Did/are you live/living a "gay" lifestyle prior to transitioning?

[he who shall not be named]

Well, I haven't transitioned yet, but I'm pretty involved in the lgbt community on my college campus.  As a queer woman, though -- I'm not out as ftm. I actually tend to be attracted more to guys, but I'm also into women and genderqueer/gender-variant individuals.

[cynthialee]

And now you are a woman? HA! Oh no... you transistioned back right?
How femine is it to feel this way about gay males.

The poll is interesting... Shows that the majority of transwoman were indeed normal functioning straight males.

I wouldn't consider the life I lived to be the life of a normal functioning straight male.

People saw me as an effeminate male. The fact that I liked women also got me into allot of fights with men who not only didn't like the fact I was competeing with them for females, they also wanted to beat me for being swishy. Seeing a "gay male" (because the average person sees a trans female only as a gay male) being romantic with females sets some men off. They hate the sight of an effeminate male.

Being an effeminate male netted me a life time of sorrow and issues.

[_Mango_]

Kia Ora,

  Just to add a poll to complement the last topic on sexual orientation= https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,98591.0.html , in fact I got the idea from some of the comments left there...So thank you to all those who have share some very interesting  comments so far on the other topic..

So back to this poll question...  "Have you ever lived /or are you still living in [what many "unenlightened" cisgender people would presume it to be] a "gay" lifestyle, in other words when you were/are presenting as your "birth sex" in a "same sex"  relationship?"

Now this should be interesting............Fingers crossed XX XX

PS I know for the most part those M2Fs and F2Ms who remain with their "opposite birth sex" partners are already in a sense living a gay life style..if you get my drift.........

Metta Zenda

EDIT: WAIT.... IM CONFUSED. I consider myself a "gay dude", since I am FTM who goes for men... is the topic supposed to be for that or if I was a FTM who likes females.... well... I dunno. I will pretend you mean the first one.

uhhh I love oral and anal sex... a lot... so.... yes! 

PS: Single right now because of the confusion I stir in my "heterosexual" male counterparts constantly... *shrug. Working on an off and on again courtship with a close male friend....its sort of shifted in confusion on both our parts though... GO figure.

[xXRebeccaXx]

I blew a guy...does that count?

[Lone Cypress]

I thought about it, but I'm a little bit boring, I guess. I voted that I'm bi as well, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch anyway.

[MiaSakura]

Currently my roomates parents and some of my friends think I'm gay.  Which is odd for me since I am kinda.  Just not the way they think I am.  I'm trans mtf with a lean to woman.  they think I like men only.  Ugh....

[LordKAT]

No

[Tossu-sama]

Sort of. After all, I've never dated a guy so naturally people assumed me to be lesbian or at least bisexual. But I've always recognized some crush-like feelings towards males in me but that could be just some form of jealousy towards their bodies or something.

[Mahsa Tezani]

I dated guys then, I date guys now.

Except for the oacasional cisLesbian...But I don't tell anyone about that.

[Felix]

Currently my roomates parents and some of my friends think I'm gay.  Which is odd for me since I am kinda.  Just not the way they think I am.  I'm trans mtf with a lean to woman.  they think I like men only.  Ugh....

Lolya I encountered a lot of this too. People thought I was gay, and they were right, but not how they thought.

[pidgeontoed]

This is a fun thread, so I thought I'd give a reply

In high school/early college, my soon-to-be girlfriend was wondering if I was gay before I kissed her the first time. She asked one of my best friends and he told her "No, definitely not." because he knew me so well and that I had openly talked about my crushes on a few girls in high school. I've been finding it pretty ironic that she thought I was gay (I do have pretty feminine tendencies and prefer to hang out with the girls, casually), but what I'm thinking more in my head is that I am MTF and probably "gay" as it says in this post title I've been very attracted to a very dear lesbian friend of mine, as well as a few straight women, so I guess I would say yes to this post.

Although, I've been attracted to my male best friend before, but more in a "perfect match personality wise" way rather than sexual. We'd always say, again ironically, "if one of us was a woman, we'd probably be dating." This is pre- anything at all so I don't know for sure, but that's where the fun is!

[Diamonds_Pearls28]

I agree this is a fun thread lol. Anyways, I guess for the most part I was "Gay" in an official, public sense, people assumed and I never corrected the assumption and when I was 14 I did come out to my parents as Gay because I was confused about gender identity vs sexual orientation. I live in a city of 100,000+ in southern Colorado that acts like a small town of less than 1,000 in the Ozarks. Everybody knows each other's families and their business and goes to church together and it's...very strange. People are very misinformed about Transgender people in general around here not just TS but everyone under the umbrella and I unfortunately had 17 years of this brainwashing fed to me until I finally realized there were people like me out there and gradually over the past 4.5 years realized I was Trans, it wasn't something I recognized easily and still have trouble with to this day. However, I never really connected with the Gay community around here, not for lack of trying but because they likely knew from instinct that I wasn't one of them. I do sometimes still wish I was a Gay male instead of a Heterosexual (Trans) woman because it would be far easier and half the people in my life have already accepted the Gay thing including my mother and all of my closest friends.

[Mahsa Tezani]

Currently my roomates parents and some of my friends think I'm gay.  Which is odd for me since I am kinda.  Just not the way they think I am.  I'm trans mtf with a lean to woman.  they think I like men only.  Ugh....

It's typical thinking with straight people. Like if someone who presented as male is now presenting as female. They must be doing it to attract men. That couldn't be farther from the truth.

[Herwinteress]

As my birth sex, I always considered myself purely hetero, but I ignored all of the signs that should have told me otherwise.  My girlfriends (and my ex-wife) weren't so fooled though.  One left me saying I was clearly gay but in the closet, another left simply because she said I treated her like a sister and not a romantic partner.

Looking back, it's pretty clear that what I wanted from my relationships was, in fact, a girlfriend.  Not the romantic type, but the friend type.  A girl with whom to go dancing, shopping, eating, but nothing in the bedroom... on the other hand, I never gave any thought to the possibility that I might like guys.  Now that I've freed the girl who was trapped in my head my entire life, I know what my true sexual orientation is.  I went from forced hetero before transition to genuine hetero after.

This fits me pretty well. My college GF was pretty frustrated with me not being 'man enough' - especially in bed. On a few occasions she chastised me for treating her more like a sister than a GF. She also openly asked me if I was gay or Bi. I denied it and never shared my secret attraction to guys.  In retrospect, I should have bought a clue when she introduced me to her new BF months after we broke up and I thought he was hot. 

I considered experimenting with a Gay lifestyle (one Gay friend once made a pass at me which I rebuffed in HS) just to quell the sexuality confusion. But never acted upon it. Deep down I knew I was more likely TS. I had no real interest in a relationship with a guy as a guy - if it was going to happen, I wanted to be in the female role.