🏳️🌈SOGIESC-related terminologies
Terminology Related to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sex Characteristics (SOGIESC)
Bisexual: The sexual orientation of a person who is sexually and romantically attracted to women and men.
Cis/Cisgender: Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their sex assigned at birth.
Conversion Practices: Sustained and deliberate efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. These practices are often referred to as “conversion therapy,” though they do not have therapeutic value and have been rejected as harmful by leading healthcare associations, and often take place outside of healthcare settings.
Gay: A synonym for homosexual in many parts of the world; in this toolkit, used specifically to refer to the sexual orientation of a man whose primary sexual and romantic attraction is toward other men.
Gender: The social and cultural codes (linked to but not congruent with ideas about biological sex) used to distinguish between society’s conceptions of “femininity” and “masculinity.”
Gender Identity: A person’s internal, deeply felt sense of being female or male, both, or something other than female or male.
Gender Diverse People: An umbrella term used to include people with non-binary, fluid gender, or non-conforming gender identities.
Heterosexual: The sexual orientation of a person whose primary sexual and romantic attraction is toward people of another sex.
Intersex: An umbrella term that refers to a range of traits and conditions that cause people to be born with chromosomes, gonads, and/or genitals that vary from what is considered typical for female or male bodies.
LGBT: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender; an inclusive term for groups and identities sometimes also grouped as “sexual and gender minorities.”
LGBTI/LGBTQ/LGBTIQ/LGBTQI: Umbrella terms used to refer inclusively to those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender along with those who are queer and/or intersex.
Queer: An inclusive umbrella term covering multiple identities, sometimes used interchangeably with “LGBTQ.” Also used to describe divergence from heterosexual and cisgender norms without specifying new identity categories.
Sexual Orientation: The way in which a person’s sexual and romantic desires are directed. The term describes whether a person is attracted primarily to people of the same or another sex, or to both or others.
SOGIESC: Abbreviation for Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression and Sex Characteristics
Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Change Efforts: Attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, which may include conversion practices.
Transgender: The gender identity of people whose sex assigned at birth does not conform to their identified or lived gender. A transgender person usually adopts, or would prefer to adopt, a gender expression in consonance with their gender identity but may or may not desire to permanently alter their physical characteristics to conform to their gender identity.
Transgender Men: Persons designated female at birth but who identify and may present themselves as men. Transgender men are generally referred to with male pronouns.
Transgender Women: Persons designated male at birth but who identify and may present themselves as women. Transgender women are generally referred to with female pronouns.
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