# Is there a sexual orientation word for this type of person?



## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Basically for my writing I cannot find a term for this.  When someone is attracted to a certain gender, let's say for example a woman only wants to engage in sexual relations with men who were biologically born as men and does not want to have sex with a woman who was transformed into a man, through gender re-assignment surgery.  She would have tastes to only want to be with all natural from birth I guess you could say.

But is there a specific term or a word to define that type of person, who prefers all natural/biological?


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## Teb (Oct 28, 2018)

Traditionalist? I see your query but it's not a line of thought I have ever traveled until now. It's got me curious as well though, but not to the extent I will be tempted to go out and seek a gender reassigned person to sleep with so I can figure out what I would be. Anyone willing to volunteer for this social experiment? 

In all seriousness I am sure there will be some kind of reference to this in a futuristic science fiction book somewhere, Phillip K. Dick might have come up with something for it, but for the life of me I can't think of it.


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## epimetheus (Oct 28, 2018)

I'm also unaware of a term. Perhaps this is an opportunity to coin a new term. Perhaps cis-heterosexual, derived from cisgender.


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## CyberWar (Oct 28, 2018)

"Natural" is the first thing that comes to mind, though all the LGBT folk will probably tear me apart for suggesting that their preferences might be anything other than that.

But, considering how cisgendered heterosexual is by far the most common identity/preference in humans (on grounds of being the only evolutionary-viable one in the long term) I suppose it wouldn't be too inappropriate to call it "natural".


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## epimetheus (Oct 28, 2018)

CyberWar said:


> But, considering how cisgendered heterosexual is by far the most common identity/preference in humans (on grounds of being the only evolutionary-viable one in the long term) I suppose it wouldn't be too inappropriate to call it "natural".



If we take the meaning of natural to be occuring in nature then there is a great swathe of sexual preferences which are natural, including homosexuality. It's not an accurate description.


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## CyberWar (Oct 28, 2018)

True, I suppose "conventional" or "baseline" would be more accurate terms with less room for accidental or deliberate political/ideological misinterpretation.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Okay thanks, but the problem with words like conventional or baseline, is that they are too broad in definition and they do not refer to this exact preference specifically.  Is there any term coined for this exact preference?


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## TL Murphy (Oct 28, 2018)

I would call the tradition role you describe as “heterosexual”. The non-traditional role you describe is the one that doesn’t seem to have a term.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

Transphobic. It's seen as bigotry, especially if it is toward someone who has had surgery. The TG community gets very angry about people like that since they are insisting on reinforcing the lie in a sometimes bizarre fashion. 

Women who have had bottom surgery regularly "pass" undetected through routine pelvic exams by gynecologists, in various vaguely unusual cases where they are not seeing their usual provider. As such, it's an informed characteristic in a lot of cases, and viewed much in the same way that one would view somebody breaking up with a woman they had been very attracted to minutes before upon discovering that much of their family had a much darker skin tone that they hadn't inherited because of the randomness of genetics. 

The idea of a trans woman who was born female, albeit assigned male at birth (that's the term used, AMAB for short) surgically adjusted to remove the outward signs of her birth defect (though be careful there since people draw that line differently) being treated differently because of her medical history is seen as highly offensive and transphobic. 

The L, G, B communities might have alternative thoughts, but I have never been in any of those.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Oh okay, well I don't want the character to come off as offensive though.  For the character, it's not a phobia per say, just a preference. Kind of like how some people prefer to eat fish, but not land animals or something like that.  It's just a preference and not a phobia, but is the reader going to read it as a phobia and see the character in a negative way, as a result?


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## Robbie (Oct 28, 2018)

I am not sure ‘preference’ is the right term in this case. A person is born the way they are. However, in response to the original question regarding a woman who prefers natural men to those whose bodies have been reassigned to match their identities. .._prefer_ is applicable imo.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Well I looked up transphobic and google defines it was someone who has severe disklike for transgender people.  Where as this character doesn't have anything against them, just doesn't prefer them sexually.  Is there a term for that, which does not include dislike or hatred?


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

Every trans person or trans ally who sees that "preference" will read the character as offensive, yes. There is no way to wiggle around it with word choice. There is some grace for people who have attempted to deal with unaltered anatomy and were psychologically unable, but that fizzles if they are dealing with someone who has had surgery to correct the problem. 

Those bits do not behave like the anatomy on someone who hasn't been on hormones, by the way, but I don't want to go vastly TMI when it isn't needed.


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## Robbie (Oct 28, 2018)

Why would a new born be reassigned? I understand that birth defects include those who are born with genitalia for both genders in tact (intersexual) but other than that or some other major defect, I don’t understand why a child would be reassigned.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Well in my story, it doesn't really matter why the other person was re-assigned so much, I just want to know what you would call such a person who prefers all birth natural to have sex with rather than re-assigned.

If this is going to offend readers unintentionally, and take the story in directions I do not intend with them being offended, then what I need to know is, why is it offensive to them?  If I know why, then I can maybe figure out how to approach it but where is the offensive coming from?

I mean that is like say... a person who is into bondage sex being offended because the person they want to have sex with is not into it, for example?  Why take it so personally?  I need to know why then?


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

Also as a thought, people (and characters) are allowed to have failings.

You can have the character have that reaction internally, and if they are aware that it is offensive, and try to overcome it, that's a pitiable human quirk, not horrible.

There's a difference between contributing to the bad and being tempted by the bad. Transphobia like described is seen as the bad. Most people are going to be tempted by the bad. The issue comes from their reaction to that temptation. Sort of like with racism. Minorities accept that everybody they meet are tempted by that bad, and ask people to show they are trying to resist it. Too many people they talk to act angry at the suggestion that they are being tempted, and it leads to a communication breakdown.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

I should write an autobiographical piece on this.
"Assigned" is when the doctor glances briefly at anatomy - which might be misleading for a lot of reasons that aren't obvious from a quick external inspection - and declares "It's a ___!" Society then fixates on that declaration.
Transitioning is the process of declaring that the doctor was wrong, and doing various things to make the people around treat the person transitioning as themselves, rather than treating them like an outdated and incorrect declaration by a doctor who didn't have all the information available to them.
It's offensive because, well. Imagine that you move to a new office, and are immediately hit by a wall of gossip declaring something about you that is very untrue. Not offensive, just wrong and major. Maybe you are a pacifist who has never even seen a gun, and the gossip is about your long and bloody military record. At some point, you make a big announcement to the office that you are not, in fact, a military action hero, and spend a lot of time squashing all the rumors telling the truth that you have never been in a fight.
You will be offended if, a year later, someone in the office - who you know heard and saw your announcements - reacts badly and weirdly to you because they don't want to work with an ex-military combat veteran.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Well I feel that that office situation is very different than the situation I am describing though.  For example, there were at least two times I hit on a woman and they told me that they weren't attracted to white guys (I'm white).  Now I wasn't offended by this, it was just her preference and it was nothing personal I felt.  It doesn't mean that the person was trying to offend me or be racist or anything, it was just a sexual preference, and nothing personal.  So in the idea of this character, she prefers an all natural male genitalia compared to a surgically manufactured one.

So how can I get that across to the reader that the character has a certain preference, and that just because a person doesn't meet that preference, does not mean it should be deemed as offensive?


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## TL Murphy (Oct 28, 2018)

Dluuni, thank you for your explanation. I feel quite naive about these things and frankly I'm embarrased about my earlier comment. No offence meant to anyone. Just uninformed.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

If a character doesn't want to be with a transgender character because of their medical history, and doesn't view that as a personal fault to struggle with, that character will be read badly regardless of word choice.


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## CyberWar (Oct 28, 2018)

Frankly I don't get why even bother with all the labels. They have been made up and serve no other purpose than pushing ideology and identity politics, and instilling guilt in those who do not happen to belong/support/approve of label groups currently in favour with the establishment.

I also don't really understand why stating a literary character's sexual preferences, much less labelling them with some trendy politically-correct buzzword, would even be necessary, unless either those preferences or the particular label is somehow important to the plot.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Well basically I had an idea for a story where a woman's sexual preference of this nature, would play into the plot though.  But I don't want readers thinking she has issues that would be deemed offensive as a result.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

CyberWar said:


> Frankly I don't get why even bother with all the labels. They have been made up and serve no other purpose...


You show me a word that wasn't "made up", and we have a premise for a cosmic horror story. 

Picture a YA character who hasn't fit in and is having to hide a major bit of personal weirdness from everybody for their entire childhood. The weird ways birds and stray cats treat them that has her dodging parts of town so nobody notices, the way the ghosts that everybody else acts like they can't see and in fact beat her for talking about keep walking up to her and striking up conversations, the way that baths and showers and rain sting and put her nerves on edge...

The labels are the moment that the older lady walks up to her and says "You see the ghosts too, right? So do all my friends. You're a witch, Ellie. I'll show you around."

Also: Ironpony, what I am saying is that what you described is see as a moral evil to everyone in and associated with the transgender community. Changing the words will not change that, because the concept is inherently bad. What the character does about that determines how bad it is.


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## CyberWar (Oct 28, 2018)

Self-censorship to appease some entitled safe-space crybabies who might feel offended about something is about the last thing an author should do. 

In the words of S. M. Stirling, a rather accomplished fiction writer, there's a special word for readers who confuse the opinions of an author with those of his characters - that word is "idiot". If some people are so sheltered, thin-skinned and emotionally immature as to be unable to cope with the opinions of a _fictional character_ that contradict their sensibilities, then you definitely shouldn't waste your time and talent trying to please their sort. They just ain't worth it.

In your fictional universe, you are God. You and you alone decide what is right and why. By letting anyone else dictate what your protagonist should be like and think like, you forfeit that privilege of being a true Creator. The result of that will at best be dull, one-dimensional and predictable charaters and plots in keeping with the official party line, and at worst you will become a propaganda mouthpiece for the people you are so trying not to offend, merely regurgitating their ideological drivel rather than writing the stories that you'd want to write.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Okay thanks.  I know sometimes offending the reader is not always a bad thing, but I need to know why rejecting someone is evil cause of a sexual preference.  When I know the WHY, it will help me with a lot of the material that comes out of it.  What's the WHY in why people not being someone else's type based on that take it so personally, or see it as evil?


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## Robbie (Oct 28, 2018)

I don’t think it needs a term. Just allow your character to have that _preference_...but it’s your story. I don’t know if anyone can tell the difference or not, but it’s a bias either way. If the person knows the person has had surgery and doesn’t want to have sex with him or her then it’s their own problem.


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## TL Murphy (Oct 28, 2018)

I kind of agree with Robbie, that it is probably impossible to assign terms to every sort of sexual or gender oriented affiliation on the planet.  But I do see that people who are in those particular "unnamed" or misnamed or misunderstood orientations would feel that they are being ostracized simply by the fact that there is no term in the language to describe them. On the other hand, some orientations are rare, so it is understandable that not everyone would know the expression or even understand the expression if they heard it.  Part of the problem comes down to "being offended".  There are obvious situations where "offending" is a form of persecution.  There are less obvious situations where "offending" comes from ignorance and yet may still be a form of persecution if the ignorance is a result of cultural bias or bigotry.  Then there are situations where "offending" is simply a case of the situation being outside someone's experience, or even comprehension.  To be "offended" by that is short sighted and even borders on narcissism. Being offended can be an insincere way of seeking moral superiority. And then it becomes about power.  And I think this is what concerns some people who rant against political correctness.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

ironpony said:


> Okay thanks.  I know sometimes offending the reader is not always a bad thing, but I need to know why rejecting someone is evil cause of a sexual preference.  When I know the WHY, it will help me with a lot of the material that comes out of it.  What's the WHY in why people not being someone else's type based on that take it so personally, or see it as evil?


Well, you see the office example as different, I do not. You are talking about a person who is suddenly uninterested in somebody because they learned something about their medical history - a bit like a character who says "I don't date anybody who was born with a cleft palate" as they reject people who had their cleft palate repaired as an infant, and whose mouth looks just like everybody else's. Something odd happened to the child as a womb, and it inconvenienced them, and then they had the weirdness corrected and are moving on with living their life normally... and somebody is treating them as though the weirdness they just went to pains to get rid of is the defining feature about them now. It's also a weirdness that they went through a lot of frustration because of, so it's a pet peeve. Like the pacifist who had to put up with being treated as a violent person over and over because of some bureaucratic glitch.

When people talk about transgender people, they frame it as (reverse as needed) "What if I, a woman, wanted to be a man?" That's not at all what it's like. Instead they should think "What if I, a woman, looked so masculine that everybody around me forced me to pretend to be a man? I don't understand men very well, and I can't imagine ever getting good enough at it for it to feel natural. At some point I might have to really pull out the stops to make people quit treating me like a man and treat me like myself." Then that woman, who was ALWAYS a woman, having gone to great lengths to get people to treat her like a woman, meets somebody who looks into her history, hears the old false rumors from long before, and cruelly dismisses her because "I don't like dating MEN". She wasn't ever a man, she just had a lot of trouble with people treating her like one for reasons beyond her control at the time. It is exasperating to find somebody so desperate to be wrong about somebody that they can't be bothered to try to get to know the woman there.

Before I transitioned, I was regularly ignored by straight women, flirted with by confused straight MEN and lesbian women, and was unwanted by gay men. (I wasn't interested, but I did note them.) I was always the odd one out in groups of men. I do not understand men at all, and figured out that if I did weird stereotypical things now and then and tried hard to watch my language and self-censored for a long time until I found out that transitioning was an option. Then I just started acting normally and after awhile the hormones and voice training had worked enough that it wasn't creating any clashing expectations.

If somebody suddenly insists on treating me like I was a guy, I get a few thoughts. 
One is annoyance that somebody is insisting on lying to themself. I'm OBVIOUSLY not a man, I never was, and here somebody is trying very hard to hold on to their delusional state.
Two is self-consciousness, because what if there are other people listening who will suddenly start being uncomfortable and awkward around me. 
Three is fear that they will be violent toward me; I grew up hearing people talk conversationally about how it seemed reasonable to murder people like me, who didn't know that I was one of the people they were proposing to kill. 
Four is a nightmarish dread that all the people around me that treat me like I am just some random woman are in fact just being polite and that everybody sees me as permanently disfigured into a masculine shape that they are politely pretending not to notice.

Subjecting people to all four of those thoughts is kind of not a nice act, and there's no real way to sugar-coat it. Thus, it is seen as a universal bad. Sort of like how there isn't a way to describe "Insulting somebody to their face and threatening to hurt them" as a good or neutral act. There might be a situational justification or some such thing, but it is going to be seen as a bad act that should be struggled with at some level, not accepted.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

ironpony said:


> Okay thanks.  I know sometimes offending the reader is not always a bad thing, but I need to know why rejecting someone is evil cause of a sexual preference.  When I know the WHY, it will help me with a lot of the material that comes out of it.  What's the WHY in why people not being someone else's type based on that take it so personally, or see it as evil?


I'm having posts pop out as requiring moderation before posting, kind of at random. Not sure what the trigger there is, I am trying to answer these in a friendly fashion, and I don't want to be breaking any rules... 

It is seen as offensive because it is treating someone badly - not necessarily horribly, but not well - because of an irrelevant aspect of their birth that they had no control over at the time that doesn't have any bearing on reality anymore. 
"I don't date anybody from the plains." 
"I grew up in the mountains, I was raised by a mountain family in the city in the mountains, I look like a mountain person, I act like a mountain person, and I don't know anything about living in the plains. Can't you give me a chance?" 
"No. I won't date anybody from the plains. I know we have dated for months, but your omission angers me. This is just my preference."


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## Bayview (Oct 28, 2018)

Dluuni said:


> Women who have had bottom surgery regularly "pass" undetected through routine pelvic exams by gynecologists, in various vaguely unusual cases where they are not seeing their usual provider.



Is this right?

I really like what you're saying in this thread and I'm glad you're saying it, but... a trans woman doesn't have a cervix or a uterus, right? I can accept that a trans woman's vagina would be unremarkable externally, but... what kind of doctor wouldn't notice the absence of a cervix and uterus during a pelvic exam?

(Possibly we're thinking of different things when we use the term "pelvic exam"? If I look at https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/pelvic-exam/about/pac-20385135, it mentions the doctor checking the cervix, uterus, and ovaries, which would not be there in a trans woman. And the pap test wouldn't be possible (or necessary), obviously.)

I don't mean to challenge the overall message you're sending. But this point has me confused.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

They pass as a woman who has had a hysterectomy or otherwise does not have a uterus or cervix, and react accordingly, asking about the hysterectomy.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Dluuni said:


> I'm having posts pop out as requiring moderation before posting, kind of at random. Not sure what the trigger there is, I am trying to answer these in a friendly fashion, and I don't want to be breaking any rules...
> 
> It is seen as offensive because it is treating someone badly - not necessarily horribly, but not well - because of an irrelevant aspect of their birth that they had no control over at the time that doesn't have any bearing on reality anymore.
> "I don't date anybody from the plains."
> ...



Oh okay thanks.  But when you say omission, are you saying that the person omitted this from the person during dating, and didn't tell the person until later?

This is interresting cause maybe I as a person do not get offended by things I should by if people turn down people for things that are irrelevant.  For example, I was rejected by a woman cause I was white and she said white guys are not her type.  Should I have taken offense to that or felt like I was treated badly cause I wasn't her preference.  Should I have taken it more personally?


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## Phil Istine (Oct 28, 2018)

ironpony said:


> Basically for my writing I cannot find a term for this.  When someone is attracted to a certain gender, let's say for example a woman only wants to engage in sexual relations with men who were biologically born as men and does not want to have sex with a woman who was transformed into a man, through gender re-assignment surgery.  She would have tastes to only want to be with all natural from birth I guess you could say.
> 
> But is there a specific term or a word to define that type of person, who prefers all natural/biological?



In the past I think many people might have used the word "normal", but I've come to understand that there are many versions of normality.
Why not simply describe what goes on in your piece and allow readers to draw their own conclusions about her preferences?


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

ironpony said:


> Oh okay thanks.  But when you say omission, are you saying that the person omitted this from the person during dating, and didn't tell the person until later?


It's a nerve wracking subject, because we are murdered over it a lot. 
Also, it just doesn't come up in conversation. I meet lots of people, and at no point is there really a natural time to blurt out that I have transitioned. I'm quite open about it, but it is at best a non sequitur in almost every case. If I am just getting to know someone, and they are in no current danger of me wanting to show them my genitalia that day, I don't really need to talk about my genitalia with them.
Then, if they say they aren't attracted to transgender women, it's a bit annoying because it's obviously false, they were attracted to a transgender woman all that time, and the target of their attraction never changed.


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## Gumby (Oct 28, 2018)

Dluuni said:


> I'm having posts pop out as requiring moderation before posting, kind of at random. Not sure what the trigger there is, I am trying to answer these in a friendly fashion, and I don't want to be breaking any rules...
> ."



For some reason the system randomly moderates posts of "new members" especially when they include quotes from other members. It is a system glitch that we haven't been able to sort out.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

Okay, duly noted! Looks like they are appearing now, so might be worth glancing back over the thread for suddenly materializing responses.


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## ironpony (Oct 28, 2018)

Oh okay I see what you mean, but I think what I mean is, is that this character is attracted to biological male genitalia, and is not attracted to surgically created genitalia.  So it's not that she means to be offensive about it, she just has a certain preference.

It's like how certain people only feel like eating Kosher food for example, and can't do non-Kosher.  The non-Kosher people shouldn't take that personally for example, should they?

Or like how I said that before I was rejected by a woman cause I didn't meet her race sexual attraction preferences cause I was white.  But's not meant to be offensive towards me, is it?


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

Well for one thing, you are still basically saying the same thing, that's going to bother the same people for the same reason. That isn't going to change.

Second point, the surgeries available for men aren't great right now. There's the pre-metaidioplasty and metaidioplasty spectrum, where they release the clitoris into the position of a phallus, which will be very small. Then in various steps along that spectrum, they might close the labia, construct a scrotum, and construct a urethra to move into the neophallus. The result is disappointingly small and might not be as rigid as desired. The next step is phalloplasty, which uses skin grafts to build a larger phallus at the cost of loss of sensitivity and needing to use a pump or inserted rod to make it rigid.

Most transgender people do not get bottom surgery at all, after all, most people don't look. Transgender men in particular rarely get bottom surgery. Top surgery is quite common for men, where the breasts are removed and resculpted into normal male shape.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

Anyways, I wanted to speak a little bit about the real people that I have seen and heard of dealing with a similar situation. 
There are a lot of partners of people who have transitioned while they are together. For example, you will have a married couple where one of the two transitions while they are together. Sometimes, they stay together, and sometimes they break up.
The way the transgender community  tends to see these depends on how the cisgender member deals with the transition. 

Sometimes the partner stays with the transgender person, which is of course always good. There's usually some stress as they deal with the change of status quo. 
Sometimes, the two struggle to work things out for quite some time, and eventually the couple grows apart. There was an internal struggle involved, and maybe the struggle didn't end in the place that we might have hoped. Because an attempt was made, it's okay now. They wrestled with their demons, and maybe they lost this time. We know where their heart was. They tried. 
Sometimes, people leave the transgender person the moment they come out. We don't see any sign of a struggle, just declaring a "preference" and abandonment. We see that as pretty straightforward, transphobic and not good at all.

The first two, you could write a story about. There is a struggle, and people change. In one case,  they are successful; in the second case,  I struggle, and change,  and ultimately  do not succeed in their goal.  That is okay for a character to do. The third, however, there is no change, and the one leaving simply becomes a villain.


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## TL Murphy (Oct 28, 2018)

Gumby said:


> For some reason the system randomly moderates posts of "new members" especially when they include quotes from other members. It is a system glitch that we haven't been able to sort out.



Big brother is watching, no matter what the glitch might seem. Fascinating discussion.


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## Dluuni (Oct 28, 2018)

Well, I try to be helpful, because I know it's a popular subject and that it is very alien to most people who might be looking at writing aspects of it. It is not self explanatory at all.
Both me and my husband transitioned together while married, in opposite directions. I've advocated for people and gotten policies changed. I have nonbinary friends. I would rather answer some questions than see a bunch of craziness. Trying to research the erotica genre is particularly ridiculous, for example...


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## Bayview (Oct 29, 2018)

Dluuni said:


> Sometimes, people leave the transgender person the moment they come out. We don't see any sign of a struggle, just declaring a "preference" and abandonment. We see that as pretty straightforward, transphobic and not good at all.



This doesn't seem fair to me. I mean, first off, I don't think it's ever a good idea to judge a marriage from the outside, but even leaving that aside... is the negative perception based on the idea that the trans person has _always_ been the "new" gender, and therefore the transition isn't really a big deal? Like, a trans woman was always a woman, really, so the person who was married to her has been married to a woman all along? Or...? I don't know.

In a way it seems kind of disrespectful to _not_ leave the marriage, if the non-trans-partner is straight. Like, if I'm a straight woman and I married someone I thought was a male, and the person then reveals that she's not actually male... I might still love her, but as a straight woman it doesn't make sense for me to sexually involved with her. Especially not if she's going to undergo treatments to make her body appear less male-like.

I guess there's the til-death-do-you-part argument? We would say that of course the straight cis woman shouldn't feel obliged to have _sex _with her trans woman spouse, since straight women rarely want to have sex with other women, but she should stay with her as a loving celibate partner, the same way we'd expect her to have stayed with a cis male spouse who got seriously ill and lost interest in sex. But the trans woman spouse _isn't _seriously ill and probably _hasn't_ lost interest in sex, so then we'd have two people stuck in a sexless marriage. That doesn't seem ideal.

I guess these are the sorts of issues you'd think the cis partner should stick around in the marriage and fight through? But, really, if the marriage was a strong one to begin with, the partners have probably been talking about all of this for a long time, and the cis partner has probably had loads of time to sort it all out mentally already. Sticking around until the transition begins would be holding on to any hope that the marriage could be saved, leaving when the transition begins would be recognizing that the marriage is over...

Or maybe they _haven't_ been talking about the possible transition for a long time because the trans partner wasn't sharing that part of themself, in which case I think the cis partner would feel quite justified in thinking that the marriage had been over for some time. Not because the trans partner was trans, but because they weren't being open and honest.

Overall, I guess I think expecting a straight person to become gay (or a gay person to become straight) is asking a lot. Expecting a person to stay in a marriage that is destined to be a celibate partnership is asking a lot. Treating someone as a villain because they are able to quickly recognize they aren't able to live up to those expectations? It would feel a bit two-dimension, to me, if I read an author handling it that way.


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## Kyle R (Oct 29, 2018)

ironpony said:


> Oh okay I see what you mean, but I think what I mean is, is that this character is attracted to biological male genitalia, and is not attracted to surgically created genitalia.  So it's not that she means to be offensive about it, she just has a certain preference.



Of all the suggestions given so far, _transphobic_ seems to be the most fitting, here. A close second would be: _cisgenderism_.

Though I'm not sure why you need to know a specific _word_ that describes her sexual preference. Is knowing this particular word a requirement for writing her story?

On a tangential note: people (and characters) can be offensive about things without actually _intending_ to be offensive. Even well-meaning people can (and often do) possess unfair prejudices and biases.


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## Dluuni (Oct 29, 2018)

Well, it's not just that the marriage breaks down, it's that the entire relationship breaks down and is discarded. The support is withdrawn suddenly, and it looks like the cis partner was only interested in the image of the person, not the person themselves. If that helps?

Generally, coming out like that is done at a point of incredible stress. For me, there were things that I just couldn't do, and which I would avoid or work around when they came up. 

Gender dysphoria tends to ratchet - things that weren't a problem before at some point become a problem, at which point they will always be a problem. It's a bit like living in a world where invisible walls appear here and there, that only affect you. For quite a while you can work around them and make excuses for your roundabout ways, but eventually one of those things plops down in front of your house or in front of your place of work, and suddenly, it becomes a huge issue.

In my case, it was a few things appearing at the same time. First, I lost the ability to mark down "M" on forms. While this doesn't seem horribly major, it was hard to explain. Also, I had issues with muscle development from the exercise that I was doing to relax.
Suddenly, I had to confront this terrifying concept that massively changed my role in the world. I needed all of the support that I could find. Thankfully, I had my husband, who was going through the exact same thing at the exact same time and for whom the the entire experience was strongly foreshadowed in both of us. 

Too many people lose their entire family at that moment, and have to deal with homelessness, gaining and getting a new job, finding a new home, and everything else, at the same time that they are trying to wrap their head around this new identity. So, even if their original spouse might not be able to continue being married, it is appreciated if they at least attempt to remain friends and a support, and work through the changing relationship.


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## Terry D (Oct 29, 2018)

Don't try to label it. Just show your character's preference through the narrative. In trying to put a label on everything is where we muck it all up.


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## ironpony (Oct 29, 2018)

Oh okay, but what if a character wanted to actually label the person in the story, through dialogue is what I meant.


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## Bayview (Oct 29, 2018)

ironpony said:


> Oh okay, but what if a character wanted to actually label the person in the story, through dialogue is what I meant.



If it's dialogue, you need to think about POV. How would _your character _refer to this sort of person? Assuming your character doesn't consult a bunch of people on an internet forum, you consulting a bunch of people on an internet forum is unlikely to tell you much about your character.

Get into your character's head. Figure out the words your character would use. Use those words.

Lather, rinse, repeat.


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## ironpony (Oct 30, 2018)

Okay thanks.  I think I am going to put this story on hold for now, cause I have a lot of things to think up for it still.   But I will keep the suggestions in mind.  Thanks!


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