I am curious if anyone knows roughly or has any idea how common (or rare) it is to continue to be attracted to the same sex/gender through transition. My sense from the (not very many) trans people I know is that they mostly are same-sex attracted post-transition (that is, the sex/gender they were attracted to never changed), but just wondering if anyone has a sense of how that tends to play out.
It varies. For instance, I identified as straight before I came out, now I identify as a lesbian, so my attraction has remained consistent. Others (like Julia Serano) went from bi pre-transition to lesbian, back to bi. Others have inverted. It can actually move around a lot.
I would say a big part of it is that pretending to be the other gender imposes a heavy burden on your ability to act. Speaking for myself, I was so terrified of being caught that I suppressed a lot of the things I earnestly believed, and would often opt out of positively picking things or expressing preferences, out of a concern or uncertainty for what the “correct” “masculine” choice was, if that makes sense. Once I got out from under that rock I found that I was actually a very opinionated person. And had lots of likes and dislikes, but there was a fair bit of lag time for that to turn on. My sexuality was definitely like that for me, where the gender I was attracted to stayed the same, but the way I understood, experiences, and expressed that attraction changed. I imagine it’s the same for others. The demands of cisnormative society require you to funnel your sexual identity into certain very specific archetypes that function within a cis presentation, and the act of performing that false identity forced you to suppress your authentic preferences very very deep down, and once you come out it takes a lot of time for those things to bubble up out of the abyss.
Also sexuality really isn’t “fixed” in that kind of fundamental way. Identity is a trialectic - the context changes the self and the self in turn changes the context etc.
(Spoilered for possible use of offensive term)
It varies. Some view it as a dated term. Others feel there is an important and necessary distinction to be drawn between trans people who seek to change their gender but not their sex, and those who seek to change their sex (i.e. undergo medical transition). I can see the utility in that the experiences are not always the same, and treating them as equivalent can be harmful to “transsexuals” - perhaps in the same way that it’s frequently harmful to treat the experiences of black and white women as interchangeable.
The other side of the coin is that using transsexual as a distinct term can fairly easily dip into harmful attitudes like transmedicalism, enby erasure, and gender essentialism. Additionally, big inclusive tents are also typically better for political activism. Personally I stick to just using trans, for the same reason aleks outlined above, but there are a lot of trans people I know and deeply respect who do maintain that distinction.
Out of curiosity; what are you individual opinions on the role the medical profession should take in the prescribing of hormones to minors?
The reason I'm asking is because a few years ago I was in a discussion with some people who took issue with my opinion that prescribing hormones, particularly for minors, should be treated similarly to other medication (such as what I take for ADHD where I needed doctors tests to diagnose me, trialing other medications/approaches with a lower risk, etc). From what I remember, their position was basically that as long the minor asking for hormones was not obviously in a psychotic or delusional episode, the role of the medical profession was purely to facilitate the process. Not diagnosing, not recommending alternative approaches, nothing. If the minor said they were trans that should be sufficient to get hormones.
Cut to now and I've seen people rubbishing the fears of "they want to chop kids dicks off" by pointing out how how rigorous the process is to be prescribed hormones. Since it is a common topic about how unhappy many are with the process for minors, I'm curious as to how you want to see the process work.
(And I'm focusing purely on minors here (<18 years old). If you are a legal adult, you do you broseph.)
Nothing has really changed from that conversation. The fear is and has always been a nonexistent one, precisely because of the difficulty. That’s the point in making that connection - the fear today is simply unfounded.
The approach we want is more or less the one we have now, with some caveats. The current gender affirming model is the result of many many years of trying to impose a gatekeeping system like the one you want (assessment -> diagnosis -> recommending alternative treatments -> drugs). This approach is called “watchful waiting,” and it was abandoned because 1) studies showed it was really harmful, and 2) studies showed that regret and desistance are exceedingly rare.
So the first thing you have to begin with is that there is no way to determine if someone is “truly” trans. This makes it different even from a lot of other disorders. All you can really go off of is 1) what they say about their internal state, 2) if affirming what they say improves their situation, and 3) if what they say about that internal state remains generally consistent over time. Going back to the “watchful waiting” approach, the rationale was that you propose alternative treatments to address the disordered behavior, and you see how they respond - whether their condition approves and if they continue to maintain the same internal state. However research showed that this resulted in some pretty profoundly negative long term negative outcomes for those kids, even while very few of them actually changed their professed state. It fudged them kids up bad.
This is incidentally consistent with the more general trend in the study of childhood development. Which found more broadly that denying a child’s agency and dismissing what they say about themselves doesn’t actually help the child in the immediate term (i.e. it simply teaches them that this adult cannot be trusted and you should lie to them and/or avoid them instead) and gives them a whole buttload of trauma that they’re going to have to spend much of their adult lives processing in the long term. This is why gentle parenting has emerged as a more broadly accepted approach to parenting by therapists and child psychologists in recent years.
Anyway enter the Dutch Model (and now the American model) aka the Gender Affirming approach. Which goes like this:
When a child comes to a clinic saying they are not a boy but a girl. You accept and acknowledge that they are a girl. You ask them about themselves, when they knew, how they know, etc. You ask them if they have a name they would be referred to as. You refer to them as that name. You advise the parents to also acknowledge them by that name and that identity. You advise them to allow the child to continue to live under that identity as long as they say they want to. You continue to meet with the child and the parents and you talk to them about how they are doing, how they feel. If puberty is onsetting, you prescribe puberty blockers - a perfectly safe, fully reversible drug with minor and largely manageable side effects - so you can reduce the child’s distress and give them and yourself time to continue to observe them. After some time of living in their identity, if they have continued to maintain the identity, and they remain happy with their new identity, then you recommend hormones. You continue ti meet with them regularly through hormones, and so on.
In this respect the doctor or therapist is serving as a facilitator for the transition. Their role is not to “diagnose” in the strict sense, but rather to observe and monitor that the child is happy with how things are going, that they still identify as trans, and still want the treatments. It’s a better approach because the child’s agency is given priority. The Dutch model was first adopted in the mid-90s, and in the intervening time dozens upon dozens of trials, longitudinal studies, and meta-analyses have been conducted on it and have basically all concluded that it is the single best approach to treating trans kids that has yet been proposed or put into practice. There’s a reason that notoriously very conservative medical associations like the APA have endorsed and recommended the approach for well over a decade at this point. The weight of the evidence is too strong to ignore. To the extent that I have issues with it, I would say it largely comes down to doctors not actually following the approach entirely, and that the recommendations for extended stays on puberty blockers are unnecessary and can lead to negative mental and physical outcomes.
I think part of the issue is as Julia Serano describes - an inherent preferential ordering of cis identity - even hypothetical cis identity, over trans identity. People see transition essentially as a fail state - a last ditch effort to preserve life, rather than a perfectly healthy, valid, even *desirable* outcome. Consequently they are willing to countenance seemingly any callous, cruel, abusive - even torturous or muderous intervention if it means the preservation of the mere possibility of cis life. A good indicator of this would be if you see the mistaken transitioning of someone who is “really” cis as an unconscionable tragedy to be avoided at all costs, but don’t see the inverse - the mistaken compelled puberty of someone who is “really trans” in the same way.
Moreover I think the problem is that most people simply don’t know or talk to trans kids or teens. Only rarely do I see news or print media pieces interview trans children and take their professed opinions seriously, presented on their own terms. Likewise rarely do people know or talk to trans kids and teens in real life. But I have. Not trans kids, but certainly plenty of trans teens, who come through the discord server I mod for all the time. They know who they are. They have spent *a lot* of time thinking about their identity and studying and reading trans stuff. I have seen their identities shift as they grow older in the sense that they gain a better understanding of themselves, and are able to describe in more complex and nuanced terms specifically how their identify functions. But never have I seen one who has gone from saying they are trans to saying they aren’t trans.
