Conflict of Interest
"Do you often feel you have to choose between being an activist and making an issue of this stuff, or finding romantic-sexual partners? I've been doing this shit for 35+ years and it has always felt like the search for personal solutions and the attempt to educate the planet about the relevant issues were like 'choose one; you can't do both', if you know what I mean".
I've mentioned occasionally in passing that speaking out and self-identifying as a gender invert has not tended to be a good mating strategy for me or, presumably, for anyone in my specific situation. I delved into it a bit in this blog post from 2014 for example. And yeah, I'll be honest: I think one of the reasons I'm doing this gender activism stuff now, in my late 50s, is that when I was younger I was lured into spending more time and energy seeking those personal solutions, trying to find a girlfriend. It's only now, with that basically working for me, that I seem to be giving the activism attempts more of my focused attention.
I assume this is NOT true in an analogous way for all people within the LGBTQIA-etc tent. Most centrally, it seems self-evident to me that gay and lesbian people, if they are open about being such and attend gay / lesbian social-political organizational meetings, will be that much likelier to meet precisely the people to whom they are attracted. And that therefore being out and about and having some degree of public visibility and/or seeking out clusters of similar people IS conducive to finding potential partners.
Gay and lesbian folks may not be all that aware of how it doesn't quite work that way for some of us who identify as sexual-orientation or gender-identity minorities.
Consider transgender folks, in particular the conventional transitioning variety, those who wish to transition, are in the midst of transitioning, or have transitioned. A transgender woman may find friends and form alliances within a support group or political action group composed of transgender women and men, but for most of them it doesn't form a very good pool of potential partners. To be precisely fair, it is possible that a transgender woman who was straight could become romantically involved with a transgender man, or that two gay transgender people of the same sex could do so. But most trans folks of either gender want to be seen and accepted as people of their target sexual identity and to have the experiences that are typical for such folks. Transgender men generally wish to live the lives of men, and transgender women to live as women, with as little emphasis as possible on their being transgender. Typically, they want to "pass". Being out and making a public spectacle of their own trans status could be seen as working against those interests. Most transgender people are not hoping to meet potential partners who have an erotic or romantic interest specifically in transgender people.
It's a phenomenon that also occurs in groups other than those associated with being part of LGBTQIAetc. Consider the situation of a radical feminist woman whose attractions are towards males. Conventional wisdom says that although her perspectives and political interests rule out a nontrivial percent of what would otherwise be her potential dating pool, she may meet some more-evolved males who are politically conscious and thoughtful people... but that her direct and immediate feminist activities aren't a set of behaviors that are especially geared to making that more likely to happen. Feminist women tend to accept the conflict of interest as a given: being a radical feminist is not in and of itself thought of as a mating call for meeting such guys. At best, it's perceived as a useful filter for driving away the attention of folks whose attention one would not want anyway.
There are groups for which I would think it could be a mixed bag for their identity-factors to be openly known. For example, bisexual people (and by extention pansexual people, to whom the rest of this generally applies) have often indicated that when potential partners learn that they aren't exclusively straight or gay, it makes many of them reluctant to get involved. Both potential same-sex and other-sex partners often tend to feel more at ease dating folks who are attracted in their own direction exclusively. It is, of course, entirely possible for bisexual people to become involved with other bisexual people, where those attitudes would not be an issue. And one would more easily meet other bisexual people via the process of being out and participating in political-social groups openly as a bisexual person. As for the non-bisexual people who would also be part of the pool of potential partners, it might once again function as a useful filter.
I don't really know for sure whether it's intrinsic to my own kind of gender and sexual identity that being out and loud and public work against the likelihood of linking up with attractive partners. My observations all come from the current (lifelong, so far, but current and hopefully transient nonetheless) situation, the situation in which gender inversion isn't on the public radar yet as an available identity. So we have to remove from consideration the notion of being part of a social-political network of gender inverts and all that that could provide. Certainly I think it would make it easier for gender inverts to find partners if I were to succeed in publicizing the concept and people were inclined to recognize themselves in the description and begin to think of themselves in those terms. But would the kind of women who find gender-inverty males attractive be attracted to the ones who are overtly self-labeling? That's the question to which I don't know the answer. It's a bit of a moot point for me (dating and connecting when you're a middle-aged person is, in general, more flexible and more geared towards the post-labels complexities that folks come to appreciate after a few decades of experience). In the entirety of my 20s and 30s, I can only think of one time when someone's interest in me may have been sparked, in part, by things she heard me say about my gender identity. But, once again, it wasn't a world where women would have heard a few things that I said and thought "Aha, he's one of those gender inverts".
I presented down in North Carolina, at Mars Hill University. I promise to blog about it next!
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Index of all Blog Posts
I've mentioned occasionally in passing that speaking out and self-identifying as a gender invert has not tended to be a good mating strategy for me or, presumably, for anyone in my specific situation. I delved into it a bit in this blog post from 2014 for example. And yeah, I'll be honest: I think one of the reasons I'm doing this gender activism stuff now, in my late 50s, is that when I was younger I was lured into spending more time and energy seeking those personal solutions, trying to find a girlfriend. It's only now, with that basically working for me, that I seem to be giving the activism attempts more of my focused attention.
I assume this is NOT true in an analogous way for all people within the LGBTQIA-etc tent. Most centrally, it seems self-evident to me that gay and lesbian people, if they are open about being such and attend gay / lesbian social-political organizational meetings, will be that much likelier to meet precisely the people to whom they are attracted. And that therefore being out and about and having some degree of public visibility and/or seeking out clusters of similar people IS conducive to finding potential partners.
Gay and lesbian folks may not be all that aware of how it doesn't quite work that way for some of us who identify as sexual-orientation or gender-identity minorities.
Consider transgender folks, in particular the conventional transitioning variety, those who wish to transition, are in the midst of transitioning, or have transitioned. A transgender woman may find friends and form alliances within a support group or political action group composed of transgender women and men, but for most of them it doesn't form a very good pool of potential partners. To be precisely fair, it is possible that a transgender woman who was straight could become romantically involved with a transgender man, or that two gay transgender people of the same sex could do so. But most trans folks of either gender want to be seen and accepted as people of their target sexual identity and to have the experiences that are typical for such folks. Transgender men generally wish to live the lives of men, and transgender women to live as women, with as little emphasis as possible on their being transgender. Typically, they want to "pass". Being out and making a public spectacle of their own trans status could be seen as working against those interests. Most transgender people are not hoping to meet potential partners who have an erotic or romantic interest specifically in transgender people.
It's a phenomenon that also occurs in groups other than those associated with being part of LGBTQIAetc. Consider the situation of a radical feminist woman whose attractions are towards males. Conventional wisdom says that although her perspectives and political interests rule out a nontrivial percent of what would otherwise be her potential dating pool, she may meet some more-evolved males who are politically conscious and thoughtful people... but that her direct and immediate feminist activities aren't a set of behaviors that are especially geared to making that more likely to happen. Feminist women tend to accept the conflict of interest as a given: being a radical feminist is not in and of itself thought of as a mating call for meeting such guys. At best, it's perceived as a useful filter for driving away the attention of folks whose attention one would not want anyway.
There are groups for which I would think it could be a mixed bag for their identity-factors to be openly known. For example, bisexual people (and by extention pansexual people, to whom the rest of this generally applies) have often indicated that when potential partners learn that they aren't exclusively straight or gay, it makes many of them reluctant to get involved. Both potential same-sex and other-sex partners often tend to feel more at ease dating folks who are attracted in their own direction exclusively. It is, of course, entirely possible for bisexual people to become involved with other bisexual people, where those attitudes would not be an issue. And one would more easily meet other bisexual people via the process of being out and participating in political-social groups openly as a bisexual person. As for the non-bisexual people who would also be part of the pool of potential partners, it might once again function as a useful filter.
I don't really know for sure whether it's intrinsic to my own kind of gender and sexual identity that being out and loud and public work against the likelihood of linking up with attractive partners. My observations all come from the current (lifelong, so far, but current and hopefully transient nonetheless) situation, the situation in which gender inversion isn't on the public radar yet as an available identity. So we have to remove from consideration the notion of being part of a social-political network of gender inverts and all that that could provide. Certainly I think it would make it easier for gender inverts to find partners if I were to succeed in publicizing the concept and people were inclined to recognize themselves in the description and begin to think of themselves in those terms. But would the kind of women who find gender-inverty males attractive be attracted to the ones who are overtly self-labeling? That's the question to which I don't know the answer. It's a bit of a moot point for me (dating and connecting when you're a middle-aged person is, in general, more flexible and more geared towards the post-labels complexities that folks come to appreciate after a few decades of experience). In the entirety of my 20s and 30s, I can only think of one time when someone's interest in me may have been sparked, in part, by things she heard me say about my gender identity. But, once again, it wasn't a world where women would have heard a few things that I said and thought "Aha, he's one of those gender inverts".
I presented down in North Carolina, at Mars Hill University. I promise to blog about it next!
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Index of all Blog Posts