Samantha sweetie, your gender identity is about who you are, your sexual attraction is about what you like. The two are not the same.
Gender Identity is an inherent part of your psyche, of how you see yourself and how you relate to the world. It has to do with your sense of your body, of your mind and of your spirit. It's all about you and has nothing to do with other people. Being attracted to girls is something else entirely. It's entirely about other people and how you relate to them, what you look for in a partner and what you want a partner to need from you. It's about who you love, and why you love them.
There is no contradiction here hon. Be true to yourself without apology, and the rest will follow.
Mina.
Post Merge: January 16, 2009, 07:14:57 AM
Laura:
According to research by Dr. Richard Kinsey, 37% of males have achieved orgasm through contact with another male and 13% of women through contact with another woman. These results were later questioned, but after retesting and reviewing by Paul Gebhard, the percentage for males was only marginally altered - 36.4, while for females it remained consistent. This is starkly contrasted to the majority of face to face surveys where only between 5 and 12 % of males own up to homosexuality or bisexuality. To be fair, Kinsey and Gebhard's findings stand out because the numbers are so much larger, but they were testing subconscious and involuntary responses while other research is usually survey based. To illustrate the danger of trusting survey data, consider these findings:
Quote...major historical shifts can occur in reports of the prevalence of homosexuality. For example, the Hamburg Institute for Sexual Research conducted a survey over the sexual behavior of young people in 1970, and repeated it in 1990. Whereas in 1970 18% of the boys aged 16 and 17 reported to have had same-sex sexual experiences, the number had dropped to 2% by 1990. [1] "Ever since homosexuality became publicly argued to be an innate sexual orientation, boys' fear of being seen as gay has, if anything, increased," the director of the institute, Volkmar Sigusch, suggested in a 1998 article for a German medical journal. [2]
Contrast this to research on homophobia done at the University of Georgia, which included only men who were exclusively heterosexual. The participants completed a questionaire to judge their attitudes towards homosexuality, and 35 were found to be homophobic.
Of the homophobic group, 80% experienced arousal in response to homoerotic material, while the non-homophobic group came out at 34%. The total sample was 64 males. That equates to about 28 of the homophobic men and 9 of the nonhomophobics, for an overall 58% of the sample being homosexual to some degree.
Kinsey postulated that the majority of people are bisexual by nature but get conditioned in one direction or the other. While I'm not necessarily in full agreement on this idea, I do think that there are ALOT more homosexual and bisexual people out there than will admit it, even to themselves. Transition is about becoming more true to ourselves, which includes letting go of sexual repression.
Sources:
Kinsey Report Data, The Kinsey InstituteThe Demographics of Sexual Orientation, WikipediaHomophobia, religioustolerance.orgMina.
