poll on sexual orientation changes
A short background on why I'm doing this: I'm writing a huge paper for my psychopathology class on GID and sexual orientation specifiers in the DSM, and how I think it's crap that clinicians are supposed to specify whether you're attracted to men, women, both, or neither. I mean, yes, I think your sexual orientation is a relevant issue for therapy, but I don't think it's necessary to make an official diagnosis of transsexuality. [note: Yes, I am in favor of keeping GID in the DSM, but I don't want this post to turn into a rehash of that debate. If you're curious to know why, read this post]
So I'm proposing a study (not actually doing the study as we don't have enough time/resources in the class) that would test to see whether there is a "clinical significance" of specifying sexual orientation, and trying to refute previous studies done that say that there is (apparently gay FTMs have lower psychological functioning and are less masculine in childhood...again, bullshit, in my opinion). One thing that they didn't account for in their studies was what I perceive to be a relatively large number of sexual orientations that change from before to after transition, so I wanted to see if there were in fact a good number of us who's sexual orientation changed, and if so, I have a feeling that the difference between the "two" populations of FTMs would disappear.
Also in a previous post someone suggested polling the community to look at this trend, to see how common the "T turns you gay" thing is, although I never saw the poll that people were suggesting. This is not going to be official data at all, just something to satisfy my (and probably your) curiosity.
First, a bunch of caveats. I'm realizing I'm probably leaving out/not fully capturing many (most?) people's experiences by my limited choices, but this is mostly a "humor me" survey. I could do a Kinsey scale for before and after, but then it'd be really hard to compare numbers of how many people changed which ways.
I'm mostly only concerned about your sexual attraction, and I tried to make the questions address genders rather than sexual orientation labels, hence the lack of the word "queer" as an option. So if you identify as queer/gay/bi post transition for the social identity, but are only into women, don't check the "both/all genders" box. However if you're with a woman or only have had experience with women, but are actually physically attracted to men in a "I want to get naked in bed with him" kind of way, then checking the bisexual box is legit. And vice versa. I know from reading a prior post that there are a lot of folk who are bisexual but lean more one way than another, I'm not really sure what to do about that, I guess just use your best judgement as to whether you think you should check a bisexual box or whether you fit better into a "attracted to men"/"attracted to women" category.
I'm not taking into consideration whether people prefer other trans people over non trans people or vice versa, but again, this survey is just a limited rough estimate, so I apologize for leaving that factor out.
I'm only looking for people who are on T.
If your sexual attraction has changed more than once, I'm mostly concerned about the sexual orientation/attraction you had directly prior to starting hormones, and directly after.
If you feel like your sexual attraction is undefinable or you're still figuring out who you're attracted to or if you're completely asexual...I hate to throw eager participants away, but people who don't have semi-definitive answers to these questions probably should refrain from answering. You can make your own poll if you hate mine.
And finally, If you do feel like elaborating, please do. Perhaps if your sexual attraction changed at a different time than transition, or if your sexual attraction has changed more than once? Or I did such a terrible job with my categories that your experience has no possible way of fitting into any of my options? Or anything else that I might've possibly alluded to in my previous paragraphs or that I missed describing in this survey.
Poll Sexual Attraction changes for people on Testosterone