by Robyn Ryle
You’d think that being attracted to both women and men might make dating easier for you. But in a society that’s set up based on the assumption that everyone is straight and that’s the way it should be, dating might still get complicated.
GO TO 65.
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To be asexual means that you’re not interested in having a sexual relationship with anyone. This identity is a fairly recent addition to the existing categories of sexuality. As with other sexual identities, asexual people often have to fight for their identities to not be treated like a disease or a disorder. Many people will assume that you have some sort of sexual dysfunction (you don’t) or that you just haven’t met the right person yet (also not true). Other people will insist that everyone has to be interested in sex because it’s part of human nature, but there’s no evidence that this is true. You might get incorrectly lumped together with celibate people, but being asexual is not the same as being celibate. Celibate people, like priests and nuns, choose to give up sexual activity. Being asexual isn’t a choice; it’s part of who you are.
ASEXUAL
adj. /(ˌ)ā-ˈsek-sh(ə-)wəl/
Being a person who is not interested in having a sexual relationship or who does not experience sexual desire toward others.
Being asexual doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not interested in having a romantic relationship with someone.
You are interested in having a romantic relationship with someone. GO TO 102.
You are not interested in having a romantic relationship with someone. GO TO 103.
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You’re demisexual, a relatively new category of sexual identity. As someone who’s demisexual, you need to feel a strong emotional connection with someone before you experience any sexual attraction. All your friends who go on about having crushes on celebrities or that barista in the coffee shop or someone they’ve never even had a conversation with? That’s not for you, and you probably don’t quite get it when your friends talk about feeling attracted to people they don’t really know.
As a demisexual person, you experience sexual desire. You might masturbate and have sexual fantasies. But you’re not interested in engaging in sexual activity unless you really know someone. Because of this lack of interest in sex outside of emotional connection, being demisexual is sometimes seen as a subcategory of asexuality. The “demi-” prefix communicates the idea that this identity is halfway between being sexual and asexual.
DEMISEXUAL
adj. /ˈde-mē-ˈsek-sh(ə-)wəl/
Being a person who does not experience sexual attraction to another unless one experiences a strong emotional connection with that person first.
As with asexual identity, you can be demisexual and sexually attracted to people across the gender spectrum. What’s most important to you, though, is first having a deep, emotional connection with your partner.
GO TO 65.
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Your identity is queer, a term that has a long and interesting history. In its current definition, queer is an umbrella term for sexual and gender minorities who are not heterosexual and/or cisgender. So your identification as queer could be based on your sexual identity or your gender identity or some combination of the two.
If you look up queer in an older dictionary, the first definition you might find is an adjective describing something strange or peculiar. Your grandparents or other older folks you know might still use queer this way, to describe things that seem weird to them but have nothing to do with sexuality. “This is queer weather we’re having today,” they might say, and by that, they do not mean that the weather is homosexual or transgender.
QUEER
adj. /ˈkwir/
Describing people who are not heterosexual and/or cisgender.
Sometime in the late nineteenth century, people began using queer as a derogatory term for gay and lesbian people. This slur still drew on the original meaning—to call someone queer was to say that they were abnormal because of their sexual identity. But this version of queer is definitely an insult, and some people still use it this way.
But in the 1990s, queer theory was born, and this brought about another transformation in the meaning of the word. Queer theory is a perspective that brings together elements from feminism, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and a more general movement in philosophy and other disciplines that questions the nature of truth. At the intersection of all these different trends, queer theory is an approach that is very skeptical of categories—including categories like woman, man, lesbian, and gay. Categories, queer theory argues, will always exclude some people, because in order to create a category, you have to have a set of criteria for who fits and who doesn’t. And once you have a set of criteria, there will be people who get left out. For example, the feminist movement was organized around the category of “women.” But how do we decide who are and aren’t women? If you use an essentialist definition and say that women are those who are born with a vagina or XX chromosomes, then you’ve already excluded many intersex people as well as trans women. Queer theory argues that this aspect of categories is kind of, well, crappy. Creating categories is connected to power—the ability to say one person is on the inside of this category while another is on the outside.
If categories can be used to exclude people, then maybe the best thing to do would be to get rid of the categories altogether. Or if that’s not possible, we should at least acknowledge that categories are something that we should be a bit suspicious about. Instead of calling ourselves lesbian or gay or women or men, what if we just called ourselves queer? We’re queer in the sense that, yes, we are strange and weird, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay. It’s awesome. Queer theory draws on this first meaning of the word because part of the mission of queer theory is to reveal the weirdness of categories and other ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. Queer theory encourages us to embrace the weirdness. And using the term queer specifically takes a word that was a slur and turns it into something positive, which can be a very powerful thing. Identifying as queer has the potential to transform the word from an insult hurled at people to an identity to feel good about.
Identifying yourself as queer, then, could signal that you’re wary of existing categories. It can also mean that you want to signal your alliance with all people who are marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality, or by existing categories. In this broadest application of the term queer, you’re expressing your alliance with, well, everyone. All of us are in some ways marginalized by existing categories, because none of us fit them perfectly all the time. So for some, but not all, queer theorists, all of us are really queer, in this way of looking at it.
Generally, though, if you identify as queer, it probably means that you’re in a category that’s marginalized in some way due to gender or sexuality.
GO TO 65.
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Sex-reassignment (or gender-confirming) surgery usually will happen only after hormone therapy. If your doctor or medical professional follows the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standard of care, you’ll have to live for a year as a man before you’re able to have gender-confirming surgery. This is often called the Real-Life Test, because it’s a test of whether you can successfully go through all aspects of your daily life—including public aspects like going to school, maintaining employment, or volunteering in the community—as a man.
Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, you can have gender-confirming surgery. In this procedure, your uterus and ovaries will be removed. You can also have a penis constructed for you using tissue from your forearm or other parts of your body that allow for physical sensation. A more difficult procedure extends your urethra to allow you to pee while standing up. This is done because the urethra you were born with is shorter than the urethra of a cisgender man. In general, the surgical procedures for creating a penis are more difficult than the surgical procedures that trans women undergo—and as such, many trans men forgo th
is option.
The surgical procedures involving the removal of your reproductive organs and the construction of a penis are often called bottom surgery. You might also elect to have top surgery, which would mean the surgical removal of your breasts. Or you might have top surgery without any alteration to your reproductive organs or construction of a penis. In fact, some trans men keep their reproductive organs so that they can still become pregnant and give birth.
GO TO 87.
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If you’re in a European-influenced culture after the nineteenth century, gender and sexuality are understood to be deeply connected. This is especially true for men. In the nineteenth century, people began to study sexuality scientifically for the first time, but what they mostly studied was the behavior of men.
For a period in the nineteenth century, male homosexuality wasn’t seen as connected to being less masculine, but instead as a natural result of masculinity. Basically, the idea was that men were oversexed beings. They needed sex and they needed a lot of it, but they weren’t particularly discriminating about how they satisfied their sexual needs. If their wives couldn’t fulfill their sexual appetites, men would turn to prostitutes and other men; this wasn’t considered surprising or unusual during the Victorian era. In this sense, having sex with other men was seen as an expression of masculinity, rather than a contradiction of what it meant to be a man. The idea that men who wanted to have sex with other men might be different or abnormal in some way took time to develop historically.
The gradual evolution of these ideas about what it meant to be homosexual is what you might call the development of the homosexual role. This is the idea that there are certain expectations beyond just sexual behavior that go along with being homosexual in European-influenced cultures. One of those expectations is that if you’re a gay man, you’re also feminine. But you’re feminine in very specific ways; for example, you’re expected to like to gossip like women, but no one expects that you’ll be excellent at taking care of babies, which is another feminine trait. The homosexual role as it comes to be defined also assumes that having any attraction to or sexual encounter with another man cancels out any attraction to or sexual encounter with a woman. We would generally consider a man who’s been in a sexual and romantic relationship with a woman for many years, but then has a sexual relationship with a man, to be gay. Same-gender desire and behavior effectively erases any heterosexual desire or behavior, but the opposite isn’t true. A gay man who has sex with a woman probably won’t be considered straight.
In a weird sort of contrast to this rule, the homosexual role also tells us that being gay is a permanent state. You don’t switch back and forth between being gay and something else. Even if you don’t come out as gay until much later in life, we assume that you were really gay all along. There’s very little fluidity in the way homosexuality is constructed in European-influenced cultures.
The connections between sexuality and gender in European-influenced cultures go way back. And as you can see, they’re pretty complicated. Regardless of what your sexual identity is, these connections are going to have an effect on you.
You are gay. GO TO 75.
You are straight. GO TO 79.
You are bisexual. GO TO 81.
You are asexual. GO TO 83.
You are demisexual. GO TO 84.
You are queer. GO TO 85.
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In your culture, sexuality and gender aren’t connected. The categories or ways of understanding sexual behavior aren’t based on gender. Maybe that sounds weird, but it’s not that uncommon. There’s no particular reason why gender should be the most important factor in determining who has sex with whom or what kind of sex they have. If you really think about it, gender isn’t a particularly good way to organize sexuality. What does knowing someone’s gender really tell us about their level of sexual compatibility? For example, say you prefer having sex with someone who has a penis. Gender—in this case, whether or not someone looks and acts in ways that are consistent with masculinity—won’t necessarily tell you whether or not that person has a penis. Many quite masculine people don’t have a penis. Or maybe you prefer someone who’s passive sexually. Should you be attracted to women? That might work out for you, but not all women enjoy being passive in their sexual interactions. You might be really into superhero role-playing as part of your sexual repertoire. Gender isn’t going to help you figure out who is or isn’t into superheroes.
There are many different ways to potentially organize sexuality that might make a lot more sense than gender. In many cultures, what’s most important when categorizing sexuality is power and status. In some contemporary Latin American cultures, certain men who have sex with other men aren’t viewed as falling outside the norms for masculine sexual behavior. If two men have sex, the man who is the dominant partner is still considered masculine. This means that a man who is the dominant partner can have sex with women or men and, as long as he maintains his dominance, he won’t be viewed as deviant. A man who has sex with another man as the nondominant partner, on the other hand, will be seen as violating the rules for appropriate masculine sexuality. Ultimately, your position of power is more important than the gender of the person you’re having sex with.
That’s just one alternative way of organizing sexuality around categories other than gender. The possibilities are endless, even if it might be hard to imagine what sex would look like without gender.
To explore a different gender path, TURN BACK TO 2.
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There are a variety of medical avenues that you might pursue as a trans woman, but a lot depends on your age and where you are in relation to puberty. If you’re young enough that you haven’t hit puberty yet, you might take puberty blockers to prevent the effects of that bodily transformation from taking place. You’ll take hormones that prevent your voice from deepening or facial hair from growing.
After puberty, you might start taking hormone treatments that encourage your body to develop in a feminine way. The effects of these hormones are similar to the experience of puberty, so this could be either a first or second puberty for you. As a trans woman, you might take estrogen, testosterone blockers, and progesterones. These hormones will have a wide range of effects on your body.
Physically, your skin might change, becoming drier, thinner, and more sensitive. You may develop breast buds and, eventually, breasts; as with cisgender women, the size and shape of your breasts will vary. You probably won’t develop breasts much bigger than an A-cup. The distribution of fat in your body may shift as well, with fat collecting around your hips and thighs. The muscles in your arms and legs will become less developed. The hair on your body will become less thick and grow at a slower rate. It might not go away altogether; remember that even cisgender women sometimes have prominent facial hair.
Your emotional state may or may not change. Changes to the level and type of hormones in your body can cause you to have different sorts of feelings, but emotions are social as well as physiological. Maybe you’ll feel more sensitive and more likely to cry. But many cisgender women don’t feel this way, so your emotions may be unaffected.
Sexually, you’ll have fewer erections as a result of hormone therapy. In addition, your erections won’t be as hard or last as long. You will still be able to enjoy sex and have orgasms, though. The orgasms that you do have may feel different, as different parts of your body come to feel erotically sensitive. Your testicles will shrink to almost half their previous size. Finally, your body will probably stop producing sperm, meaning that you’re likely to become sterile—incapable of producing children.
You’ll be safest if you pursue hormone therapy under the guidance of a doctor or other medical professional, although it is possible to obtain hormones while circumventing the medical route. The drugs used in hormone replacement therapy are available to purchase from online pharmacies and can be obtained without a doctor’s prescription. Online discussion pages, such as TransDIY (do-it-yourself
) on Reddit, provide information from other transgender people on how to purchase and self-administrate hormone replacement therapy. Some of these online pharmacies are of dubious legality, but as a trans woman, you might pursue this route for two reasons.
First, hormone therapy can be expensive and, depending on where you work, your health insurance might not cover the costs. In 2017, 647 companies in the United States covered healthcare costs for their transgender employees, up from a mere 49 companies in 2009. If you’re lucky enough to work for one of those companies, you’re more likely to go through a doctor or other medical professional to obtain hormones. But the other reason you might be reluctant to see a doctor is that many are still unsympathetic or outright hostile to transgender patients. This attitude might come from a lack of knowledge about transgender health or from their own cissexism or transphobia. Cissexism is prejudice or discrimination against transgender people, while transphobia is a fear or hatred of transgender people. Unfortunately, many doctors and other health professionals are no more immune to cissexism and transphobia than other people are.
CISSEXISM
n. /ˈsis-ˈsek-ˌsi-zəm/
Prejudice or discrimination against transgender people, or the belief that transgender people are inferior to cisgender people.
In fact, science and medicine as institutions have sometimes contributed to the stigmatization of transgender people. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a sort of bible used by psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to diagnose various disorders. First published in 1952, the DSM is important because insurance providers use its codes to decide on coverage for various conditions. Basically, the DSM codifies certain disorders as real or not. Until 2012, the DSM included a category for “gender-identity disorder,” described as a mismatch between the gender a person expressed and their assigned gender. Transgender activists argued that this category made being transgender into a disorder—like the other illnesses in the DSM that need to be treated and cured. It made being transgender feel abnormal and stigmatized. In 2012, the DSM removed gender-identity disorder, replacing it with gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria focuses on the distress caused by the mismatch between a person’s gender assignment and gender identity, rather than on the mismatch itself. So the disorder is now defined as the psychological distress caused by societal reaction to being transgender, rather than as being transgender in and of itself.