Orientation shifted after transition - my version, in case it helps someone in the confusing middle bit (43, 3 years on T)
Tldr; thought I was all into women. I'm actually 95 percent gay now that I can be myself post-transition.
I see this question come up a lot here and in the T subs - "my attraction changed on T, what's going on" - so I thought I'd write up my own experience. Not as an answer, just as one more data point. Everyone's different. This is only mine.
Quick background so you know where it's coming from. I'm 43, about three years post medical transition. Before transition I had four long-term relationships, all with women. In my early 20s I'd had some sporadic sex with men - I framed it to myself as "experimenting" at the time - but it never felt like it fit, and I filed it away and went back to dating women. For twenty-odd years I'd have told you I was mostly into women, maybe a bit bi, and left it there.
Then testosterone, and time, and the thing a lot of you describe: my attraction to men came online in a way it simply never had been. Not "I decided to try men." More like a channel that had been switched off my whole life suddenly had power running through it. And in parallel - this surprised me - women went quiet. Not gone. I can still find a woman beautiful. But the actual wanting isn't there and, being honest with myself, I don't think it ever really was.
The thing that took me longest to work out, and the thing I actually want to share, is that "attraction" turned out to be three different things that I'd been lumping into one. Untangling them is what made it stop being confusing:
Aesthetic appreciation - "I can see that person is beautiful," and nothing else happens. I get this for men and women both. It's real but it's not desire.
Sexual pull - the actual bodily "I want you." This, for me, turned out to be men. Full stop. And crucially it comes from the body first - it doesn't need me to admire the person or build up to it, it's just there. When I finally felt that with a man, it was the easiest thing in the world, and it didn't wobble if something was slightly awkward or imperfect, which sex with women always had for me. That difference told me everything.
A rarer, deeper pull - "I would take that person seriously" - which for me is keyed almost entirely to intelligence and the way someone uses language, and it's fairly gender-blind. There are a couple of women (brilliant, dry, verbal types) who trip this one. But it stays in the "I could love your mind" register - the sexual channel doesn't light up. So it never becomes what it becomes with men.
Where I've landed, and I hold it loosely: I'm about 95% gay. The residual isn't really sexual bisexuality - it's that I can appreciate women aesthetically and occasionally be genuinely moved by an exceptional woman's mind. Basically gay with a narrow demisexual door for extraordinary women that, in practice, has never quite opened. If that's a clunky way to put it, sorry - it's the most honest map I've got.
A couple of things I wish I'd known earlier, for anyone in the middle of this:
- The fact that you could "construct" attraction to one gender and not the other isn't the tell you think it is. I was actually better at manufacturing desire for women - because I'd had to be, for decades. The ease with men wasn't a skill; it was that the desire was just there and never needed constructing. Took me an embarrassingly long time to realise low effort meant more real, not less.
- "This is completely confusing" is often just what it feels like when new data doesn't fit the story you've been told about yourself. The confusion isn't you being broken. It's the old frame not fitting anymore.
- Give it time and let yourself actually explore rather than deciding in advance. Mine took months to settle and honestly is still sharpening.
Anyway. One person's experience, not a global answer to anything! If any of it is useful to someone staring at this same confusion, that's why I posted it. Happy to answer questions if people have them.