Confused About Genders And Orientations? A Practical Guide To Master The Topic
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
Let's address the elephant in the room: despite a certain degree of tolerance and freedom, western societies are nonetheless highly heteronormative. Meaning that sex, love, and gender roles are centered around heterosexual relationships - a man with a woman - being the norm.
More than that, we're taught that our sex at birth defines our gender and sexuality. For example, if you're born with female sex organs, you're assigned the female gender and "should" be with a man to create a family. That's how it goes.
Everything in our society promotes this binary view, and anything else that doesn't fit this model can only be stigmatized as "abnormal" and "unnatural".
But for a few decades now, we have frequently witnessed how people express more freely their sexuality. As a matter of fact, the acronym LGBT slowly turned into LGBTQIA+, illustrating how identities other than gay, trans, and bisexual, get more recognized.
Even on Instagram, people started to indicate the gender they identify with in their bio, such as "she/her", "they/she", and more. We'll see later what that means.
Expanding our language necessarily allows more inclusion, awareness and recognition - and all have a role to play in this!
What is sexual orientation?
Definition of sexual orientation
Sexual orientation refers to the way we experience emotional, romantic and sexual attraction for a particular (or more) gender(s).
Although sexuality is evolving all along our life, we talk about orientation when there is a repetitive pattern in our preferences and behavior, thus defining our sexual identity.
Binary sexuality vs. spectrum thinking
Most of us grow up believing that only two genders, defined at birth, exist: male and female. This is the binary way of thinking. But once you challenge that idea, you realize that seeing gender and sexuality as a spectrum (e.g. a way to classify something depending on its position on a scale between two extreme points) allows more freedom, rather than putting pressure on ourselves to fit one identity for life.
Sexuality changes over time, making people's identities and orientations too complex to conform to predetermined categories. That's what we call fluid sexuality.
Talking about a spectrum allows us to perceive the different layers and shades of sexuality while opening new possibilities of expression. For example, you can desire to be in a romantic relationship with one gender without engaging sexually. On the other hand, sexual attraction is based on what turns you on and who you'd like to have sex with. They relate to very different behaviors but equally correspond to sexual orientation!
Sexuality spectrum models: some examples
Over the years, a few models of spectrum emerged. The Kinsey scale was one of the first attempts to finally recognize the wide diversity of human sexuality. Published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, the father of the sexual revolution imagined a scale ranging from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual) that offers a new view on attraction patterns, not being confined to either heterosexuality or homosexuality.
Thirty years later, the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid will go a bit further. It includes seven different aspects of sexual orientation: sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, heterosexual/homosexual lifestyle, self-identification. The perspective of time was also added, past, present and ideal, hence illustrating the notion of sexual fluidity!
All the sexual and romantic orientations you should know about
Allosexual & asexual: the first means regularly experiencing sexual attraction, while the second is the exact opposite, someone who's not feeling attracted to any gender. It's similar to sex-indifferent, sex-averse and sex-repulsed - which are on the asexual spectrum.
Demisexual & demiromantic: someone who is in between asexuality and hypersexuality, experiencing sexual and romantic attraction in some cases. Similar to graysexual and grayromantic.
Autosexual & autoromantic: the fact of being sexually and romantically attracted to yourself.
Aromantic: refers to a person that rarely experiences romantic attraction.
Bicurious: someone curious to explore bisexuality.
Bisexual: describes someone experiencing sexual, romantic, emotional attraction to people of other genders.
Closeted & in the closet: used to talk about people within the LGBTQIA+ community who don't openly share their gender and sexual orientation, often because of fear of discrimination, rejection, or violence.
Coming out: when people are displaying their sexuality and gender publicly to friends, relatives, and acquaintances.
Fluid: we talk about sexuality being fluid when someone experiences an evolution in its preferences and behavior over time.
Gay: a person that feels sexual, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to people of the same gender. For women or female-identified, the words lesbian and queer are also used.
Homosexual: considered as an outdated and offensive term among the LBGTQIA+ community. It acquired a pejorative meaning due to medical history associating homosexuality with a mental disorder.
Queer: simply put, queer is an umbrella term that describes a person that's not exclusively heterosexual/cisgender. But beyond that, it encompasses the words gay, lesbian, bisexual to talk about someone who doesn't entirely fit any of those labels.
Heterosexual: also called "straight" people, they are exclusively attracted by the opposite gender to theirs.
Monosexual: people who are attracted to one gender only, it can refer to gay or heterosexual people.
Gynesexual: includes all those identifying as women, female, or feminine (regardless of anatomy) and who have a sexual or romantic attraction to women, females, femininity.
Androsexual: same thing but applied to men, males, masculine (regardless of anatomy) who experience attraction for male figures.
LGBTQIA+: acronym for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex and asexual. The "plus" means that it includes more genders and sexual orientations that are still to define.
Questioning: being curious about exploring sexuality and gender identity.
Libidoist asexual: someone that experiences libido and sexual feelings and satisfies them by self-stimulation, without the need to engage with others.
Omnisexual & pansexual: people who can experience a sexual and romantic relationship with people from any gender or sexual orientation.
Panromantic: a person that experiences romantic attraction to a person of any gender.
Polysexual: a person that has a sexual and romantic attraction to people of various genders.
Polyamorous: a term referring to people who are open to consensual relationships with more than one person at the same time. It's also called ethical non-monogamy, the opposite of monogamy.
Spectrasexual: it describes those who are sexually or romantically attracted to people of various sexes and genders.
Pomosexual: a person that challenges and rejects all sexuality labels, refusing to identify with any gender or orientation.
Skoliosexual: a person attracted to non-cisgender folks (e.g. non-binary, genderqueer, or trans).
What is gender?
Sex & gender: what's the difference?
One of the most common mistakes we make when trying to understand gender and sexual orientations is to use sex and gender interchangeably. From the very first moment we enter this world, we're already told: you're a boy / you're a girl. In this way, we are taught that our gender depends on our biology (e.g. chromosomes and genitals).
So let's be clear: sex is indicated by a person's chromosomes, hormones, sex organs, thus attributed at birth. Instead, gender is used to describe male or female characteristics that are socially constructed. We are born with specific genitals, but we learn to be men and women in our behavior.
All the gender identities and expressions you should know about
Cisgender: a person that identifies with the sex and gender that were attributed at birth. The opposite is non-cisgender.
Binary: it describes the way our society is stuck into a system of classification that doesn't allow any choice, flexibility, and fluidity when it comes to gender identity.
Non-binary: umbrella term for someone whose gender is not exclusively male or female, such as genderqueer, androgynous, bigender, and more. It can mean different things depending on the person you speak to: some feel both male and female, some others, neither of them.
Transgender: a person that identifies with another gender than the one attributed at birth.
Trans woman: a transgender person that transitioned from male to female.
Trans man: a transgender person that transitioned from female to male.
Update: Apologies concerning my inadequate description of the word "transsexual", which I'll correct now.
Transsexual: Harry Benjamin coined the term to describe people who feel the need to change their sex, in order to belong to another gender. From that point, it was generally associated with a mental illness throughout the 60s & 70s. For example, the physician Hamburger used the word "transsexual" to diagnose his patient Christine Jorgensen, the first American who had a sex change operation. Nowadays, the term "transsexual" is controversial. Even if it's sometimes used to describe people who went through surgery, it's increasingly rejected by transgender people as restrictive and irrelevant, as you don't have to undergo surgery to be a trans person. And so, it shouldn't be used spontaneously, nor to define the whole transgender community, as many don't identify with it. The preferred word is "transgender", being more inclusive.
Genderfluid: someone who has a gender identity that constantly fluctuates.
Agender: a person who doesn't identify with any gender, also called genderless.
Bigender & polygender: people who identify as two genders, or more.
Intergender: a person that identifies somewhere in between male and female on the sexuality spectrum.
Androgyne: an expression that has both masculine and feminine characteristics. An androgyne person doesn't identify as female nor male or can identify as both.
Gender apathetic: people who don't identify with any gender, and beyond that, don't really mind how they appear to others.
Male to female (MTF): somebody who is assigned as a male at birth, but chooses to identify as a female.
Female to male (FTM): somebody who is assigned as a female at birth, but chooses to identify as a male.
Genderqueer: a non-binary gender identity that fluctuates. For some, it can be a combination of male and female, for others, neither of them.
Femme: someone whose gender or sexuality is more feminine, generally used for women and lesbians.
Butch: someone whose gender or sexuality is more masculine, generally used for women and lesbians.
The Intersex Case
An intersex person is born with a body that isn't strictly male or female, in the sense that sexual anatomy can be both. For example, an intersex person can have both ovaries and testicles, or genitals of a particular sex (male or female) along with a combination of chromosomes that don't match the sex of the genitals, etc.
There isn't one intersex condition as it can develop in many different ways, which suggests the existence of a sex spectrum: sex and reproductive organs can appear in various combinations.
While being intersex is completely independent of gender and sexual orientation, it can be quite complex for intersex people to determine their identity.
How to be respectful to non-binary folks?
How to refer to a non-binary person?
Once we avoid making assumptions about people's gender, we finally enter into a vast world of possibilities, vast and complex. What do you call someone that feels both male and female? If you're unsure of someone's gender, it's always better to simply ask how they want to be called.
Being appropriately referred to in a way that matches the way we feel about ourselves empowers us. We all need to be recognized as we are, don't we? In a society that is still very restrictive, we all have a role to play in allowing inclusivity and space for diversity.
You might have already noticed it, but more and more people are sharing the pronouns they identify with on Instagram. Making the difference between binary and non-binary pronouns is important, as our language restricts and influences our identity within society.
Binary pronouns:
she/her/hers
he/him/his
Gender-neutral pronouns:
they/them/theirs
ze/hir/hirs
ze/zir/zirs
What can we do to help sexual orientations and gender recognition?
Once you get to know other sexual orientations, you realize how complex and multi-layered human beings can be. There is no one way to love, as there is no one way to be sexual - which we find beautiful.
Anyone who isn't personally familiar with non-binary genders can be pretty confused about the countless genders and sexual orientations that actually exist. We are raised to believe that binary genders are the norm, and trying to come out of this belief can challenge the limits of our comfort zone.
Being aware and seeking to understand sexual and gender diversity is a great first step, while embodying support to non-binary and LGBTQIA+ communities.
Even as a cisgender person, sharing your pronouns helps showing you're aware of gender diversity, and that you support non-binary folks in their quest for recognition.
And then? Personally, researching the difference between all genders made me think about how much we rely on appearance (the way we look, or the way we dress) to put people in a box. And it's important to recognize it. While fashion trends are slowly shifting towards more androgynous looks, a man in a dress and a woman in a suit would still draw attention - right?
I think it's also the perfect opportunity to reflect on our own femininity and masculinity. Regardless of our sex, we all have both feminine and masculine energies. What do they mean to us? How do they come up in our personality? In what way(s) do we identify with them?
Happy exploration ♥︎
Understanding sex & gender: you want to go further?
A series of enlightening videos made by BBC Three:
Frequently asked questions about transgender people, National Center for Transgender Equality
A brief history of the third gender in India, The Culture Trip
Gender Variance Around the World Over Time, Teen Vogue
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