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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)

many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male

many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person

many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (a sufficiently common phenomenon that the term "gold star lesbian" was coined to describe the subset of lesbians who've never had sex with a man - the converse is very common as many female people take some time to fully understand their own desires)

many female people who describe themselves as lesbians are currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (who may or may not also describe himself as female)

These are all weasel words. 'Many' could mean 0.001% (which still ends up being thousands of people since we're dealing with nationwide statistics).

I honestly don't believe that 1, 2, 3 and 5 have any significant effect on the numbers. 4 could well do, but the onus is on you to show that, not to preemptively dismiss a survey whose results you evidently don't like. After all, if we take the 'definitions aren't 100% clear' approach to any other survey we could perform the same kind of muddying the waters on its results.

In an effort to put hard numbers on some of my previous claims:

  • "many people use the word "woman" to refer to a person who is male (including themselves)" - This report from the Williams Institute says that "Of the 1.3 million adults [in the US] who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming." - annoying that they can't just list sex somewhere to make my job easier. I assumed that the GNC people were fifty-fifty male and female (which is obviously an assumption on my part). Based on this assumption, there are 686,100 trans women or gender non-conforming males in the US (or in other words, there are more than 600,000 males in the US who could be expected to refer to themselves as "women").

  • "many people who describe themselves as lesbians are male" - see this comment:

I found this survey from 2011, which surveyed 6,450 transgender or gender non-conforming people in the US and dependent territories. On page 35 there's a pie chart showing the sexualities of the MtF respondents. 29% described themselves as gay/lesbian/same-gender attracted, 31% as bisexual, and 23% as heterosexual. (I have no idea what "queer" means in this context.) I'm interpreting "heterosexual MtF" to mean "a trans woman who is exclusively attracted to cis men", and "lesbian MtF" to mean "a trans women who is exclusively attracted to cis women", but I wouldn't be remotely surprised if even some of the survey respondents were confused by the wording of the question and gave an answer they didn't intend.

If I'm interpreting this correctly, at least 60% of American trans women are attracted to cis women and at least 54% are attracted to cis men. So while you're correct that trans women are vastly more likely to be interested in having sex with cis men than cis men are, it's not like the sexuality demographics of trans women are identical to cis women. The overwhelming majority (something like 86%) of cis women are exclusively attracted to cis men, whereas only a quarter of trans women (as of 2011) are.

So of the 686,100 trans/GNC women in the US, 29% are exclusively attracted to females, or 198,969. According to this poll, 1% of Americans identify as lesbian. Hence, we can assume that 6% of the lesbian population of the US is male. 6% isn't much, but it's far from a rounding error. Also note that we aren't comparing like with like: the Gallup poll is from 2023, the NTDS survey is from 2011 and the Williams Institute report is from 2022.

  • "many female people who describe themselves as lesbians or bisexual have never been in a romantic or sexual relationship with a female person" - I admit I couldn't find hard data on this one.

  • "many female people who describe themselves as lesbians have been in a past romantic or sexual relationship with a male person" - my first slam dunk of this comment:

There were 7929 respondents. The analysis sample for this article consisted of 6935 women from the 50 United States who identified themselves as lesbians on the basis of their response to the first item of the survey, "How do you describe your sexuality," with the following response options: (1) homosexual, gay, or lesbian; (2) bisexual; (3) heterosexual or straight; and (4) not sure... Of the respondents, 77.3% reported ever having had a male sexual partner, 70.5% had engaged in vaginal intercourse at least once, and 17.2% had engaged in anal intercourse at least once (Table 2). Among women who had engaged in vaginal intercourse, the mean age at first intercourse was 18 years, and the mean age at last intercourse was 25 years. Our data showed that 5.7% of respondents reported having had 1 or more male sexual contacts within the preceding year. Respondents in this study also reported a history of ever having participated in the following sexual activities with men: kissing (94.5%), mutual masturbation (64.0%), fellatio (62.0%), and cunnilingus (62.3%).

In 1999, not just a significant proportion but in fact the overwhelming majority of American women who identify themselves as "lesbian" have had sexual experiences with at least one male partner. If we scale that up to the Gallup poll estimates from 2023, of the roughly 3 million lesbians in the US, 2.31 million have had at least one male sexual partner. "Gold star" lesbians are a minority.

(I would expect that a more recent study along the same lines would find that the proportion of self-identified female lesbians who've had at least one male sexual partner has shrunk in the intervening 25 years - not because of any cultural shift in the lesbian community, but as part of the secular trend towards sexlessness which affects hetero-, homo- and bi-sexual people alike.)

Interestingly, this study was published in an effort to raise awareness among healthcare providers that just because a woman describes herself as a lesbian, doesn't mean that the healthcare provider can safely assume that she hasn't contracted an STD from penetrative sex. This seems closely related to our current discussion.

  • "many female people who describe themselves as lesbians are currently in a romantic or sexual relationship with a male person (who may or may not also describe himself as female)" - see the previous point, 5.7% of women who identified themselves as lesbian have had at least one male sexual contact in the past year, which is close enough to "current" for my purposes. Based on the Gallup poll estimates, this means that of the roughly 3 million lesbians in the US, 171,000 have had a male sexual partner in the last year.

Again, not an isolated demand for rigour. Almost three-quarters of women who describe themselves as lesbians have had at least one male sexual/romantic partner. This has obvious implications when surveying lesbians about whether they've been abused by a current or former romantic partner - you cannot simply assume that all of their current or former romantic partners are female. Indeed, when conducting a survey of this type you should assume that at least one of the person's former partners was male.

Well for starters I'd like to point out that I'm not "dismissing" this survey (certainly not "preemptively" dismissing it: I read a significant chunk of it). I'm pointing out limitations, both in how this specific survey is designed and the general concept of a survey as a tool for investigating epidemiological questions of this type. I'll do some digging and try to find estimates for what proportion of lesbians have had at least one male romantic partner etc. To reiterate, at least one finding in the study (relative rates of reported nonconsensual sexual penetration among lesbians, bisexual women and straight women) is essentially impossible to reconcile with my alternative hypothesis and far more consistent with your reading - does that sound like something I would say if I was "dismissing" this study and its relevance to the debate?

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