Estratégias sexuais e escolha de parceiros em pessoas transgêneras

Abstract

Several researches on the intersexual differences of human sexual strategies and mate choice criteria have been made over the last decades, resulting in empirical data supporting the theories that have explained the evolution of human sexual and reproductive behavior, such as Sexual Strategies Theory (SST), Strategic Pluralism Theory (SPT) and Biological Market Theory (BMT). In general, these studies have focused on heterosexual individuals because hypotheses and predictions from explanatory theories of sexual strategies focus on their consequences in terms of reproductive success. Though many recent researches have also been performed with samples of homosexual individuals, pointing largely towards sex-typical behavioral strategies regardless of sexual orientation, the transgender phenomenon still remains relatively absent from investigations on human sexual strategies. This study aimed to assess and compare indicative and moderating variables related to sexual strategies and mate choice criteria in a sample of 120 individuals composed by 27 male-to-female (MtF) transgenders, 24 female-to-male (FtM) transgenders, 37 female cisgenders (F) and 32 male cisgenders (M). It was investigated whether either biological sex or gender self-perception was more influent on transgenders’ measures of sociosexuality (SS), mate value self-assessment (MVS), self-esteem (SE) and preferred characteristics for both short- and long-term mates. Statistical analysis of the obtained data indicated that, for sexual strategies deemed as more advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint (short-term for males and long-term for females), transgenders’ mate preference criteria were concordant with their biological sex. For the less advantageous strategies (long-term for males and short-term for females), however, the data pointed towards a likely influence of gender self-perception on mate preference criteria. Transgenders’ MVS measures were also congruent with their gender self-perception, whereas SS ones were mostly sex-typical. No statistically significant differences were found for SE measures. In sum, the study’s findings largely corroborated SST, SPT and BMT predictions, although both MtF and FtM transgenders had mixed patterns for what literature has established as being typical of each sex regarding the investigated variables.