What is the deciding factor from one being gay or having a sex change?

To the very best of my understanding, they are two different scenarios, really. Being gay is about who you’re attracted to, who you want to date and have sex with and be romantically involved with.
Gender identity isn’t about that. You can fall anywhere on the spectrum as far as sexuality goes… but you don’t feel like you biological sex matches your gender. I have to imagine it would be like you waking up one day and suddenly having a vagina. (Granted, in that situation it might be temporarily “neat” or “fun”) Ultimately you would still feel like a man, despite your genitalia being female. It has very little to do with sexuality, and is far more about who you are. They are just two different things.

This is how I think of it:

Transgender people don’t feel gay. They feel their body is the wrong gender. So, if a woman’s mind is in a male body, being attracted to men is, in fact, being attracted to the opposite gender. (She is female, in her mind, and attracted to men… so, she is not gay.) Having a sex change just allows her body to match her mind. Now she will be a female mind, with a female body, attracted to men.

@augustlan I always thought that it made more sense for it to be psychological disorder, rather than an anatomical one.

@Nullo But then, I imagine you feel the same way about homosexuality, right?

I’m neither gay nor transgender, but I think @ANef_is_Enuf and @augustlan are on the right track. The first step toward getting gender reassignment surgery isn’t discovering whether you’re straight, gay or whatever. People who opt for surgery feel as though their bodies aren’t of the proper gender, regardless of what gender they’re attracted to.

They are two completely unrelated issues.

This is a totally stupid question. The two states are not the same at all. The deciding factor is your genetics.

If you are gay, you are attracted to people of the same sex, but you feel that you are that sex.

If you are transgender, you feel like you are the opposite sex trapped in the wrong body.

It’s not how the person feels about those they’re attracted to, it’s about how they feel about themselves.

It’s not a decision in the slightest. If Brian is homosexual, he stays Brian. If Brian is transgender, then he feels like Brianna trapped inside Brian. He has about as much deciding power as we all do in choosing our gender at conception.

@augustlan In its own way, yes. As noted above, they are different issues; one has more physiological ramifications, the other not so much. I think it’s silly to cut yourself up in order to fix a psychological issue.

There is precisely zero correlation between the two.

@Nullo You do realize that your view is horribly outdated, yes?

@marinelife This is a totally stupid question. The two states are not the same at all. The deciding factor is your genetics. It would be a totally stupid answer if one took it as a relationship question and not one of science or biology. Females are attracted to males by hormones, genetic, biology, however you want to call it and visa versa. I have had cats many times in my life and never had an unneutered Tom try to hump another Tom. Being attracted to the same sex is a byproduct of a cause. If biology makes females predisposed to being attracted to males when they hit puberty, it would allude to any woman wanting to be with women have more male biology, etc, visa versa with males. It would seem logical then, that they would want to switch to be in the sex opposite the one they were in because the biology, physiology, etc, tells them. Wanting to know why that manifest in some wanting to stay the same sex while having a natural attraction for that sex as oppose to someone having a natural attraction for their sex but wanting to be the other sex is nowhere near stupid; that is information seeking. –I guess maybe I am better off just assuming, who care how accurate it could be—.

@sliceswiththings It’s not a decision in the slightest. Tell me you read the question in context? I certainly did not say it was a choice as they chose it. The context of the question is what cause or effect decided one over the other, but if it was as simple as a chromosome, pheromones, etc.

@augustlan That’s okay, the world will come back around eventually, once we get all of the social engineering out of psychology. Meanwhile, we’ll keep trying to bend reality around the spoon rather than looking for proper fixes.
I’m actually rather proud of it, really. It’s a POV that I arrived at on my own after extended wikipedia sessions and interviews with one so afflicted; I am surprised to learn that it had ever been popular in professional circles.