I think many transgender people first wonder if they are gay. For instance, when was a teenageer I had no idea that there was a difference between a person identifying themselves as a gender opposite their genetics (transgender) and sexual attraction (homosexuality). As a kid it really never dawned on me that the two weren't the same thing. In my mind there were 3 types of relationships between people - male and female, male and male, and female and female with the last two being unnatural.
Transgender never entered the equation. I had heard stories about men turning themselves into women but never equated the two and never applied it to me. In fact, I always thought the idea was funny. Why do that if you were already a man? It made no sense.
In some ways I'm sure part of the issue was self denial as many of my mannerisms mimicked a girl and I worked hard to hide it. It wasn't until a series of girlfriends commented behind closed doors on my feminine nature that I finally accpeted I'd never get rid of it. Even then I wondered if I was gay and I didn't think much about my being transgender.
My concern was this ---
What if my feminine tendencies were in fact my mind trying to convince me to be a girl because that would allow me to accept the fact I was gay? After all guys were supposed to be with girls.
I even considered going to a gay bar just to find out if they were right. I knew somewhere deep inside my upbringing conditioned me to reject the whole notion of being gay. Was it as simple as meeting some guys and trying being gay for a while? Ultimately I couldn't bring myself to take that step.
As time passed, I couldn't help myself and gave into my feminine side. As a child, I'd worn my mom's clothing when no one was at home. As an adult, I experimented with makeup behind closed doors. The next step is hard to explain to anyone that isn't in my shoes but the only way I can explain it is my skin felt itchy. That doesn't even begin to explain the feeling but as I grew older and went through the ebbs and flows of shame, I felt an anxiety that I had to do more. Finally I gave in and bought some clothing. I actually don't remember my first time but it wasn't long until I had a wardrobe full of panty hose, bra's and underwear along with full outfits.
It felt wrong but I also knew I couldn't help myself. As I spent my first night in women's clothing I felt the tremendous anxiety fall away but I also knew it wasn't enough. As I've said in other posts, I knew I had to go further. I spent my evenings in private, dressed as a woman. All my role playing online was as a woman. I felt the urge to go further but also knew I couldn't. Instead I began to write and I began to research in hopes of satisfying this 'curse'.
That led me to ask a series of questions that I still struggle to answer.
What is a woman? Why do men crossdress? Why do TG people feel like they are a trapped in the wrong body?
I don't know. I can answer other questions.
Why are men gay or transgender?
This is a philosophical question as no one can really answer for anyone else. We are what we do and what we feel. As of this moment right-wingers believe 100% that these are learned traits which can be unlearned while science has found that hormones, genetics at least play a partial role. I, like most people in my situation, can guarantee the fundamentalists that being LGBT isn't a conscious choice as many of us would change our minds once we see the hurdles faced by an alternative lifestyle.
Why do LGBT exist?
To answer this I turn to science. I'm a big believer that the way modern humans act didn't pop up since we've learned to write. In fact, I think one of our biggest hurdles is overcoming our animal nature to allow our brains to control our act
s instead of instinct. Humans are unique in that we can choose to have sex with our partners. That decision is made in our brains so we must search the brain if we want to get answers.
One assumption I make throughout all of this is that if LGBT people exist today, then they must have existed 20,000 years ago. Proof of this is you see commentary about it in just about every ancient text modifying people's behavior. The Bible is a prime source and viewing it in the context of a social contract makes it easy to understand why societies prohibited homosexual or transgender relationships.
After all, they depended on families to have children to survive. In that sense, homosexual or transgender relationships were bad for the community.
It still makes me wonder what homosexuals and transgenders were like 20,000 years ago.
Homosexuals feel the need to be with those of the same sex.
Transgenders need to appear like the other sex because their brain tells them they are the other sex..
It's not like high heels existed back then. :P
I've seen arguments that say transgenders are a modern construct because woman's clothing is a modern construct. It's a false argument because the human brain doesn't work like that. Transgender men wear modern women's clothing because their brains tell them in order to match their brain to their appearance they need to change their manner of dress. It's the same reason why 'two-spirited' Sioux males on the American Plains wore women's dresses while women with the ability to hunt were allowed to dress as men.
It is not hard to 'prove' that the LGBTs of prehistory probably had it a lot better than the group does today.
Societies in prehistory tended to be small groups with alpha males leading the 'tribe'. Do you think a male that took on the appearance of a woman was seen as a threat by the leader? My guess is men like this would be prized and encouraged. What about men that liked to be the recepiant of anal sex with other men? Do you think they might be valued on a long hunt in a society without social stigma? What about women that preferred to do the work of men? Do you think the alpha male saw them as any kind of threat to his authority?
My guess is LGBTs were prized during prehistory.
That leads to in interesting question however -- if LGBT men were unlikely to reproduce (I'm sure women still had no choice in the matter) then how did their genetics pass into the current day.
I will try to answer that later.
How did the split occur between women and men in our genetic history?
((This is a bit long and off topic but I enjoyed looking into it and I hope you do too. I promise there is a point at the end.))
There are two types of reproduction - sexual and asexual. Asexual reproduction was the only method of reproduction for most of the world's history. Life started about 4 billion years ago with single celled organisms but about 1.2 billion years ago these single cells organisms evolved the ability to have a male and female form. In some ways the cells that did this are the true Adam and Eve as most living creatures on the Earth descend from this split.
These creatures, called eukaryotes, soon evolved into more complex creatures but it took a long time for their DNA to appear anything like like modern humans. As these creatures branched into plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, insects and mammals, DNA used different ways to determine sex.
((Keep in made that there are outliers in everything in the next paragraphs. After all outliers is literally what evolution does as it allows the 'fittest' variation to thrive.))
Life evolved from amphibians into reptiles and the method for determining sex in most reptiles to this day is the temperature of the eggs during a specific point in embryonic development. When mammals evolved from reptiles about 200 million years ago, they needed a different method of determining sex as all their eggs develop at the same temperature as mammal offspring develop inside the body at a constant temperature. As a result, mammals evolved to use XX (female) and XY (male) chromosomes to determine sex which is what tells the body when to apply hormones at various parts of natal development so that offspring develop into male and female versions.
These chromosomes are like a cookbook to bake a loaf of bread. Hormones are like the yeast to make the bread react in a certain way. As every cook knows ... just because you have a recipe it doesn't mean the bread will always turn out the same. Sometimes, timing can effect the end result.
Going back to my comment earlier about direct genetics ... if genetics were the only cause of LGBT tendencies then this would have led to their extinction when they didn't reproduce at the same rate as 'normals'. The fact that they still exist shows the answer is more complex and why many feel that like our amphibian ancestors, that timing of hormones during a specific point in gestation is the key in creating a feminine brain.
Where does gender ID originate? Is gender learned or innate?
This is a question that science cannot answer at this point as causation isn't easy to pinpoint. This has made it easy for many skeptics to state that being LGBT is 'all in your head'.
Put a box of toys on the ground in front of a bunch of 6 year olds and the boys will tend to play with balls and trains while girls tend to play with dolls. Some of this is reinforced by the toys we give our children but if there weren't innate differences, the number of boys and girls demanding to play with the other genders toys would be much greater. Either there is an inborn need to identify with your gender or the children of both sexes have variations in the way their brains work ((the answer is probably both answers are true)).
As you might imagine, this is a controversial topic as can lead to stereotyping women and reinforce societal prejudices that has caused women to end up in more menial and lower paying jobs.
Having said that, testing has shown that male brains tend to focus to the left side of the brain which is where the logic centers reside, while female brains allow for better connections between the right (artistic) and left hemispheres of the brain allowing easier communication skills. Men's brains are about 10% bigger which can be a result of their larger size but they tend to have more gray matter (thinking matter) while women have more white matter (connective tissue). At the risk of sounding stereotypical, men have more brains, but women have the ability to put more of their brain into use.
Scientists are still just touching the surface of understanding how our brains work but we do have studies that give us a few answers.
For instance, 90% of the people in the world use their right hand as the dominant hand. This makes sense as men typically are left brained focused and it controls the right side of the body. What doesn't make sense is that women are 4% more likely to be right handed than men.
According to one study, left handed people are twice as likely to have gender identification issues than right handed people. Is that because 'femaleness' is in the right side of the brain and these people have an easier time accessing it? Or perhaps they have a female brain?
On a personal note, I am right handed but a few years ago my company tested all its managers to see how their brains work as an exercise to help us better understand one another. As our primary work function was to work with numbers, most everyone was deep into the left side of their brain. I was an outlier sitting at 48% left brained. While most of my co-workers made fun of my outlier status (they averaged about 70% left brain), the facilitor explained that this actually increased my value to the company as I was more able to have outside the box thinking as I could use both sides of my brain.
At the time I never considered the possibility that it also allowed me to mimic a female brain.
That brings me back full circle. Is my ability to to access the right side of my brain what causes my feminine tendencies or was I given a female brain sometime during gestation and I have fought my nature my entire life? What came first the chicken or the egg? Cause and effect? Nature and nurture? I don't know the answer.
How does sexual attraction work?
For most creatures on earth, sexual attraction is hormonal. For most mammals this means the female releases a pheromone to let the males of their species know it is time to mate. Males of the species have a
vomeronasal organ (VNO) in their nasal cavity that detect these pheromones and when it is triggered, an uncontrollable impulse forces copulation.
About 200,000 years ago, humans evolved away from having a VNO and therefore became the only creature on the planet with the ability to choose whether or not we want to mate. We choose our partners.
This evolutionary branch in humans would have been a disaster except our large brain allowed us to reason that having children was beneficial to our survival (and after all it wasn't like sex wasn't fun).
This evolutionary change of giving us choice in our partners also made us face something no other species in the 4 billion year history of the earth ever had to consider. Since we weren't controlled by hormones what if somehow the brain's wiring got messed up and we were attracted to the same sex?
Certainly some of the old urges remain. When I see a girl in a summer dress, it can send shivers up my spine as a deep unspoken need asks to be filled. That is biology and hormones but my hormones do not control me. Sex is a choice.
The ability to choose means that means that homosexual sex is a learned behavior but then again so is heterosexual sex. It comes from within based on our attractions and this again is something that science cannot answer at this time.
If vaginal sex is needed for procreation then why did we evolve to make anal sex feel good?
This is a question I've wondered for a long time and something I ask Christians when they say God did not intend for humans to have anal sex. Why do this? Was he trying to lead 'weak-minded' people into temptation?
Again I return to evolution and while I have no proof, I believe the answer (and keep in mind I'm totally talking out of
my depth) is that sometime during the evolution, males found they preferred mates that also enjoyed anal. After all to a man, any hole is good when they want to have sex and humans were smart enough to figure out that anal sex did not cause pregnancies.
Finding a partner that liked anal meant the woman would be more likely to get a return visit. This meant more births and over time it led to both men and women with nerve endings in the
anus to make sex feel good in that area (or so I'm told).
So what does that mean?
It means simply that homosexuality is all about attraction to a physical look. It doesn't not mean a desire for anal sex as any sex is really the goal here. I understand this was a long route to get to this point but I make it to get to my the reason I started this post in the first place.
Gay vs Trans
Imagine you are a homosexual man who has dated another guy for 5 years but your boyfriend realizes he's really not gay, he's TG and he decides to transition. Considering that homosexuality is all about physical appearance, can the homosexual man accept the new trans-woman? In theory he couldn't.
Then again humans have the ability to choose their partner. Will he be able to look past the fact he no longer finds the trans-woman attractive? It is his choice.
Does that make him straight since he is now dating someone with the appearance of a woman?
Nope. He's a gay man that has chosen to date a trans-woman.
Now let's flip that on it's head:
Imagine you are a transgender male who by definition has a female brain. Keep in mind that a large majority of trans-women prefer other self identified women as their mate.
Doesn't that have to mean that the area that develops sexual attraction is in a different area of the brain than gender?
Doesn't that prove that gender ID and attraction have little to do with one another?
I don't know the answer but one thing is clear to me. The human ability to choose will always cloud studies into the LGBT area as there will never be a consensus and that will allow the people that discriminate ammunition for their hate.
((I know most of this ignores lesbians and trans-men but I can only speak from my own personal viewpoint))
