Is sexual attraction only based on genitals, or is there more to sexual attraction (e.g. attraction to secondary sexual characteristics, "femininity", "masculinity", etc)?

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[–]GoValidateYourselfuseful lesbian 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

No such thing as a "feminine" or "masculine" penis. Feminine and masculine are used to describe behaviors, cultural norms, and dress, stereotypically associated with the two biological sexes. In other words, "gender". It's a social construct.

A penis is a male sex organ. It is part of a male body, and is coded by male sex chromosomes. It's not a penis flopping around on the floor. Genitals don't exist in isolation from the rest of the human body. The human body has a genotype, which results in an outward expression of the genes, the phenotype. Male and female bodies, just like other human traits, are coded in our DNA.

"Trans" people are people who chose to take exogenous cross-sex hormones, block their natural hormones, and have cosmetic surgeries. They have a mismatch of secondary and primary sex characteristics due to tampering. It's not a natural state of affairs, and if they stopped their interventions, their bodies would eventually go back to resembling their sex's phenotype. Clothes and hairstyle irrelevant.

Is a man that is only attracted to "trans women", and is not attracted to men that are not "feminine" and don't take hrts or surgeries to "pass as" women, really gay? Or is he "straight" for being only attracted to secondary sexual characteristics that are usually on women and "femininity"?

Transwomen are men. If he's attracted to only transwomen and not normal men, or normal women, he is bisexual or a closeted gay. B/c he is attracted to a mishmash of male and female phenotypes.

To sum up: femininity and masculinity are social constructs entirely dependent on culture, time, and place. Sex is real, observable, and consistent across 99.99% of human beings, and in most non-human animal species too. Sexual orientation is based on sex.

[–]Not_a_celebrity 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I have a question regarding genotypes vs phenotypes. Is sex determined by phenotype or genotype? There are intersex conditions where a gene is not expressed and the body ends up having genitalia of the sex that has nothing to do with the genes. It's like someone has a gene for being tall, but the gene is not expressed so they end up being short. Are they actually tall or short? Should we say they are tall because they have the gene for a taller height despite it not being expressed and them being short in phenotype? Or should we only take phenotype into consideration?

Wouldn't that be the same for sex?

[–]Ladis_Wascheharuum 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Is sex determined by phenotype or genotype?

Phenotype, strictly speaking. There is a lot of talk about primary and secondary sexual characteristics, and I think people are getting confused about it all. Male and female, biologically, are defined by the gamete-producing organs of an organism. In humans, that means ovaries or testes. This is fundamental because it's what sexual reproduction is based on and what the entire concept of sex is built upon.

Nearly every human was born with structures to produce one of the types of gametes: sperm or ova. Despite any disorder of sexual development or intersex condition, it's virtually certain they have either ovaries or testes.

Having none at birth is a very rare anomaly. From strictly biological view, such a person is neuter. (Despite this, an argument can be made that they still have a sex that can be determined by which organs "should" have developed if whatever blocking factor were removed.) Having both at birth is beyond rare and biologically such a person would be a true hermaphrodite. These two kinds of people are the only ones who can possibly claim to be neither male nor female, or both, and there are maybe a few thousands or tens of thousands of them in the entire world.

For example: Caster Semenya was born with testes, just ones that didn't develop properly and remained internal. Despite outward appearance, Caster Semenya is male, biologically.