This page and its associated posts are dedicated to my views on social issues, in particular matters relating to politics, discrimination (racial, sexual, etc.) and social attitudes. The articles below represent only my personal opinion, of course.

Gender Identity & Sexual Orientation

Sadly, we’re all too aware of the widely held prejudices against non-heterosexuals. These prejudices also affect transgendered persons due to the common misunderstanding that gender identity and sexual orientation are causally related. They are not. Sexual orientation is relative to gender identity, in that if you identify as male and are sexually attracted to females, you’re heterosexual. Indeed, there are many genetic influences on gender identity that are wholly unrelated to sexual orientation in origin, for example Klinefelter’s (XXY) syndrome, hermaphroditism, tetragametic chimeras, etc..

What makes this area particularly interesting is that it deals with the continuum of mental gender identity, which many people mistakenly assume is a simple binary state; “male” or “female” but is, in fact, a far more complicated.