Words

Follows some words and various definitions or usages I have heard or inferred from books for them.

Transgender

1. Umbrella term meaning 'cross gender' and referring definitely to anyone whose gender identity does not match up with their assigned sex, whether their gender identity is male, female, or something else. May also include intersex people and/or cross-dressers, or may not.
2. People who were a. assigned female at birth and identify as male or b. assigned male at birth and identify as female. No one else.

Trans*

1. Umbrella term referring definitely to anyone whose gender identity does not match up with their assigned sex, whether their gender identity is male, female, or something else. May also include intersex people and/or cross-dressers, or may not.

Transgendered

1. Umbrella term referring definitely to anyone whose gender identity does not match up with their assigned sex, whether their gender identity is male, female, or something else. May also include intersex people and/or cross-dressers, or may not.  
2. A pejorative, outdated term for transgender.

Transsexual

1. People who were a. assigned female at birth and identify as male or b. assigned male at birth and identify as female. No one else.
2. People who have undergone physical transition, possibly including genital surgery, to match the sex opposite from the one they were assigned at birth.
3. A pejorative, outdated term for transgender.

Transvestite

1. Someone who, usually, identifies as male but dresses up as a woman for a multitude of purposes. Less commonly, the other way around.
2. A pejorative, outdated term for cross-dresser.

Cross-dresser

1. Someone who, usually, identifies as male but dresses up as a woman for a multitude of purposes. Less commonly, the other way around. 

Drag queen/king

1. Someone who identifies as male but dresses up as a woman (drag queen) or identifies as female but dresses up as a man (drag king), specifically for performance.
2. New definition I think I'll be using: The use of a gender expression distinctly different from one's own for purposes of performance, or the performance of a gender identity different from one's own. Somehow this has got to be differentiable from ordinary theatre, but I haven't thought of a way to word it.

Sex (ignoring certain uses, here)

1. The biological makeup of a person as either male or female as determined by organs, hormone makeup, chromosomes, and secondary sex characteristics.
2. An assignment at birth by a medical professional based on that medical professional's perception of the above.
3. The unique biological makeup of any distinct person, free of determination into categories.

Gender

1. The social construction which tells us that people are divided into men and women, usually correlated with sex.
2. The personal identity of male, female, or something else that is inherent to the individual.

Gender identity

1. The personal identity of male, female, or something else that is inherent to the individual.

Gender expression

1. An individual's use of mannerisms, clothing, hairstyle, makeup or lack thereof, and other attributes that tend to be associated with either masculinity or femininity.

Whenever I mention a definition as being pejorative and outdated, I include it at all because I have heard someone use it to self-identify.
These definitions come from memoirs of trans people, from surveys of trans people, from scientific studies on trans people, not from lay cis people. Is it any wonder no one can get the words right when we can't even agree on what they mean? Not enough time has gone by for the language to catch up. I'm not saying we should just let people get away with not bothering, but maybe give people a little slack for not using the exact wording we like.

A few less debated terms, for those just here for info:

MTF/FTM

1. Male to female/female to male. Respectively, people who were assigned male at birth and identify as female, and people who were assigned female at birth and identify as male. An imperfect term, as it implies there is some sort of change from one to the other. Many people always identified as the same gender, and the changes trans people make to their bodies vary widely in scope (from nothing to extensive, multiple surgeries). However, it's still in wide use, and important to know.

AMAB/AFAB/MAB/FAB/MaaB/FaaB

1. Various permutations of Assigned Male at Birth and Assigned Female at Birth. These encompass cis and trans people, and refer specifically to the sex assigned by a medical professional and marked on the birth certificate, without implying correlating gender identity or, in some cases, perfectly correlating biological makeup. These words are much more politically correct, as they avoid problematic ideas like gender and sex being binary, among others.

Genderqueer

1. (I think) An umbrella term to encompass people who do not identify as either male or female.
2. More commonly, a specific gender identity somewhere between the poles of male and female, as opposed to off this spectrum entirely.

Agender

1. A gender identity meaning without gender. 

Bi-gender

1. Someone who identifies as both male and female, not (I believe) at the same time, but who is in a fluid state that moves from one pole to the other.

Genderfluid

1. Someone whose gender identity is fluid and moves along the spectrum.

Cisgender

1. Not trans. Sex assigned at birth and gender identity match up just fine.

While we're at it, a few words for sexual orientations that still get confusing.

Bisexual

1. Someone attracted to men and to women.
2. Someone attracted to multiple genders.

Pansexual

1. Someone attracted to people of all genders.
2. Someone who experiences attraction as to people rather than to their gender. 

The difference is still hotly argued over, and the safest thing to do is ask people which word they use.

Asexual (Ace)

1. Someone who does not experience sexual attraction to anyone. Does not directly correlate with no sex drive or unwillingness to have sex--everyone's different.

Greysexual

1. Someone with sexual attraction between completely asexual and completely not asexual.

Demisexual

1. Someone who only experiences sexual attraction to people with whom they already have a close bond.

Asexual spectrum (A-spectrum)

1. Just what it sounds like, the spectrum of sexual attraction including asexual, greysexual, demisexual, and anything in between.

Allosexual

1. I think this one means not asexual in the same way cisgender means not trans.

And let's not forget romantic orientation! This is the ability to be romantically attracted toward people. It often, but not always, lines up with the sexual orientation. I've heard people use aromantic (not romantically attracted toward anyone) and panromantic (capable of being romantically attracted to anyone) most frequently, but I see no reason why people can't keep on combining prefixes with suffixes and use homoromantic, heteroromantic, and biromantic.

I often think of graphing the interactions of all of these--sexual orientation, romantic orientation, a-spectrum, gender identity, biological makeup, gender expression--and quickly realize I'm out of axes. Especially if I want to allow for change over time. The most axes I've ever seen is five over on www.gapminder.org, but one of them kind of has to be time. Not that I can actually use the software--though with enough time, it doesn't look hard to recreate.

Marriage legality

I was reading the New York Times today, and came across this article. It's about the fight for gay marriage and the new donor pool it has. The really interesting thing, though, was that I recognized the name of the Republican lawyer, Theodore B. Olsen. I came across him while writing my research paper. He stood out for writing about why conservatives ought to support gay marriage, something I think needs to be a central point in changing minds. You can't change many minds just by saying 'this is right' and 'your way is unconstitutional', you need to add a 'this is why you should want this' to the mix. People are selfish, and often won't do anything unless it benefits them or their values in some way. Anti-gay people know that refusing to pass ENDA and similar laws (not marriage--by legal definition, we have exactly the same right as straight people: to marry the opposite sex*) is pretty unconstitutional. They probably know they haven't got any decent arguments. But the whole idea of gay marriage and gayness at all hits their gag reflex. Plain and simple, they don't like it. So they throw everything they've got, like money and religion, against it. We need to make them like it. We need to tell them why they should want equality for all.
Here's Olsen's article.

*This confuses a lot of people. If you're one of them, I'll put it in black and white.
Susan is straight. She has the legal right to marry a man, whether or not she loves him. She couldn't marry a woman for whatever crazy reason. She doesn't have the right.
Annie is gay. She also has the legal right to marry a man, even if she doesn't love him. She couldn't marry a woman even if she does love her. She doesn't have the right.
There's no actual legal difference. Gay and straight (and bi) women alike have the right to marry a man, not a woman. Gay and straight (and bi) men alike have the right to marry a woman, not a man.
Straights don't actually get any special privileges--they're just lucky enough to have the people they're attracted to/people they're capable of loving in the same category as people they're legally allowed to marry, while gay people aren't.
This is not to say I support this. Yes, I think the federal legal definition of marriage should be changed. Point is, this is how things stand. We can't really shout 'equal rights' on this because we have them. What we're asking for is more rights--the right to marry any legal adult human being we please. It'll extend to straight people as well, who don't have that right either, although they generally don't want to marry someone of the same sex, so no one sees them as missing out.

My story

I'm a fan of this page on Facebook called Love is Love. The more I read the posts on this page, the more I am educated. And the more I think even we, the people who have the most reason to be against prejudice, still have it. We want everyone, or at least everyone within a group, to be like us.
If I'm understanding the book I'm reading rightly, this isn't our fault. In literature, it's called postmodernism. The evil of our time is prejudice, but it's very difficult to be free of it in all forms. I have only met one person who I felt was completely free of it, and she happens to be the girl I'm in love with.
Many GLBT people complain about how everyone tells them it's a choice. But others have more interesting stories to tell. One believes he did choose to be straight. Another tells how he grew up feeling straight, and over the next several years simply started losing interest in the opposite sex.
Even in our community, people are different. So I thought I'd offer my view.
One person says that the majority of people are bisexual to one degree or another. I'd agree with this in terms of myself. I'm not going to say I've never looked at a guy and wanted to kiss him. I have. It's just never been to the forget-how-to-breathe intensity I've gotten with more than one girl, none of whom have ever been interested in me. I've never wanted a guy to anywhere near the extent I've wanted a girl. That's not to say I'd be completely repulsed by kissing a boy, or further. It's not to say that it's completely impossible that some day I'd find the 'right guy'. It's just really very unlikely. Not living in a community where no one would bat an eye no matter who I dated, or make assumptions about who I wanted to date, saying, "I'm gay" is the clearest way to explain to my friends that the likelihood of finding a man who was all that to me is so low that I'm not looking for it. If it finds me, great. But there are girls who I like now, girls who I could be happy with, girls who take my breath away. So that's where I'm looking. That's where I probably always will look. 'Cause I sit next to a sleeping girl in the car, and spend what feels like hours just concentrating on keeping my hands off her. I spend time with my first love, and find myself experiencing something similar to a two-hour adrenaline rush. I look at the girl of my dreams, and I want nothing more than to take her face in my hands and kiss her. But with a guy? Even the ones I crushed on didn't turn me on like that.
I'll call my first love Audacia. Because she is audacious. She is my wild child. When I was ten years old, I fell in love with her. I asked her to marry me, without blinking an eye. She loved me so much, as a friend, that she said yes, and we went through with it. I touch her and I feel an extension of my soul in her. We are the same person, two halves of one whole. I still see her, and I still want her, and part of me still loves her and always will.
Then I fell in love with the girl I'll call Allegra. Not the medication, the happy one, from allegre, from Maggie Grace's character in The Jane Austin Book Club. I came out to her yesterday, and she told me that although she's straight, she doesn't plan to stop hanging out with me. I fell in love with her three years ago, the nineteenth of April, at my birthday party. I've been spending the better part of that time going through a cycle something like this: try to get over her, almost get there, get so close, see her again, and fall right back to square one. I was raised to think for myself, and I try to. I question everything. Yes, my sexual orientation. Also my faith. My sanity. Whether it wouldn't be better if we just let humans kill each other off so that the world could reassert itself. I can think of nothing (except the realms of the absurd, such as penguins ruling the world) that I haven't questioned. But most of all my faith. Occasionally it falls out from under me, like losing the floor beneath my feet. And when that happens, I take a deep breath, and start over, beginning with my Allegra. Her I am sure of. She may not be everything to me, but she's right up there with food. I don't need her to be my girlfriend. I just need her to exist. There's one memory I have, and maybe I was just a fanciful kid, but this is how it seemed to me. I was lying on my bed, and I felt my love for her drain out of me. And I prayed, I prayed to have it back. I liked loving her. I wanted to be in love with her. And it came back. That's what I mean when I say maybe I did choose it. I chose her. But there was Audacia before that, all of this before I applied 'gay' to myself.
You know how that happened? The same year I fell in love with Allegra, I went to a friend's wedding. I came back and told my mother about how I was planning my wedding now. She said, "Who's the groom?"
"No groom," I replied uneasily. Something in me knew this was unusual. "Just [Allegra]."
She bought me a book a few days later. GLBTQ: The Survival Guide for Queer and Questioning Teens. I thought, Gay? Is that what I am? Huh.
It was never about being gay. It was about loving girls. It was my mother, society, who put the label on. Not that I blame her. Perhaps if I lived in a different community I'd cast it off and say, I date who I date, whoever may come along. Unfortunately, I'm part of a community where the possibility of dating the same gender, or a genderless person, doesn't even occur to anyone. Since I'm not dating anyone, allowing them to assume I'm straight, as I know they do, only makes me feel more isolated, because I believe they love me for who they think I am, not who I really am. So I take it. The label is for society. It files me away into a neat little pigeonhole, just like we've been doing for years. Slaves and free, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. Men and women. Gay and straight. And there is so much more between. People of mixed race, for so many generations that they can't claim one nationality. People without a fixed gender. And such fluid sexuality. People are people. Everything else has holes in it somewhere.

Homophobia.

Who's up for International Day Against Homophobia? (Monday, May 17th)
All you have to do is wear a plain black shirt to silently protest homophobia. If you can, you can write "Gay rights are human rights" on your arm or on a piece of clothing.
*definition* Homophobia: The fear of homosexual behavior and those who practice it, often manifested as hate.
And by behavior, I mean everything, including kissing, holding hands, and the simple act of loving. (I know, loving can be anything but simple. But falling in love can be easy.)
This might not be the best definition. But I think it's the closest. Remember that post about labels? I would wager that homophobia is mostly about fear of the unspoken 'rules' getting broken.
I think that transphobia takes a slightly different definition than homophobia, but for simplification, assume that trans-phobia is included in, but not the same as, homophobia.
Transphobia: The fear of behavior and dress as though one were the opposite sex (especially in M2F trans people), often manifested as hate.
Homophobia is a horrible thing. It makes people fear themselves, their friends, and their family in the name of 'what's right'.
It is not a disease to be GLBTQ. Be proud.

Gay or Trans?

Several days ago, Monday I think, I saw the latest episode of a TV show called Glee on Hulu.com. It was hilarious. I don't know how many times I watched the beginning. It started out with one of the characters, a boy, doing the Beyoncé Single Ladies dance, wearing a unitard. A boy doing a girly dance to a girly song in a girly outfit. You can imagine why it was so funny.
However, all praise aside, it wasn't entirely accurate. The point of the dance was to emphasize the character's femininity, since the character was gay. Except a guy doesn't have to be girly to be gay. That whole stereotype is more indicative of trans people.
I wasn't offended or anything, I could appreciate the humor, but I decided to use it to make a point.
Again, a few definitions are needed here. All these are defined as adjectives, but 'gay', 'transsexual', and 'transvestite' can all be used as nouns. That is, I write the definitions as descriptions (a gay person, a transsexual person), but you can also use them as definers (a gay, a transsexual) though that's not entirely polite.

Gay--to be solely attracted to people of the same biological sex.
Transsexual--to have had sex reassignment surgery. Some people don't identify as transsexual, rather they feel that they have become the opposite gender.
Transvestite--to dress as the opposite gender.
Transgender--to feel that one is actually a separate gender from one's biological gender. It can also include transvestite, transsexual, and intersex. When I say 'trans', I mean transgender.
Femme--feminine, girly.
Butch--masculine.

Trans people can be gay, bi, or straight. People happy with the gender they were born with can be gay, bi, or straight.
The guy on Glee (season 1, episode Preggers) was stereotypically femme, which ended in just about everybody knowing the truth without his telling them. But although it's certainly true that gay men can be femme, they can just as easily be butch. All the same, I do recommend the episode, and the previous one, Acafellas. Most any of us can identify with his difficulty coming out, even if not with his dress sense.
Who would have guessed I was anything but completely straight, the way I talk about guys? I do like to dance with them, and I do find them handsome, but a girl can get into my blood the way no guy so far has. I'm not taking a definitive label yet, but that's okay. I know who I am. I'm Phoenix Tawnyflower.