What’s with the Alphabet Soup?

(attracted to any and every gender), and asexual (not experiencing feelings of sexual attraction—called ace for short).

Orientation can shift based on how it’s defined. Some people are erotically bisexual (they’ll sleep with multiple genders) but romantically gay or straight (they’ll only fall in love with one gender). And that adds aro (aromantic) to the orientation list.

The changing definitions of and understanding around gender and orientation are personal to me. I’ve spent my life with changing definitions of my orientation. Prior to using queer, I have at various times used lesbian, bisexual, and heteroflexible. (At other times I just kind of refused to answer the question because it felt too complicated.) Indeed, definitions of words I’ve used have changed as well. Bisexual used to mean “attracted to two genders,” as if there were only two. Some people use pansexual to mean “attracted to humans regardless of gender,” or, as someone once described it to me, “I’m attracted to spirits, not bodies.” When I first heard that, I thought, “Oh, that’s not me.” I’m definitely attracted to bodies and to gender. It’s not accurate to say I don’t care what’s in your pants. I do care. I just like more than one of the possible answers (and there are gender identities I’m not particularly attracted to).

My beloved Professor Spouse identifies as genderqueer, but that’s a word she chose before nonbinary was in common usage. She now uses both, as well as butch. The language, then, is not just theoretical in my family.

What’s with the Alphabet Soup?

LGBTQIA+ means:

Lesbian means women who identify as oriented toward other women. This began to be separated from gay in the 1970s, when gay women noticed they were often explicitly or tacitly excluded from gay spaces.

Gay typically means gay men—men who are oriented toward other men. It can also be a synonym for homosexual and mean both gay men and lesbians.

Bisexual, as defined above, means oriented toward more than one gender. Transgender is sometimes used to include nonbinary and sometimes not. A trans person is someone who identifies as other than the gender they were assigned at birth. Other acronyms you’ll see are AFAB or AMAB, meaning assigned female at birth or assigned male at birth. Trans people prefer AFAB and AMAB to the prior terms, which were MTF and FTM, meaning male-to-female and female-to-male. Many trans people assert that they were never the gender they were assigned at birth. Thus, a trans woman might say MTF is inaccurate because she was never M. Some trans people are not comfortable with the terms AMAB/AFAB either, for the simple reason that no one really needs to know what sex they were assigned at birth. We use the terms in my group for parents of transgender adults, but there, as parents, we often talk about birth, babyhood, and growing up, as well as our adult children in their authentic gender today, so in that specialized circumstance the distinction is helpful. I don’t want to say something awkward and inappropriate like “when my daughter was a little boy,” so I would instead say “when my AMAB daughter was little”—that conveys my meaning without misgendering her.

Nonbinary people can accurately say they are not the gender they were assigned at birth. For that reason, some nonbinary people also use the word trans to describe themselves. Others do not. Some people use trans only to refer to those who transition, who undergo a process of changing gender, which may or may not include medication or surgery and generally also includes things like changing one’s name and whatever identity markers are accessible for change.

And some trans people might continue to identify as nonbinary. I know one trans woman who has shifted from he/him to they/them to she/her, and has a female gender expression while

continuing to identify as nonbinary. Her AFAB partner identifies as trans and nonbinary as well, and has begun taking genderaffirming hormones while continuing to use they/them pronouns. This isn’t at all uncommon.

Nonbinary, like bisexual, is a bit of an umbrella term. Genderqueer, gender-fluid, agender, and gender flexible are all variations of nonbinary, or may be considered so by people who identify in that way. Many nonbinary people don’t perceive themselves as existing on a spectrum “between” male and female, which still seems to define them by reference to “male” or “female.” It’s fair to say that gender is a spectrum, and that most people perceive male and female as the extreme ends of that spectrum, but we shouldn’t be forcing everyone to fit into that particular spectrum against their will. There are, after all, other spectrums. Again, terminology is changing, but it’s helpful to know that not every nonbinary person has the same understanding of their gender as every other nonbinary person, which is, I think, as it should be.

Queer means somewhere on the spectrum of any or all of any of the other letters. Sometimes Q stands for “questioning,” meaning not sure yet. Intersex means the biology of your sex is complicated, perhaps because of chromosomal anomalies or something morphological (meaning your body shape). The word hermaphrodite is considered a slur by many intersex people. Asexual people don’t experience or rarely experience sexual attraction and have no desire for sexual relationships, although they may experience libido. Ace people may or may not also be aromantic (having no desire for romantic relationships). Like nonbinary, asexual is an umbrella term that includes things like demisexual (experiencing sexual attraction only when an emotional bond exists) and graysexual (experiencing sexual attraction very rarely). Terminology here is emerging and evolving.