Sexual orientation and gender identity are distinct things
Dr Helen Webberley on LBC: trans healthcare, with Tom Swarbrick, LBC
Sexual orientation and gender identity are basically the same thing, or at least closely linked. If someone is trans, it must say something about who they are attracted to, and the two questions are really just different versions of the same question.
They are completely separate things, and conflating them causes real harm to real people. Sexual orientation is about attraction: who you want to be with. Gender identity is about who you are. A trans woman might be attracted to men, to women, to neither, to both, to people of any gender, and none of that changes the fact of who she is. I find myself making this distinction often, because the confusion is so common and so consequential. When people muddle the two, they end up thinking that being trans is somehow about sexuality, which it is not. It is about identity, about the person you are on the inside, independent of anyone else.
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