Quote from: kimwilde12 on October 27, 2009, 04:28:30 PM
Well i can agree with you on that one...But can i add something, i Personaly think i am Transgender->or whatever you call it "Born as a boy but always wishes that he was a GIRL" and i know Many many many "Gays and Queers" who are the same its matter of how far they can take that, can they take that to a Next step and become one?
And sometimes what they look like doesn't mean what they are deep down inside.
Not everyone can be as Brave as many Transexuals "today", because its a very Big step to take, its a very risky step to take, its not for everyone and not everyone have that caurage to do it. I give a big hand to them.
OK, I think I can see what you're implying here, but I'm just going to re-iterate what other people have been saying:
sexual orientation, sexual preferences, internal gender identity, and personal gender expression are four different things.
*sexual orientation is static, it is generally unchanging and probably hard-wired -- or at least such is the prevailing hypothesis and probable theory based on EEG (brainwave) patterns
*sexual preferences are fluid and in most people change somewhat in a person's lifetime. Sexual preferences are such things like Dominant/submissive/Switch, Top/Bottom/Versatile, Active/Passive, etc. Preferences can include things like BD/Sm, Leather and other fetishes, paraphilias, and so forth. Preferences can also include people with genuine bisexual orientations, but who prefer either the same sex or opposite sex at different points in one's life. Sexual preferences are largely influenced by environmental factors -- upbringing, social circles, etc.... Paraphilias are less understood, but some psychologists still feel that they are still triggered by environmental factors.
*gender identity is how one relates to one's biological sex. The typical set up of man/male and woman/female is how over 99% of people relate (the University of Michigan recently published a paper suggesting that TS/TG persons may be as many as 1 in 500, but that's still 0.2% of the population --
at most; more consistent statistics say that TS persons are 1 in every 5,000, on average). When TS persons happen, for whatever reason we may happen, essentially some "wire got crossed" in the person's internal gender identity, and that leads to people who are biologically male having an instinctual drive of being women and biological females having an instinctual drive of being men (there are also people who feel that their gender identity is "Other" and have all sorts of words and self-definitions of what that "Other" is; the most common "Others" I've noticed are "Androgyne" and "Genderqueer"). There are many hypotheses, but nobody is quite sure how or why this happens, but the long and short of it is that gender identity is typically immutable, static, unchanging; some confusion may lie in the facts of 1) people who are determined "male" at birth are often socialised to be very good at repressing their feelings and emotions, which could lead to years or decades of a person living as a gender identity that they truly feel is wrong for them, and 2) people determined "female" at birth have
immense freedom of gender expression in most places of Western civilization, but do to the pressures to still socially identify themselves as "women", may still ultimately be repressing their true gender identities for years.
*gender expression is how one expresses their gender identity. Gender identity is common described within three variables: Masculine, Feminine, and Androgynous. Most people consider most things to be either "masculine [or men's] interests" (like auto-mobiles), "feminine [or women's] interests" (like needlework) or "androgynous [or neutral] interests" (like cooking). Most people have a mix of all three interests with one or two categories being dominant. Therefore, a male person with a gender identity of Man may still have "feminine" interests dominating without it really contradicting his gender identity -- he's simply expressing himself as a feminine man. Gender expression is also rather fluid for a large number of (if not most) people -- Freddie Mercury, for example, at the beginning of his career had a rather feminine/androgynous expression, but then went to very overtly masculine, then starkly androgynous toward the end of his life. Furthermore, gender expression really has no bearing on sexual orientation -- James Dean is an example of a rather masculine-expressed man-identified male with "androgynous" interests (poetry and philosophy) and most of his surviving friends have confirmed that he was bisexual with a preference toward men. Rock musician Marc Bolan was rather feminine/androgynously-expressed throughout his entire career, and had come out in interview as being bisexual with a strong preference toward women. Prince is incredibly feminine/androgynous and has maintained in interviews throughout his career that he's totally heterosexual in orientation and ex-girlfriends have stated that he has a preference for being the dominant partner in the relationship.
(edited for format readability)
