (well, I modified mine). That being said, many transgender persons do change their sexual preference, but in reality they had the sexual preference before, they just didn’t express it.
Example: several of my transgender women friends changed from liking women to either being bisexual, or preferring men after transition. Many of them made comments along the lines of “I always wanted to be with a man, but not as a man. I’m a woman.” Still others have said “I only married a woman because I hoped that marriage and kids would have helped ‘cure’ my gender dysphoria.” Of course, it did not.
But that’s the problem. We don’t choose to transition out of convenience. Holy crap, I wish I could have been “just” gay. My life would have been much, much easier. No medical treatment, no ostracism, the ability to be “stealth” most of the time (or all of the time) if I chose. Transition is hard, damn hard, the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Some of us attempt suicide, or kill ourselves rather than transition, because it’s so desperately needed - and so terrifying at the same time.
Good statistics are not available. The “rule of thumb” among transgender women is that before transition, they are:
Attracted to women: 2/3
Attracted to both: 1/6
Attracted to men: 1/6
and after transition, transsexual women tend to be:
Attracted to women: 1/3
Attracted to both: 1/3
Attracted to men: 1/3
Among my local community, I’d have to say that it’s a bit different. Maybe 50% or more are still attracted to women, and maybe a 40% are bisexual.
My preference changed slightly after transition, in that as a result of feeling well and healthy and safe within my own body, I was able to relax and just appreciate people without focusing too much on the genitals, or gender. I was lesbian, I am now bisexual. Oh I’m in a committed marriage to Fierra, and were I single I would still greatly, greatly prefer other women. But if I were single and I met “the right guy,” yeah, I could have that relationship.
There is some information which I’ve collected here: http://transascity.org/the-transgender-brain/
This was the source of my confusion. In my mind I can’t seem to qualify that these two aspects of my identity are separate components of my sexual “self”. It could be that the complementary position of my identity and preference never gave me cause to challenge that notion.
I don’t disagree with your statement as there is a mountain of proof behind it.
I just realize that it’s something that I can’t resolve via my own feelings and experience. It’s like Neptune to me. I haven’t seen it but I believe the evidence of it’s existence as explained by others.
On the transgender and genderqueer message boards and groups, I’d estimate more than 10% less than 20%… it’s hard to know really because some people are enthusiastic participants while other folks hang back and don’t post as much.
Well, my co-workers sure don’t get it…
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I’m a male-bodied person who displays feminine traits and nuances, behavior and personality and all that. All my life people have assumed it meant I was sexually attracted to males. I guess folks figure “hey, you’re like a girl in this way and that way and these other ways, well, liking boys sexually is another way of being like a girl, so that must be going on with you as well”. Or something like that.
Some gay guys get tired of people assuming they must be feminines, the same logic running the other direction, “hey, you’re attracted to males, that’s a girl thing, so you must be like girls in other ways too, right?” Some gay guys have gotten insistent about their conventional masculine ways, and expressed distaste and contempt for sissy gay guys, to the point that proudly feminine gay males have gotten tired of them for it.
Oddly, people seem more accepting of the idea that a female person can be sexually oriented towards other female folk without being a masculine or being butch. (They’re not generally quite so on-board with the idea that women can be masculine or butch and yet be erotic fans of the male body, not the female body).
I understand how it must feel (sorta…for me, my gender identity has always been disconnected from my sexual preference.)
I can understand that too.
Based on twin studies and historic cultures (like Greece), it seems likely that 95% of humans have no innate sexual orientation. We’re brought up to think (or through whatever random apparatus come to decide as children) that some particular gender is good and the other bad. Once we leave our formative stages, that’s basically a settled deal, but brought up in a different environment, it could have been swung 180 degrees different.
And then, based on the twin studies, it seems plausible that roughly half of gay people (so ~2.5% of the population) are that way due to genetics and consequently it’s reasonable to assume that another 2.5% of people are genetically straight.
But for most of us, if we’d been brought up in a nation where you were told to take a lover of your own sex and only use the opposite gender for breeding, we’d simply have developed that way and been basically satisfied with it.
So, moral of the story, whatever you think is sexy is likely to stay that way once you leave childhood, based on the evidence we have at hand. (Which isn’t very good nor authoritative evidence.)
The bolded is the part I’m confused about. What “feminine traits, nuances, behaviour and personality” do you display?
Only adding to my confusion is where someone posted an example to try to explain this to another poster. It went along the lines of saying it’s like being confused on which bathroom to use.
No-one should be confused by this. If you own a penis use the one with the urinal. That’s what it’s for.
It’s also great for getting the crap kicked out of you by a homophobic/transphobic idiot because, in addition to possessing a penis, you also happen to be wearing a dress and makeup.
Or to be mocked, jeered at, pushed around, and even physically thrown out of the restroom. Some of which I’ve personally witnessed.
The bolded is the part I’m confused about. What “feminine traits, nuances, behaviour and personality” do you display?
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I don’t mean to be saying that there exist traits and nuances and behaviors that are intrinsically feminine, but rather that there are traits and nuances and behaviors that are regarded by a critical mass of people in our society as feminine, to the point that we all pretty much know about them (I’d be astonished if you didn’t, in other words), we expect each other to know about them, we even expect each other to expect people to know about them —— all this despite the presence of many people who disagree with these notions. The disagreeing people are fully familiar with all this too.
I’ll divide it up into THINGS BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION BY OTHER PEOPLE and THINGS I NOTICED MYSELF; the ones in the latter batch I can elaborate on if asked, whereas the first set aren’t really my attribution.
THINGS BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION BY OTHER PEOPLE (various ages up through present)
Apparently, I…
• smile too much for a boy
• walk like a girl
• cross my legs like a girl
• sound like a woman on the phone
• choose clothes, colors, ways of wearing things, that girls would do but boys don’t do
• sprawl on beds and couches like a girl, whatever that means
• read all the time / read too much / read women’s lit / things intended for women to read
• don’t like to fight / don’t fight good / hold my fists wrong like a girl
• like girls’ activities (specified ones include: playing with paper dolls, cooking, jacks, jumprope, playing house / indoor role-play make-believe games with other girls, liking schoolwork) more than boys’ activities (specified ones include: sports in particular, playing with other boys especially setting up clubs with hierarchies, deliberate mischief like petty theft or tormenting younger kids)
• dislike profanity, porn, ribald humor, lewd discussion of bodily functions, hence allegedly have a girl’s sensibility for stuff like that / a prudish girl at that, one person said
• am too quiet
THINGS I NOTICED MYSELF
• I take emotional content seriously, and process it; not that all women do and men don’t but it’s something where when I discuss it with other women they confirm / know what I mean more often than other women
• In childhood years when lots of the above comments were made, other boys told they did X like a girl or were otherwise compared to girls etc would get angry and outraged, like they didn’t want to be thought of that way. I admired the girls and agreed that I was like them so if someone pointed it out I was all “yeah, so?” and didn’t try to change. So I think that shapes a person inside, as they’re growing up, shapes them different from the boys who avoid doing things or exhibiting behaviors that cause other people to compare them to girls
• I formed notions of what it would be like to have a girlfriend and be in love and have sex and be in a relationship and all that, just like everyone does when they’re approaching puberty and adolescence. My notions do seem to have been more like how girls think of and anticipate such things than what boys and men report when I’ve asked them.
• Guys often have a way of being, temperamentally — short attention span before they get decisive and emphatic, sometimes angry, taking control or cutting off the indecisiveness, — that I mostly don’t share.
• Over and over again in group discussions in various kinds of groups etc, I find that my priorities, the things it occurs to me are what we shoudl focus on, put me in agreement with most of the women, few of the men
•I never wanted to “be a boy” or “be a man”. Somewhere along the line I outgrew a lot of the snobbery but originally I thought other boys should want to be like me because I was obvously doing it right, not them. If not—— if they did not opt to emulate me and admire me——? further proof of their inferiority and unimportance in the overall scheme of things. I wanted to be respected by the girls (later, women) as an admirable person, by their standards, which I shared. (Generalizing here of course). So over time how I thought of myself, my image of myself, was male person who is like them, like the girls, like the women. And having that self-identity shapes further decisions, other attitudes about things, about others, about self, all of which makes this sense of identity self-reinforcing. Whatever things in our society are gendered, I was inclined to identify with and embrace the feminine, while being inclined to be suspicious or wary of things considered masculine, alhthough not being rigid about either.
Think of it this way: if someone forcibly changed your body to a woman, would you start finding yourself attracted to men? Or would you stay attracted to women?
Brilliant. I think that works quite well