I Laughed...

...When the doctor wanted to know my sexual history.

Lets face when it comes to love there are not many options for trans people.

Are Trans People Excluded from the World of Dating?
New research explores the extent to which trans people are excluded from dating.
Psychology Today
By Karen L. Blair Ph.D.
June 16, 2019

Imagine for a moment that you were to find yourself looking for a new partner at some point in the near future. Perhaps you would turn to a popular dating app and begin filling out your dating profile in hopes of finding "the one." In the process of doing so, you'd likely be asked to indicate your gender and the genders of others that you would be interested in dating. Under these hypothetical circumstances, which of the following people would you consider as a potential dating partner (check all that apply):

• a cisgender* woman
• a cisgender man
• a transgender woman
• a transgender man
• a person with a non-binary gender identification

So who do you think was at the bottom of the survey?

Recently, my colleague and I asked this question of just under 1,000 participants and we published our findings in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Our results indicated that 87.5% of the participants who were asked this very question only checked off the cisgender options and excluded transgender and non-binary individuals from their hypothetical dating pool.

In addition to simply looking at the overall percentages of how many people included or excluded trans persons from their hypothetical dating pool, we also examined the demographics of those who were inclusive. For example, while only a very small minority of cisgender, heterosexual individuals (3.1%) were willing to date a trans person, a much greater percentage of individuals who identified as bisexual or queer provided inclusive responses (55%). One reason for this may be that individuals with queer or bisexual sexual orientations are already looking beyond gender in many ways when selecting a person to date. This also provides some promising insight, as it means that within certain demographic groups, acceptance seems to be much higher.

Looking more closely at the patterns of responses, it also became clear that individuals were least likely to express an interest in dating trans women, even if their sexual identity would otherwise indicate an interest in women. Indeed, nearly 20% fewer people indicated an interest in trans women than would have been expected based on the sexual identities of the individuals within the sample. 

No surprise here if you are a trans person… we know that already.

I don’t think there is much we can do, unless there is a huge culture change.

The study didn’t include trans men which on an anecdotal level I see having more couples than trans women and I have a theory about that.

I think it has a lot to do with how well you can integrate into society, those that are easily identified as trans have a lot harder time finding a partner. So what does that indicate? That there is a lot of gender bias out there by people who think that they are not biased.

I am not saying it doesn’t happen, I know of several trans people who have partners but most of them can integrate into society. Some are partnered with cisgender partners, so are in same-sex partners, some are in opposite sex partners, and some are partnered with trans partners. I dated a cisgender women for awhile, I never knew why we broke up but it happened after we went out to dinner with some other trans women.

The way I look at it, is that love is like lightening because you never know when or where it is going to strike… so never give up looking.

*Note: ‘cisgender’ refers to someone whose current gender identity is the same as the one they were assigned at birth, while ‘transgender’ refers to someone whose gender identity differs from the one they were assigned at birth.)