Queer@M additional definitions | Asexual | Allies

The alphabet soup

The Queer community is sometimes called the “alphabet soup” because there are so many acronyms and abbreviations used. Here are some of the basic ones you’ll come across.

• GLBTI / LGBTI – Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Intersex
• LGBTQA / GLBTQA - Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans Queer/Questioning Asexual/Allies
• SGD – Sex and Gender Diverse
• DGS – Diverse Sex and Gender
• SSAGQ – Same Sex Attracted Gender Questioning
• SSATIQ – Same Sex Attracted, Transgender, Intersex and Queer
• MAAB - Male assigned at birth; people who have been brought up as male
• FAAB – Female assigned at birth; people who have been brought up as female

Identity | Pronouns | Gender 101 | Gender

You’re walking down the street…

Normal: Melbourne, 31 May 2012 by boigrrlwonder

What’s the first thing you notice when you see someone on the street? Some would say their clothing. Others their gender.

Actually, the first thing you see is a human shape.

Everything else that we see builds to a point where we can make an educated guess about who the person is, all based on verbal and non-verbal cues – the way someone speaks and the movements they make with hands, face and body, their clothing choices, hair length and other things.

As human beings in society, we are taught that the presence of a particular collection of visual cues – what we see with our eyes – corresponds with a male or female gender identity.

Assume nothing

Except this isn’t always the case.

A person with tattoos isn’t automatically a biker and/or a criminal.

A person in a business suit may be a high-powered business-person, but could equally be just about anything else.

Our concepts of masculine and feminine are similarly flawed and based on our personal and collective assumptions – stereotypes – about what particular appearances mean.

So what do I do?

So what to do you do when you see someone who looks female or male? Don’t make assumptions.

A person’s gender expression is their business not yours.

What is Gender |  ”It’s pronounced metrosexual” website explanation of gender

If someone questions their gender they want to be another sex, right?

Gender Thing: Northcote, February 2007 by gotheek

Not quite.

People who come to you may feel they want to explore what it would be like to be less the gender they were assigned at birth.

Some just want to look outwardly like another sex.

Others may want to appear more neutral, neither male nor female, more androgynous.

They may want to take hormones to make physical changes to their bodies, and gain some of the physical characteristics of their preferred gender.

They may want to have surgeries to alter some parts of their bodies.

They may want to have surgery on their sexual organs to remove or reshape them

Any variation is possible in gender-questioning or genderqueer people.

Gender-questioning

If someone comes to you and says they’re questioning their gender, then they’re asking questions about what it is to be male or female. They’re asking questions about the relationship between their physical body and how they feel inside about their gender.

Genderqueer

When a friend or family member says they’re genderqueer – neither male nor female, or both, or something else entirely, then they’ve come to a conclusion that the categories of “male” and “female” as understood by mainstream society don’t fit who they are.

Transgender

Someone who calls themselves transgender is saying that they could be gender-questioning, genderqueer, transsexual or another non-normative gender expression.

Transsexual people identify with the opposite sex and their gender identity is fixed: they ARE the other sex rather than wondering about gender (gender-questioning) or floating between (genderqueer).

Cisgender

Finally, cisgender people are those whose internal gender identity (their own sense of gender), outward gender identity (how others perceive their gender) and physical body (chromosomes, hormones and sex organs) match up.

Comic on Gender pronouns | List of Gender Neutral pronouns | Blog on “they” as a singular pronoun | Grammar Girl – “Yo” as a pronoun

In English, he is a pronoun that identifies a male. She is a pronoun that identifies a female.

So what do you do if you don’t identify as either? What do you do if you can’t tell just by looking what gender a person is?

I want to be called…

Some people invent their own pronouns or rely on ones created by others for this purpose such as xe, ze or hir. Other people may choose to use the singular pronoun they. Many different pronouns have been suggested, as the list on the Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog indicates.

Everyone assumes

Based on outward appearance, most people assign other people a gender based on whatever they see in front of them.

Very few people actually ask what a person’s gender is or how they want to be addressed.

It’s often not deliberate, it’s just the way we’ve been brought up in this society of ours. There are males and females and that’s it.

So what do I do if I can’t tell?

Well, the simplest way to find out is to be bold and ask! For example: “What pronoun do you prefer?” or “How do you like to be referred to, in terms of pronouns?”

Or you could rely on knowing the person’s name and use that instead of him or her.

Finally, some people use they to identify people who don’t identify their gender.

The XKCD cartoon to the right is a great reasoning for why you can use “They” as a gender-free pronoun.

Sex differences | Gender | Third gender | Intersex | Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

3 dimensions of gender

Gender in our world is really split into the physical aspects of our bodies and the way we express ourselves through the way we dress and the ways we behave.

One way to imagine gender is with three dimensions:

• Physical – the way the body looks and its underlying biology
• Mental – the way we feel we are
• Expression – the outward appearance, the way we express ourselves through behaviour, clothing, haircut, etc.

Physical

Gender is supposed to be clear and well-defined by our external and internal genitalia – male or female.

There are physical aspects that are identified as male or female, including:

• body shape
• external and internal genitalia
• secondary gender characteristics (eg. male facial hair, female breasts, etc.)

Our genitalia, hormones and chromosomes are used to identify our physical gender, but even these aren’t 100% accurate. Here is where the sliding scale above can help.

Our genitalia can be large, small or different depending on all sorts of factors, both known and unknown. People born with ambiguous genitalia are termed intersex and their lives can be very difficult.

Hormones can be affected by different biological syndromes which means that despite their presence or absence, our bodies don’t react as expected. Androgen insensitivity syndrome is where, for example, testosterone doesn’t make the fetus change to male as expected.

Mental

How a person feels about their gender identity is rarely taken into consideration. The majority of people in the world identify as male or female and are perfectly happy with that.

These people are referred to as cisgender.

But this isn’t an absolute rule. It’s an assumption, an expectation. And it’s not true for everyone.

We all sit on a sliding scale of mental gender, from the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity shown in movies and popular culture, to the ways we behave around others.

Expression

Not everyone conforms to the stereotypes we often see in popular culture about how men and women look, dress and behave. Men can cry. Women can be strong.

Many of the rules about appropriate behaviour and appearance for people perceived as male and female date back to the eighteenth century and reflect the influence of dominant religions (Muslim, Jewish and Christian). The result was that social gender roles for men and women became very sharply defined, with “male” and “female” roles viewed as being complete opposites.

Historically, however, there have always been variations in gender expression, and in some societies people who didn’t fit in with dominant gender roles were accorded particular status. For example, two-spirit people often became the shamans of native American tribes.

These days, not conforming to social gender stereotypes is more permissible; females especially have more license to be tomboys and dress in ways that are not considered stereotypically feminine. People who are perceived as boys on the other hand often still face stricter social conventions about  appropriate dress and behaviour, although this varies considerably by social context and group.