By the way, Cervaise, your first two hypotheticals are bi, your last one is gay. The other assorted kinks and fetishes have no relevance to sexual orientation. “Furry” is not an orientation.
Why not?
Because orientation only refers to gender attraction. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with fetishes or paraphilias.
Doesn’t that rather badly undercut your argument that someone with a she-male fetish is homosexual?
I disagree that it’s a fetish. I think it’s an attraction to male genitalia, i.e., it’s an attraction to males.
But he’s not attracted to males! He’s attracted to women who have male genitalia. The key word there being “women.” If a guy gets off to pictures of a woman who looks like a golden retriever, he’s a straight guy with a fetish, but if a guy gets off to pictures of a woman with a penis, he’s gay? That doesn’t make any sense at all. In both cases, he’s fixating on images of females with an unusual physical characteristic. What’s so special about a dick that makes fixating on it a matter of orientation, while fixating on a pelt of fur is just a paraphilia?
Yes, because the genitalia is the defining characteristic for gender attraction. It’s a sine non qua. as a heterosexual male, I cannot be attracted to a person who does not have a vagina. The correct genitalia is essential to defining gender attraction (which I am distinguishing from gender identification).
I think you’re being too glib in trying to define pre-op trannies as “women.” You know it’s not that simple when it comes to external perceptions and unconscious responses to visual stimuli. I still think you’re trying to apply an intellectualization of gender to animal response. Sexual attraction does not recognize those kinds of cultural/linguistic exceptions to the rule.
No, it’s not. It may be the defining characteristic of your sexuality, but you’ve got no basis to say that’s the defining characteristic of heterosexuality in general. As evidence to the contrary, I present you with the very subject currently under discussion: men who identify as heterosexual, but are attracted to pre-operative transexuals.
I think you’re mistaking social conditioning for animal instinct, and are guilty of vastly oversimplifying sexual attraction. You appear to have completely internalized the idea that “penis=male,” but I maintain that this is an artifact of your socialization, and not your biology. Sexual attraction is not primarily about what someone’s genitals look like, but instead it is based on their manifestation of secondary sexual characteristics. Which is a good thing, because otherwise we’d all have gone extinct as soon as we invented clothing.
You just don’t want these guys to be in the same Category as you. That’s it, isn’t it?
ETA: Or perhaps you don’t want to be in the same category as them.
Same diff either way.
Except I don’t think this could be true. You don’t have to see a woman’s vagina to be sexually attracted to her, right? How many times have you been sexually attracted to a woman from seeing her primary sexual characteristics compared to the times you were attracted to a woman from seeing her secondary sexual characteristics?
It is my contention that straight men respond primarily to female secondary sexual characteristics, not primary. And gay men respond primarily to male secondary sexual characteristics, not primary. So a straight man is much more likely to be attracted to a mtf transexual who still had a penis than a ftm transexual who still had a vagina.
In fact, if you’re like most straight males you experience sexual attraction to all sorts of women as you go about your daily life. And a small number of those sexually attractive women were mtf transexuals, you just didn’t know it. That’s not to say that if you saw them naked you’d still find them sexually attractive, but to the extent that they displayed female secondary sexual characteristics, and their male primary sexual characteristics were hidden, your brain responded to them as you would an attractive female.
Glad someone else picked up on this. You, Cervaise, CaerieD, Lemur866 and Miller have delineated some quite cogent ideas on this subject, ideas that make a lot of sense, and more fully explain what is meant when it is said “sexual orientation is on a continuum.” That continuum does not operate by one leaving Point A and sailing as fast as one can to the Midpoint B or, tacking past and going fullsail ahead as fast as possible to Endpoint C. There are many stops and wonderful ports of calls all along the way.
I’d like to suggest that it’s not primarily what’s thought of as homosexual males’ proclivity towards butt-sex that gives everybody the heebie-jeebies when it comes to tolerance and acceptance.
I think it more the thought that if same-sex pairings can be accepted (and, in addition, bisexuality), then it opens the all-too-scary door to imagining and exploring the full range of things we, as humankind, can be into. Too much acceptance and too many possible stops on the continuum (which cannot then be as easily categorized and ladeled (here’s to you Autocylus)) and we’ll all mentally sail off the edge of land as we know it.
It’s the flat-earth approach to sexual orientation.
I dunno about you, but what attracts me are breasts and faces. I hardly ever see the vagina until sex is immanent. Also, while I admire the vagina for it’s feel and function, I don’t think it looks particularly erotic. I wouldn’t have sex with a woman with a penis because–to be honest–it freaks me out. But I’ve seen some semi-transexuals that I thought were pretty atttractive.
Well, speaking just for myself, the big turn-ons are the constant insistence on mind-reading, petty vengefulness toward other women, and impaired spatial reasoning skills. And a big dose of raging PMS can just be so incredibly hot. You don’t get any of that from a beschlonged female.
there aren’t enough winky smilies in the world
I concede that there is something to the secondary characteristics when it comes to initial attraction. For me the effect is spoiled if I see a penis. I shouldn’t assume that all other straight guys have the same reaction, though.
You can’t concede now! I just thought up a really good argument! Get back in here and fight, dammit!
Your sailing metaphor makes me happy!
Miller and CaerieD have both expressed my transsexual reality so well, I don’t have much more to add except to thank you for getting it right. The estrogen in particular, as CaerieD said, made a major difference in how my body feels all over, in my erotic responses and everything. Mmmmmm I love it. 
purr
To everyone -
“The problem of applying the terms homo- and hetero-sexual to transgender and intersex people is deciding what exactly qualifies as same (homo) and what as different (hetero).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_Transgender#The_semantic_problem
Compare Lakota - Women’s declarative sentences end in kšto while men’s sentences end in yelo. There are more gender markers in Lakota depending on the type of sentence, but you get the idea.
For example, Winyan hemaca kšto - I’m a woman.
The language discussion, to me, is one of the more fascinating aspects of it. I’d love to know more about it, but this thread is probably not the place.
Woo! Glad to have confirmation that I wasn’t just spouting off nonsensically. I’ve been involved in a lot of different T* groups for several years now and have given lots of advice on makeup and dressing to maximize certain characteristics. As a result, I’ve seen a lot of girls in different states of undress over the years, discussing breasts and such, so I’ve seen the truly dramatic changes the estrogen can make. 
I must’ve missed the memo that declared you the Ultimate Arbiter Of The Definitions Of Gender and Orientation.