If you are looking for resources to help educate your parent(s) or guardian(s) about transgender youth, The Transgender Teen and The Transgender Child, by Stephanie Brill and Lisa Kenney, and The Conscious Parent’s Guide to Gender Identity, by Darlene Tando, are books that provide helpful information for parent(s) and guardian(s) about the importance of affirming the gender identities of trans and GNC youth. Transgender Family Law by Jennifer L. Levi and Elizabeth E. Monnin-Browdwer is a valuable handbook that provides resources for parents and educators to understand the rights of transgender families.
If you are looking for mental health and community support for transgender young people, The Trevor Project is an organization that provides 24/7 suicide prevention and crisis intervention for LGBTQ+ youth in need. The Trevor Project also provides an online affirming community space for LGBTQ+ youth to connect with each other.
Bisexual+: Describes a person who has the potential to be attracted to people of more than one gender.
Cisgender: Describes people whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth.Gay: Describes a person who is attracted to people of the same gender. While the term is often used to refer to men who are attracted to men, it is also used to refer to women who are attracted to women.Gender Confirming Surgery: Surgical procedures that help to align a transgender person’s body with their gender identity. Gender confirmation surgery is sometimes called “gender affirming surgery” or “sex reassignment surgery.”Gender Dysphoria: Discomfort or distress caused by a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and that person’s sex assigned at birth.Gender Expression: A person’s presentation or communication of their gender to others, through hairstyles, clothing, physical mannerisms, alterations of their body, or name and pronouns.
Gender Identity: A person’s core and hard-wired sense of their own identity as a boy/man, woman/girl, something in between, or outside the male/female binary. Everyone has a gender identity, which may or may not align with that person’s sex assigned at birth.
Gender Nonconforming (GNC): Describes a person who does not conform to traditional gender stereotypes.
Gender Transition: A process by which transgender people align their anatomy (medical transition), identity documents (legal transition), and/or gender expression (social transition) with their gender identity.
Intersex: A general term used for variations in sex characteristics in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that appears atypical. Some intersex traits are discovered at birth, while others may not be discovered until puberty or later in life. Just like other people, an intersex person may identify as male, female, or non-binary, and may be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight. Being intersex does not mean that a person does not identify as male or female.
Lesbian: Describes a woman who is attracted to women.LGBTQ: An acronym that refers to individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Some people add other letters to this acronym to specifically include other subgroups within the LGBTQ community, but this is the most commonly used form.Non-binary: Describes a person whose gender identity is neither man/boy nor woman/girl. People who identify as non-binary frequently also identify as transgender. The terms “genderqueer,” “bigender,” or “agender” also describe gender identities that fall outside the gender binary.Queer: An umbrella term that describes a person who does not identify as straight or cisgender. The term has negative connotations for some people, given its historical use as a slur. Many people have reclaimed the term, often to expand upon limited sexual and gender-based categories.
Transgender/Trans: Describes a person whose gender identity is different from their assigned sex. A transgender man is a person who was assigned female at birth, but identifies as a man. A transgender woman is a person who was assigned male at birth, but identifies as a woman.
Transmasculine: An umbrella term describing individuals who were assigned female at birth but align more closely with the male side of the gender spectrum. A transmasculine individual may identify with many aspects of masculinity but not describe themselves as "a man".
Transfeminine: An umbrella term describing individuals who were assigned male at birth but align more closely with the female side of the gender spectrum. A transfeminine individual may identify with many aspects of femininity but not describe themselves as "a woman".
Transition-related Care: Also known as “gender affirming health care.” Medical treatment that affirms someone’s gender identity, as experienced and defined by the person. Treatment may include, but is not limited to, social transition, puberty blockers, hormones, and gender confirming surgeries.
Two-Spirit: Two-Spirit is an umbrella term used by many Indigenous communities to describe gender variant people. Two-spirit people often held revered roles in Indigenous communities prior to colonization. The term bridges Indigenous and Western understandings of gender and sexuality, and is derived from the Anishnaabemowin term “niizh manidoowag,” which directly translates to “two spirits." Many Indigenous languages have specific terms recognizing a spectrum of gender and sexual identities and roles, such as wíŋkte (Lakota), nàdleehé (Diné) or ininiikaazo (Ojibwe).
Sex Assigned at Birth: The designation of an infant’s sex at birth, usually by a medical professional, based on the child’s external genitalia. A person’s sex assigned at birth may or may not be congruent with the person’s gender identity.Sexual Orientation: An attraction to others that ranges from attraction to only men or only women, to varying degrees of attraction to both men and women, to attraction to neither men nor women.
