Unsure of who I am sexually

Hi, and welcome to EC.

First, I don't think you have a fetish for trans women.

To understand arousal and attraction, you have to recognize that there are multiple components to it. The majority of it is hardwired and unconscious, but there's also another layer, which is the inherent bias that pretty much everyone has, at least to some extent, that we get from organized religion, right wing conservatives, much of media, and the like, that being gay is a bad thing. Even if our friends and family are supportive, we still at some level hear this message. And that impacts, initially, our perception. Nobody wants to volunteer to be in a class of people that experience discrimination and rejection.

OK, now put that aside for a second.

The next piece of this is how arousal works with masturbation, especially with pornography. This is more true for men than for women; men's patterns of arousal tend to be driven by visual stimuli, while women's patterns tend to be more emotionally or touch-centered. So if you have been regularly watching pornography for 5 or 6 years, especially at an early age while your brain is still very much forming (which it will continue to do until you're about 25), you've basically conditioned your brain to respond to very strong stimuli: pornography is in a way like a pure form of a drug: specifically engineered to have a very specific effect (to create arousal and encourage orgasm and ejaculation.) The problem is, just as with any powerful drug with abuse potential, over time your body habituates to it: it gets used to the strong stimulation, and so the stimuli has less effect... which means you need more extreme or edgy pornography to create the same sense of excitement.

Now the last piece of this: because of the habituation and desensitization that porn causes, it is not at all a reliable indicator of sexual attraction, and this is especially true of people in their early-to-mid teens, when hormones are at very high levels and fluctuating wildly. Because your brain is still forming neural pathways, you can effectively desensitize the pathways associated with arousal. It doesn't change what you are attracted to at your core, but it can change what arouses you in the short term, if that makes sense.

So... let's put all of these pieces together. The fact that you had no attraction at all to vaginas is likely a very reliable indicator that... you don't like vaginas. This, more than anything else, would point to the idea that you are likely closer to gay than straight.

Now... very often, when people first are confronted with the idea that they might be gay, even if consciously they're like "Oh, I'd be cool with that, not a problem", there's still an unconscious part going "oh fuck. Shit. I don't want all the baggage that comes with being gay." And mind you... the unconscious part is unconscious, meaning, it's outside of your conscious capacity to understand or have awareness of it, but the effect is felt nonetheless. The way this manifests, and what we very commonly see at EC, is people who initially say "Well, I like penises, but I don't like guys, I just like penises." And typically what's going on there is the very core, primal sexual drives, which are the deepest and most hardwired, are driving the attraction to penises, but the still-unconscious-but-less-unconscious part of self is going "Yuk. Guys. That's a no-go."

At this point, we enter into the stages that everyone goes through when they process a loss (in this case, the loss of your identity as straight.) The stages are denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance, and it can be anywhere from minutes to months or longer to go through them. It is also not necessarily sequential; one can move back and forth, though eventually, when you reach depression and acceptance, that is generally the end of the process. So what is likely here (though I'm not saying it's certain) is that your attraction to penises is real, and your attraction to guys is probably also real, but somewhere between conscious and unconscious, there's a part of you that is rejecting that, and so you're like "Well, I can't actually be gay, because I don't like guys." This is the denial phase, and as that starts to change, it becomes "well, OK, I like dicks, but not the guys attached to them, so I could still be straight", which is the bargaining phase.

One thing I can suggest off the bat (which you probably won't like) is to give up porn entirely for a month. Instead, think about fantasies you create in your own mind. Imagine guys (or girls) you could find attractive and use that as your fantasy material. Masturbating will suck (no pun intended) for about the first 10 days because you're habituated to, essentially, a very pure drug. But if you go off of this drug (the porn), after about 10 days or so, your neurochemistry will start to reset itself and you'll find that the fantasies not only work, but can drive you just about as intensely as the porn did. Except that... now you are in control, and you won't habituate to the fantasies in your head.

A byproduct of this is that as you are working off of fantasies in your head, you can experiment, thinking about guys in one session and girls the next. And maybe different kinds of guys (masculine, more feminine, etc) and different types of girls. For the purposes of figuring yourself out, I might try focusing initially on gender binaries rather than trans folks in your fantasies, and then expand out from there. A very large percentage of the time, once you do that for a week or two, you'll figure out pretty quickly that one or the other (guys or girls) create much stronger arousal for you. And that's a pretty reliable indicator of where your orientation lies. (I suspect that your real-life experience probably already gives us a good idea, but this should make it easier.)

So I hope that's helpful. If you're so inclined, give it a try, feel free to ask questions, seek clarification, or discuss anything else related, and let us know what happens.

 

No, it isn't.

Actual addiction to porn, as it would be described in the DSM, is rare. What General648 is experiencing is habituation to a strong stimuli, which is different.

This may well be true, but porn (for the reasons I stated above) is a completely unreliable indicator of sexual attraction/arousal. So the kind of porn you watch is not reliably predictive in real life of who you're attracted to. Now... this isn't to say that gay men don't watch gay porn and straight men don't watch straight porn. What it is saying is for those who are unsure, and especially for those who watch a lot of porn, it is a completely unreliable indicator.

Oversimplification. But it is a good idea to give up porn.

Also a gross oversimplification that completely ignores the complexity of denial and the stages of loss (which it seems clear that General648 is going through)

 

If you're trying that hard, what it sounds to me is something more along the obsessive thoughts/compulsive behavior spectrum. So if you're trying so hard and getting no response, it's probably safe to say you have no attraction to men.

 

You're the only one that can know for sure. If I were to hazard a guess, based on what you've described, I'd say it is likely you have genuine attraction to men, and little attraction to women (at least to AFAB women) which puts you closer to the gay spectrum. The significant attraction to trans women, which you were concerned about fetish-like attraction, could be part of the conscious/disconscious disconnect of not wanting to acknowledge and embrace same-sex attraction. Then, too, it can also be simply an attraction to people regardless of what parts they happen to have. But in this case we'd expect you'd have attraction to trans men as well, and you don't seem to have that.

As someone once said, labels are for clothes. I wouldn't stress about the label, just work on finding out where you fit and who you love.

 

What would happen if you simply didn't use porn at all? When you feel like masturbating, instead of picking up your phone or tablet or laptop or whatever, just think about a fantasy... someone you like or are attracted to or find hot, and simply start masturbating to that. It isn't going to provide the same level of stimulus initially, and it will take some practice, but if you simply do that for a couple weeks, your brain will reset and it will become pretty normal.

 

It might take 2 weeks of trying, but it will eventually reset. The issue is that you have conditioned yourself to need porn. But your brain is remarkably adaptive, and given the opportunity, it will reset itself. But not if you keep giving it the stimulus it is used to.