Ask GayDemon: Trans Mission

Please help me! I have always been gay since before I can even remember, but recently I started finding trans women attractive and slept with a few. Now I'm thinking about experimenting with women and I feel as though I'm losing the attraction to men altogether. How can sexuality change in such a strange way!?

-Sex Change

What you do in the world and who you are inside are not the same thing. They may seem to be when they are concordant, like gay on the outside and gay on the inside. But when a straight guy has sex with a guy, it's totally up to him if he still defines his identity as straight. Who you have sex with doesn't define who you are.

But it can if you want it to. And it can help you find what you're looking for if you have some clarity about it and can communicate to people about it effectively.

While there is still huge stigma and bigotry against gay people, there is even more against transgender people (regardless of the sexual orientation involved). I'm speaking very broadly here, but my point is that clearly you're having some challenges regarding your desires. It may be that you would have explored them more in the past had there not been a stigma around it.

The key is to treat each person as an individual, not some notch on your fetish bedpost (unless they want to be that). But really that means connecting with people not only because of who they are on the outside but also who they are on the inside and how they treat you, just everything involved in a connection.

And that means while each experience can give you a measure of insight about your interests (at least for that moment), it doesn't define your entire future or mean your entire past was false.

You can be a gay man who is sexually attracted to transgender women and/or biological women. You're still you. Just be honest about it to yourself and the other person.

As for how sexuality can change, well how can anything change? You're a dynamic, growing, changing person. Years of one particular thing not changing doesn't mean it wasn't actually changing that whole time, just imperceptibly. Until you gained that awareness and now you're acting on it.

And maybe someday you'll fall in love with a women (transgender women are women by the way as are cis women) and want to get married. If you spend years fighting for your rights, you may even be able to get married to your female partner. Marriage shouldn't just be for gay people, after all.

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