Ok, heres the situation, my Girlfriend and i were debating it, and no one can give a straight up answer...

A man has a sex change and becomes a woman. (Looks like one, has all the parts..)

Another Man has sex with this "new" woman. And he knew before hand that it is a guy.

Does this count as a same sex encounter?

you and your "girlfriend" are gay

you and your "girlfriend" are gay
Hahaha sorry, but that was fucking funny as hell.

And he knew before hand that it is a guy.
I'd say that makes it count as a same sex encounter.

if you take it down to the gene yes, if you go by looks (like what talid does alot) then its gay, and talid is very gay

Dear Tlaaneq:

If the person was always 'female' (had a feminized brain and female gender identity), and simply had hormone therapy and surgery to correct that problem, then it is my opinion that that person is just as much a woman as of those of us who were born that way and so it wouldn't be a 'gay' encounter per se.

The brain/body gender mismatch that we call gender dysphoria can be caused in a variety of ways, the most common being hormonal perturbations due to medication or illness between the 8th week (when male/female physical organ differentiation is set) and the 13th week (when gender differentiation occurs in the brain) of pregnancy. Androgen insensitivity and specific defects along that line can actually result in a person developing into the gender opposite their *chromosomes* (males develop as females, the reverse doesn't generally happen because no SRY gene = no male instruction). But back to your query...

Anyway, what's the big deal? Since she is currently a woman, 'innie' and all, what she was physically previously shouldn't matter in any case. Interestingly, for many folks who undergo sex-change surgery and those close to them, the big adjustment is the one of moving from the gay community (where they often have spent time while transitioning, although they frequently don't view themselves as gay, because of the acceptance they find there) to the straight one, and if their partner is gay, and now is involved with a woman, this can cause identity issues from the other side (omg, does this make me bi or straight? ;) ).

Regards,
Nydia Ywalmoriel
Past Coercer - Autonomous Collective

The Old saying goes something like, you become what you hate the most.

Just asking this question (And Nydia as always i cherish your responses) Becasue of a situation that happened to a friend a few weeks ago.

My good friend is very homophobic (Mind you i'm bi.. well not exactly, i think i'll steal a quote from Nydia here - "I have no preferance to either end of the sexuial spectrum")

So long story short, my homophobic friend had this amazing few nights with this girl he met at a bar. Now mind you he didn't tell me about this untill after the fact. Also mind you i've known the girl since she was a male.

I agree with Nydia (More so you can understand a bit more about her) She was always "Female" Even when she was a male, was the way she was.

Now, when my friend finally told me about this event, i had asked the girls name. her name was Schiqua. (Sheekuh) Aka William. After he told me i nearly died laughing. My Girlfriend and i have been debating it for a few hours wether or not this should be considered a same sex encounter, so figured id ask the boards.


Also, let me clear something up, first post i said he already knew she was a He. This is a bit complicated. i've TOLD him about her, but at the time it didn't click with him untill he realized why i was laughing at him. He said he was thinking about it when she told him her name, but his reason to me as to why he didn't inquire was "She was too f*cking Good looking, i didn't think there was ANY way she was ever a dude"

I'd love to hear some more opinions.

Few other funny things, and an interesting note i'd like to hear some opinions on.

1) Schiqua Had ner name changed, but she still can whip out her mans voice on the phone, it's funny to watch her doge phone calls by speaking in her man voice and pretending that it's a wrong Number :-p.

(if you want an idea of what she looks like, Watch the TV show Degrassi, the charicter Manny (no pun intended) Age her about 10 years and thats almost exactly what she looks like.


Now for another interesting topic of debate.

Sheiq, Before her Sex change was in a 2 and a half year relationship with another man. They were, and i will say this in all truth, In love. (was kind of sappy Lol) They were constantly with the "I love you for who you are, the person i've watched you become, i love your mind etc..." the Relationship had a VERY strong emotional base, was not a physical relationship. After Sheiq got her sex change, 3 days to be exact, her boyfriend had seen her only once before, and to put it simply told her that he was no longer interested, becasue she was now a woman. Even tho he was in love with "The person he was"

I'm not sure how to accurately make a debate question, but i'll try my best.

Is there anything that is really "Boundless Love" or is most loves boundaries physical?

I guess one good way to think of a response to this question is, if you are in love, or if someone is in love with you, if you were to have a sex change, would you or your partner still be in love with you? And Still want to be with you.

The love between a parent and child is boundless. Relationship wise, I believe it's kinda rare.
I love my girlfriend very very much. She is my best friend and closest confidante. If she were to get a sex change, I would still love her and she would still be a friend, but I could not have a relationship with her.
If your friend always carried himself as a womanand now has the parts to match, Well then for all intents and purposes he is a woman. If he was dating a gay man before the operation he should not be surprised that he dumped her. He may still lover her/him but she is a woman now. She/he cant expect him to go straight at the drop of a hat. I hope that made sense.

She was too f*cking Good looking, i didn't think there was ANY way she was ever a dude
Nothing beats having a thread about transgendered Springer drama, with censored curse words!
Is there anything that is really "Boundless Love" or is most loves boundaries physical?
Not while you're young. It's biologically ingrained into our underlying nature to choose the physically superior mates. As we get older, the physical becomes less and less crucial.

ie you become far more desperate? :D

On an intellectual level, I can certainly say that someone born with the "mind" of a woman, who later gets the "parts" of a woman should be considered, even for purposes of kinky sex, to be a woman.

On a gut-feeling level, however, it's just... ...creepy to me.

We had, at my company, a man by the name of Jim (James). Jim had to be late forties at the youngest. One day, he announced, with the FULL SUPPORT OF HIS WIFE his intention to follow through with his desire to have his gender changed to female. He began wearing earrings, then make-up, then nice pant-suits, then dresses and heels, and adopted a perm. He took his hormones, did his exercises, CHANGED BATHROOMS, and eventually got the big snip :)

Oh sure, they just turned it inside out and tucked it in or something, but still...

The only "awful" part of all of this is that Jamie was a pretty odd looking man to begin with -- imagine a less sauve James Cromwell (Babe, LA Confidential) --- who decided to become a woman.

If people like James Carville can get a spouse..... I suppose anything is possible...

If the shoe fits...

Oh wait.

Dear Tlaaneq:

It's my perception, bolstered by several years of facilitating bisexual/lesbian support groups (and 25 years in and out of relationships ;) ), that people have relatively little flexibility in their lovemaps (term coined by Dr. John Money, a sexologist at Johns Hopkins university, to describe the spatial area of what we are capable of responding to sexually). A gay or straight person who is married to, or in an intimate relationship with, someone who has gender dysphoria may *know* that the person feels that they are in the wrong body, and truly love them and fully support their decision - but what they are capable of being attracted to sexually is tied to the equipment, and it's *very* difficult to retain the physical portion of the relationship afterwards, even if it wasn't ever acted on, as in your friend's case (unless they had some capacity to respond to the other gender to begin with). For those of us who run pretty much smack down the middle of the Kinsey scale, that may seem kind of odd (if you love them, you love them, right?), but the available evidence suggests it to be so. It's why you can't 'fix' homosexuals, among other things.

I think that your friend's experience with her former boyfriend is pretty typical - although had they been a couple of 20 years standing, they might have elected to stay together because the relationship they had built over all that time superceded the issue of the change/loss of the sexual part of the relationship. Since most transsexuals in the past were typically older (due to the difficulty of dealing with the issue internally/social controversy/expense of the procedure - all but one of the transsexuals I have known personally were in their forties), they may have built lives with their spouses/lovers that are important/cherished enough that the emotional intimacy is retained, and the sex issue is worked around (not so different from many normal marriages/LTRs later in life :) ).

Interestingly, I've known a couple of people who were "tranny-chasers", that is to say, they were attracted to and dated transvestites and MtF transsexuals... but only while they were transitioning. (we had a couple of semi-regulars to the support group who fit this category, and I regret that we never really provided a forum for talking about it, but it wasn't our focus)

As it becomes more understood and accepted as a legitimate medical issue, and more support has become available, people are able to get reassigned earlier in life, which helps reduce what has historically meant decades of suffering - and the number of situations like what your friend Schiqua went through, where the loss of an intimate relationship is a result. Seventeen magazine actually ran an article last July wherein three young transsexuals told their stories, with a really cute FtM featured on the cover! I was blown away that this was actually covered by a mainstream teen fashion magazine, who would have thought that the editors actually had enough concern for other teens who might be grappling with the issue to get the article by the advertisers and run it...

But back to your issue of 'boundless love'... I suppose the answer to that question depends on whether you believe that 'boundless love' must have a sexual component. If I had to cite which relationship in my life has truly been 'boundless love', I'd have to go, hands down, with my relationship with my maternal grandmother, who passed away last year. We truly were 'kindred spirits', although we were born 50 years apart, and we appreciated each other on a level that is very difficult to describe - we just knew how to be around each other, and for the last 15 years of her life I spent half my summers and most of my other vacation time with her, whether I was involved with caring for her at the time or not. She was an amazing woman, intelligent, kind, and possessed of a very unassuming certitude, and I still love her and miss her a great deal. I'm sure that most of the people here who are parents will tell you that they knew it (boundless love) when they first looked upon their child and their hearts just kind of grew and broke open.

I guess one good way to think of a response to this question is, if you are in love, or if someone is in love with you, if you were to have a sex change, would you or your partner still be in love with you? And Still want to be with you.Sorry to have posted a novel again :). In answer to your question, I think it depends on the person and their lovemap, as well to some extent what else relationship wise is at stake. In my own case, because gender doesn't play a huge role in what attracts me to a given individual, if I'm in love with someone, and they wish to undergo a sex change (and hopefully I knew about this going in), then most likely this would not be a problem for me (and because I have an incredible fascination with both gender concepts and endocrinology, I'd probably drive them crazy wanting to talk about what was going on while they were transitioning) ). On the other hand, if I ever mentioned to Faervas that I wanted a sex change, he'd still care for me, but our relationship would fundamentally change - no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Does this 'inequity' bother me? Not really - it's who he is, and he just isn't capable of attraction to his own sex. Would we stay together? While after 10 years there's a substantial amount of nonsexual 'glue' holding us together (we enjoy each other's company in a lot of other ways), I can't say whether separate bedrooms would play into such a hypothetical scenario, or whether he would find the whole thing too uncomfortable and we would separate entirely.

Since you brought up the whole idea of 'boundless love', something that has fascinated me in the past couple of years is the issue of sexual relationships where bodies aren't physically involved at all - that is to say cyber relationships. Particularly when there is only text involved, and gender is strictly a construction (possibly supplemented by an image provided by, say, SoE) of the writer, does it matter what the person has for plumbing or looks like on the other side of the screen? Clearly it is at least possible for people to have not just sex (masturbation), but involved and in some cases committed sexual relationships, with no 'bodies' being involved whatsoever. I know that this has been the subject of numerous jokes, but I do wonder if anyone is doing legitimate research on this. If not, there's got to be a dissertation in there someplace... :)

Regards,
Nydia

What is different about a man and a woman that can make someone say, "I don't feel like a man, I feel like a woman." What does that person feel is the difference?

That's a fundumental question.

Aye, Siludorf, it is, and it (one's gender perception, and I think you'd agree that almost all of us can clearly define ourselves as one or the other, although there are a few blended/intersexed people) seems to be at least somewhat independent of 1) sexual orientation and 2) 'masculine' vs 'feminine' personality traits. Moreover, children are aware of gender very early, and most folks who eventually opt for sexual reassignment surgery state that they knew very definitely that they were in the 'wrong' body by age 4 or 5 (in other words, as soon as they understood the difference between 'boys' and 'girls'). In contrast, recognition of sexual orientation typically doesn't surface until just before puberty.

What makes a 'man' or a 'woman'? We don't know, really, but one clue lies in the way neurological wiring is laid down in the brain in the 12-13th weeks of pregnancy, and this is hormonally influenced. We do know that the centers of the brain that deal with communication are laid down, and operate, very differently in females than in males, with verbal processing occurring in three separate centers, with inter-hemispheric communication linking the nonverbal to the verbal; in males, this third processing center on the left side of the brain either doesn't develop or is not used.

It's clear that there's more to gender than just this difference, that there seems to be a more global gender concept that people perceive above and beyond anatomical and communication differences. Interestingly, John Money's lab has produced 'masculine' ewes by exposing them to androgens during the corresponding week of pregnancy and sure enough, these ewes appear to think that they are rams, try to pick fights with other rams, and try to mount female sheep... Hormones don't tell the whole story either though, even though human behavior in adults is very susceptible to perturbation along very predictable lines when hormone levels change - one's gender perception doesn't change because one goes through menopause, for example, nor sexual orientation change when one is given a dose of hormones - these characteristics have already been hard-wired.

My ex-husband was somewhat insecure in his own masculinity and would occasionally criticize or belittle me for having what he called 'masculine tendencies' (apparently those included having any independent will whatsoever ;) ). It's true that I 1) like women and 2) seem to be more direct in various ways than a decent chunk of people sporting a vagina (Jung would have said I had a healthy animus, and Jung's hypotheses about gender are worth reading btw), but I've never had any doubt whatsoever of my gender, and there's no question that it's a significant part of my identity - I not only perceive myself as 'female', but I *like*, if such a word is appropriate, being female, and to be otherwise would be, in some fundamental way, 'wrong'. Why is that? I really can't say... :)

Walk through a crowd sometime, and without really looking at people, see if you can't tell whether individuals 'feel' masculine or feminine. The elements that make up that perception don't just include the obvious anatomical clues. When that gender isn't apparent right away, most of us become uncomfortable. There is definitely *something* there, and when around transgendered folks, even if they haven't begun therapy, it is often very evident that they 'feel' opposite their physical gender in a way that non TS drag queens, for example, don't. Of course, sometimes people 'feel' opposite their gender when they're perfectly happy with their equipment, much to the chagrin of a straight happily male friend of mine who has a perceptable feminine aura about him (without being at all nelly) and who frequently gets hit on by confused lesbians, but can't seem to get a date with a woman who would actually sleep with him... ;).

If all that wasn't complicated enough, I've got another good friend, bi activist, and intersexed (he was born indeterminate, raised male, intersexed births are in the 1 per 3000 or so range in the US) fellow I've known in BiNet for many years who just radiates femininity, and not in that overdone, affected way - it's something very basic and natural. He just looks 'right' in simple jumpers or casual dresses and tennis shoes, with his hair long; he looks like any of a thousand small, caring women you might know who are psychologists or social workers, yet he doesn't have any desire to have any modifications made to his body (which is functionally male), and has a nominally masculine self-concept.

So, at the end of the day, what I come away with is a big /shrug. What the hell is gender? It's multifactorial, and difficult to actually define, and yet it's unquestionably something real and basic that folks have an internal realization of at an early age.

When transsexuals started becoming numerous enough to form support communities, and became visible in the gay community, a legitimate question started popping up among people transitioning and their friends and families. "When is someone a man? (or a woman)". The only answer that made sense was "When they say they are..."

Regards,
Nydia

We just Paroled a he/she out of my prison this weekend. The dude was on hormons and a set of tits. My go what problems tits can cause in a maximum security prison. Anyways, he/she ran right into a womens bathrom and whipped on a dress and make up. What a strange sight to see let me tell you.

back to original question. my answer is..

GAY!

So, is MJ caucasian?
No.
Neither is that guy a chick.

Good call Kiv.

The love between a parent and child is boundless.

That must explain why my mother told me to drop dead and she didn't want me. <3's.

The funniest part about this question, is that it came up between me and some of my buddies, while we in the middle of a barracks inspection by our Sergeant Major...

Imo, well even though he's a "she", still gay, not that is anything fundamentally wrong with gays, but it's still gay.

Now my friend who brought it up, we never did get a confession out of him, but were pretty sure he slept with a s/he...

There's more to being who you are than just having the parts and hormones... just look at science finally figure this one out

Men, Women More Different Than Thought (http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040925/D85APROG0.html)

Nydia,

What exactly do you do for a living? From Years of watching these boards...

You know Everything, about Everything. (it's a complement BTW)

Dear Tlaaneq:

I actually don't know much about a lot of subjects (the religion debate this week springs to mind, as well as Halo's history debates), and try (don't always succeed) to stick to replying to the ones I know something about, but thanks for the compliment anyway :). To answer your question, I teach Biology, Microbiology, and Genetics at a medium sized community college in South Texas. I was a 'late bloomer' and my very broad based curiosity (read: easily distracted) led me through a variety of jobs and interests before I finally was able to settle in to my education in my late 20s - took another break after graduating and spent a few years in industrial microbiology before returning to grad school, and finally moved on to teaching. I hope to get off my duff and finish my doctorate before I'm 50 ;).

On the topic of intellectual dilettantism, I don't believe in astrology, but I had an odd event happen when I was fifteen that I've never forgotten about. That year, my friend's mother (who fervently believed in it) insisted on doing a full chart on me (the one on the wheel shaped paper, with all the planetary positions drawn out). She told me that I had a 'grand water trine' in my chart and that my extreme broad-mindedness was to be my greatest strength... and my greatest weakness. It seems that this, at least, was true :). Thanks for posting the topic! It's one that I have a great deal of interest in and curiosity about it and it took some guts to be as forthcoming as you were in light of the rogues' gallery here...

Warm regards,
Nydia

The big question isn't whether or not it's gay. The real question is... why does it need a label in the first place? ;p

Dear Akipt:

Amazing, huh ;)? (that men and women are physiologically different). Since this is actually something I know something about :), I wish I had a way to put a picture of the two molecules testosterone and estrogen up for you guys. The molecules are almost identical in appearance (differ at only two functional groups) and yet... are almost entirely responsible for male/female differentation. How is it that two almost identical molecules can have such different, *and* wide ranging, impacts? A big part of it is not receptor specificity, but the fact that both are *steroid* hormones. Lipid soluble, they don't need cell surface receptors, but pass straight through plasma membrane, nuclear membrane, and hook up with operons on your DNA directly, and because they don't need a 'pass' into cells, these hormones have systemic effects. These hormones have a direct link to immune functioning, too; estrogen levels have a direct effect on the balance of cellular to humoral immunity, which is why women have more autoimmune disorders, and men are more prone to infectious diseases. Its part of why some people have been screaming for years about the fact that drug studies, and diagnostic/treatment protocols for most diseases (unless they are female specific) have historically been based almost exclusively on all male sample populations and responses.

Geek alert: I know something about *this* topic because part of my masters research concerned parasite hormonal manipulations by the tapeworm Taenia crassiceps in its mouse host: it stimulates 17-B estradiol production, which feminizes male mice, but more importantly for the parasite shifts them from a mostly cellular (effective) to humoral (ineffective against this particular parasite) immune response, while also giving the host something in return both immunologically, and by improving host nutritional efficiency. Host/parasite interactions are just freaking amazing...

Warm regards,
Nydia

The big question isn't whether or not it's gay. The real question is... why does it need a label in the first place? ;p

Good Answer! good Answer! *clap clap Family Fued style*


Vhex, I am sorry your relationship with your folks isn't good. I am lucky enough to have a beautiful little girl, but I would love her just as much if she looked like Quasimodo. Thats what I meant by the love between a parentand child as boundless. I dont care what she looks like and she doesnt care I look like.

intellectual dilettantism
Ok damn it... Enough with the big words. You make my brain go ouchies.