Obviously, there is room for a lot of individual variation. But I’m talking about populations here - just as we might say that the majority of females are sexually attracted to males, what can we say about the majority of persons born in a male body who undergo sex reassignment surgery to become women, and individuals born in a female body who have surgery to become men?
I’ve just learned that a girl I was close friends with in grade school is now married to a woman who was born male. It never occurred to me that a person would change gender and be gay or lesbian afterward. Is that indeed unusual, or am I just incredibly ill-informed?
AFAIK, it’s no more unusual than for the general (non-trans) population. I’m aware of one survey (sorry, I will have to find the cite) done in the '90’s that found that a significant number of trans people identify as gay or lesbian following sex reassignment. The numbers were in line with the proportion of the general population that self-identifies as gay or lesbian.
In my own experience, I’ve known or known of trans folk who identify as gay, lesbian, bi, and heterosexual. Of the people I’ve known personally, the trans women all identified as heterosexual, but I can think of several trans men who identified as bi or gay.
Wow! I just thought of something. If I person changed their gender, then dated/married someone of their new sex, would that be an incidence of homosexuality/lesbianism actually being chosen? Am I totally confused or is this a valid question? Or would sexual preference still remain inbred/inherent (you know what I mean) because the person had actually been born in the wrong body? I hope I’ve made my question clear. I had trouble wording it correctly I think.
The question is valid, and can lead to some odd results.
In Texas, for instance, it’s illegal for two people of the same sex to marry. But Texas law doesn’t take sex changes into account – changing your sex does not change your gender in the eyes of the law. If you’re born mail, you stay male.
This means that there are some same sex marriages that are legal in Texas (where one partner has had a sex change).
I cannot find my cite, but I believe that in the case of both M2F and F2M transsexuals, a much larger percentage would be considered lesbian or gay than heterosexual. The numbers I specifically remember was that something like 25-35% of M2F transsexuals were still attracted to women, and something like 15-25% of F2M transsexuals were still attracted to men (and some percentage of both was asexual, that percentage escaping my brain but IIRC was much larger than the general population - this however could be the result of a large number of things, including hormones and post-surgery psychological issues). Mind you, when dealing with transsexuality the sample sizes are small, control grouping is difficult, and there are a lot of social factors to consider, so the error bands are quite large. I think there’s an opportunity for some really interesting research on the root drivers of the differences between gender, sex, and attraction to the other gender or sex here.