Sex and Sexuality – where would we be without that, eh? ;) One thing that I found during my transition is that nearly everyone expects that the MTF TS is doing this because they want to have sex with ‘other’ men. Personally, I think that SRS is an awfully tough way to go just to have sex! Gay men don’t have a lot of problems finding other gay men, if that’s what they are looking for. For the TS, it is very rare for anyone to do this just to have sex from a female perspective, and I don’t know anyone personally. We are all sexual beings, and wanting to have sex from a female perspective is certainly a part of all of this. It’s just not the main part. We do this to feel comfortable in our own skin, to be comfortable in our societal role, where our interactions with the rest of the world match who we are inside.
I believe that there are three separate, distinct things going on with everyone: Sex, Sexuality and Gender.
Sex is, of course, whether you are physically male or female. What we have learned, though, is that nothing in life is absolute. There are ‘Intersexed” individuals that have ambiguous genitals that don’t fall into the binary expectations people have about male and female. It’s just not that clearly defined, but our world definitely has lines drawn down sex lines, and for very good reasons. The sex of an individual is the first determination you make about another, and if you can’t figure that out, then it makes you uncomfortable. It’s a survival of the species thing, I’m sure, that we make this determination first.
Sexuality is whether you like males, females or both, and from what standpoint you are coming from. Heterosexuality is the supposed norm, but again, nothing is absolute, and many people have overlapping desires or tendencies.
Gender is the third component, and that is how you perceive yourself and how you interact with the world around you. It’s how you feel inside, what you are comfortable with; it’s something that goes to the very core of who you are. Once you make that male/female binary determination about another, how you interact with that person is going to be quite different based on that determination. If we treated the opposite sex the same as those like us, then we might not be as successful in mating, and wouldn’t have survived as a species.
Humans are incredibly complex, on many levels, yet we tend to see things in such simple terms: black and white, male and female.
For most people the Sex, Sexuality and Gender components all line up. You may be male, like women, and enjoy being a male and playing that male role in society. For a TS individual, the Gender component is certainly the opposite – to some degree - from what the physical body appears to be. You aren’t comfortable playing the male role, for instance, and interacting with the world as a male is your primary problem. You may like women, be married and have children, and to all outward appearances have your three components all in alignment. Little do they know! Gender is not something others can see, and my experience has shown that it is very difficult for someone that has these three components all lined up to understand, to grasp the concept, of one or more of these being askew for someone else.
Way back when, it was thought that you were TS only if you were this femme little boy when growing up, that you hated your genitals, and were attracted only to males. A binary expectation from people that couldn’t possibly understand. We now know that this ‘diagnosis’ wasn’t based on reality, but that was the expectations of the male doctors in the SRS programs, and many people had to pretend to be what the doctors expected in order to get SRS. Oddly, despite the advances, there are many, many people that still have this expectation of a transsexual. What we have learned is that the world is not binary, that there are shades of gray in all things, and that some components of who we are can be changeable and fluid throughout our lives.
You may be heterosexual after surgery, or not
Or homosexual, or lesbian, or bisexual, or nothing at all. Some people find that they are heterosexual before and after surgery. For some people your attraction stays the same, and you are now a lesbian or gay. I recently read an e-mail from a MTF TS that said she identified as gay before surgery and lesbian afterwards!
As I’ve said, a common misconception is that being transsexual has to do about sexuality, and it doesn't. Your sexuality, however, may be greatly affected by your little change. Sexuality is the only component of you that may change under the influence of hormones. I believe that, for some people, part of the change in sexuality has to do with mental barriers slowly going away as they transition and ultimately have surgery. You may not know going into this if you will be one thing or the other until you come out the other side.
You can not have more children after surgery
You can not have children after surgery, sorry, since you will no longer have testicles and the surgery can not create functioning female reproductive organs. If you look into normal female reproduction you'll understand that it is an absolute miracle that it happens at all with normal female anatomy. If you see on the Internet a site talking about a man carrying a baby, guess what? Can't happen, sorry.
You have options, though, and some of them depend on your eventual sexual orientation, I would imagine. The first thing you can do is to store your own sperm. Do this before you are on hormones for any period of time. What you do with them later depends on your future relationships. If you marry a man, then the sperm is useless, and you can adopt or get a surrogate mother to carry your child with his sperm and the surrogate's egg. If you get in a lesbian relationship then you could use your sperm and her egg, and that's the only way you could have a child that is genetically yours after SRS. Things to think about, certainly.
In the future, who know, they may be able to perform sex organ transplants from FTMs and MTFs. The perfect arrangement, eh? Be careful what you ask for! :-)
Page updated October 20, 2007