Libido and Conversing: What Transsexuals Can Teach Heterosexuals

Transsexuals show the rest of us that in relationships our desires for both sex and conversation are more hormonal than many of us believe.

Mention “raging hormones,” and most people think of horny teens hungrily groping their way to sexual initiation. As the years pass, most people’s hormones stop raging, but thanks to transsexuals, we now know that they never stop arranging us.

What Changes for Male-to-Female Transsexuals

I’m acquainted with a few male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals, and we’ve chatted about the changes they’ve noticed as they’ve transitioned from one gender to the other. Uniformly they’ve noticed two significant differences:

• Less interest in sex. “When I was a man,” one told me, “I thought about sex a great deal, almost constantly. I experienced my libido as a driving force that sometimes felt irresistible. And if I didn’t get sex, I masturbated. I masturbated a lot. Now that I’m a woman, I still enjoy sex, but I think about it a lot less and don’t masturbate much anymore.”

• More interest in conversation. “When I was a man,” this MTF transsexual continued, “my wife used to complain that I wasn’t as open to talking with her and didn’t listen to her. But as far as I was concerned, I talked, I listened—just not as much as she wanted. Now that I’m a woman, I see what she meant. I find men to be aloof. Now, given a choice between having sex or talking with my girlfriends, most of the time, I’d choose a good conversation.”

What Changes for Female-to-Male Transsexuals

I’m not personally acquainted with any female-to-male transsexuals (FTM), but a few years ago, the New York Times interviewed one of the most public FTMs, Chaz (nee Chastity) Bono, the daughter, now son, of singer-actress Cher and her ex-husband, the late-singer-politician Sonny Bono. As Chaz Bono has transitioned, he’s noticed two main changes:

• More interest in sex. He says he thinks about it much more than he did as a woman and “needs release much more often.”

• Less interest in conversation. “As a woman, I used to really enjoy conversations with the girls. As a man, I have less tolerance for women’s talking. I’ve noticed that Jen [his girlfriend] can talk endlessly. But there’s something in testosterone that makes that really grating. I’ve stopped talking as much. And when she talks, sometimes I just zone out.”

It’s Nothing Personal. Just Hormones

Many women have difficulty with men’s sexual appetites. To be sure, not all men badger women for sex. In about one-third of couples who consult sex therapists for desire differences, it’s the woman who wants more sex. But two-thirds of the time, it’s the man who feels the more compelling sex drive, and in the cultural stereotype, the word that follows horny is guy.

Many women don’t understand this. How can you want sex so much? As the experience of transsexuals shows, libido is largely hormonal. MTF transsexuals reduce testosterone and add estrogen, and quickly feel less sexually driven. So ladies, your horny guy is not perverse, he’s simply responding to his hormones.

Meanwhile, many men complain that women talk too much, and many women complain that men don’t listen. To be sure, not all women are motor-mouths. Some are quite reserved, while some men can’t shut up. But in her book The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine, director of the University of California, San Francisco's Women's Mood and Hormone Clinic, asserts that women speak an average of 20,000 words a day, while men utter only 7,000. Other researchers have disputed these numbers, but in the cultural stereotype, the phrase is not Chatty Charlie, but Chatty Cathy.

Many men don’t understand this. I listen. But you talk so much that I can’t decide what’s worth listening to. As the experience of transsexuals shows, the drive to verbal expression is largely hormonal. FTM transsexuals reduce estrogen and add testosterone, and quickly quiet down and get annoyed by women’s seemingly constant talking.

No doubt women will continue to complain that guys are horn-dogs, and men will continue to complain that women run at the mouth. But transsexuals show us that neither gender is out to drive the other crazy. It’s nothing personal, just hormones.

P.S. How Old is Transsexuality? How Many People are Transsexual?

Speaking of trans-sexuality, gender–switchers are more visible than ever. There’s even a MTF actress on “Orange is the New Black.” However, the phenomenon itself is ancient. Ever since paleolithic humans began telling stories, some dealt with men and women who believed they inhabited the “wrong” bodies, considered themselves members of the other gender—and acted that way. But actual gender-changing dates from 1931 when German surgeons performed the first male-to-female reassignment surgery.

Trans-sexuality remained little more than a blip on the cultural radar until the 1990s, when increasing acceptance of homosexuality led to a growing appreciation that some people suffered “gender dysphoria,” deep discomfort with their birth gender and a strong yearning to live as the other.

Early studies tabulated the prevalence of trans-sexuality by counting those who consulted physicians for hormone treatment, the first step toward changing genders. Studies in Europe in the 1990s suggested that one man-by-birth in around 12,000 requested female sex hormones, and that one woman-by-birth in about 30,000 wanted male hormones.

But since the millennium, as transsexuals have become more visible, surveys have taken a step back from hormone requests, and have asked large populations probing questions about their gender identification. A 2012 survey of 2,730 San Francisco middle-schoolers showed that 1.3 percent identified as transgender (while 3.8 percent identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual). Meanwhile, researchers in the Netherlands surveyed 8,064 Dutch people, ages 15 to 70, and found that 1.1 percent of the men and 0.8 percent of the women identified more strongly with their non-birth gender.

So it appears that about 1 percent of the population is potentially transsexual. And that 1 percent of humanity teaches the rest of us that key elements of gender identity—libido and conversation—are heavily influenced by our hormones.

References:

De Cuypere, G. et al. “Prevalence and Demography of Transsexualism in Belgium,” European Psychiatry (2007) 22:137.

Bakker A et al. “The Prevalence of Transsexualism in The Netherlands,” Acta Psychiatry Scandinavia (1993) 87:237.

Kuyper L. and C. Wijsen. “Gender Identities and Gender Dysphoria in the Netherlands,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2014) 43:377.

Wilson, C. “The Reluctant Transgender Role Model,” New York Times, May 6, 2011.

Shields JP et al. “Estimating Population Size and Demographic Characteristics of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth in Middle School,” Journal of Adolescent Health (2013) 52:248.