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LGBTQ+ Glossary Guide

You’ve probably heard of the terms ‘LGBTQ+’ used before, but understanding what it means can be confusing. Here’s a handy guide to help aid your understanding. 

What LGBTQ+ means:

Types of Attraction:

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) have explored a range of different types of ways that people are attracted to each other, beyond the most commonly known type which is sexually. The main types they have identified are:

These attractions form orientations that make up part of your identity and can be used to explain how you experience attraction to others. The identities do not need to all align with each other, though many people experience it that way, but it is perfectly normal and okay if you don’t.

Sexual Orientation:

Sexual orientation is a way to explain your sexual attraction to others and it comes with a variety of different identities that explain that. Here are some of the common ones:

Some less common sexual orientations include:

Romantic Orientation:

Romantic orientations are like sexual orientations in that they explain how you experience romantic attraction to people. They use the same set of prefixes as sexual orientation, like hetero- and homo-, but use the suffix of romantic instead, such as:

Sensual and Aesthetic Orientations:

Like the other orientations, they use the prefixes mentioned above, but they use the -sensual suffix for sensual attractions and -aesthetic suffix for aesthetic attractions.

Sex:

A person’s sex is a biological description of the person’s biology. Sex is made up of:

Medically, there are currently two officially-recognised sexes in the UK: male and female, however, there are currently debates over the inclusion to recognise a third sex known as intersex. 

Gender:

Gender is the attitudes, feelings, and behaviours that a different cultures associate with a person’s biological sex.

Gender Identity:

Gender identity is one’s own self-definition of gender and how that person experiences it. There are many different gender identities, but some of the most recognised are:

Gender Expression:

Gender Expression is the way a person chooses to present their gender identity through interests, clothes, body language and many other forms of expression. This is usually taken from societal concepts, such as “girls wear pink” and “guys wear blue”, but, as always, this changes over time, as it once was considered to be the other way around.

Trans* Terminology:

Trans* is an umbrella term for used for many of the identities below:

Genderbread person –  A Useful Infographic:

Source: It’s Pronounced Metrosexual 

 

For more definitions, please look at Stonewall’s Glossary of Terms

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