An Essay on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Your Experience is not Mine
I’m getting tired of people thinking I’ll magically start liking men. Even other trans women have told me that it’s going to happen, “it just takes time.” If it does happen, fine, but don’t think that it’s a certainty because that makes me feel like you know my sexuality better than I do. That’s pretty arrogant.

As someone who is completely open and honest about my gender identity and sexuality, I have a growing amount of self esteem and confidence. There isn’t any room in my life for confusion or denial. If I get confused about something, I analyze it until I understand it. In this case, I have gone through it in my head and I realized something: I don’t have to analyze my sexuality; I like what I like and screw anyone who tries to tell me any different. Is it possible estrogen will make me like men someday? Sure, but I’ll know when it happens and from what I’ve read on the subject of sexuality and HRT, it never results in a huge shift.

Someone who only likes women won’t exclusively only like men because of HRT. For those of you who don’t know, sexual orientation is on a spectrum. It isn’t a light switch, where you turn the homo on or off. Instead, sexual orientation is like a dimmer switch: heterosexual gradually changing into homosexuality.

For those of you out there who say: your sexuality is going to change. It already has. My sexuality used to be about 90% homosexual. Now, I’m 100% homosexual. HRT has increased my awareness of the female sex and men are only noticeable as people who happen to be male. I’m neutral toward them.

How is this possible? Doesn’t estrogen increase sexual attraction to men? It only has the possibility of increasing sexual attraction to men. It’s different from person to person. It’s all about how your body uses estrogen. You won’t have any idea how it will impact your sexual orientation until you start. Probability is a weird thing and anomalies do exist.

I have talked to my therapist in the past and he told me that in his personal experience with clients, as well as in materials he has read, sexuality only changes a little bit from HRT. The majority of the change that the individual experiences is psychological and not physical in this area. Meaning, if a trans woman suddenly starts liking men, it’s more probable that she always has liked men, but felt unable to express that attraction until she started feeling more like a woman.

So, if your experience is that you used to like women, but now you like men, you probably were always bisexual. It was originally more socially acceptable for you to like women, but now that you are a woman yourself, you date men. There’s nothing wrong with being bisexual, but don’t start misinforming less experienced transgendered women out there that your experience will be theirs because it won’t. Each person’s journey is different.

I went through a long, grueling adventure in discovering my sexuality. I tried to like men. I really, really did. I dated them in an attempt to be as normal as possible. I didn’t want to be both a lesbian and a trans woman. Being one is hard enough, being both would be extremely difficult. Unfortunately, I discovered that you can’t just simply will yourself to like a certain sex. You either do or you don’t naturally. I simply don’t feel anything—except from extreme awkwardness—when I kiss and do things with men. Nothing happens, even when I actually like the guy.

Problem is that it’s more like I like him as a friend and not a boyfriend. I can’t get beyond that with men. They’ll always be stuck in the friend zone. With women, it’s really easy, honestly. Things come simply and emotions fill me when we touch and kiss. Nothing like that happens with men. I can quite easily pick out hot girls in a room, but I struggle to see what makes men attractive. I usually take other people’s word for it.