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.
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 pronoun.
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.
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. 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.