 Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm James Mulan. This is our series, The ABCs of LGBTQ Plus. And this particular episode is going to address those ABCs. To do so, we have invited to the studio a couple of guests to guide us through. And on the far side, we have Noah Stang Osborn. And between us, Valerie Overton, I'm going to ask you guys to introduce yourselves, please. So, Valerie, why don't you go first? Okay. My name is Valerie Overton. My pronouns are she, her. And I'm the co-chair of Lex Pride, which is a Lexington-based organization that works to advance social justice for the LGBTQ community. My name is Noah Stang Osborn. My pronouns are they or he. And I am in college and a part of Lex Pride. All right. Thank you both, as I said, for being here. So, let's dig right into it. We want to talk about things in this kind of like a primer for folks who are interested, but not necessarily particularly knowledgeable about gender and sexual identity issues, or sexual and gender identity issues. So, to begin with, most basically, what are the different types of gender and sexual identities out there? And yeah, we'll start with that. Great. Well, we usually talk about five types of identities. One is the sex assigned at birth, the next is your gender identity, and then gender expression, sexual orientation, and romantic orientation. So, we can go through each one of those and explain what they are, because sometimes it's a little confusing to understand what they are and how they're distinct from each other. Yeah, if I could ask Noah, if you wouldn't mind, tackling the first of those, because it was part of a conversation you and I have had before in this studio. So, I'll just... Sure. So, when a baby is born, the doctor looks at their genitals to figure out if they are like assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth, or intersex. When I was born, they thought I was a girl. So, I am assigned female at birth. However, that is not my gender identity. I am a non-binary, transmasculine person. So, my gender identity is that, and the sex I was assigned at birth is female. Okay. So, sometimes those things align, and sometimes they don't. Right. And just to explain intersex, because not everybody is familiar with the intersex phenomenon. And that is, a lot of times people believe that your sex assigned at birth is either male or female. And intersex is a kind of complex group of situations where your external physical characteristics and or your chromosomes and internal reproductive organs don't look like a classic typical male or female. And it could be having characteristics of both to varying degrees, and that is called intersex. And that is 1 to 2 percent of the population. Okay. And really, that is a, for want of a for want of a better term, a way of a third category that just fits outside of the other two. Right. Right. It's a catchall for anything that doesn't look typically male or typically female. Okay. And I am spacing out on what the second your list was. So, the second category is gender identity. Okay. Good. So, if you think about sex assigned at birth as based on your physical appearance and chromosomes and those kinds of things, your gender identity is what you feel deeply in your heart and soul and brain as being. And so, for example, your gender identity and your sex assigned at birth might align. They might be the same. So, for me, I was assigned female at birth and my gender identity is female. I feel myself to be female. On the other hand, Noah mentioned that they were assigned female at birth and their gender identity is non-binary, meaning that they feel some combination of male and female. And for some people who are non-binary it could be some fixed or varying mix of male and female or a third gender or feeling not related to either male or female. So, non-binary is a broad category. So, as between gender assigned at birth and gender identity, my assumption would be that gender identity, you can become aware of your gender identity very early or sometime later in your life. Is that the case both for you in general and what you under or for you in particular, excuse me, and what you understand in general, Noah? Yes. So, for me, my gender identity has been and still is like a journey. I'm going on like seeing what feels most comfortable and how I like to identify and what words I use to describe myself. And that's something I found out relatively young. I came out as transgender when I was 16, but it's something people can come out in their 70s. People can come out when they're four. There's no wrong time to do it. And do you find, you know, from the folks that you know, the research that you've done, etc., that there are some number of people who write from, you know, from their earliest memories or feeling that there's some misalignment between their gender as assigned and how they... Absolutely. I think that, you know, you, we certainly know a lot of children who from the time they can talk will say, you know, I'm a boy and insist consistently and persistently that I am a boy, even though they were signed female at birth and everybody's referring to them as a girl. And so I think that a lot of times what we see is children understanding their gender identity earlier because there's more language out there now than there used to be. And so in some cases, people who knew that they were different in that way but didn't have a language or a concept for it in previous years might have come out earlier but actually came out much later. And in other cases, as Noah said, you know, gender identity can be a journey. It can be fluid and it can change and evolve over time in terms of what your understanding of your own gender is. And I think another assumption that people might have is that whenever there is a discrepancy or misalignment between the gender as a sign or how other people are treating you and how you feel or see yourself, that there's always pain there. Is that the case? I don't think there has to be pain for everyone. For me, I think a lot of my dysphoria and discomfort comes not from like how I am but how I'm treated. So if you can line up the way that you are treated with the way that you feel, then that can... Right. And the statistics really bear that out. For transgender people, for example, the statistics are that almost 50% of transgender people attempt suicide by age 21. And the reason for that is not because there's anything wrong with being transgender or they feel bad about being transgender, but when you live in a society that insists that you are not who you know yourself to be and puts that in a very negative light or treats you harshly, it wears you down. It really wears you down emotionally. Whereas children who live in an affirming environment, live and play and go to school in an affirming environment, the rate of suicide is actually the same as for cisgender people. So it just goes to show you kind of what the social influence is of all that negativity. Yeah, that's a very, very dramatic and grim, unfortunately, illustration of that for sure. What is another category of gender or sexual identity that we haven't yet discussed? So related to gender identity in some ways and not in others is gender expression, which is like how someone outwardly presents themselves, which can be clothing, makeup or not makeup. What's how you use your voice, how you speak and present yourself, your mannerisms. And for some people this can be lined up, like you may have someone who is like, I identify as a boy, I like only masculine things and that's cool, that's fine. And for some people those things are different. I am non-binary. If I wanted to wear a dress, I could wear a dress and that wouldn't change anything about my gender identity and who I am. And that's I think a really key point is that one's gender expression doesn't change what your identity is. So in a lot of respects gender identity is actually independent of both sex assigned at birth and your gender identity. You know, if you think about... Say that again because you said gender identity twice. Oh, sorry. So your gender expression is separate from your sex assigned at birth and your gender identity. So for example, whether you're cisgender or transgender, your gender expression may vary. And so you have women who present the varying degrees as more feminine or more masculine. Likewise with men, cisgender or transgender men who present to varying degrees as more masculine or feminine or other. And so... I'm sorry, Valerie. I'm going to interrupt you just because you've used the term cisgender a couple of times in your answer and I just want to clarify what do you... Sure. Yeah. So that's where we talk about kind of how these different identities interrelate. And so cisgender and transgender has to do with the extent to which your sex assigned at birth matches your gender identity. So if your sex assigned at birth matches your gender identity, like with me, I was assigned female birth and my gender identity is female, then we call ourselves cisgender. Okay. If your gender identity is different in any way from your sex assigned at birth, then the umbrella term for that is transgender. And transgender encompasses a lot of different kinds of differences between your gender identity and your sex assigned at birth. Okay. So there is a kind of bifurcation there between cisgender, which is an alignment of those things, and transgender, which as you said, is an umbrella term that kind of describes a non-alignment. Right. Right. And that can get complicated. Identities can get complicated, right? I mean, if you think about a child who has born intersex, then our conventional terminology doesn't really work well because your gender identity, it's like, how do you match your gender identity with an intersex sex assigned at birth? So our terminology can be kind of limiting, but I think the main thing is just to be respectful of whatever identities people hold and to accept that those are their identities and to be respectful of that. And I think it's a really important point for people to hear and understand and wrestle with, frankly, because it's going to take that, that you both have said that gender expression can be different from gender identity. I think people, again, that's not going to be intuitive for people to understand. It's not intuitive for a lot of people, yeah. But it seems that, again, that acceptance and respect is the best. As somebody told me once, acceptance beats understanding. You don't have to understand as long as you accept. And it seems to me, again, that this is a great example of that, the fact that you just have to accept that fact, that gender expression is separate from these other things. Right, right. And we're really talking about what the facts are. The facts are that these different identities exist. And in order to live in a peaceful community, ideally we are all respectful of all of our identities. What your personal beliefs are might be different, but if at least we can be respectful and welcoming accepting, then we can live in a peaceful community. So there are two forms of gender identity that we haven't, or sexual identity that we have not yet addressed, though they were mentioned. So either one of you feel free to tackle either of those. Do you remember? So I'll tackle sexual orientation. So sexual orientation is who you're attracted to. And so you may be attracted to women. You may be attracted to men. You may be attracted to people regardless of what their gender might be. And so the terms that are probably most familiar are gay or lesbian. So you're attracted to someone of the same sex. So I'm female. I'm attracted to women. So I'm a lesbian. And then there are people who are bisexual, who are attracted to both men and women. People who are asexual, who don't experience sexual attraction. And people who are pansexual. And those people are attracted to people regardless of what the gender is, whether it's this gender or transgender, whether it is the binary of male female or non-binary. We say it's like your heart, not your parts. So those are kind of the basics. And the thing to remember there is that your sexual orientation is based on your gender identity and not your sex assigned at birth. So it doesn't matter whether I'm a cisgender female or transgender female. My gender identity is female. So whether or not I'm cis or trans, I am lesbian because I'm attracted to women. And so in your complicated you know admixture of different identities, how does that last point that Valerie was just making, how does that play out? I am a non-binary person and I identify as queer. I like people of many different genders. But I do know non-binary people that use terms like lesbian or gay because they do feel connected to either womanhood or manhood and that's okay too. It depends on the person. So if you don't mind, I'm going to do some wrestling myself here. When you say that you are non-binary but you identify as queer, for me it's not clear how does that work. Doesn't queer depend on you identifying with one sex or the other in order to be in order for that to be an apt description? The way I like to think about it is because there is no opposite gender to non-binary, everything I do is queer in some way. I think that queer is a term that's really been reclaimed by the LGBTQ plus community because it used to be and still is used in a very negative insulting fashion. But we've reclaimed that term and people use queer in different ways. Some people use queer as an umbrella term to encompass any kind of sexual or gender identity, anything in the LGBTQIA plus spectrum. And some people use queer in terms of sexual orientation as Noah described where as a non-binary person any kind of sexual or romantic experience that you have does not fall neatly within the old school terms that we have. And it sounds like that is precisely the way in which you are employing that term. And queer can also be used for gender identity. Some people are gender queer which is another way to be non-binary. We have a lot of different terms. I think that sometimes we go through there's gender fluid and gender queer and non-binary and so on and so forth. Third gender, two-spirit. A gender. There are many different terms. And again I think that it's helpful to know some of the basic terms and the terms are evolving and we keep adding more terms. And if you can't keep up with that, again the rule of thumb is just to be respectful of however people identify themselves. Well I can promise you I care and I can't keep up with that because I am curious about whether that number of new terms that you both just introduced in the last minute whether those are all variations of terms that we've already been discussing or whether they're actually describing things that we have not that we haven't talked about. In which case I would want to get the explanation of what those terms are out as well. And so again I think there was a I'm not going to ask you to go through all of them but if they're gender fluid for instance what do you mean by that? Gender fluid is someone whose gender identity can change on a day to day or like can change over time basically. Over a very short period of time or over a long period of time. I know a few gender fluid people and one of them can kind of like feel like different genders throughout the day and one has like felt male for a few months and before that felt non-binary and yeah. I think it's important to kind of recognize that all of these things exist on a spectrum and so when we talk about feeling male or a female or third gender or two-spirit or any of these things if you think about kind of like the spectrum like you might feel varying degrees of male or female or other and so the extent like where you are on those spectrums can vary and so with gender fluid people you know the degree to which you feel male or female might change over the short term or the long term. So you were mentioning that sexual orientation has to do with who you're attracted to and I imagine that that is related to the fifth term which is romantic orientation and so just describe what you mean by romantic orientation. Sure yeah so sexual orientation has to do with your sexual attraction right and romantic orientation has to do with your romantic or emotional attraction and in a lot of cases those align people are sexually and romantically attracted to a particular gender or to a whole variety of genders. In some cases they don't align so for example someone might be asexual not experience sexual attraction but they may experience romantic attraction and so in that case they don't align or someone might feel sexually attracted more to one gender or another and the extent to which they feel romantic attraction to those genders is different. So there's a whole range of the extent to which those align or don't align and so we separate those out to acknowledge and respect those differences. Okay you know I have to say that in this discussion with the involvement of images such as spectrum and range and just the sheer number of terms that you both are in command of and have shared with us it does give an overall impression to this listener and maybe to others of a general fluidity around all of these kinds of forms of identity so that I think it's very important as a grounding principle to reiterate one more time what you have said various times both of you and that is acceptance acceptance respect listening to and in honoring somebody's sense of themselves around this and honoring the fact that that can change and that that very same person might might come to you and say no I want a different pronoun I feel this wet you know this this is different so I would appreciate and perhaps the audience as well if you guys have any other if that is one way that we can navigate we those of us who seek to be allies who are you know pretty aligned in terms of our gender assigned at birth and the way that our life has gone relatively simple in that way for those of us how do we navigate these these fluid waters so the values of acceptance and respect any any other things that you would you know want to point out or help us to remind ourselves of that will again make this make the world a better kinder more compassionate place for all of us so so I think that one thing is just to remember that we are complex beings and we are complex in many different ways in terms of our personalities our aptitudes our skills our identities and so I think it's helpful to recognize that in terms of our sexual and gender identities we can be very complex just as we can be in other ways and so in doing that to try to not make assumptions about other people and to assume that the world out there the people out there are complex and to respect whatever their identities are whether it's sexual or gender or race or faith or abilities or you know immigrant status and all of those things because we are just complex in many ways and these identities are part of a whole I think related to that in some ways is being okay with not knowing yes you don't need to know the gender of everyone around you you certainly do not need to know what people were assigned at birth and if you don't understand a term someone uses and they are not particularly close to you you can just let it go I think I see a lot of frustration from people that sort of becomes expressed as hostility because they don't understand what's going on and I really think that that's okay to not understand everything that's going on as long as you are trying to be respectful you don't have to know why I use they them pronouns because I don't have to tell you that also but you still should try to use them right and mistakes will be made yes and everybody needs to understand that and accept that in themselves and others and that's a really good point because sometimes people are afraid to engage because they're afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing and I think from my perspective from many people's perspectives it's not about saying or doing the wrong thing if you're trying to understand trying to accept trying to be respectful you make a mistake quick simple apology and move on we don't need to you know go over and over and over again okay well this conversation you will not be surprised went on a little bit longer than we were anticipating mostly because these are we wanted to get everything out on the table and these are tough things for for folks to wrap their minds around so do really appreciate the fact that you guys have obviously done a lot of thinking on this as well as living the lives that you've lived so as to be able to share this with us from an informed and life experience perspective appreciate that very much I'm going to say goodbye now you'll be happy to hear to Noah staying Osborn and to Valerie Overton our appreciation and our appreciation to you I hope you found the conversation worthwhile as I did and we'll see you on another episode thank you