I’m working on my paper for ICFA next year and I have a question about terminology I’d like help with. As all knowledge is contained in the blogosphere I’m hoping that someone will have an answer for me.
The terms “sexual preference” and “sexual orientation” are generally understood to mean whether one is gay/lesbian, bi or straight. The object of one’s attraction can be assumed from one’s own sex.
However, in a trans context, particularly in a science-fictional trans context where sex changes are common, this gets more complicated. So I need a way of distinguishing the nature of one’s sexuality (i.e. is one G/L, B or straight) from the object of one’s attraction (i.e. is one attracted to men or women or both). “Bi”, I think, does duty is both cases. But if, say, a gay man becomes a lesbian woman, is that preserving sexual orientation or changing it? The person is still G/L, but the object of attraction has changed.
For the benefit of those thinking ahead, yes, I am trying to find words to explain the daftness of Steel Beach.
An interesting question (and one I had problems with in Excession which has similar issues). It occurs to me that you might want to start by actually drawing a table of possibilities and using that as a hand out. That doesn’t solve the terminology issue but helps keep things clear in the audiences mind. It also then means that you can describe someone as physically-lesbian but intellectually a straight man? I’m using intellectually by the way because in Excession what struck me most was that having changed sex to female there was no sense at all of being touched *as* a woman, *by* a woman, so that it felt like an intellectual, not a physical or emotional excercise.
I have known people whose sexual preference is “homosexual”, in that they have changed sex and continued to be homosexual, such as changing from gay man to lesbian.
The incredible range of sexual possibility that humans indulge in is something I find remarkable and beautiful.
You may want to talk to Dr. Carol Queen at the SF Center for Sex and Culture, as she has done great work in the arena of sexual preference and relationship preference (a gay man may have a preference for long term relationships with a femme lesbian, while they both find their sexual partners outside the long term relationship)
It is a wonderful and complex subject. Best of luck.
Farah:
Interesting idea. I’ll probably do that, though the paper is already heavily footnoted with things like defining different types of trans people.
Your point about Excession highlights one of my main beefs with “sex changes” in science fiction – the characters involved often show no personality changes at all and changes in gender performance are often limited to clothing. Obviously I need to re-read Excession as it sounds like a source of good examples. Thanks!
I make liberal use of the words gynophilic/gynosexual and androphilic/androsexual because being attracted to men or women is not at all the same as being attracted to people who are like or unlike oneself. If a gay man becomes a gay woman, that’s a change of orientation from androphilia to gynophilia, but the person is still homosexual in the sense of being drawn to people who are physically like herself.
I also think the focus on genital configurations is generally misleading. For example, if a butch lesbian is attracted to femme women, wouldn’t that make her in some ways more heterosexual than a butch straight man who likes butch women?
In a world where gender assignment is easily changed, orientation will have nothing to do with gender assignment. You’re not either “gay” or “straight” (or whatever), but oriented towards men or women (or whomever). I think that’s true today – your orientation is not “gay” or “straight”, but towards a gender.
I think too that orientation is independent of gender identity. If your gender identity matches your orientation, you’re homosexual. If not, you’re heterosexual (and so forth).
Gender identity too, is more or less, independent of gender assignment. [I know that’s not biologically completely true, but will do fwiw], so a gay man plopped into a woman’s body wouldn’t change orientation to become a lesbian, “he” would still be oriented toward men.
Don’t know if that helps any at all with your vocabulary search, and I don’t know what Steel Beach is, but it sounds like I don’t want to look it up.
Steel Beach is a trip, but you should read Charles Stross’s Glasshouse for comparison. My own characters have made me wrestle with exactly these kinds of issues, and here’s what they’ve told me:
First comes gender. One is usually, physically born male or female (although in a shocking 1 out of six or something like that there can be obvious “gender ambiguity” which the doctors used to correct before society was any wiser). Then there’s the gender in your brain. Your body may be one sex, but your heart and mind and brain know different.
Gender’s something different from sexual orientation. Read Dark Light by Ken MaCleod. Stone lives as a woman because in his culture men are warriors and Stone has no wish to kill other men. But even though he is a “woman” he rejects sexual advances from “men.” Stone’s a lonely person until he meets a gun-toting female from another planet. His people recognize her as male and they live happily ever after or something like that
Jahn, the character who educated me, lived in a culture where the community formally confirms one’s gender some time around puberty. They all agreed that Jahn was female. Only Jahn was in love with a young woman. He rejected the decision and left the community. When I caught up with him years later he was a wildly successful actress and lesbian. Duh! *I* had no clue. (And yet there’s still something masculine in his character. I’d almost describe him as a womanizer).
Sophie:
FYI: Glasshouse, Dark Light and Gender.
@Bob: I think that really depends on the person. My gender identity is pretty fluid, and I’ve gone through times of: being butch and attracted to femmes, being femme and attracted to femmes, being male-identified and attracted to women, being male-identified and attracted to men, being female-identified and attracted to women, etc. The types of people I find appealing, and my reasons for finding them appealing, definitely change depending on my sense of who I am; for example, my fondness for queer men feels very different when I’m male-identified (when I’m looking for men who will take my masculinity seriously and find it attractive) than when I’m female-identified (when I’m looking for men whose overt queerness helps to undermine the cultural baggage of the male/female dynamic).
My gender is easily changed in the sense that the gender I woke up with today might not be the one I wake up with tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect me. Quite the opposite. I have to plan around it by only dating people who are broadly queer and genderqueer themselves; most monosexuals can’t keep up, and it’s amazing how badly most people react to a statement like “sorry, my orientation doesn’t include people like you this week”. I have enough clothes for four people, so I can usually find something to wear that feels appropriate for that day’s sense of how I want to express my gender. And of course I have to deal with other people’s comments, however well-meaning: my mother calling me a “beautiful girl” is enough to put me in polo shirts and khakis for a week, and my close friends have learned to compliment my looks with gender-neutral words like “fabulous” and “impeccable” because few things frustrate me as much as thinking of myself as handsome and then having someone tell me I look pretty. This isn’t directly about sexual orientation, but of course I’m more drawn to people who support my sense of myself when so much of the world does not.
Orientation is genetic and inherent to some extent, certainly–I can no more stop being attracted to women than I can stop breathing, and I often wish I had more control over my gender and orientation shifts–but there is no question that culture and other external factors affect it as well. Look at how many people are taught to think that thin women are beautiful and attractive and fat women are not; yet in other places and eras, fat women were seen as beautiful and attractive and thin women were not. That’s not about whether you have the likes-fat-people gene. As long as there is gender, people will be affected by their concepts of their own genders as well as by cultural messages about gender, because so much of sex and gender is about the question of how one fits into the world, and what role(s) the world wants one to play, and how much one decides to take that role seriously or subvert it or transform it or transgress it.
I too like the gynophilic/androphilic distinction for many purposes, though it doesn’t really address the particular example you give. I wonder in fact whether the continuity involved in moving from being a gay man to a gay woman is not so much one of sexual orientation as in the way one conceives of oneself in relation to society at large – i.e. a sense of oneself as aligned with a particular community and its values, rather than with a particular sexual attraction or gender? Not that these things are, finally, ever entirely separable.
Waaaay back in the day when I was a counseling psych grad student, we used the term “affectional orientation” (or sometimes “sexual-affectional orientation”, which was a mouthful). The idea was to distinguish between gender choice for an individual and who that individual chooses to love/partner. Also to make it clearer that orientation wasn’t just about sex. But I haven’t heard that term used since, so I suppose it never caught on.
Actually, Rose, I think you’ve supported my point (at least the one I thought I was making) better than most could. Gender identity and orientation and assignment are independent.
@Bob: I directly disagree with your statement that “orientation will have nothing to do with gender assignment”, though, and I’m not sure how you see my comment as supporting it. My gender identity, orientation, and experience of culture are all separate things, but they all interact with and affect one another.
The other significant difference in our comments is that mine talks about my personal experience while yours makes blanket statements about how the world is for everyone, a rhetorical style that I confess rather rubs me the wrong way.
@Charlie: Community membership is definitely another important factor, as is community estrangement. I know at least one man who identifies as queer not because he has any interest in dating men–he doesn’t–but because he doesn’t want to be affiliated with the straight mainstream at all. He’s a big activist for bi causes and that’s the community he feels he belongs to (and I’ve never heard any of his bi friends tell him he’s trespassing or appropriating).
@N.K.: I do like “affectional orientation” and will try to use it more. Given that two of my four partnership-like relationships are explicitly nonsexual, it seems very appropriate.
I was a straight male before my sex change, and am a homosexual female now. My “sexual preference” stayed the same (i.e. I’m still interested in women), but my “sexual orientation” (hetero-, homo-, bi-sexuality) changed.
@Rose – There are, I acknowledge, six billion-plus personal experiences. It is not possible, I would argue and acknowledge, to speak to each of those, especially in this type of forum. I also acknowledge that what rubs me the wrong way is someone saying that something that works for 99.9% of a situation is dead wrong because their experience is different. There we have an impasse. Let’s make it a friendly one.
In my *ahem* personal practice, I tend to just identify as queer, and deal with attractions in a much more… in the moment sort of way. though to be fair, I pretty much just date menfolk, I’m thoroughly convinced that this is much about habit as it is about anything meaningful about my “orientation” or preference. Not that I’m complaining.
What dose this mean for transfolk? lord only knows. They’re queer, by the fact of their situation and existance. Unless you’re writing an SF world where people transition as part of normative cultural practice, in which case they’re probably not queer as we know queer today. What does this mean for their attraction? Some probably will have “types” that stick regardless of what their personal gender/bodies are doing at the moment. Some may find that their “types” change a bunch. I suspect most would probably figure out that the whole “body” thing matters less than they thought pre-transition, and end up being more in the middle, as it were (though I don’t think that is in and of itself a particularly good articulation of queer).
FYI, I am not looking to put people in boxes, or denigrate anyone’s personal experience. I’m just looking for some way of making a distinction between sexual attraction that is dependent on the gender of the object of attraction and sexual attraction that is dependent on your personal gender. Rose and N.K. have the right idea. Let’s not get into whether any of these behaviors is “correct”, “normal”, likely to persist in an SF world and so on.
As a queer transman, a handful of things spring to mind.
“Sexual orientation” seems to be the preferred term among the people I know (myself included). Chocolate over cheese is a preference. Blue shirts over green is a preference. Who one is attracted to is not so simple.
With regard to gender, I’d recommend “gender identity” as a useful term to use, as it’s bigger than the body. It’s my whole self that doesn’t match how I got tagged. Another term you might find useful is “cisgendered” (for people whose gender identities match their physical birth sex).
As for sexual orientation and gender identity, remember that they’re two different spectra, and that experiences vary widely. Sometimes the sort of people a person is interested remains consistent during/after transition, sometimes it changes. My own experience is that I’m pretty flexible (pan/omnisexual), but with a general bent toward the masculine. Before I came out and started to transition, I was more interested in feminine people. If I needed a term, I might say I’m an omnisexual invert, but that’s such a personal term, and I don’t really hear others using it.
From my own experience, I’d challenge the assertion that a person who undergoes transition doesn’t grok being touched “as” their proper gender. I’ve always felt masculine. Transition isn’t putting on a dude suit. It’s using medicine to bring my body more into line with what I actually feel and experience generally.
That said? Mileage is always going to vary. Testosterone made me more deliberative, less likely to cry, and more aware of certain moods than I was with no hormone therapy, or on oral contraceptive pills. There’s an old saw among transguys that “T makes you gay.” My transwomen friends talk about how differently they experience their libidos. It’s not, I don’t think, sufficiently consistent to prove stereotypes, and in a lot of cases, I can see really awesome challenges to existing stereotypes in my trans friends.
I think attraction to same traits one has is different from attraction to a specific set of gendered traits. I like the idea of androsexuality or gynosexuality, but I think they would be distinct from heterosexuality, homosexuality, bi (ambi?) sexuality, pan- or- omnisexuality, asexuality, or even the sort of queer sexualities you can have even among people whose genders/sexes are different.
You’re also missing out genderqueer, bi-gendered, genderfluid, genderless, androgynous, etc. people. Also, no-op/no-hormone transpeople. Or people who are comfortable with their bodies, but like experimenting with gender roles.
So yeah. This is a huge conversation, and a very delicate one. A lot of cisgendered people get the experience very, very wrong when they talk about it, and it can be hard to be heard when you’re living under the trans umbrella.
Some more guidance.
1. Saying that characters in a book behave in a particular way is not the same as saying that you think real people behave in that way.
2. Don’t assume that someone is totally ignorant about wider issues just because they asked a very narrow question.