Terminology

A note about terminology

The language around gender and sexuality changes faster than Google can scrap products. Apart from acronyms, many terms in use by the LGBTQ+ community have fluid definitions, depending on who is using them. There is no one definition on what many of these things mean that we can defer to as an authority; and even if there were, not everyone would recognise the authority of The Authority.

The problem then is that these things happen faster than online resources – such as this one – can be updated. I’m going to write down some definitions below, and these should be taken to apply only to the pages of the website. In no way is the use of these definition to be taken as my imposing an identity on people who use those terms (I myself belong to the second group below).

In general, I support the concepts and definitions as they are described at Genderbread.org.

An example

For example: as stated on the About page, I consider the primary demographics for this website to be these groups:

Cis men who are comfortable experimenting with their gender expression
Nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth (AMAB) due to the appearance of their external genitalia

Postgenderific is described as for Hims and Thems. In its pages, I may refer to “men and AMABs”. I use these terms for expedience and readability.

As a reader, you would quickly tire of sentences like “Gender-free fashion and beauty for cis men who are comfortable experimenting with their gender expression and nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth due to the appearance of their external genitalia.” Trust me.

Terminology

Terminology	Definition
AFAB	Assigned Female at Birth (due to the appearance of their external genitalia, usually the vulva). This differs from anything that the individual chooses to identify as when they get older, and also does not take into account any intersex condition that was internal or not visible at the time.
AMAB	Assigned Male at Birth (due to the appearance of their external genitalia, usually the penis and testicles). This differs from anything that the individual chooses to identify as when they get older, and also does not take into account any intersex condition that was internal or not visible at the time.
Cis/cisgender	Cisgender, shortened to cis, is the term used to apply to someone who identifies with gender they were assigned at birth – biological sex, gender identity and gender expression all aligned. The prefix ‘cis’ comes from the Latin ‘on this side of’; to differentiate from the prefix ‘trans’, signifying ‘opposite from’.
Femme	Femme relates to someone whose gender identity and gender expression are both on the feminine end of the scale. Historically it was often used to described feminine-presenting lesbians; however, femme-identifying and femme-presenting individuals may have any biological sex.
Gender	Gender is the umbrella term that relates to the non-biological factors that make up an individual, i.e. their identity and expression.
Gender-free	Gender-free, gender-neutral and unisex are usually treated of synonyms, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as, “relating to people and not especially to men or to women”. Our preferred definition would be similar: “relating to people and not unnecessarily related to sex or gender”.
Masc	Masculine-of-centre relates to someone whose gender identity and gender expression are both on the masculine end of the scale. Such individuals may have any biological sex.
Nonbinary	Nonbinary is an umbrella term that is used to denote any gender orientation that falls outside the traditional male/female binary. Sometimes individuals will use that as their gender – “I am a nonbinary person” – or they may prefer a more specific term that falls under the nonbinary umbrella – e.g. “I am a neutrois person”. This does not include trans people who identify with their preferred binary identity.
Sex	Sex is often used in two ways: – Sexual intercourse (“they had sex”) – Gender (“her sex is female”) To remove doubt on these pages, we’ll use “sexual intercourse” (or something more explicit) for the first use case; and use “biological sex” when referring to biology, as the counterpoint to “gender” as defined here.