Clearly Knowing One's Sexual Preference and/or Gender Identity is Greatly Complicated by Sexual Abuse

I've already discussed, in several of my previous blogs, how sexual abuse negatively affects an individual's 'sense of self', how it makes survivors want to 'peel off their skin' and not 'live in their bodies', and how it greatly increases the fear of intimacy with another person. What I want to talk about today is how sexual abuse complicates and 'muddies the waters' of an individual's sexual preference and gender identity.

First, it is important to define these two issues and distinguish the difference between them.

Sexual preference is focused upon whether an individual is sexually and intimately attracted to men or women.

• If one is heterosexual, generally a person is attracted to members of the 'other sex' (though not always - more later). I'm using 'other sex' rather than 'opposite sex' because it's fairly clear to me that there's far more in common between the sexes than within each sex. In other words, males and females share far more characteristics than is commonly supposed; the greater 'differences' are among members of each sex, rather than with the 'other sex'. 
• If one is homosexual (gay or lesbian), an individual is sexually and intimately attracted, by definition, to persons of their own [same] sex.
• If one is bisexual, attraction is for both sexes, though a greater preference for one sex or the other may be more prominent at certain times.
• If one is transgender or transsexual, it becomes even more complex (more on this in Transgender Explained: For Those Who Are Not, by Joanne Herman). Transsexual women who are sexually and intimately attracted to males are defined as heterosexual transsexual women and those attracted to women are defined as gay transsexual women. The same is true for transsexual men (transmen): those attracted to females are defined as heterosexual transsexual men and those attracted to other males are defined as gay transsexual men.
• Defining sexual preference for transgender and questioning individuals sort of pushes the whole issue of sexual preference in a whole different direction, and one that other writers are far more adept at defining than I ever can be (see Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity).

Gender identity is a very different issue. This has more to do with what sex an individual sees themselves to be and whether or not it differs from the sexual organs with which they were born.

• As a 'general rule', the majority of the society is comfortable with their 'birth sex' -- genetic males seeing themselves as males and being fine with that, genetic females feeling a solid sense of themselves as females. Individuals may question whether they 'fulfill the cultural definition' of maleness or femaleness, to a degree with which they are comfortable, and they may be very critical of their body image (females are well known for feeling overweight even if they are well within a healthy weight-to-frame ratio, due to media images of females that have far more to do with 'current fashion' than with a realistic perception of an average female body -- and males are being increasingly affected, as well, by these 'media images', with concurrent body discomfort). But this self-criticism doesn't move beyond the point of "I don't like my body the way it is". Unlike transgender-identified or transsexual-identified individuals, most of the population is comfortable, at a basic level, with the sex of the bodies 'they were born with'.
• Transgender and/or transsexual-identified persons, by contrast, though, have often, since childhood, felt 'at odds' with their birth sex, and their gender identity is expressed by an identification with the 'other sex' (or with neither of the 'cultural definitions of binary sexual groupings'). They often, either since childhood or realized later in adulthood, have a strong and pervasive 'sense of their own gender' as being quite different from the sex to which they were born.

Hopefully, that at least defines the difference, at a basic level, between sexual preference and gender identity.

For sexual abuse survivors, their 'personal sense' of sexual preference or gender identity is profoundly and irreparably compromised by the sexual molestation and/or rape that was perpetrated upon them, often in childhood. The problem is that of the null proposition. In other words, what one's sexual preference or gender identity may have been had the sexual abuse not occurred (the null proposition) is indeterminable. An individual could have been born with a 'natural' inclination for 'other' or 'same' sex preference and could have been born with a 'clear inner sense' that they were the 'sex of birth' or that of the 'other sex', but the sexual abuse profoundly 'muddies the waters' of that clarity (to the extent that it was or was not clear, early in their life journey, what their sexual preference or gender identity was or the direction that it was taking).

Now, one may argue that it really doesn't matter why an individual has this or that sexual preference or what the 'cause' is for an individual to choose a gender identity that differs from their birth sex -- and say that it simply 'is true' and 'valid for that person'. I'm surely not making an argument about the validity of sexual preference or gender identity; as far as I'm concerned, ones choice is valid, in sort of an a priori way. For me, this isn't a political or cultural argument, it is simply a fact. Rather, what I'm talking about here is that the individual, later in their life [in adolescence or in adulthood], when trying to determine a 'stable sense of personal identity' doesn't know and, to some degree, can't know what their sexual preference or gender identity would have been had they not been sexually abused. And for sexual abuse survivors, this question is quite relevant.

There have been arguments made in the popular media that boys who were sexually raped by other boys or by adult males are, due to the molestation, predisposed to becoming gay. For me, this is an outrageous, and in and of itself, an abusive argument. A greater likelihood is the possibility that if one is sexually raped by a member of ones own sex, they will avoid members of that sex like a plague until they have achieved a reasonable degree of mental health intervention (and are able to understand that the trauma is related to a specific individual molester, not all males or females). The same applies to gender identity: the argument is often made that boys who say later that they want to become transsexual females and who were raped as children will either identify with their molester and want to have similar power (hence, if the abuser was female, the gender identification is with being female) or avoid identification as a male because they were raped by a man. (See Mike Lew, Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse, p. 41, for a discussion of the gender confusion engendered by sexual abuse.)

The problem is that there have not been [to the best of my knowledge] double-blind, longitudinal studies to determine why individuals later want to transition to the 'other sex', other than the stories told by trans-persons in their required psychological pre-screening for hormones and SRS, and those stories are often carbon-copies of what the 'gatekeepers' want to hear. (On the whole bizarre paradoxical nature of that process -- and why it should be discarded altogether -- see Julia Serano, quoted above.) This is not to say that such 'story scripts' are untrue for the individuals involved, rather that the variations in the story of how one acquired one's 'alternate' gender identity, that is true for a particular individual, are often discarded in the interests of fulfilling the 'codified' version required by the psychological pre-screening process.

The complexity of my point is far too involved for me to cover all its aspects in this one blog. But, hopefully, the reader at least has an inkling of how sexual abuse greatly compromises an individual's 'stable sense' of their sexual preference and/or gender identity. Such sexual abuse causes a much greater degree of anxiety for the sexual abuse survivor than the often already great anxiety caused by the cultural repression of the society for persons who are trying to have a clear sense of their sexual and gender preferences, especially when that 'sense' differs from the 'binary sexual demands' of American society.