Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
“Growing up, I felt I was a in a constant battle with adults. I wanted long hair but was given a buzz cut. I wanted to play house but was pushed toward kickball. I wanted to take home ec and learn to sew but was put in shop class. It seemed like who I looked like was directing my life instead of what I felt like.”
— Joely Adamson, male-to-female transsexual
Initially, a child with significant cross-gender expression or a transgender person may be thought to be gay or lesbian — partly because of the general public’s lack of education on the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation.
“I spent the majority of my high school years confident that my attraction to other women and my love of boyish clothes meant that I was a lesbian,” says Eddie Goldman, a college student in Cleveland who identifies as genderqueer. “There was available information about sexual orientation and public role models like k.d. lang and Ellen DeGeneres. It wasn’t until I saw Boys Don’t Cry [the film that dramatizes the life and hate crime murder of Brandon Teena, who was born female but lived his teen and adult life as a man] that I began to consider that I myself might be something other than a ‘traditional’ dyke, but maybe a boy. I began to think beyond just how I identified and into how I felt inside.”
One reason that confusion persists is that most education about sexuality and identity issues has been done around sexual orientation. Society tends to categorize people based on the knowledge it has, however limited that knowledge may be. So the uneducated person sees a “butch lesbian” when the individual may actually identify as a female-to-male transgender. Or people see an “effeminate gay male” when in reality the individual’s true gender identity is female.
As more transgender people come out openly about their gender identity, this confusion will become less of a problem.
Many transgender people find it helpful to seek professional counseling and therapy. Health care professionals are able to assist transgender people in determining how best to proceed in remedying the internal sense of self with the physical body.
“If I could send one message to those who are coming to terms with their gender identity, it would be to tell them that it is not a mental disorder,” says therapist Stephen Braveman. “But it is critically important to have a knowledgeable health care professional to speak with during this time.