The Q can mean either “queer” or “questioning (one’s sexual or gender identity).” The second meaning is transparent: someone who is actively working to figure out what their internal sense of self is, or what kinds of people they’re romantically and/or sexually attracted to, falls under the Q of LGBTQ in its “ questioning” meaning. The I means “intersex,” and describes someone born with intersexuality, a condition in which someone has both male and female gonadal tissue, or has the gonads of one sex and external genitalia that is either ambiguous or is of the other sex. Often, transgender means specifically that the person’s gender identity-their internal sense of their gender-is opposite the sex they had or were identified as having at birth. The T means “transgender,” which describes someone whose gender identity is different from the sex the person had or were identified as having at birth. In this second meaning, bisexual covers the same semantic territory as the word pansexual, but there are people who identify as one but not the other, and people who identify as both. Bisexual can describe someone who is romantically and/or sexually attracted to people of their own sex as well as people of the opposite sex, or it can describe people who are romantically and/or sexually attracted to people of their same gender identity as well as people of other gender identities. The B means “bisexual,” which can have two distinct meanings. ![]() The G means “gay.” Gay can describe anyone who is romantically and/or sexually attracted to people of their same sex, or it can be used narrowly to describe a man who is romantically and/or sexually attracted to other men. The L means “lesbian,” a lesbian being a woman who is romantically and/or sexually attracted to other women. Some letters refer to sexual orientation-who someone is sexually and/or romantically attracted to-and some letters refer to gender identity-a person’s internal sense of being male, female, both, or neither.Īll of the abbreviations refer to groups of people who in some way fall outside the most common norms of gender and sexual identity. These abbreviations all refer to groups of people, which each letter representing a single or multiple group. The fact remains that these uses are against the prescribed use.īecause of the overlap in meaning, sometimes gender and sex are used together, as in “gender/sex bias” and “sex/gender discrimination.” For more on this pair, see the note at the entries. It's likely that the tendency to apply gender in such contexts as “gender bias” and “gender gap” is specifically because of the word's psychological and sociocultural meanings, the word's duality making it dually useful. Some people assert that gender should only be used to refer to either the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex, or to a person’s internal sense of self, but gender is frequently used more broadly than that, as in phrases about differences between male and female people. Gender by itself can also refer to gender identity, which is a person’s internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female. Gender is also used to refer to the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex. Gender is sometimes used in exactly the same way, as in “a party to announce the baby’s gender.” It's common in phrases like “the baby’s sex” and “able to quickly determine the sex of the chick.” We define this meaning of sex as “either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures.” When referring to either of the two major biological forms of individuals, sex tends to be the preferred term, especially in medical, technical, and academic contexts. ![]() Remember that just as we say “you are” whether we’re talking to one person or multiple people (“You, Miriam, are my friend you, Miriam and Noah, are my friends”), “they are” is correct for both a single person and multiple people. The fact that they and them function in the language as plural personal pronouns (“I asked the attendees if they wanted coffee, and many of them did”) can make using these as singular personal pronouns seem tricky. In the current century, it’s become increasingly common for people for whom neither he/him nor she/her accurately apply to go by they and them. These are, technically, only a particular kind of pronoun: third person personal pronouns. He did a good job, and I’m going to tell him so.” He and him are Noah’s pronouns. When we talk about someone’s pronouns, we are referring specifically to the little words that replace the person’s name in sentences like “Noah wrote that definition. Formerly a term you’d only hear in English classes, the word pronoun is everywhere these days.
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