Gender transition shapes perceived sexual orientation

ABSTRACT

We examined whether and why the amount of time a transgender person has spent transitioning influences perceived sexual orientation. We found that transgender individuals who had spent more time transitioning were more likely to be categorized as straight (vs. gay), and that greater gender typicality in part accounted for shifts in perceived sexual orientation. These perceptions were not contingent on whether people made judgments about how they personally felt or what the average person would say. Overall, these findings support the idea that gender and sexuality intersect in people’s minds, and that shifts in one can lead to changes in perceptions of the other. We discuss how these findings contribute to understanding perceptions and experiences of transgender individuals.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• gender typicality
• perceived sexual orientation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Consistent with the preregistration plan, we originally requested 800 participants from Qualtrics. More participants were collected than requested.

2. Results for femininity and masculinity ratings analyzed separately for both studies can be found in the online supplement.

3. The reported analytic plan deviates from the preregistered plan in how we accounted for between target variance. In the preregistration plan, we indicated we would account for this variance by specifying target as a fixed effect using generalized estimating equations in SPSS. However, we ultimately conducted all analyses in R, in which we were able to specify target as a random effect in analyses. Results are consistent regardless of which approach is used.