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What exactly is LGBT? We’re talking the basics today on this episode of the Gay Business & Marketing Made Easy podcast!
This podcast is dedicated to teaching you how to do business with and marketing to the LGBT community. There is no better place to start than to talk with you about what exactly LGBT is and what it isn’t.
Listen to the episode by clicking the play button below
Acronyms broken down
LGBT – Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender- GLBT – Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender
- LGBTQ – Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning
- LGBTQIA – Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual (or Ally) (These hyperlinks go to Wikipedia definitions of each area. I do not claim that these definitions are entirely accurate, however it’s a good starting point if you are looking for additional information and resources.)
Links Mentioned in this Show
- “Pardon my ignorance but what is LGBT?” http://jenntgrace.com/whatislgbt/
- Queer: What does it mean? http://jenntgrace.com/queer/
- What’s the buzz about the ‘gay dollar’? … and why you should care.
- 3 reasons you should never say homosexual. ever.
- If I’m not lesbianed you can’t be transgendered…
- Storytelling with Tony Ferraiolo for “30 Days – 30 Voices – Stories from America’s LGBT Business Leaders” [Podcast]
The Hard Data on preference
I like to provide hard data that shows what the community actu
ally prefers. There is a company called Community Marketing Inc. they are based in San Fransisco, CA and they are the leaders in LGBT market research. They have been working in the space since 1992 and survey LGBT people annually and then develop the market data that companies can use to help shape their ad campaigns, marketing messages, communications to employees, etc.
The following information around which LGBT term to use comes from the 2011 LGBT Community Survey that Community Marketing Inc. If you want to see information for yourself I highly recommend checking out their website here.
The question that was asked was “What is your opinion of each of the following terms being used in corporate advertising?” I believe there were roughly 13,000 respondents who weighed in.
- LGBT | 76% gay men and 87% lesbians
- GLBT | 67% gay men and 69% lesbians
- LGBTQ | 43% gay men and 62% lesbians
- LGBTQIA | 14% gay men and 24% lesbians
So there are some of the numbers around which is the preferred broad term to encompass the community. The survey also showed additional terms and their breakdowns which you can view by heading to their website.
Transgender demystified
My head begins to spin when I hear people say the word transgendered. Have you ever really thought about the word transgendered? When broken down it is trans + gender. The prefix meaning of trans is to cross or to go beyond. So in its root form transgender means to cross genders. Simple enough, right? So why do people add the -ed to the end to make it transgendered?
Am I the only one who cringes at the sound of this word? I can’t imagine so. You’ll often hear me refer to myself as a professional lesbian (yes in those exact words). But I would never walk up to someone and say, “Hi, my name is Jenn and I’m lesbianed.” Just as you wouldn’t hear someone say “Hey, my name is Tony and I’m transgendered.” I think it is important for everyone to understand that by adding a -d or -ed you are creating the past tense of a word which is inaccurate in this case.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the Reaching Out MBA Conference. This conference was great on many levels. My favorite part was the fact that one of the conference organizers stood up in front of a packed opening session and stated that you can’t be transgendered, the appropriate usage of the word is transgender, so please use it correctly over the next few days.
As an ally to the transgender community I was elated to hear someone stand up and put the kibosh on a word that drives me crazy and definitely ranks as one of my pet peeves. Every opportunity I get to educate someone on correct usage of the word, I do. Often you may hear my smart ass response which is typically, “Last I checked I wasn’t lesbianed… are you?” It gets a laugh and gets my point across in a non-aggressive manner.
Would you prefer to read the transcript than listen to the episode? No problem! Read the transcript below.
AUDIO TITLE: Episode #2 – What Is and Isn’t LGBT
You are listening to the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast, Episode 2.
Welcome everyone
Welcome to the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast where you’ll learn how to do business with and market to the LGBT community in an authentic and transparent way. We’re talking about the $790 billion lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. We’ll help you grow your business, gain market share and impact your bottom line. And now your host – she’s an entrepreneur, a marketing maven and an advocate for the LGBT business community. Jenn, with two N’s, T. Grace.
Hello and welcome to Episode Number Two of the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy podcast, I am your host Jenn T. Grace, and today we are going to talk about what exactly is LGBT. This podcast is dedicated to teaching you how to do business with and market to the LBGT community so I figure there’s no better place to start in that education better than educating you on what exactly LGBT stands for, what it means, what it doesn’t mean and pretty much go on from there.
For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jenn and I have been working in the LGBT community since around 2005 or so. I work with large companies and small companies training them how to do business with, market to, the community but my main focus is teaching them how to do it in an authentic and transparent way; which we’ll get into in many different occasions on many different episodes. But today, as I said, we’re going to talk about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, LGBT, GLBT, LGBTQIA, LGBTQ – there are a variety of different ways that LGBT and gay are thrown out into the mainstream. So today I’m going to kind of try to break it down for you and really just start from a really broad level, letting this be the foundational episode for you, so when you are listening to future episodes you can refer back to this one if you hear something that you are a little bit confused about.
How the title of this Podcast came about…
So let me share a little story with you. When I was trying to figure out what exactly I would name this podcast, I really was hung up on wanting to name it LGBT Marketing Made Easy. Because I am an advocate for the entire LGBT community and I thought, you know, why not? LGBT, everyone knows the acronym LGBT. However, in a conversation with my mastermind group, it was revealed to me that, no not really. Not everybody knows what LGBT stands for. So when I was talking with them and I was going over possible show names, I had a ton of them, and my mastermind consists of four other people. Three of them are allies to the LGBT community and one is a member of the community. So when I was talking with them they were really a good diverse group of people to talk with because they have varying levels of understanding of what LGBT is; and several of them only know what LGBT stands for, or anything of what it’s about because of my being in that group with them. So when I’m talking with a person who’s actually a member of the LGBT community, and even she is saying, “You can’t use LGBT, you need to use the word gay because gay is something that everybody knows.” So I even had somebody, our very own member of our community, saying that if you really want to reach a broad audience you should title it gay. And basically that’s what I decided to do. And one of them had a really brilliant quote because I was explaining to them that the entire purpose of this podcast is to really educate people around LGBT, what the community is about, how you can market to the community in an authentic way by supporting the community by being involved in the community and all of those things, and she basically said to me, “You have to speak our language to change our language.” And I thought that that was a great quote because she makes perfect sense there. If I want the mainstream community to start adopting the term LGBT, then I first need to speak their language, or in this case her language, using the word gay. Because if she knows the word gay and I’m talking about gay business and gay marketing and I’m interchanging gay and LGBT left and right, she’s going to start really understanding that LGBT is the right word and then she’ll start using that word and hopefully that affect will carry on, not only from me to her but her to other people that she talks to, and then we have a trickle-down effect of people really starting to latch onto the term LGBT. I consider myself an advocate for the entire LGBT community and I do not intentionally try to leave anyone behind in any of the work that I am doing. So by my naming this podcast the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast, I want everybody in the LGBT community to know that my naming it gay and not LGBT has absolutely no reflection on the amount of work that I’m doing for everybody that falls under that LGBT banner.
So I wanted to share that little story with you just so you have an understanding of why I named the podcast the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast and not the LGBT Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast. There was a very specific intention behind why I did it and I hope you understand that it is for the purpose of broader education and I know that a lot of people listening to this podcast are allies to the community and you’re here listening because you really just want to know how to go about reaching out to the community in an effective way, but also in a way that you’re not going to offend anybody, or you’re not going to say the wrong thing or end up burning a bridge when you’re really trying to do a good thing here.
So essentially I’ve already thrown out a handful of terms just in my intro here and I’ve thrown out LGBT, I have thrown out ally, I’ve thrown out gay and I threw out LGBTQIA, GLBT and a couple of others right from the beginning; because I really want to throw them out there, have you think about them for a couple of minutes, figure out, “Hey I actually don’t know what that stands for,” and now for me to sit here and explain to you what they all mean.
The many faces of the LGBT acronym..
Recently I was in a conversation with somebody in Australia and she was really honest with me and just kind of stopped me in the middle of what we were talking about and said, “Pardon my ignorance but what is LGBT?” And I wrote a blog post about that so if you are interested in looking at additional information around that you can certainly take a look at that post but I basically outlined LGBT in a nutshell for her specifically and then shared it with my readers. So let me just kind of go through that very quickly. LGBT is somewhat like alphabet soup. So you have some people who prefer to use the term LGBT, like myself, which is lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. Then you have people who prefer to use GLBT which is really just swapping out the gay and the lesbian so that would be gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. Then you have LGBTQ which includes questioning for some and queer for others. So you might see it referred in different places meaning different things. So the Q sometimes means Questioning, sometimes it means Queer. LGBTQIA on the other hand, is Queer, Intersex and Asexual, or sometimes it’s Ally. So as you can see it’s really easy to get confused with all of the letters that are jumbled up in this alphabet soup. So even people within the community I think could be sometimes confused. So you kind of have to read in the context of whatever you’re reading to figure out if the Q is Queer or Questioning, or if the A is Asexual or Ally because it really does depend, depending on what you’re reading.
So in addition to having to kind of figure out what the right context is of the specific letters, you also have- there’s somewhat of a debate here and there that is whether or not it’s LGBT or GLBT. And honestly I don’t think it really matters either way you say it or either way you put it. But there is a company called Community Marketing Inc. And they are based in San Francisco, and they are a marketing research company that focuses specifically around LGBT needs and finding data and statistics and all sorts of great stuff that they can provide to major companies who are looking to market to the community. And one of the questions that they asked in one of their surveys, which I believe was from 2011, was “What is your opinion on each of the following terms used in corporate advertising?” And they listed LGBT, GLBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA and additionally they had a couple of other terms in there which to avoid even further confusion I will just kind of skip over them and I’ll focus on these top four. So for LGBT, it was shown out of 13,000 respondents that 76% of gay men and 87% of lesbians preferred the term LGBT. So that was definitely on the top of the list. The second one down was GLBT and that was for 67% of gay men and 69% of lesbians. Then LGBTQ there were 43% of gay men and 62% of lesbians. And LGBTQIA was by far lower than the others at 14% gay men and 24% lesbians. So as you can see there are a number of different terms and LGBT and GLBT are certainly kind of at the top of the list of preferred usages. My point with sharing with you these terms and the percentages of who prefers what is to give you a little bit of a broader idea of how in depth the LGBT community is and how much research is actually out there in terms of what the most appropriate way to go about marketing to the community is.
A term of endearment.. or a term of offense?
So I’ve really just highlighted the terms that are the good terms to use. And if you’re looking at LGBTQ, for example, and we’re saying that the Q could be Questioning or we’re saying the Q could be Queer, it really comes down to a generational thing, because I’ve talked to plenty of people who are a little bit older and when they hear the word queer, it’s something that they’ve never embraced. They’ve always associated queer with being something that has a negative connotation to it. If you talk with the younger generations, people between 18 and 26 or so, they actually embrace the word queer. So queer is a word that is empowering; and that’s not to say that it’s for everybody for 18 and 26, nor is queer a negative term for anybody of the older generation, it’s just kind of the general basis out there. So you’ll see a lot of younger people embracing the word queer. I myself being in my thirties, I’m kind of stuck in the middle. So I am between two generations with two very different points of view as to the meaning of queer, and I personally, I’m not a fan of it but that again is just my personal opinion; I’m sure there are plenty of people exactly my age give or take a few years who are perfectly fine using the word, embrace using the word, et cetera. But the whole point of all of this is regardless of what term you’re using, if you’re saying gay, if you’re saying LGBT, if you’re saying LGBTQIA; however you’re doing it, as long as you are authentic, you are transparent, you’re reaching out to the community because you have a desire to be an advocate for the community or be an ally to the community and not specifically because you want to get the “gay dollar” and if you could be in my studio with me you would see that I indeed just did air quotes for the “gay dollar.” That is something I will certainly touch upon in a later podcast but you just really need to be authentic. You know every business person has the right to want to make money, and the LGBT community is one of many specific niches where there is certainly money to be had. But as with any business adventure and business endeavor, you really just want to make sure that you’re doing it in the right way and you’re not saying things that you shouldn’t be saying or being derogatory and not really even meaning it. So when I say that I mean if you were to put together an advertising campaign and perhaps you’re a small law firm and you’re really just looking for LGBT couples as your- you’re trying to build a bigger practice around LGBT couples. I can guarantee you, if you put out an advertising piece talking about how you cater to the needs of the homosexual community, I cannot only guarantee that you will not get a piece of business but you will also get probably nasty emails or phone calls by somebody within the community for using the word homosexual. So that’s just one of those negative words that I would advise against using.
I was recently in a conversation, and as you can see this is a common theme; I’m constantly in conversations with people around these issues. And I was talking with somebody and she used the phrase, “Well I think you would get along with him because I think he’s a closet homosexual.” And she didn’t mean anything bad by this in any way, shape, or form, she’s somebody that’s really close to me and we were talking about this person that she’s been wanting to introduce me to but she thinks he’s – since this is a PG show I will not say the exact words that she was saying – she wasn’t really sure if we would get along or wasn’t really sure if it would behoove her to introduce the two of us. And I can totally respect that but then as she was sitting there she’s like, “You know what? I actually think maybe you would be a good person to talk to because I think he’s a closet homosexual.” And again, this is somebody that’s close to me and this is somebody that hears me talking all the time and understands fairly well as to what I do in terms of my educating the broader community. And she had absolutely no idea that saying that wasn’t a good thing. So that was my opportunity to tell her that using the word homosexual in any type of context typically isn’t a good thing, and if you pay attention to the media or the news or any of those groups who are out there who are trying to fight against gay marriage, you’ll hear them using ‘homosexual’ over and over and over again. So that is certainly not a word that I personally want to hear in my interactions with people. If somebody were trying to target me as a member of the LGBT community and used that, I know that I personally would immediately write that company off. I wrote an entire blog post on this topic , which you can read here.
So we’ve talked about what the acronym LGBT stands for, and if we really want to go even into a deeper base foundation level, I can say that lesbian is when two women are in a relationship, gay is two men in a relationship, bisexual is somebody who could be a man or a woman in a relationship with a man or a woman, and then there’s the transgender community; and that’s where my next area of focus to educate you around is the trans community. To start talking about the trans community I’m going to bring up my- I would say it’s probably close to my number one pet peeve. And that is people who use the word ‘transgendered’ with an ‘ed’ at the end. And I have written a blog about this particular pet peeve of mine as well and you can check it out by going to my website by clicking here. When I hear people say the word transgendered, I feel like I turn into something out of the Exorcist where my head begins to spin because transgendered is just not a word. It’s transgender. Period. Very simple, transgender. And if we were going based on transgendered with the ‘ed’ then that would mean that somebody is ‘lesbianed’ or ‘gayed’. So if you think of how ridiculous that sounds, that’s how ridiculous you may sound if you were saying transgendered. And I think it’s one of those things that there’s really just not enough education around it because there are many, many, many people in the industry, in the LGBT community, in the business community, who say transgendered.
In the fall I was invited to speak at the Reaching Out MBA Conference. It was in Boston and it’s a fabulous conference for anybody who hasn’t heard of it; it’s for MBA students who are LGBT. And it’s just an amazing group of people and there were a lot of students there. And I was so incredibly excited that one of the conference organizers, on the first opening session, addressed the fact that transgendered isn’t a word. It was just absolutely fabulous because I feel like not enough people stand up and put the kibosh on the fact that it’s not a word. So until we’re out there saying, “Listen, this isn’t a word,” people aren’t going to stop saying it. So I wrote, like I said I wrote my long ranting blog about it and I’m addressing it here now, and I’ve gotten so much feedback from people via email and via any of my social networks saying, “I had no idea that it wasn’t transgendered because that’s what I hear other people in the community saying.” So that’s just my little plug for the fact that transgendered is not a word.
So what is transgender exactly?
However, I’m going to tell you a little bit about what transgender actually is. So I know that this is an area that tends to be a little complicated and a little confusing for some people. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it needs to be as confusing as it does come across. There is a diagram called the Genderbread Person, and I am going to share this in the blog post that accompanies this podcast episode. But to describe it in case you’re not in front of a computer where you can look at the Genderbread Person, it’s basically what you would imagine a gingerbread person to look like and most of the time you hear it called the gingerbread man. In this particular case it’s called the Genderbread Person for a reason because we’re not identifying a sexuality or a gender to the Genderbread Person, if that makes any sense whatsoever. So basically at the top of the Genderbread Person you have the head, and it says Gender Identity. So Gender Identity is somebody’s internal sense of who they are. So my gender identity is a woman, I am a female, I internally acknowledge myself as being a woman, as being a female. When you’re talking with somebody who’s transgender, their Gender Identity doesn’t necessarily match what they are outwardly expressing as themselves. So I’ll come back to that in a second. But then you have your Sexual Orientation and your Sexual Orientation is really just who you’re attracted to. So I, with my gender identity being female, and being attracted to females, that would make my Sexual Orientation being attracted to women, being a lesbian. So the third part of the Genderbread Person is you Sex, and this refers to physical characteristics, chromosomes, your internal reproductive system, all of those things. So it’s the Genderbread Person is a combination of all three of those things. So somebody who is transgender typically is somebody whose identity or their internalized sense of themselves is different than the sex they were born as or the sex that they may be portrayed as. And I know that this may be a little complicated or sound a little bit confusing as I’m trying to explain it but just bare with me. So there’s two different terms that you’ll hear quite frequently, and that’s Gender Identity and Gender Expression. So the Gender Identity piece, as I was saying before, is really that sense of who you are. So I can say that my Gender Identity is a female; versus Gender Expression and that is how somebody presents themselves. So that could be in the way of behavior, in clothing, in hairstyles, in your voice or your body characteristics. So even though I identify as being a female, my Gender Expression could be male. So I could be expressing my gender as being a very – I don’t really know how to say this appropriately – but I could be a very butch lesbian. And that’s a term, and that’s not something that I’m a big fan of saying but just for visual sake of things, I could be really showing my Gender Expression as very manly; even though I identify as a woman. So there are a lot of different levels of how you can express your gender and how you can identify yourself as a gender. So there’s really – it’s not just black and white, there’s a lot involved in how this all plays out. There’s even additional things here such as Gender Non-Conforming. So Gender Non-Conforming is a term for individuals whose Gender Expression is different than what people perceive that gender to be. So I could be a straight woman who happens to be viewed as very manly in society’s standards for being a woman and people could be associating me with being a lesbian or being a transperson, when really I’m just minding my business as a straight woman and have no involvement in the LGBT community.
So there really are a lot of nuances around this whole area. And if you do get a chance to go to my website and check out the diagram of the Genderbread Person, I promise you that it will make a lot more sense when you’re actually looking at the visual diagram.
A couple of other terms to note is when you’re talking with somebody and they refer to themselves as a transgender man, that means that they now identify themselves as a man, but was once a woman. And it’s the same thing with transgender woman; that’s somebody who identifies themselves now as a woman who was once a man. And those two terms I know a lot of people get confused around so if you just hear ‘transman,’ just know that that person now identifies themself as a man; and if you hear ‘transwoman,’ that person now identifies themselves as a woman. If you go on those two rules of thumb you’re in pretty good shape.
Problematic terms…
At the top of the show I had mentioned that we would talk about terms and really going over what is LGBT and then I also mentioned that we would cover some terms that – the do’s and the don’ts. So here are a couple of the don’ts as it relates to the trans community. And there are a lot of problematic terms that are out there and as I said, and I went on and on about transgendered being one of those problematic terms, transgenders plural, that is also a problematic term. Then there is the term transvestite and that is a very old, outdated term that you very rarely hear; and that is not something that you ever want to be using either. So when we’re looking at those being problematic terms the preferred terms would just be transgender people, or a transgender person. It’s really, it’s not that complicated so try not to make it complicated.
Closing out the topic around transgender, I want to read a LinkedIn message that I got from somebody the other day and it reads, “I am not gay, I am a transsexual female. I used to be male and am now female. The only problem I run into is from gay men asking me why I didn’t just become a gay man. They don’t understand why I had to change to be me.”
And this is- I would say a very common thing; a very common question for people to wonder and to not know the answer to. And if we go back to the diagram of the Genderbread Person and in this case this person is a little bit older so she’s comfortable using the terms transsexual, which is a term that I didn’t even actually get into now that I’m thinking about it, I didn’t even get into earlier but transsexual is another one of those words that, similar to queer, depending on your generation depends on whether or not you’re going to use the word transsexual. And transsexual does tend to be something that people who are a little bit older tend to use more often than somebody who’s younger. So in this case for her to refer to herself as a transsexual female, that’s totally fine, that’s her prerogative to do however I would advise you not to use the word transsexual. What she’s asking here, or what she’s stating here I should say, is when she’s having conversations with gay men – and I’m sure this isn’t just for gay men, it’s for anybody she’s having conversations with; is that they just don’t understand why she couldn’t just be a gay man. And I think this is the part where a lot of people struggle with. And if you’re looking at the Genderbread Person diagram you need to understand that gender is- it’s in your brain, it’s in your body, your gender identity is who you know you are. And for people who are trans, it’s just the fact that they have been born in the wrong body. So if you’re talking to- if we’re using this person who sent me the LinkedIn message, who we’ll call ‘Megan,’ I don’t want to use her real name but we’ll call her Megan. So if we’re talking to Megan it’s really that she’s spent her entire life in a man’s body but knowing in the core of her being that her gender identity was to be a woman. So if you try to think of that from an ally perspective, or from an outsider perspective, how incredibly difficult it must be to be born into a body that you don’t feel like is your own. And I think that that’s the case with a lot of people who are trans, it’s certainly the case with a lot of the trans people that I know and it’s not any fault of theirs that they’re born into the wrong body. So me to be judgmental or for the gay man that Megan was talking to, to be judgmental over, ‘Well why won’t you just be a gay man instead of transitioning into a woman?’ And that’s really, it’s not the case. If Megan were to stay a man, she would still feel like a woman on the inside. She would still know that she is a female; that she is a woman internally, inside and out she feels that she is a woman. So for her to live her life as a gay man and to be dating men under the guise of being a man, that’s just going against everything about who she is. So she needed to transition to be a female in order to be able to express her gender the way that it was meant to be.
So I know that may sound a little bit confusing and I apologize if it does, and I’m certainly happy to answer any questions if you do have them. I really try to educate people on the trans community and I’m hoping that the Genderbread Person diagram will help you out with this; but just understand that somebody who is transgender, you know I know that I’m talking to a lot of allies here, and I’m talking to a lot of people who aren’t really familiar with LGBT community, but take a step back, really think about it and have some compassion.
So when you’re talking to somebody who is a transfemale or a transmale, think of what they’ve had to go through in order to transition; because there’s a lot involved in actually transitioning. But do you think that anybody would intentionally go out of their way to be somebody that they’re not. There’s a lot involved in transitioning one’s gender and I would just ask you to take a step back and think about what you would do. You are who you are right now, right this very moment, I am a woman. Just if I am sitting here thinking and take myself back for a moment and think, “How would it feel if I in the core of my being knew that I was man but I am trapped in this female body.” Think how uncomfortable that must be for yourself when you know who you are, everything in your body is saying, “But I’m a man. But really I’m here and I’m trapped in this female body.” And this is what people who are transgender go through. And for them to have the courage and have the strength to go through and actually transition from one gender to another, I think that that is something that we should applaud and admire because it’s a long road and it’s not a road that doesn’t come without discrimination. So think about that the next time you’re in a conversation with somebody and trans comes up, or when you’re thinking about your business endeavors and how you can be compassionate to the trans community. And compassionate to the LGBT community as a whole quite frankly. Because you know there’s plenty of debate out there from the right wing who says that being gay is a choice, but honestly let’s just look at it – really would anybody want to choose a path where they’re going to be discriminated against? Of course not. Why would you intentionally want to put yourself in a vulnerable position where you’re going to be discriminated against?
In closing..
So this concludes the What Exactly Is LGBT Podcast. If you have found that I have overlooked something I would love for you to email me or reach out to me on any of the social networks. My email address is blog@jenntgrace.com, and you can also reach me on LinkedIn, on Twitter or on Facebook. So if you have any questions around What Exactly Is LGBT, if perhaps I have overlooked something entirely, I certainly apologize for overlooking anything that I may have; but I would be more than happy to do a follow-up episode that covers anything that I’ve missed, or be able to address any questions you might have in an upcoming blog.
So I thank you so very much for taking the time to listen to this, whether you’re in the car or you’re in the gym working out, I know there are plenty of other things you could be listening to and I appreciate that you have chosen to listen to me. If you did like this episode I would love for you to rate it in iTunes if you’re listening to it in iTunes. But any reviews would be fantastic because I am here to serve you, the listener, so however I can make this podcast more effective for you I would love to know. Or if you want to share any information from my blog please do, you can find me at Facebook at Facebook.com/gaybusinessandmarketing.
So that wraps up Episode Two of the Gay Business and Marketing Made Easy Podcast, I hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to talking with you next time. Have a great one!
In an effort to provide some education around terms in the trans community, here are some common terms and a few problematic terms to help you on your way.
Common Terms
Transgender: Refers to a person whose gender identity, one’s deeply internalized sense of oneself as a man or a woman, is different than the gender identity typically associated with the person’s birth sex.
Gender Identity: An individual’s internal sense of being male, female, or something else. Since gender identity is internal, one’s gender identity is not necessarily visible to others.
Gender Expression: How a person represents or expresses one’s gender identity to others, often through behavior, clothing, hairstyles, voice or body characteristics.
Gender Non-conforming: A term for individuals whose gender expression is different from societal expectations related to gender.
Transgender Man: A term for a transgender individual who identifies as a man.
Transgender Woman: A term for a transgender individual who identifies as a woman.
Problematic Terms and their Preferred Counterparts
Problematic: “transgenders,” “a transgender” , Transvestite
Preferred: “transgender people,” “a transgender person”
———-
Problematic: “transgendered”
Preferred: ”transgender”
———-
Problematic: “sex change,” “pre-operative,” “post-operative”
Preferred: ”transition”
I hope you’ve enjoyed Episode 2 of the Gay Business & Marketing Made Easy Podcast. A special thanks to the Human Performance Academy for sponsoring this show!
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