Today I Learned

Fellas, is it gay to be sexually attracted to women?

Trans women are women so yes, it is, and they are.

Does erotica count as porn? That category may be the only one that is predominately consumed by women, but I haven’t looked into stats or anything.

Talking to old-headed guys is a weird phenomenon.

- Would you kiss a trans woman?
"No, that's gay."

- Then would you kiss a trans man?
"No, that's gay."

(Well that, and also we should've stopped seeing homosexuality as a moral failure by 1000AD)

attracted to Masculine and Feminine

me, a bisexual: and vice versa.

I don't think I saw anything in the article about trans women specifically.

Hardcore man on man on man on man on guy on man. Believe it or not 90% of viewers are straight men.

"Transsexual" makes me think of this guy:

Hijacking top comment to also add that there are words for men who are attracted to femininity outside of the bounds of cisgender women: gynesexual (older term, less inclusive due to implication of a vagina) and finsexual (newer term, more inclusive and drops implication of a vagina).

It is quite likely that many of those men actually fall into these categories even if they have not accepted that about themselves as of yet. Others are bisexual, and even others are pansexual, and haven't "come out" as it were.

Especially if this is relying on self-reporting and how often men want to appear straight, the number of men who are wrestling with such feelings but still put down "straight" is probably quite high.

I thought "trans" was short for transsexual? Could someone bring me up to speed here?

In what way is it outdated?

I often wonder about the contemporaneous use of that word, and I think it’s mostly geared toward a particular audience by writers who mostly don’t know better. Perhaps because they or their editors are afraid to use the word “transgender“ due to the politically charged nature surrounding it at the moment, and believe (falsely) that using the word “transsexual” yes, somehow, less offensive.

I really wish they wouldn’t.

However, considering that this article is 14 years old, the use of this term is most likely a product of ignorance. And, as usual, I’m probably overthinking things.

If anything this is less surprising now than it would have been then, but in 2012 it was already becoming readily apparent to people outside the LGBT and academic communities that sexuality doesn't match a stereotypical categorisation that puts everyone into "straight, only wants to see the bits of the opposite sex", "gay, only wants to see the bits of the same sex" or "bi, anything goes" boxes. Certainly if you spent much time online back then, it was talked about frequently.

Now it should be pretty much obvious: does anyone other than conservatives think that sexuality works like that? Do any of us think that "straight" is something more than an identity, a social construct like gender and race? Given that, can anyone be surprised that there are people who identify as straight but don't quite match someone else's strict drawing of the boundaries of that identity?

Maybe some LGBT allies want to say, "honey, if you like watching porn with two dicks in it, maybe you're a lil bit gay", but how comfortable would you be with telling someone who identifies as gay that actually they don't know their own sexual identity? Hopefully you would be pretty uncomfortable with that. Of course there are limits and sometimes people can be in denial or in the closet, but you need extreme caution when drawing such a conclusion otherwise you're going to erase someone or something. Erasure isn't OK just because you think you're erasing straightness. Erasure is only OK in one scenario.