However, I’d like you to make you decision about the future of your relationship after you are armed with the facts. I can also understand if you no longer want to date him because he is bisexual or gay. I can understand if you no longer want to date your boyfriend because his sexual/sensual interests and fantasies feel different, scary or gross to you. Too, trans women are women, so being aroused by them doesn't automatically mean your boyfriend is attracted to men.
Early adulthood is a time for sexual exploration (with oneself, with others, with the internet) and people get temporarily fixated on all sorts of things for all sorts of different reasons. The fact that he has looked at porn featuring trans women doesn’t lead me to any particular conclusions about his sexuality and I encourage you not to jump to any conclusions as well. I don’t know if your boyfriend is straight, bisexual, gay, or another orientation entirely and he might not know right now either. Your letter raises several different issues in my mind, although the loudest one for me is your desire to not be intimately involved with a man who may be bisexual or gay. Are you bothered that your boyfriend looks at porn in general or are you only bothered that he looks at pornography featuring trans women? How would you feel if he told you he was straight but he wanted to continue to look at this type of porn? It might be helpful for you to have some clarity about these questions before you try to discuss the situation with someone else. Before I do so I just want to let you know that I’ll be using the term trans women rather than “she-male.” The term “she-male” is a slang term used to describe people assigned male at birth who realize they are actually women and chang their gender expression, sometimes with the help of hormones and/or surgery.įirst off, I think it is important for you to take some time and try to articulate why exactly you are feeling so sad and so heartsick. I am sorry that your heart is hurting and I hope that I can shed some light onto your situation. Demographic information is being collected for research purposes only and will be kept strictly confidential.Thanks for writing. The test is also available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Italian, Malay, French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Dutch, Korean, and Japanese.īefore we get to the test itself, we'll ask you a few basic questions about yourself. If you are conducting research and would like to collect raw data for a group that is taking this test - for a business, research study, classroom activity, or other purpose - please see our Group Testing Instructions. This test will show you where you are on the Sexual Orientation Continuum, and it will also calculate your Sexual Orientation Range, an estimate of how much flexibility you have in expressing your sexual orientation.
Robert Epstein, one of America's most distinguished research psychologists (follow on Twitter at The test has been empirically validated with a sample of more than 600,000 people in 219 countries and territories.Īlthough many people believe that everyone is either "straight" (heterosexual) or "gay" (homosexual), sexual orientation actually exists on a continuum. You are about to take the Epstein Sexual Orientation Inventory (ESOI), a test of sexual orientation designed by Dr.