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Definitions:
Gender Identity: Gender Identity: One's internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or another gender(s). Everyone has a gender identity, including you. For transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same. Female, woman, and girl and male, man, and boy are also NOT necessarily linked to each other but are just six common gender identities.
Gender Expression/Presentation: The physical manifestation of one's gender identity through clothing, hairstyle, voice, body shape, etc. Most transgender people seek to make their gender expression (how they look) match their gender identity (who they are), rather than their sex assigned at birth.
Sex Assigned at Birth: The assignment and classification of people as male, female, intersex, or another sex based on a combination of anatomy, hormones, chromosomes. It is important we don't simply use "sex" because of the vagueness of the definition of sex and its place in transphobia. Chromosomes are frequently used to determine sex from prenatal karyotyping (although not as often as genitalia). Chromosomes do not determine genitalia.
Sexually Attracted To: Sexual Orientation. It is important to note that sexual and romantic/emotional attraction can be from a variety of factors including but not limited to gender identity, gender expression/presentation, and sex assigned at birth.
Romantically/Emotionally Attracted To: Romantic/emotional orientation. It is important to note that sexual and romantic/emotional attraction can be from a variety of factors including but not limited to gender identity, gender expression/presentation, and sex assigned at birth.
Example of how to fill out your own Gender Unicorn:
Here are some fundamental issues with the graphic:
Many people were curious if agender and asexual people were included in this graphic. In short, they are. For example, identifying on the left of the sexuality spectra would indicate no attraction.

Changes from The Genderbread Person
You may recognize this graphic as similar to The Genderbread Person
by itspronouncedmetrosexual. We created a similar graphic with significant changes to more accurately portray the distinction between gender, sex assigned at birth, and sexuality.

1. The itspronouncedmetrosexual Genderbread Person is plagiarized.
2. We wanted to create a gender graphic that shows how queer and trans people view gender instead of one straight, cisgender man.

Here are some structural issues with the graphic:
1. Nongendered isn't the only identity that may fall on the "left" of the Gender Identity Spectrum. Most people prefer the term "agender".
2. Agender is typically used as a gender identity, not a gender expression
3. Biological sex is an ambiguous word that has no scale and no meaning besides that it is related to some sex characteristics.
It is also harmful to trans people.
Instead, we prefer "sex assigned at birth" which provides a more accurate description of what biological sex may be trying to communicate.
4. Asex isn't a word, everyone has some sex characteristics prescribed to them.
5. There are other genders besides male and female and not all cultures operate on a male/female binary ( which is mostly a European construct).
We included "other genders" to indicate the many genders that other people might identify as, express themselves as, and be attracted to.
6. Sex, whether referencing an array of sex characteristics or sex assigned at birth is not exclusively determined through genitals as insinuated by the image.

Sources:
Queer and trans organizers have been making the distinction between gender identity, gender presentation/expression, sex, and attraction for decades. No one person or organization has created the concept. However "Genderbread" itself has two main sources:

1. textualharassment.tumblr.com (http://www.reddit.com/r/transgender/
comments/ipgod/oversimplified_diagram_
but_still_a_good_way_to/)

2. http://cisnormativity.tumblr.com/post/
9652156368/gingerbread-person-this-is-an-anthropomorphic

Illustrations by Anna Moore. Design by Landyn Pan, Eli Erlick, and many others.

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Definitions: Gender Identity: Gender Identity: One's internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or another gender(s). Everyone has a gender identity, including you. For transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same.

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Share these stories about love with your kids

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Celebrate love with these kids’ books about crushes, weddings, and romance from an LGBTQ+ perspective.

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Creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is far from easy, but we can't let perfection be the enemy of progress. There are many ways to bring your DEI strategy to life, but one major (but simple) step you can take to promote inclusivity is enabling conversations around gender pronouns.

Gender pronouns are the words people use to refer to themselves (i.e., he, she, they). They were also once referred to as "personal gender pronouns" or "preferred gender pronouns," but there has been a strong shift away from those two terms. GLSEN explains, "This change was made because a person's pronouns are not just preferred ... They're the pronouns that must be used."

Aubrey Blanche, Head of Equitable Design at Culture Amp, further elaborates:

"Beginning the conversation around sharing your pronouns is a simple way to normalize not assuming someone's pronouns or gender - it's one of the cornerstones of an inclusive culture."

Today, about one in five Americans say they personally know someone who prefers a pronoun other than "he" or "she," and this number is only growing over time. Furthermore, about 1 in 4 LGBTQ+ youth - the workforce of the future - report using a pronoun that falls outside the gender binary.

This means that understanding and respecting gender pronouns is increasingly vital for any organization trying to build a truly inclusive and equitable workplace.

Why are gender pronouns important?

If you've never had to worry about the pronoun someone uses to refer to you, specifying or sharing gender pronouns might not seem necessary. "For most people, their pronouns simply aren't a big part of their experience. But for people who are constantly questioned about their gender or are misgendered, the experience can leave them feeling excluded and alienated," explains Aubrey.

And gender pronouns matter - studies have found that affirming a transgender person's pronouns can help lower depression and raise self-esteem and well-being. Meanwhile, being misgendered and/or misnamed is associated with feeling disrespected and invalidated.

That's why asking for, remembering, and using someone's gender pronouns is essential. You can't assume anybody's gender pronouns simply by looking at them. Some people may identify with genders different from the sex assigned at birth. Meanwhile, others do not identify with any gender, while others may identify with multiple genders.

The table below provides examples of gender pronouns from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual Resource Center at UC Davis.

Using the correct pronouns is a form of basic respect and validation. Leaders who support and model the use of gender pronouns in their own workplace can go a long way in fostering an inclusive culture where everyone can belong.

How do I ask someone about their gender pronoun?

As part of an introduction or icebreaker at work, you can say, "Tell us your name, your role, and if you're comfortable, your gender pronoun."

You might hear gender-neutral pronouns like "they, them, theirs." In other cases, people may prefer that you use their name. In a one-on-one conversation, the best way to ask is with a straightforward: "What are your gender pronouns?" or "Can you remind me of which pronouns you like for yourself?"

What happens if I use the wrong gender pronoun?

If you realize it at the moment, correct yourself. Apologize and restate the correct pronoun, "Sorry, I meant she."

If you realize your mistake after the fact, apologize in private. Don't dwell on your mistake - it's not productive. It's also inappropriate to make the person feel awkward about the situation, nor should they feel responsible for comforting you. In other words, it's your job to remember and respect someone's gender pronouns. The best apology is to be better in the future.

1) Include gender pronouns in e-mail signatures and work profiles

An easy way for companies to introduce gender pronouns into the conversation is to include them in email signatures. This action serves as a reminder internally and builds awareness externally.

When asked why she chose to add gender pronouns to her e-mail signature, Aubrey explained, "Adding pronouns to simple but visible parts of your 'work-life' may be a small action, but it can have an incredible impact by signaling to trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people that they belong."

Of course, gender pronouns can also be included in other areas, such as:

And if you're an individual whose company currently does not ask for people's gender pronouns, you can be the one to start the conversation. A small, easy way to get started is - you guessed it - adding your gender pronoun to your e-mail signature, LinkedIn profile, etc.

2. Make sharing pronouns the norm

Sharing pronouns may not come naturally for cisgender employees, but it can be learned and normalized as part of the company culture.

This tip particularly pointed at leaders and managers, because they have an outsized influence on the rest of the organization. When someone at the top opens a conversation with, "Hi, my name is _____, and my pronouns are _____," people are more likely to feel comfortable sharing their own pronouns.

The best leaders understand the importance of modeling the behaviors they want to see. If promoting inclusion through gender pronouns is a priority, the practice must be consciously incorporated into the organization's default way of working.

3. Create consequences for intentional misgendering or pronoun misuse

Using the wrong gender pronouns or misgendering is a microaggression - even if someone didn't do it intentionally. These cases can often be solved internally without requiring organizational intervention.

However, there are unfortunate situations where people may intentionally deadname or use the incorrect pronoun for someone. In this case, we recommend including deadnaming and incorrect pronoun usage in your formal definition of harassment and reflecting these in your policies. Doing so will set a firm expectation for respect and inclusion of trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming employees.

4. Embrace gender-inclusive language

Gender inclusivity goes beyond just using the right pronouns. It extends to how we speak, write, or communicate ideas about people across the spectrum of gender identities - in other words, to language itself. To foster a truly inclusive and welcoming workplace, it's critical to promote and prioritize gender-inclusive language.

According to the United Nations, using gender-inclusive language means "speaking and writing in a way that does not discriminate against a particular sex, social gender or gender identity, and does not perpetuate gender stereotype."

Below are a few examples of gender non-inclusive language and alternatives for your workforce to consider:

Taking inclusion one step at a time

Adding gender pronouns to your company email signature is a significant but easy first step to building gender inclusivity in the workplace. It brings awareness to something many people might not have considered before. Another way to build inclusion in the workplace is by asking leaders to model and normalize the act of sharing pronouns. Finally, it's worth considering creating formal, defined consequences for anyone who may purposefully and/or maliciously call someone by the wrong pronoun.

There's always more work to be done to create a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive world of work, but the most difficult obstacle is often getting started.

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Why sharing gender pronouns is important in the workplace | Culture Amp

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Knowing and using people's gender pronouns is critical for building an inclusive workplace. Learn about why pronouns matter and how to introduce them.

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In light of the current health crisis, Time to THRIVE will be going virtual for our 2021 conference. We are organizing an outstanding list of virtual keynotes, interactive virtual workshop sessions, online networking opportunities and the ability to engage with virtual exhibitors.

February 9-11, 2021
Even more exciting, we have significantly reduced our registration fees to encourage more educators, counselors and other youth-serving professionals to participate. Time to THRIVE is co-presented by the National Education Association and the American Counseling Association and attracts a broad range of youth-serving professionals to learn more about promoting safety, inclusion and well-being for LGBTQ youth.

HRC presented Don Lemon, Sam Long and Jamie Clayton with Upstander Awards.

Take a Look

A day of featured speakers, breakout workshops, a panel discussion and a film screening.

View Highlights

The premier national conference to promote safety, inclusion and well-being for LGBTQ youth.

Why You Should Attend

HRC, in partnership with the National Education Association and the American Counseling Association, present Time To THRIVE, the annual national conference to promote safety, inclusion and well-being for LGBTQ youth...everywhere!

About the Conference

The premier, national convening to build the awareness and cultural competency, learn current and emerging best practices and gather resources from leading experts and national organizations in the field.

Read About Time to Thrive

The Human Rights Campaign, All Rights Reserved

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Register now for HRC's 8th annual Time to THRIVE Conference! In light of the current health crisis, Time to THRIVE will be going virtual for our 2021 conference. We are organizing an outstanding list of virtual keynotes, interactive virtual workshop sessions, online networking opportunities and the ability to engage with virtual exhibitors.

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On August 1, 2019, I paid my last preschool tuition payment ever. My baby will be joining her big brother in elementary school as a kindergartener in just three short weeks, and you better believe that all of the mom feels are happening over here.

The difference in their maturity levels at the start of kindergarten is dramatic. Her brother was almost 6-sensitive and quiet, but an old soul. She has just turned 5, has more than her fair share of spunk and sass, and is still figuring out the world. I am a very different parent to each of them because what they need to feel safe and ready to learn is so different. But one thing is true for both: they need to feel seen and validated at school. They need to know that they can share openly about their family-a family headed by two moms in the middle of a divorce-in a way that feels normalized and unthreatening.

When my son started kindergarten three years ago, his story was different. He had two married moms, which felt like a challenging enough scenario to describe to classroom of thirty kids. My daughter has the added challenge of trying to explain same-sex relationships and divorce at the tender age of 5. But for both of them, the underlying theme is that, like snowflakes, no two families are the same, and there's no one right way to be a family. It's estimated that less than 25% of American households are led by a married mother and father, yet that's still the predominant image and model that children see in school in the books that they read, the images on the walls, and the examples teachers use in curriculum. For me, it feels especially critical this year to make sure that both of my children's teachers are armed with information about all kinds of families, including queer families, single parents by choice, divorced parents, foster families, kinship care, multi-parent families, and more. Our families are unique, sure, but the reality is that even within the LGBTQ+ community, we tend to want to paint a picture of happy, perfect, two- parent headed households. We're more than that, and we know it. We know that our community creates family in a wide range of ways that are often absent from the public discourse and certainly not discussed in public school.

So this year, I'm sending each of my children back to school with our Safe Schools Form sharing a bit about our unique family. I'm also taking the time to look through Family Equality's Book Nook and purchase a handful of books for each of their classrooms that represents a more diverse range of what families can look like.

I know that my kids are not the only ones heading back to school this fall without a married mother and father at home. The tools we give to our children's teachers help not only our kids, but the child who is being raised by her grandmother, the kids too embarrassed to share that they are in foster care, or the children with two moms and a known donor all co-parenting. We've evolved enough as a community that there's space to talk about our differences. We're allowed to be queer and divorced, single by choice, or in a multi-parent coparenting arrangement, because at the end of the day, the message is the same. LOVE makes a family. And regardless of your age or social/emotional learning, that concept is simple.

So as we head back to school this year, I will do my part in making sure that my kids' school is ready for not only our family, but a range of families outside of the heteronormative-married dynamic. Will you?

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Back to School: LGBTQ+ Families in the Classroom - Family Equality

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On August 1, 2019, I paid my last preschool tuition payment ever. My baby will be joining her big brother in elementary school as a kindergartener in just three short weeks, and you better believe that all of the mom feels are happening over here.

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Cisgender is a word used to describe gender identity. Straight, on the other hand, is used to describe sexual orientation.

Being cisgender isn't the same thing as being straight, but they can overlap: People can be both cisgender and straight.

Here's what you need to know about when these labels apply, other terms to use, and more.

When you were born, people looked at your genitals and decided that you were a girl or boy based on what they saw.

As you grow up and learn about the concept of gender, you might identify as the gender you were assigned at birth, or you might not.

If you do identify with that gender, you're cisgender, or "cis."

For example, if you were born with a penis and identify as a man, you're a cisgender man.

Similarly, if you were born with a vagina and identify as a woman, you're a cisgender woman.

If you don't identify with the gender you were assigned at birth, you may find that you're transgender, nonbinary, or gender non-conforming.

It's not that simple.

Cisgender is considered the opposite of transgender, but some people feel that they identify as neither cisgender nor transgender.

Some people identify as nonbinary, which means they don't identify strictly as a man or a woman.

Some nonbinary people consider themselves to be transgender, but some consider themselves to be neither entirely transgender nor cisgender.

For example, let's consider a nonbinary person who was assigned male at birth. This person might describe themselves as genderfluid. They might feel that their gender identity shifts over time, and they could identify as a man some days, and a woman on other days.

In this case, the person shifts between the definitions of cisgender and transgender. They might identify as both cisgender and transgender, or neither.

So, cisgender and transgender aren't a part of a strict binary. It's possible to be neither cisgender nor transgender, or to identify as a bit of both.

The word "straight" is often used to mean "heterosexual." It can also mean "heteroromantic."

Heterosexual means you're sexually attracted to the opposite sex only.

Heteroromantic means you're romantically attracted to the opposite sex only.

Generally, "straight" means you're attracted to the opposite sex, whether it's in a sexual or romantic way.

This is also not so simple.

Some people are straight and some people are gay, but there are other possibilities.

For example, you can be:

bisexual or biromantic: you're attracted to people of multiple genders

pansexual or panromantic: you're attracted to people of all genders

asexual or aromantic: you experience little to no sexual or romantic attraction

sexually or romantically fluid: your orientation changes over time

queer: you're not straight, though this terms mean many things to different people

These are only a few examples of how people may describe their sexual or romantic orientation. Of course, some people choose not to label their orientation.

You can be sexually attracted to one group of people and romantically attracted to another group of people.

For example, it's possible to be homoromantic and pansexual. This means you're romantically attracted to people of the same gender as you, but sexually attracted to people of all genders.

Orientation and attraction can be complicated - it isn't just a matter of simply being gay or straight.

"Cishet" means someone is both cisgender and heterosexual. It could also mean both cisgender and heteroromantic.

In other words, a cishet person identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth, and they're attracted to people of the opposite gender.

Nope!

There are many cisgender people who aren't straight. So, you can be cisgender and gay, cisgender and bisexual, or cisgender and asexual, to name a few identities.

Similarly, you can be transgender and straight. Some trans people find themselves exclusively attracted to people of the opposite gender.

Every human is unique.

There are different terms to describe orientation and gender identity because there are so many ways to experience attraction and gender.

The diversity of terms actually reflects the diversity of humans.

Having a term to describe who you are can be validating for many people. Often, these terms help people find community so they feel less alone.

Some people tell you what terms they use to describe themselves. For others, you might have to ask.

If you're not sure and you aren't comfortable asking, don't make an assumption about the labels someone does or doesn't use.

Remember that some people might feel uncomfortable talking about their gender or orientation, especially if they've experienced discrimination in the past.

If you're unsure about what terms to use to describe yourself, have a think about it. Read up about terms that might describe you. Check out forums on Reddit and Facebook groups.

You can't always tell what pronouns someone uses by looking at them. They might state their pronouns up front, or you have to ask. Remember, it's better to ask than to assume.

If you'd like, you can share your pronouns when you meet new people.

For example, you could simply say "Hi! My name is so-and-so and my pronouns are they/them." You can also add your pronouns to your social media bios and email signature.

There are many places where you can learn more about gender, sexuality, orientation, and attraction. For example:

Healthline also has a transgender resources guide.

If you're an LGBTQIA+ person looking for support or community, it might also be helpful to reach out to any LGBTQIA+ social and activism groups in your area.
Sian Ferguson is a freelance writer and editor based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her writing covers issues relating to social justice, cannabis, and health. You can reach out to her on .

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10 FAQs About the Difference Between Being Cisgender and Straight

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Cisgender is used to describe gender identity. Straight, on the other hand, is used to describe sexual orientation. Being cisgender isn't the same thing as being straight, but they can overlap: People can be both cisgender and straight. Here's what you need to know about when they apply, other terms to use, and more.

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What is misgendering?

For people who are transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming, coming into their authentic gender can be an important and affirming step in life.

Sometimes, people continue to refer to a person who is transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming using terms related to how they identified before transition.

This is known as misgendering.

Misgendering occurs when you intentionally or unintentionally refer to a person, relate to a person, or use language to describe a person that doesn't align with their affirmed gender. For example, referring to a woman as "he" or calling her a "guy" is an act of misgendering.

There are a number of reasons why misgendering happens.

For example, people may notice that a person has primary or secondary sex characteristics and make assumptions about that person's gender.

This includes a person's:

facial hair or lack thereof

high or low vocal range

chest or breast tissue or lack thereof

genitals

Misgendering can also occur in situations where government identifications are used. The Transgender Law Center's report on changing gender markers reveals that in some states it isn't possible to change your gender on documents such as driver's licenses and birth certificates. And in some states, you must have undergone specific surgeries in order to do so.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality's 2015 U.S. Trans Survey, only 11 percent of people surveyed had their gender listed on all of their government IDs. 67 percent didn't have any ID with their affirmed gender listed.

In scenarios where government IDs need to be presented - such as at government offices, in schools, and in hospitals - people who haven't changed their gender markers can be subject to misgendering. In many cases, people make assumptions about their gender based on what's listed on their IDs.

Of course, misgendering can also be a deliberate act. People who have discriminatory beliefs and ideas about the trans community can use misgendering as a tactic for harassment and bullying. This is evidenced by the 2015 U.S. Trans Survey, which found that 46 percent of respondents experienced verbal harassment because of their identity, and 9 percent had been physically assaulted.

Misgendering can have negative consequences for a transgender person's self-confidence and overall mental health.

A 2014 study in the journal Self and Identity, asked transgender people about their experiences with being misgendered.

Researchers found that:

32.8 percent of participants reported feeling very stigmatized when misgendered.

Genderqueer folks, and people who had taken fewer steps in the transition process, were most likely to be misgendered.

Those who were misgendered more frequently felt that their identity was very important, but experienced lower self-esteem around their appearance.

They also had a reduced sense of strength and continuity in their identity.

"Where I'm at school now there are way less trans and nonbinary folks, no visible trans community, and while our equity training included a video on pronouns, none of my professors or colleagues have ever asked what my pronouns are," N., 27, said. "When someone misgenders me at school I just get this shock of painful tension throughout my body."

When you misgender someone, you also run the risk of outing them to other people. It's never anyone's right or responsibility to out a person who is transgender without their express consent. It's a trans person's right and their right alone to tell others that they're transgender, depending on whether they wish to be out or not.

Outing a trans person is not only disrespectful of their boundaries, but can also result in that person experiencing harassment and discrimination.

And, discrimination is a major issue for the trans community. The 2015 U.S. Trans Survey found these startling statistics:

33 percent of trans people surveyed had at least one experience of discrimination when seeking medical treatment.

27 percent of respondents reported some form of employment discrimination, whether it was being fired, mistreated at work, or not hired because of their identity.

77 percent of people who were out in K-12, and 24 percent of those who were out in college or vocational school, experienced mistreatment in those settings.

For many - though not all - people who are trans, a shift in pronouns is an affirming part of the transition process. It can help a trans person and the people in their lives start to see them as their affirmed gender. Getting a person's pronouns wrong is a fairly common example of misgendering.

Pronouns are terms we use to describe ourselves in the third person in place of our name.

These can include:

he/him/his

she/her/hers

they/them/theirs

gender-neutral pronouns, such as ze/hir/hirs

While there's been some controversy around the use of gender-neutral pronouns - particularly the use of they/them/theirs as a singular pronoun as opposed to a plural one - public acceptance of the singular "they" has grown in the past several years.

Merriam-Webster came out in support of the singular "they" in 2016, and the American Dialectic Society, a group of professional linguists, voted it their 2015 " Word of the Year."

Thankfully, all you need to do to get it right is ask! Be sure to offer up your own pronouns when you do.

Author's note
It often feels difficult to ask people to use the correct pronouns for me, especially since I use they/them/theirs. People tend to push back or struggle to make the adjustment. But, when people get it right, I feel really affirmed in my nonbinary identity. I feel seen.

Stopping your own misgendering behaviors and encouraging others to do so is an easy and effective way to support the trans people in your life.

Here are a few things you can do to prevent misgendering and affirm a person's identity:

1. Don't make assumptions.

You might think you know how someone identifies, but you can never know for certain unless you ask.
2. Always ask what words you should use!
You can ask people specifically or ask people who know a given person. Or, you can simply get in the habit of asking everyone their pronouns and terms they use for themselves.

3. Use the right name and pronouns for the trans people in your life.

You should do this all the time, not just when they're around. This signals the proper way to refer to your trans friends to other people. It also helps you get accustomed to saying the right thing.
4. Avoid using gendered language to speak to or describe people unless you know it's the language that a particular person prefers.
Examples of gendered language include:

honorifics such as "sir" or "ma'am"

terms like "ladies," "guys," or "ladies and gentlemen" to refer to a group of people

typically gendered adjectives such as "handsome" and "beautiful"

Practice using these gender-neutral terms and forms of address instead. You can say things like "my friend" instead of "sir" or "ma'am," and refer to groups of people as "folks," "y'all," or "guests."
5. Don't default to gender-neutral language if you know how a person wishes to be addressed.
It can seem like using the singular "they" to describe everyone is a safe bet, and sometimes that's actually a good way to navigate a situation where you're uncertain how a person identifies. But, it's important to respect the wishes of people who have specific gendered language that they want you to use.
6. Avoid using passive language.
Instead ofsaying: "X identifies as a woman" or "Y prefers he/him/his pronouns," say things like "X is a woman" or "Y's pronouns are he/him/his."

At the end of the day, know that it's fine to make a mistake here or there so long as you don't make a habit of it. If you do make a mistake, just apologize and move on.

"If you need to correct yourself, do it and move on," said Louis, a 29-year-old nonbinary person. "Don't apologize profusely unless that's what the other person wants. It's not the trans person's job to accept your apology or make you feel better for your misgendering them."

Misgendering is a difficult issue for trans folks. You can show support and compassion for the transgender people in your life and in your community by being conscious of your participation in it and taking these simple steps to avoid doing so.
KC Clements is a queer, non-binary writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work deals with queer and trans identity, sex and sexuality, health and wellness from a body positive standpoint, and much more. You can keep up with them by visiting their , or finding them on and .

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Misgendering: What Is It and Why Is It Harmful?

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What is misgendering? For people who are transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming, coming into their authentic gender can be an important and affirming step in life. Sometimes, people continue to refer to a person who is transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming using terms related to how they identified before transition.

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Bisexual Visibility Day has been celebrated on 23 September for the last 20 years.

However, at a time of seemingly wider LGBT acceptance, is society actually accepting of the "B"?

Some people who identify as bisexual have told the BBC of issues they regularly come across when trying to live openly as bisexual individuals.

They have experienced abusive relationships, disrespect in the workplace, and discrimination on dating apps just because of their sexuality.

The Trades Union Congress has released a report highlighting that about one in five bisexual people (21%) reported they had been sexually assaulted at work.

'It scares me how people will react'

Matt is a graduate trainee living in Cambridge. He has struggled to maintain relationships with both men and women, and says he now has to lie about his sexuality in order to date people.

"It scares me how people will react," he says. "It feels like I have a dark secret that I haven't aired fully.

"One girl I was dating suddenly said that the thought of me being with a man made her physically sick. Then she blocked me on everything.

"When I date people, and mention I'm bisexual, the relationship ends. When I lie to people, and hide my sexuality, it lasts. I still don't know whether I should reveal it from the start, or wait, because the longer I wait the more anxious I get, but I don't want any relationship to end."

"I feel like if I end up in a straight relationship, I'll look like I was just experimenting all these years, but if I end up in a gay relationship people will say I was never actually bisexual. Then if I don't have a monogamous relationship people will say I'm just greedy."

Stonewall and LGBT history: Has Pride lost its meaning?

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Battling to be bi: A Newsbeat documentary

Nichi Hodgson is a writer who lives in London. She says she came out "late" as bisexual at 26, and had trouble exploring who she was because of society's pressures to be either gay or straight.

"It's a wild ride because of people's misconceptions," she says. "People still can't get their heads around bisexuality.

"I would have to hide that I'm bisexual online. I would have a straight profile, and a gay profile, but having a bisexual one created serious problems. Some people think that bisexuality is kinky and code for BDSM. It's like you're up for anything. There's a real stigma.

"My ex-girlfriend used to joke that she'd have to bleach me before she could sleep with me because I'd been with guys before. I was really disturbed. It's deeply hurtful.

"I have heard people say that bisexual people don't get married - they just go straight and get married. There's a real social pressure to go straight rather than being bisexual."

In the TUC survey - conducted by ICM Unlimited using a sample of 1,151 LGBT people in the UK - 30% of bisexual workers said they had experienced unwanted touching at work, for example hands being placed on their lower back or knee.

And 21% said they had experienced sexual assault, such as unwanted touching of the breasts, buttocks or genitals, or attempts to kiss them, and 11% said they had experiences sexual assault or rape while working.

TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said the results reveal a "hidden epidemic".

"Bisexual people should feel safe and supported at work, but instead they're experiencing shocking levels of sexual harassment," she said.

"Sexual harassment has no place in a modern workplace - or in wider society."

'People are comfortable with their biphobia'

Lewis Oakley is a bisexual activist and writer who lives in Manchester and is currently in a relationship with a woman.

He says his girlfriend is judged for being with him, with people warning her that Lewis will cheat on her with a man.

"It seems like it's socially acceptable to be honest about your bisexual discrimination. Nobody has ever turned to me and said: 'Eww you're mixed race, I couldn't possibly date you,' but I always hear that my bisexuality doesn't fit with people's needs.

"A lot of gay men came out as bisexual themselves in order to come to terms with their sexuality, but they fail to realise that whilst for some people bisexuality is a stepping stone, for others it's a destination.

"When bisexuals come out, they are immediately putting off people they could be with, because both gay and straight people reject them."
For more stories like this, follow the BBC LGBT correspondent Ben Hunte on Twitter and Instagram.

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Bisexual Visibility Day has been celebrated on 23 September for the last 20 years. However, at a time of seemingly wider LGBT acceptance, is society actually accepting of the "B"? Some people who identify as bisexual have told the BBC of issues they regularly come across when trying to live openly as bisexual individuals.

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Female-to-male surgery is a type of sex reassignment surgery, which is also called gender affirmation surgery or gender-affirming surgery.

This can take different forms, including the removal of breasts - a mastectomy - and the altering of the genital region, known as "bottom" surgery.

Examples of bottom surgery include:

removal of the uterus, known as a hysterectomy

removal of the vagina, known as a vaginectomy

construction of a penis through metoidioplasty or phalloplasty

In this article, we describe female-to-male gender-affirming surgeries. We also discuss recovery and what to expect from a transgender penis.

Before having female-to-male gender-affirming surgery, a person will receive testosterone replacement therapy.

They may then undergo one or more of the following types of procedure.

Chest restructuring

A person undergoing surgery to transition from female to male typically has a subcutaneous mastectomy to remove breast tissue. The surgeon will also make alterations to the appearance and position of the nipples.

Meanwhile, testosterone therapy will stimulate the growth of chest hair.

Removal of the uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes

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There a number of different surgical procedures for female-to-male sex reassignment.

A person may wish to undergo this type of surgery if they are uncomfortable having a uterus, ovaries, or fallopian tubes, or if hormone therapy does not stop menstruation.

In a partial hysterectomy, a surgeon will remove only the uterus.

In a total hysterectomy, they will also remove the cervix.

A bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, or BSO, involves the removal of the right and left fallopian tubes and ovaries.

Metoidioplasty

A metoidioplasty is a method of constructing a new penis, or neopenis.

It involves changing the clitoris into a penis. A person will receive hormone therapy before the surgery to enlarge the clitoris for this purpose.

During the procedure, the surgeon also removes the vagina, in a vaginectomy.

In addition, they lengthen the urethra and position it through the neopenis. To achieve the lengthening, the surgeon uses tissues from the cheek, labia minora, or other parts of the vagina. The aim of this is to allow the person to urinate while standing.

Another option is a Centurion procedure, which involves repositioning round ligaments under the clitoris to increase the girth of the penis.

A metoidioplasty typically takes 2-5 hours. After the initial surgery, additional procedures may be necessary.

A Centurion procedure takes approximately 2.5 hours, and removing the female reproductive organs will add to this time.

An advantage of a metoidioplasty is that the neopenis may become erect, due to the erectile abilities of clitoral tissue.

However, a neopenis resulting from a metoidioplasty is often too small for penetrative sex.

Phalloplasty

A phalloplasty uses grafted skin - usually from the arm, thigh, back, or abdomen - to form a neopenis. Doctors consider taking skin from the forearm to be the best option in penile construction.

Compared with a metoidioplasty, a phalloplasty results in a larger penis. However, this neopenis cannot become erect on its own.

After a period of recovery, a person can have a penile implant. This can allow them to get and maintain erections and have penetrative sex.

During a phalloplasty, the surgeon performs a vaginectomy and lengthens the urethra to allow for urination through the penis.

Disadvantages of a phalloplasty include the number of surgical visits and revisions that may be necessary, as well as the cost, which is typically higher than that of a metoidioplasty.

Scrotoplasty

A person may decide to have a scrotoplasty - the creation of a scrotum - alongside a metoidioplasty or phalloplasty.

In a scrotoplasty, a surgeon hollows out and repositions the labia majora to form a scrotum and inserts silicone testicular implants.

A person may have to stay in the hospital for a couple of days following surgery.

The recovery time from female-to-male surgery varies, depending on the type of procedure and factors such as the person's overall health and lifestyle choices.

For example, smoking slows down recovery and increases the risk of complications following surgery. If a person smokes, vapes, or uses any substance with nicotine, a medical team may consider them less eligible for this type of surgery.

Following gender-affirming surgery, most people need to stay in the hospital for at least a couple of days.

After leaving the hospital, the person needs to rest and only engage in very limited activities for about 6 weeks or longer.

Also, when a person has had a urethral extension, they need to use a catheter for 3-4 weeks.

Some complications of a metoidioplasty or phalloplasty include:

urethral fistula - a tunneled connection that forms between the urethra and another part of the body

urethral stricture - a narrowing that causes a blockage of urine flow within the urethra

A person who has had a phalloplasty may experience:

scarring in the area where the graft was taken

skin graft failure or tissue death

Risks of a scrotoplasty include rejection of the testicular implants.

All gender-affirming surgeries carry a risk of:

infection

bleeding

reactions to anesthesia

dissatisfaction with the results

A person's experience after surgery may vary, depending on the procedure they had.

A person who undergoes a metoidioplasty may have erections and enjoy more sensation in their neopenis. However, the penis will be relatively small in size.

A neopenis that results from a phalloplasty is usually larger, though it may be less sensitive. To have erections, a person will need a penile implant.

If a person has urethral extension, the goal is to be able to urinate while standing after a full recovery from the procedure. Some studies report a high number of urological complications following phalloplasties. It is important to attend regular follow-ups with a urologist.

A 2005 study of 55 people who underwent gender-affirming surgery - including 23 female-to-male participants - notes that 80% of all participants reported "improvement of their sexuality" following surgery.

Transgender men tended to report more frequent masturbation, sexual satisfaction, and sexual excitement than transgender women. They also reported reaching orgasms more easily than they had before surgery and a tendency toward "more powerful and shorter" orgasms.

Transgender men with penile implants for erections experienced pain more frequently during sex than those without implants. However, they also reported that their sexual expectations were more fully realized, compared with participants who had not received implants.

A 2018 study found that 94-100% of participants who had undergone gender-affirming surgery reported satisfaction with the surgical results, with the variance depending on the type of procedure.

The 6% of people who reported dissatisfaction or regret did so as a result of preoperative psychological symptoms or complications following the procedures.

The outlook for female-to-male surgery depends on the type of surgery, the person's health, and other factors. Most people report satisfaction following the procedure.

However, the complication rate is relatively high, especially in relation to urinary health.

Therefore, it is important to work closely with a qualified plastic surgeon, urologist, gynecologist, and mental health professional to ensure the best outcome.

It is also essential to follow recovery guidelines and attend all follow-up appointments.

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Transgender penis: How does female-to-male surgery work?

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Female-to-male surgery is a type of sex reassignment surgery, which is also called gender affirmation surgery or gender-affirming surgery. This can take different forms, including the removal of breasts - a mastectomy - and the altering of the genital region, known as "bottom" surgery.

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Tone policing is when someone tries to diminish the validity and importance of a statement by attacking the tone in which it is said and presented, instead of the message itself. This diversionary tactic is used everywhere-households, educational institutions, workplaces and most significantly in cultures of protests by people high up on the "privilege ladder". It is yet another tool used to protect privilege instead of understanding the structures of oppression that exist in our society. Naming something and knowing what it is, is the first step towards fighting it.

What Does It Sound Like?

" I wish you would say that in a nicer way."
"Your language is hateful and divisive." "This isn't the time or place for you to express your emotions." "You cannot speak to me in that tone." "You'd have a lot more people on your side if you weren't so rude."
Also read: Being An Anti-Caste Ally-5 Things To Keep In Mind

Why Is It Wrong?

The privileged like to avoid conversations that make them feel uncomfortable or ashamed. The ones who tone police like to remain oblivious and use the status quo to their advantage. Being subject to injustice is infuriating and the last thing anyone wants to hear is how their emotional response to it is wrong or could have been more nuanced. Tone policing renders a perfectly valid complaint irrational.

Someone who speaks up, requires a lot of courage to do so and usually has a deep understanding of the oppression they face. The marginalised have to suffer and are afraid to speak up because no one is ready to believe them or hear their stories. They are often labelled as uncivilised. Tone policing only further oppresses the already marginalised people.

Learn And Unlearn

The right reaction is to listen, check where and how you went wrong and do better in future. Don't be quick to condemn the anger, instead examine the root of the problem. Place your priorities on the right path. Focus should be on the issue and not the tone in which the issue is expressed.

Anger, frustration and pain are valid emotions. You are allowed to be angry and emotional when you are being mistreated. You do not owe anyone any sort of explanation and it doesn't make you unreasonable or rude.

Also read: It's Time For Queer People To Stop Policing One Another

We need to speak up, not only for ourselves but also for others. By calling out and speaking up, we make sure that the truth isn't silenced by those who are in position of power. It makes sure that we aren't being compliant in the bigotry.

References
Featured Image Source: Femmagazine

A student of Economics who can be found in streets of Delhi looking for art and good pancakes. Shambhavi hates sugar in her coffee as much as a man telling her what to do.

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Infographic: What Is Tone Policing And Why Is It Wrong?

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Tone policing is when someone tries to diminish the validity and importance of a statement by attacking the tone in which it is said and presented, instead of the message itself. This diversionary tactic is used everywhere-households, educational institutions, workplaces and most significantly in cultures of protests by people high up on the "privilege ladder".

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For parents who use donors to conceive, an unexpected challenge of the process can be explaining the situation to the child. Here, experts offer tips and provide sample scripts for talking to kids about their donors.

Four years ago, my partner and I were sitting anxiously in a fertility doctor's office. We wanted to have a child and because we're both women, we needed a sperm donor. We got undeservedly lucky: Today our son is 3 years old and the in vitro fertilization process is far behind us. But, like other parents (gay, straight, or single) we're finding that sometimes the hard part of donor conception comes after the wild journey of donor selection, countless doctor visits, and the long-awaited birth day.

Last year, the number of babies conceived through assisted reproduction technologies reached an estimated 5 million worldwide, making donor conception a mainstream medical issue. For those of us using donors to build our families, one of the most delicate issues of our parenthood is how to talk to our children about their donors. How do we weave the idea of this other person, often a stranger, into the story of their life? When's the right time to discuss it? And what, exactly, do we say? We asked for some expert advice and put together a step-by-step guide on how to talk to your child about his donor.

Start Early

Most child psychologists agree that it's never too early to tell the truth: The longer you wait, the harder the conversation will be. Some even recommend telling the story when your child is in the womb so you get used to telling it. My son started to pay attention to the story around the time he turned 3; your child may be ready earlier or later. Whenever the right time is for your family, be matter-of-fact about it; if it's not a big deal to you, it won't be to your child. Call the donor a "helper" or simply "the donor," and refer to him in positive terms without romanticizing him. If you're crafts-oriented, make a scrapbook with family photos, ultrasound pictures, and pictures from the birth. Focus on the makeup of your family, rather than the details of your child's conception. You can say, "Mommy and Mama loved each other very much and wanted to have a baby. We needed help to make a baby because we needed a part that comes from a man. This man is called a helper or a donor. He gave us sperm, which is like a little seed. The doctor put the seed in Mommy's belly. When Mommy's belly grew very big, Mommy and Mama went to the hospital and you were born. Now our family is made up of Mommy, Mama, and you."

Make the Distinction Between Donor and Parent

As your child grows, other children might ask him or her why he doesn't have a "dad" or a "mom." This is when the distinction between a parent and a donor is especially important. Madeline L. Feingold, Ph.D., a psychologist specializing in alternative family-building issues, suggests this script: "Even though we had all the ingredients to grow a family, we were missing some ingredients to make a baby. It takes three ingredients to make a baby: something called sperm, and sperm always comes from men, although not always from daddies; something called an egg, and eggs always come from women, although not always from mommies; and something called a uterus for the baby to grow in." You can add: "Not all children have a daddy or a mommy. Some children have a helper or a donor."

Talk, Talk, and Keep Talking

By the time your child learns about the birds and the bees, make sure she understands that intercourse is not the only way babies are made. If the donor isn't in your life, this might be the time to share the rest of the information you have about her. You can add to the story: "Mom and Dad had the sperm and the uterus, but we didn't have the egg to have a baby. We picked our egg donor because she wrote a very thoughtful letter about how much she wanted to help other families who could not have children by themselves. Once we had the egg, Mom and Dad went to the hospital and our doctor fertilized the egg with Dad's sperm. That created an embryo, which the doctor put into Mom's uterus. That embryo grew into a baby and you were born. Mom and I were so happy."

Acknowledge and Respect Your Child's Feelings

The donor conversation is hard for parents because we fear that our kids will be confused about their family. But "children are clear about who their parents are," Dr. Feingold says. "When parents talk to their children about their desire to build a family and about the donor in the context of family building, they provide their children with the meaning that's necessary to understand donor conception. Rather than feeling confused and frustrated, these children experience a sense of belonging. They appreciate the emotional bonds that tie them to their parents and create their family, understand their donor origins in relation to their identity, and always know they are loved and celebrated for exactly who they are." But this doesn't mean that your child won't have complex emotions about the donor. Encourage your child to talk to you about his feelings. Keep the dialogue open and be prepared to answer questions when they come up, even if it's at inconvenient times.

No matter how our families come together, we all want to raise happy, self-assured children. If you start the conversation early and keep reaffirming that all families are made by emotional rather than genetic ties, the story of the donor and the details surrounding your child's conception will be a natural part of his family's narrative.
Copyright © 2013 Meredith Corporation.

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Explaining Sperm and Egg Donors to Children

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For parents who use donors to conceive, an unexpected challenge of the process can be explaining the situation to the child. Here, experts offer tips and provide sample scripts for talking to kids about their donors. Four years ago, my partner and I were sitting anxiously in a fertility doctor's office.

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LGBTQ people are in every community, every profession and every culture -- and yet often face enormous obstacles simply because of who we are. The HRC Foundation works to build capacity and change policies, practices, hearts and minds in a range of institutions that shape our daily lives.

Learn More about the HRC Foundation

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Working across the organization and with allied groups, the team drives groundbreaking research, compelling digital campaigns and one-of-a-kind tools to deepen the public's understanding of LGBTQ people - especially the experiences of LGBTQ people with multiple marginalized identities.

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While our work is vast, we seek to make transformational change by changing policies and practices through consultation, technical assistance and training and pioneering benchmarking tools.

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The strength of the LGBTQ community is our diversity. That's why the HRC Foundation prioritizes actions that support and invest in building the capacity of community advocates both in the U.S. and around the globe, as well as creating strategic partnerships to advance meaningful change.

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Skip to Content LGBTQ people are in every community, every profession and every culture -- and yet often face enormous obstacles simply because of who we are. The HRC Foundation works to build capacity and change policies, practices, hearts and minds in a range of institutions that shape our daily lives.

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Resources and Readings

Teaching Tolerance, Best Practices for Serving LGBTQ Students, Section III: Instruction

Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

The New York Times, Girls Who Fall in Love with Each Other (1897)

Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity

Farah Jasmine Griffin, Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868

Leila J. Rupp, Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women

Susan K. Freeman Return to Episode Listing
Transcript

Leila Rupp: When I was in my 20s while married to a man, I fell in love with a woman. In the early stages, my new relationship was purely romantic. I thought about her all the time. We talked endlessly on the phone. I gave her presents. I longed to be with her. Eventually, we became lovers. The way we all understood what was going on was that I was really a lesbian and in the process of coming out, but that she was really heterosexual and had just happened to fall in love with me. In the back of my mind, I worried that our relationship might be doomed because how could she love me if she weren't really a lesbian?

And then I found an article called "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America." It was written by historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and it's now a classic. In it, she shared a correspondence between Sarah Butler Wister and Jeannie Field Musgrave, who met in school in Massachusetts in 1849. I devoured their story. Sarah kept flowers in front of Jeannie's portrait when they were in school together. The intensity of their friendship continued uninterrupted by Sarah's marriage.

At the age of 29, Sarah wrote to Jeannie, "I can give you no idea how desperately I shall want you." And after one precious visit, Jeanie poured out her love. "Dear darling Sarah, how I love you and how happy I have been, you are the joy of my life." She urged Sarah to "just fill a quarter page with caresses and expressions of endearment," and ended her letters with such expressions as "Goodbye, my dearest, dearest lover," or, "A thousand kisses. I love you with my whole soul." Jeanie finally married when she was 37, provoking anxiety on Sarah's part about the impact on their relationship, but their love lived on.

And this was only one of dozens of examples of passionate, intense, loving, physically affectionate relationships that have come to be called "romantic friendships." Smith-Rosenberg uncovered these stories in the correspondence of a wide range of white American middle-class families between the 1760s and the 1880s. What is important about these friendships is that they were widely accepted, even admired, and often lasted from adolescence through marriage and into old age. The supposedly repressive Victorian sexual system in fact allowed a great deal of latitude in moving along a spectrum of what came to be called heterosexuality and homosexuality.

These stories meant a great deal to me, but it wasn't that they made me feel all right about being a lesbian because there had been lesbians in the past, nor was it that what I was feeling was all right because it wasn't lesbian desire. Rather, it was that our modern categories of heterosexuality, homosexuality and even bisexuality were not complex enough to capture the slippery reality of love and desire. The vision of a world in which love and sexuality could have a variety of complicated relations to sexual identity made sense to me. Now, we talk about sexual fluidity, girl crushes, heteroflexibility, bi-curiosity, men who have sex with men.

But in 1975, these were not familiar concepts. The woman I fell in love with and I didn't know where we would end up. We might have stayed together. I might have stayed married and thought of myself as bisexual. She might've come out. So even though she is now married to a man and I am celebrating 40 years together with my partner, Verta, I don't take that to mean that those were the only possible outcomes. What learning about things like romantic friendships does is show how thinking about intimacy and sexuality changes over time. Expressions of love and longing that today we would label lesbian were commonplace in the past, showing students that sexuality has a history.

Understanding that girls in the 19th century might fall in love and express their love and desire openly shows students that history holds a lot of surprises, and that can help them think differently about the present they live in and the futures they will make. I'm Leila Rupp, and this is Queer America, a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. LGBTQ history has been largely neglected in the classroom, but it's necessary to give students a fuller history of the United States and to help them understand how that history shaped the society they live in.

This podcast provides a detailed look at how to incorporate important cultural touchstones, notable figures and political debates into an inclusive U.S. history curriculum. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises. Talking with students about sexual and gender identity can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can discover the history and comprehend the legacy of queer America.

In this episode, Susan Freeman will introduce us to the history of romantic friendships, same-sex relationships between women in the United States. She'll begin by telling stories of girls who fell in love, expressed their devotion to each other and maintained their love even after marrying men. She'll also provide activities for incorporating romantic friendship into your U.S. history lessons to help students understand that love has a history. Here's Susan Freeman.

Susan Freeman: Today, general public awareness of same-sex love is at an all-time high. Yet at the same time, the history of same-sex partnerships, romances and flirtations, we can feel pretty sure is not something known to most students of U.S. history. In fact, it would be reasonable for people to imagine that historically, girls' crushes on other girls, adult women forming long-term intimate relationships, that these things were invisible if they existed at all, that they were taboo, that they were unacceptable.

Historians of queer America, however, have found that same-sex couples and intense friendships between girls existed in the past, often fully within view of their neighbors, families and communities. In the 19th and early 20th century, these bonds were more likely to be seen as a curiosity than a threat. When people didn't have labels like homosexual or lesbian at their disposal, two girls falling in love didn't automatically upset the social order. Yes, people in the 1800s and 1900s spread rumors and they shared cautionary tales that suggested there were limits to acceptable same-sex or different-sex affection.

But when girls and young women fell in love with one another, their devotion often found enthusiastic expression, and some degree of community acceptance. Girls' and women's deeply passionate letters, their diaries and evidence of community acceptance in their day brings together queer history with women's history, which can inform our broader thinking about U.S. history as a whole. Educators can easily present romantic same-sex relationships as they address the changing gender norms and growing opportunities for 19th- and 20th-century women.

So maybe you've read some of the scholarship on LGBTQ history, and if so, you'll probably know that historians tend to argue that queer history is not a straightforward march of progress toward greater liberation, knowledge, and better understanding of sexual and gender minorities. Anyone aware of current events can readily grasp this. So on the one hand, yes, the Supreme Court recently legalized same-sex marriage in the United States, and this was the culmination of generations of activists clamoring to change the second-class citizenship of gay men and lesbians.

But of course right now, many in the queer and trans communities are not terribly secure. The backlash of the past few years reveals that a great number of politically powerful people retain disdain and disgust for queer people, our loves and our families-or at least they're comfortable with being perceived that way. One of the first historians to write on the subject was Carroll Smith- Rosenberg. In her 1975 article she situated same-sex love between women in what she called "The Female World of Love and Ritual." This was the domestic, educational and institutional settings where it was gender appropriate for women to spend the bulk of their time with each other and to express deep care and affection for other women.

Bear in mind now that for most of the 1800s, the concepts that came out of medicine and sexology like inversion and perversion did not exist. At the turn of the 20th century, a new professional literature was proposing a vocabulary and understanding of sexuality in these terms, but the larger public remained oblivious to this emerging system of classification. Women's love and affection for other women in the 1800s was ubiquitous and openly expressed. Whether it was chaste or not is a question we'll come back to. Closeness between women who tended to one another's emotional and physical well-being was central to 19th-century gender scripts.

Embracing and empowering women was a norm for women no matter their sexual proclivities. Remember that 19th-century social life included very little unsupervised time for hetero-social or mixed-sex socializing outside the family unit. Heterosexual mingling opportunities for young people would develop more robustly with the commercialized spaces that arose in the early 20th century, places like dance halls, amusement parks and nickelodeons, but the 19th century was by contrast, a much more homo-social time; and this extended to men as well as women.

Here, my focus is on women's relationships. Nineteenth-century men's romance with other men took a different shape and the patriarchal pass, and if you'd like to explore this topic, see Jonathan Ned Katz's fabulous book, Love Stories. Perhaps you already teach about the gender divisions built into the notion of separate spheres, an ideology that arose in the Industrial era. Separate spheres supposed that men belonged in the world of the public: politics, commerce and so on, and women by contrast were relegated to the realm of hearth and home. Smith-Rosenberg's discovery of women's romantic friendships naturally arose in this female world.

Heartfelt and emotionally expressive love letters between women, diaries and other primary documents revealed the norms of literate women, particularly white, privileged women living in the Northeast. Thanks to the survival of documents and letters, at least the ones that didn't get destroyed by the women themselves or their relatives, we have a glimpse into the sentiments and conventions of women's passionate communication with other women. What they teach us is the substance of women's emotional lives: they allude to painful separations, fond memories and hoped-for reunions.

By looking at such primary sources, we can teach our students to think critically about possibilities for same-sex love in the past. Helena and Molly, for example, kept up a correspondence after they met as schoolgirls in New York City in 1868. In a typical letter written during the intense phase of their romantic friendship, Molly wrote, "I have not said to you in so many or so few words that I was happy with you during those few, so incredibly short weeks, but surely, you do not need words to tell you what you must know. Those two or three days so dark without, so bright with firelight and contentment within. I shall always remember as proof that, for a time at least, I fancy for quite a long time, we might be sufficient for each other.

"We know that we can amuse each other for many idle hours together, and now we know we can also work together." The pair continued writing into adulthood. On the verge of Helena's marriage to a man in 1873, Molly sent a congratulatory note to Helena's husband-to-be, which included the following passage, "Do you know sir, that until you came along I believe that she loved me almost as girls love their lovers. I know I loved her so, don't you wonder that I can stand the sight of you." The bond between Helena and Molly illustrates 19th-century romantic friendships.

Within this category of romantic friendships, historians include intense and youthful schoolgirl crushes like Helena and Molly's, adult longing some women express for female lovers, whether singular or plural, and finally women who opted out of marriage to a man, but embraced the so-called Boston marriage, cohabiting and building a life together with a beloved female partner. It's important to keep in mind that women's romantic love for other women in the past cannot easily or neatly be mapped onto our modern categories of sexual identity. For example, we might be tempted to apply a term like bisexual to women like Helena and Molly, but this is decidedly not a concept in circulation at their time. No one would call themselves bisexual.

But, they seemed to be attracted to, or at least engaged in romantic relationships with both sexes, right? Share with your students why we as historians hesitate to adopt such labels. For one, the thrills, heartbreak or contentment these women experienced in relation to other women in their day did not set them apart from their peers as a particular type. They weren't separated as "others" in relation to heterosexual peers because heterosexual was also not a concept at the time. The modern classifications of heterosexual and homosexual and even bisexual belong to a later age.

Sexual orientation simply wasn't a thing. If you were a girl or a woman who loved another girl or a woman, you didn't have to be any particular kind of person. You might be labeled odd, eccentric or somehow different; people might whisper about you, but you would not be slapped with a label like "sexual deviant." And so, what to say in response to a point-blank question: Were Helena and Molly gay? As a teacher, you can confidently stress that same-sex desire and gender-transgressive behavior in the past is not disputed. Historians have found it everywhere across vast swaths of time all around the globe.

But were people pursuing same-sex attractions equivalent to gay people today? This is a question of terminology and methodology that can help cultivate students' ability to think historically. As an analogy, consider "teenagers." This is a term that emerges in the 20th century and it has connotations beyond just a number that ends in the suffix "teen." Teenagers of the 20th century are a peer group positioned between childhood and adulthood and they develop a particular kind of culture that arises within compulsory schooling and age-segregated classes, the growth of mass media, and a certain set of consumer-mediated rituals and rites of passage.

Did teenagers exist before the 1940s? In the most literal sense, people in their teens? Yes. But, if we take a 14-year-old enslaved youth, a 16-year-old girl sewing in her family workshop, or, say, someone like Pocahontas, the 17-year-old bride of John Rolfe. These people were in their teens, but they weren't teenagers in the sense of teens that we come to associate with a post-World War Two youth culture. So teenage, bisexual, gay-our present-day vocabulary risks distorting the past. Even though the terms may have simple, agreed-upon dictionary definitions, they're not terribly portable across time.

The desire to classify people by sexual identity markers anyway is a modern compulsion that Molly and Helena and their contemporaries on the whole did not possess. In this way, looking at past love between women, we can appreciate better that the sex and gender of who you love has not always defined who you are. If it hasn't always been this way, if it isn't this way in every place in time, the task of defining and categorizing sexualities can be recognized for what it is: a project that developed at a particular time of social upheaval and intended to separate the "normal" from the "abnormal" as defined by people in power, the not surprisingly self-appointed "normals."

Equally important, stories of same-sex love in the past show how attitudes and stigma can and do shift over time. This knowledge is deeply empowering to those of us on the margins. Our marginalization is not a God-given inevitability. It's not evidence of innate inferiority, and it's not the way things have always been for time immemorial. Our marginalization rather is a result of human or manmade power arrangements. Every day now, it seems like we encounter a new barrage of news about openly expressed racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-queer bigotry.

In this context, history is an important tool for our educational system and for the pursuit of social justice. We must teach our students to question false narratives about the past that legitimates systems of exploitation and exclusion as the proper order of things. Beyond that, we can equip our students to envision and create families, communities and a broader society that respects the dignity of queer people and others who've been persecuted for their difference. Consider, for example, the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, which draws on the excellent book, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America by the author Rachel Hope Cleves.

Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake were two middle-class white ladies who met in 1807 and became a couple for life. In the book, Cleaves details Charity's backstory, which includes numerous affairs with other young women in her youth. She was very active in pursuing girls' attention by sending and receiving expressive and affectionate poems and notes, some of which looked back longingly on physical intimacy shared in bed. Charity also boldly moved out of her parents' home in her early 20s to escape from domestic drudgery. Ultimately, Charity met and became Sylvia's life partner.

She referred to Sylvia as her helpmate, which is a biblically derived synonym for wife. Sylvia enthusiastically adopted this role, and from the time they met until Charity-who was older by seven years-died in 1851, the two were inseparable. For four decades, they shared a home and a bed, and ultimately their bodies were united in one burial plot adorned with a single headstone purchased by surviving members of Sylvia's family. A couple of women, essentially married women, accepted and integrated into the community in the 1800s? It wasn't like that from the outset.

At first, they had to have the story of going into business together. They took in tailoring as the ostensible reason to set up a house independent of their families. But economic independence was a choice to enable the continued avoidance of heterosexual marriage and to live together. It wasn't the work that drew them together, and also not all was harmonious at the start. Sylvia's mother is one example-stubbornly disapproved of them as a couple. Yet she continued to visit and stay for weeks and months at a time throughout the early years of Charity and Sylvia's life together.

What do we make of the fact that theirs was an intimate and sexual relationship? Cleaves argues that it was an open secret, not unknown, but not openly discussed. As they aged, the couple was increasingly integrated within their Vermont community's family, social and religious lives. They were widely referred to throughout the community as "Aunt Charity" and "Aunt Sylvia." An actual nephew of Charity's, the poet William Cullen Bryant, wrote with reverence about the couple in the 1840s. He paid homage to the "union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, which subsisted in uninterrupted harmony for 40 years during which they slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each other's relations."

Charity and Sylvia's remarkably enduring commitment to one another invites us to reconsider some myths about the way things are today as being new and advanced and different from the past. First, we may have an assumption, for instance, that same-sex marriage and same-sex unions are a brand-new phenomenon. We associate them with marriage equality or the rise of gay movements in the late part of the 20th century. However, what we learned from Sylvia and Charity's relationship and others like theirs is that they don't depend on legal approval or well-developed social movement campaigns or the formation of urban gay subcultures.

A pre-industrial small town like Weybridge, Vermont, was able to make space for Charity and Sylvia to cohabit and build a life together as partners. And a second myth that we might reconsider: Same-sex relationships have not always been relegated to the margins of society, nor did they evoke universal disapproval and shame. Charity and Sylvia were not pariahs. Sylvia and Charity's joyful union was recognized and ultimately accepted. That's not to say that their love didn't attract gossip or cause some inner turmoil.

Sylvia in particular wrote about struggling with her sinfulness, but she seemed to believe in God's ultimate forgiveness at the end of the day. The story of Charity and Sylvia leads us to some overarching questions that we might want to address with students while we're exploring women's love for women in the past. First, how thinkable or unthinkable was it for girls to fall in love with one another, or for women to become each other's intimate partners, girlfriends, lovers or spouses?

Was it universally frowned on, as we might assume? Second, what meanings did individuals in their communities make of schoolgirl crushes and long-term committed couples? And then what do their relationships teach us about opportunities and constraints that women faced in U.S. history? Likewise, how does gender, class, race and region effect the ability women had to prioritize a same-sex relationship. And beyond that, what relationship is there to women's economic independence, their capacity to pursue a career, or perhaps engage in public service or political activism?

Third and finally, we can address questions about the significance of gender within same-sex marriage. It can get a little complicated because gender normally connotes men and women, also masculine and feminine. But in some regards, their gender was in question, and of course this is easy for your students to see because women were supposed to pair with men in a heterosexual world. Choosing not to pair with a man kind of raised suspicion about what kind of woman you were. So, you can explore with your students, did rejecting male suitors and opting out of patriarchal marriage always go hand in hand with falling in love with women? And how was two women's femininity or perhaps masculinity perceived within the relationship and also by people outside the relationship?

And this ties into an enduring question that your students may bring to the class. Is one partner supposed to be the man and the other one supposed to be the woman in a same-sex relationship? Where does this idea come from? Why do people think this way?

Leila Rupp: We're listening to Susan Freeman discuss romantic friendships and the history of same-sex relationships between women and girls in the United States. This is Queer America. I'm your host, Leila Rupp. While we're busy launching this podcast, another Teaching Tolerance podcast is wrapping up its first amazing season. Hosted by Hasan Kwame Jeffries, it's a detailed look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. You can find our sister podcast, Teaching Hard History: American Slavery in iTunes, or visit tolerance.org/podcasts. Once again, here's Susan Freeman.

Susan Freeman: To get into the richness and diversity of women's relationships in the past, I'm going to talk about two major categories from the historical literature. First, as we've been discussing, is romantic friendships. This includes schoolgirl crushes-young women's affectionate and sometimes erotic connections with other women. Second, I'll address Boston marriages. If romantic friendships especially took root in all girls' environments like boarding schools, the Boston marriage involved adult women couples.

These were women who formed households and lifelong or multi-decades-long companionships. With Boston marriages, we find adult women cohabiting and throwing off certain gender restrictions that had constrained many of their mothers and grandmothers. But not always-with a nod to Charity and Sylvia-their aunts. Smashing, raving, mashing and chumming were among popular terms to describe girls' attraction to one another in the 19th century, so maybe the general idea here is a crush, but these were particular terms that came into usage in different school contexts where girls would describe same-sex love and attraction.

So as an opener to discussing this topic-smashing girls-with your students, you might ask them to share some of the words they use when they are attracted to someone or when they're interested in forming a relationship with somebody. The nuances are likely to be pretty important to them. I recall in middle school needing to clarify to my parents that people my age did not "go steady"-that was some old-fashioned term. Instead, they would "go with" somebody. So you might pose your students the question, "Do you have a sweetheart?" Or "Are you courting so and so?" And these kinds of questions are likely to make them laugh. And levity, perhaps some ribbing, about how nobody calls it that.

Generational conflicts about how to name behavior and how to talk about forming relationships are not new, and historical sources can shed light on an adult point of view. We can think of these sources as prescriptive literature, cautioning young people and their parents about signs that they find concerning. In 1897, the New York Times magazine published an article about the danger of girls' love for their peers. And this article can transport your students into a different era's vocabulary and stereotypes related to girls' behavior and their loving relationships with one another.

So from October 1897, "Girls Who Fall in Love with Each Other" appears in the New York Times' illustrated weekly magazine:

"It may not be known to many readers, and especially those to whom the inner life of a girls' boarding school is a sealed book, that at the present moment, there are hundreds and indeed thousands of cases of two girls who genuinely 'love' one another, or at any rate act as if they do and believe that they do. This 'love' is so far as its signs and symptoms go, as fervid and soul stirring as the love between the normal lad and lass. It is characterized by similar jealousies and heart burnings, and is of equal, if not greater intensity.

"In one respect, these irregular love affairs differ from the normal ones. It is almost always the case that the love on one side is much more demonstrative and passionate than the other. That is to say the 'lovers' seem always to remain at the wooing stage-the one being coy, standoffish or cold, while the other is ardent, aggressive almost, and intensely jealous. The type of girl who 'falls in love' with one of her own sex is not usually difficult to recognize. She is highly nervous or highly strung as it is called, and is characterized by weakness of the emotions, hysteria and morbidity.

"She is generally extremely diffident in the presence of those of the opposite sex, to whom she is an object of little to no interest, particularly perhaps as she is usually plain in face and awkward and clumsy in carriage. She affects the weaker and more emotional of our poets and novelists and is seldom quite robust in health or active in outdoor sports. The girl for whom she develops the tender passion is nearly always older than herself, often considerably so. It having been noticed that the governesses in schools are often marked out for adoration by these girls who love girls.

"The wooed one is somewhat of the same type, but her greater age and often greater self-respect prevent her from manifesting her feelings in quite so marked a manner as her more juvenile wooer. I have recently read some of the letters written by one girl to another, which are for all the world cast in the same mold as are the passionate and often senseless epistles which are read to their huge amusement of jury and spectators alike on occasion of breach-of-promise trials. 'My dearest,' one runs, 'I lay awake thinking of you and you alone nearly all last night. I wonder if you were thinking of me. I do wish I was certain that you loved me as I love you.' And so on ad nauseam.

"The other letters are really all on a par and it would be uninteresting to quote from them. But it is not in letters alone that these extraordinary weak-minded, foolish, hysterical girls reveal their maudlin 'love.' An acquaintance of mine who is a governess in a girls' boarding school overheard the following sensible dialogue between two girls, age respectively, 15 and 17. Younger girl, 'Oh, Katie, I wish you knew how I adore you. I love you better than anyone in the whole world.' Elder girl, 'Hush, Lucy, dear. Think of your mother.' There is no exaggeration in this picture of girl lovers. Every boarding school furnishes examples of this morbid and abnormal affection.

"And although the normal, healthy-minded tennis-playing, cycling, athletic, studious or domesticated girl would shudder at the bare idea of such foolishness, there are many and many girls who possess none of these steadying and physical and mentally strengthening attributes. These usually become the typical, confirmed old maid whose affection is ultimately bestowed upon a favorite cat or an overfed dog, which she probably adores in much the same way as she loved her school companion in her younger days."
So you might use this article with your students, perhaps having them read out passages aloud to one another or printing and having them look at it together. And then come up with some questions for your students to consider, and I have three suggestions here.

You might start with asking the question, why would such a story appear in a reputable publication? We don't know if there was a precipitating event, we also don't know if the idea for the story came from the author or from the editor. You can allow a little speculation from your students so they can assess and kind of reinforce their grasp of gender politics of the day. Is the writer a woman? Is she a mother or a school teacher or a journalist? Where does her authority come from? And is there any reason to think perhaps that it's a man?

Next question you might pose to your students, not only why did the story appear in the first place, but why are girls' crushes on other girls newsworthy? Perhaps the author is just trying to inform the public of a phenomenon they don't think people will know about because they're not privy to the "inner life" of a girls' boarding school. And even though the article was full of stereotypes, you may agree with me that it doesn't have a particularly voyeuristic or strongly punitive tone. Still, you might invite your students to discuss its mixed messages. By the conclusion, the explicit lesson seems to be that excessive girl-girl love can lead one to an unhappy life as a spinster, and that discouragement-"Think of your mother"-is warranted. But another read could be, hey, some girls fall in love with their girlfriends. Some women choose not to get married to men and though not everybody would prefer it that way, that's the world we live in-perhaps especially, in the United States where, at least in theory, we value individuals' pursuit of life, liberty and happiness on their own terms. For some people, that involves a same-sex relationship.

And then a third question you might have your students consider: how the author's uneasiness about girls loving girls relates to what's happening as gender expectations shift from the Victorian age to the Progressive era.

The most notable change is the rate at which college-educated women between the 1870s and the 1920s never married. About half of women who graduated from college at the turn of the 20th century chose not to marry compared to about 10 percent of women overall during that time period. So this was a disturbing trend to many observers; there was a lot of advice offered from different quarters about how to address the social unease around women's rejection of marriage. Yet, as beneficiaries of higher education, women-especially professional women-themselves weren't likely to call for an end to women's higher education in order to preserve the institution of marriage.

Perhaps this writer's seeking to find a way to guide girls back toward thinking about heterosexual marriage as a viable life plan alongside an education. To the author, perhaps the danger's not girls going on to get education, but instead these "irregular"-as she calls them-affections in girlhood, that girls are showing very gendered kinds of mental health disturbances, labeled nervousness or hysteria, and also perhaps too little effort to disguise one's unfeminine or unattractive appearance. So we could imagine that this author is perhaps suggesting a way that girls can pursue an education, but also maintain their attractiveness to men, maintain an interest in the traditional ways of courtship and pursue husbands, motherhood and parenting in a way that would preserve the social order.

Were you or any of your students surprised that the author emphasized physical fitness? You can place this in the context of the new woman of the turn of the 20th century. Not only was she educated, she was also physically active. The author seems to be celebrating these young women who were "quite robust in health," as she puts it, active in outdoor sports. And so rather than being worried about sporty tomboys who maybe are not going to fall for men and going to turn toward women with their affections, the stereotype that's pretty common still today, instead the author seems to find that bookish or physically weak or moody girls are the ones that we should be concerned about.

You might engage your students in dialogue about how shifting boundaries and ideas about what's "appropriate girl behavior" and what's "appropriate boy behavior" might not look the same over different time periods. This can be especially helpful to students whose parents discourage their interests in cross-gender activities, and maybe these are kids who get in trouble at home or perhaps they get policed by their peer groups for being too girly or not girly enough-with terms like homo, fag, gay being thrown around-in order to punish gender nonconformity.

In a history class, examining how stereotypes and gender ideals change over time can be instructive and reassuring, and not just to queer students, but also straight kids, not just to transgender students, but also cisgender people, because our stereotypes and distortions around gender and the relationship between gender and sexuality is very confusing, and policing of gender happens with all populations. You could also explore with your students depending on the parameters of your class, the case of Alice Mitchell, who murdered her beloved Freda Ward in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892. There was a big court case and trial that was widely publicized that followed, telling the story of 19- year-old Alice Mitchell and 17-year-old Freda Ward, who had fallen in love, made plans to elope and live as a married couple, but when Freda backed out, Alice murdered her.

There's a great book on this topic by Lisa Duggan, the title Sapphic Slashers. And this book gives you more details, including primary documents, evidence from the court cases, written testimony of friends. And she analyzes the case with some historical topics that may be already on your course agenda-things like the rise of the mass media and sensationalism in news reporting, as well as the racialized and sexualized discourses of lynching. Now that we've entertained a contemporary adult take on smashing girls or girls who love girls, let's hear from some of the young women themselves. I'm drawing here on collected letters of African-American correspondents named Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus.

Their letters are collected in a volume that's edited by Farah Jasmine Griffin called Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends. If your students have already been introduced to Charity and Sylvia, you can point out a number of common characteristics between them as well as the most obvious contrast-that Charity and Sylvia were white, and Addie and Rebecca were black. All four were literate young women living in the 19th century. Rebecca and Charity both had a vocation as school teachers and Sylvia and Addie both came from slightly more modest backgrounds, but the class contrast was actually greater between Rebecca and Addie: Addie lacked formal education and worked as a domestic servant.

There's also a time and location difference. Although both situated in the Northeast, Charity and Sylvia grew up in the wake of the American Revolution and they were in a small Vermont town of about 750 residents. By contrast, Rebecca and Addie-their correspondence dates to the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and they lived in Northern black communities. Hartford is the hometown of Rebecca and where much of the correspondence was received. It was a thriving urban area where black residents-even though they only made up about 2 percent of the city's population in 1860-numbered 700, was practically the size of the town that Charity and Sylvia lived in, the black community of Hartford.

I'll read several excerpts from some of their correspondence and again, you can find these printed in Farah Jasmine Griffin's book, Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends. The full correspondence engages a variety of themes including racial uplift, what's going on in their families and communities, events, what books they've been reading as well as ardent expression of Addie's affection for Rebecca. I'm going to read some excerpts from the letters and then I'll follow with some questions that guide you to engage students with broader queer American history themes within the letters. Our first preserved letter-it's one of the earliest-comes from August of 1859. Addie is writing to Rebecca from a town about 30 miles outside Hartford, and she references in her letter a recent visit from Rebecca. She also makes mention of her employer, Mr. James, who seems to have been pursuing Addie. And you might discuss with your students that sexual harassment was not uncommon experience for women working in domestic service.

So Addie's writing to Rebecca:

"My ever dear friend, I no doubt you will be surprised to receive a letter so soon. I think it will be received with just as much pleasure this week as you will next. My dearest, dearest, Rebecca, my heart is almost broke. I don't know that I ever spent such hours as I have my loving friend, it goes harder with me now than it ever did. I am more acquainted with you, it would seem to me this very moment, if I only had the wings of a dove, I would not remain long in Waterbury, although we can't always be together. Oh, it is hard. Oh dear, I'm so lonesome, I barely know how to contain myself.

"If I was only near you and having one of those sweet kisses. Man appoint and God disappoints. There's not much news here worthy to attention. There's going to be a picnic tomorrow, the children's Temperance Jubilee, the Hand of Hope will be celebrated too. It'll be a grand affair. Mister Pete Saint Claire, the well-known apostle of Temperance, will be addressing the gathering. I suppose it is quite gay in Hartford. Oh, my dear friend, how I did miss you last night. I did not have anyone to hug me and to kiss. Rebecca, don't you think I am very foolish? I don't want anyone to kiss me.

"Now, I turned Mr. James away this morning. No kiss is like yours. You were the first girl that I ever love, so it you are the last one. Dear Rebecca, don't say anything against me loving you so, for I mean just what I say. Oh, Rebecca, it seem I can see you now, casting those loving eyes at me. If you was a man, what would things come to? They would after, come to something very quick. What do you think the matter? Don't laugh at me. I must say, I don't know that I ever enjoyed myself any better than I did when I was at your parents' house. I was treated so rich by all the family, I hope I may have the extreme pleasure of returning the same pleasure to you all.

"Each will remember the visit. As for yourself, dear, there is no one like her, if you was to travel all over the United States. Affectionate friend, Addie. P.S. Give my love to all the family and kiss also to your mother, Addie. Please write soon."

Leila Rupp: This is Queer America, and I'm your host, Leila Rupp. You can learn even more about romantic friendships and Boston marriages in a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History. This podcast is produced in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Press, publishers of this anthology, which I edited with Susan K. Freeman. It's the first book designed for high school and university teachers who want to integrate queer history into their standard curriculum. From now until the end of the year, the University of Wisconsin Press is offering a 30 percent discount for Queer America listeners who order this collection.

You'll find a link to purchase the book at tolerance.org/podcasts. Just use the promotional code QA PODCAST, all caps. Again, here's Susan Freeman.

Susan Freeman: "When we are together, our moments are limited. I do not know why it's so, although one comfort I have, is a day coming, there will be no parting. It is very gloomy here. If I was only near you now, I'd rather have my head on your lap than pencil these few lines to you. I'm going to be laid down now. Goodbye until you hear from me again. Yours forever until death parts us, Addie. P.S. Accept a secret kiss, I will imprint on here, so you look good. You may perchance find it, Addie." And then she continues, "I was even so foolish to expect you last evening, but all was in vain, every footstep I heard, thinking it was my loving Rebecca, few days past my love, been toward you more than I can express."

"Dear Rebecca, one thing I am going to say is this: whenever you want me to come down and stay all night, you must tell me. No more until we meet. From your ever dear and loving, Addie. One sweat kiss from your sweat lips." Eighteen sixty-one, the Civil War has begun and Addie relocated to New York City. She was working in the home of a black family as a domestic and caregiver for the couple's nine children. She also helped with sewing, taking in and the family had boarders living there as well.

This was an environment of economic insecurity, irregular paychecks and chaos with so many people living in the same space. Addie, at the time, was 20, Rebecca 25. Addie talks about her suitors and prospects for marriage directly. She asks for Rebecca's understanding in this letter that's sent from New York on February 23rd, 1862. "Darling, my own dear friend. I have again perused your sweet and affectionate epistle. It seems to me that you made every nerve vibrate in me. I could not express the feeling, you spoke of my unexpected visit last Friday, my darling, I don't. That purposely, I must say, I was highly paid for doing so.

"You spoke of enjoying my society, any length of time, all gone. I don't agree with you there, for if I live long enough, I expect many, many hour with you and alone. Loved one, I want to ask you one question that is: will you not look at my marrying in a different light than you do love me, my darling? I'm here with mother. Perhaps I see you about three time in a year, happy, more time unhappy. I will get my money regular for two or three week and then irregular. What would you rather see me do? Have one that truly love me, that would give me and/or give him up and remain in this home? Or could live with you and either be you parts of the day. I would never, Rebecca, do not feel thus, perhaps it may all be for the best.

"Now, think it over, and tell me whether you agree with me or not. Now, my dearest, I will bring the subject to a close." And finally, after some other paragraphs, she signs off, "Will you my love, give my love to your mother and the rest of the family. Accept a sweet kiss from you. Ever dear and devoted, Addie. Ps, my dearest, I feel this moment if I could throw my arm around your neck and lay until my soul was in heaven, Addie."

In 1862, both Rebecca and Addie are again living in Hartford. There's a gap of letters at this time period, probably because they were living in the same town and then there's even a period of a year where we don't have any letters about their relationship at all.

This letter, in January 1864, Addie is writing to Rebecca and it appears that Rebecca has experienced some kind of pain or difficulty and we don't know what that's about. Also, you'll hear that they use nicknames for each other, perhaps terms of endearment. Again, unclear where these come from. Addie refers to Rebecca as Stella and signs the letter from Athena. "My truly love sister, although it's but a few moments since I have left you, I thought while you were discharging your duty, I will pencil a few thoughts to thee. No doubt you would like to know how I got home. Nicely. That loving embrace kept my spirits up until I reach home. I spent a very pleasant day.

"Dear Stella, you don't know how bad I felt to see you in so much pain and to think I could not do anything to help. Oh, my darling, don't eat any more sweet effect for they do not agree with you. I know that I love you, I never could feel as I did. My sympathize was so great that I had straight pain. I often heard, but I would not believe them, I know by experience. Dear Stella, do you ever think of our visit last summer? I do very often. Sometime, I think it's all of dreams. What happy days those was. Will they ever come again? Oh, don't say no. I live in hopes that we'll be together, nothing will separate us, but death.

"While sitting on your lap, I had a very thrilling sensation pass through me today. Did the same occur to you? I ask, you would not tell me. Sister, why will you prefer darkness sometime instead of light? I suppose you wonder what I mean. Well, I will tell you. All day, I have trying to have you tell me something that you would not until you sleep with me. Why can't you make up that with me? Don't you think we can love each other the same? You know my dear, just what I mean. Come, let us try. Oh dear, here come somebody to disturb me." She continues, "I am sorry that I can't have you to sleep with me tonight. Perhaps it's all for the best. Now, my darling sister, I must leave you a little while. It's 9:00 a.m. I guess you were thinking about letting your school out. I hope you will not. I hope you will have a pleasant night rest. Accept a kiss goodnight. Your sister, Athena.

"To Stella," she closes with a poem. "I will never forget thee darling though thou art far from me. I'm ever of thee thinking my heart belongs to thee. Of thee by day, I ponder; of thee by night, I dream. This world without thee darling, a lonely place would seem."

Their correspondence continues until February of 1868. If you want to take a look at the later correspondence in Griffin's book, you can find letters suggesting that Addie's been flirting with some other girls and accepting their affectionate attentions. That April, you'll also learn that Addie's engaged to and marries a male suitor. And sadly, Addie dies two years later at age 28 from tuberculosis.

Some questions and activities that you can use with your students. First, you could try to link the letters to the New York Times piece about girls who fall in love with girls. When the story appeared in the 1890s, Rebecca would have still been alive in her 60s, but the New York Times article was undoubtedly written by a white author with white girls and white readers in mind. So you can consider with your students: Do any of the warnings that the author offered seem applicable to Addie's and Rebecca's love? What doesn't apply or what might have changed between the 1860s and 1890s? And as a point of similarity, you can note that Addie is the younger and seemingly more assertive of the pair, and that fits the age profile that was described by the New York Times author.

It's also true that Addie is the one to marry first, in her early 20s, and Primus marries later in her 30s. And actually, neither one of them ends up as an old maid. You could see what else your students notice as similarities or differences about the patterns of girls' romantic love toward other girls. The second thing you could do, especially if you've introduced them to Charity and Sylvia, is have them consider the similarities and differences between Charity and Sylvia's relationship, and Rebecca and Addie's relationship. And, of course, one of the main commonalities is that writing was a really important way for them to express their affection toward one another, especially when they're living apart, and that their ability to connect with other women was enhanced by literacy.

They also were readers who read books about women's friendships and romantic love and they use similar language and communicating thoughts with terms of endearment and feelings of loss and separation when they were apart. It's also interesting that in both cases we have more evidence from one writer than the other. In the case of Addie and Rebecca, we only have Addie's side of the correspondence. And Charity and Sylvia were both writers, but we have much more evidence that comes from Charity's pen. In terms of dissimilarity, we can find that Charity and Sylvia, for example, completely opted out of marriage, whereas Addie and Rebecca did find husbands, ultimately.

Also, you can see that Charity, who was older, was clearly a pursuer in the Charity and Sylvia relationship. She was also the more husband-like in their relationship-she was older and more economically privileged. And then you see a little bit of a contrast between Rebecca and Addie. Rebecca had more social and economic power, being from a relatively privileged free black family. She was older but seems not to have adopted the masculine prerogatives in relation to Addie. Rebecca, I may not have mentioned, was working in a Reconstruction era-school in the South, in Maryland, and so in this way, she was similar to Charity, who also sought out school teaching as a path toward independence. But in Rebecca's case, she was also participating in a tradition within her family: a gender-appropriate way to continue the legacy of racial uplift.

Another thing you can point out as a contrast is that Charity and Sylvia, very early in their relationship, determined to be exclusive partners to one another, whereas in couples like Addie and Rebecca, they didn't rule out marrying, and that was pretty typical of romantic friendships. This is a phenomenon that's been identified from the earliest scholarship, "The Female World of Love and Ritual" in 1975 by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and many other historians, including Leila Rupp, our podcast host and author of many books, including Sapphistries: A Global History of [Same-Sex] Love between Women, as well as Lillian Faderman, whose work we'll be addressing later in the podcast.

Yet another activity you could do with your students is to have them examine the text of the letters. If you want to print them out, you can get copies from Griffin's book. Again, the title is Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends. And then with the text in hand, invite the students to notice the terms of endearment, words that are used, whether they're repeated or capitalized or underlined. Also, what words seemed to be missing? There's an occasional question mark too where the interpretation of the handwriting might be in question. For teachers of literature, there's a whole lot you could do with the letters between Rebecca and Addie. You could also have them look at Charity and Sylvia's correspondence and writing.

There's lots of examples of that, again, in Rachel Hope Cleves' book by the title Charity and Sylvia. If you're teaching in a literary context, you could use these texts. Another option would be to use the letters and poems of Emily Dickinson to Sue Gilbert, her sister-in-law, to whom she wrote romantic poetry. The texts that Dickinson wrote, poems and letters, are of a similar vintage and intensity to those of Charity and Sylvia, and Rebecca and Addie. With your students, you could explore the language, the ways they might use euphemism for sex or other kinds of erotic exchanges, their allusions to religion, to landscape, to other literature and so on.

It could make for a rich conversation about what are the conventions of love poetry written from women to women as compared to the correspondence and poetry between men and women. And ask your students to think about what feelings that are expressed in the letters and poems-how do they adhere to the gendered expectations of the era and how do they maybe contradict what women are supposed to like, think and do? Should we avoid using our 21st- century terms, words like lesbian, bisexual, et cetera, to define lady lovers of the past? I think we should. Still, what we can do is apply these insights about the past to how we think about the present.

With Rebecca and Addie, historians have good reason to conclude that the relationship was mutually romantic, but questions about the sexual nature of women's friendships are tough to unravel. The evidence is sometimes ambiguous. Here you can capture your students' attention by having them think about not just the artifacts of the past, but those from their own time, asking them to think about and consider how revealing it is to encounter, say, a collection of text messages, a sequence of Snapchats, a certain picture on a website. Do these artifacts reveal truths? Ask them, when historians look back to today, what sense will they make of relationships, sexuality, identities? Are these a more reliable source or would you rather see reflections on one's past- your youthful attractions, relationships, flirtations and so on-from the point of view of adulthood?

Students will have many opinions, and the subjective nature of our emotions and relationships makes this subject quite an uncertain one, especially when we're looking in on relationships from the outside. However, these uncertainties are not a problem. For one, they keep historians in business as we evaluate and re-evaluate evidence and claims drawn from original source material. As we try to make sense of stories from the past, most queer historians are just not to assume that same-sex relationships were identical counterparts of today's LGBTQ relationships. By the same token, we also need to guard against the erasure of queer lives, the presumption that everyone in the past is straight and the myth that same-sex desire was unthinkable and unexpressed in supposedly less enlightened and more restrictive time.

Leila Rupp: Susan Freeman is an associate professor and chair of Gender and Women's Studies at Western Michigan University. She and I co-edited the anthology that is the basis of this podcast. And this episode is inspired by a chapter on romantic friendship by Dáša Frančhiková. Susan is the author of Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education Before the 1960s. Her current research examines the development of gay and lesbian studies classes beginning in 1969. In our next episode, Dr. Freeman will continue this exploration of romantic friendships in U.S. history, focusing on often-public relationships between women that came to be called "Boston marriages," so be sure to listen.

Queer America is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Press. They're the publisher of the award-winning anthology, Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History. In each episode, we're featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. Use the code QA PODCAST, all caps, to get a 30 percent discount when you purchase the book through tolerance.org/podcasts.

You'll also find additional tools, including resources we've mentioned, episode transcripts and an LGBTQ Best Practices guide to help your school create an inclusive curriculum and an open and respectful climate for dialogue among students and staff. Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can also find those online at tolerance.org. Thanks to Dr. Freeman for sharing her insights with us.

This podcast was produced by Shea Shackelford, with production assistance from Russell Gragg. Kate Shuster is our project manager. Music in this episode is by Chris Zabriskie. So, what did you think? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter, review us in iTunes, and please tell your friends and colleagues about this podcast. I'm Dr. Leila J. Rupp, professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and your host for Queer America.
Back to Queer America

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Episode 4 We're passing love notes across time. Historian Susan K. Freeman takes a deep dive into the history of women who loved women-and offers ways for educators to connect love letters to lessons on culture, women's rights movements and literary themes.

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Join The History Project for an LGBTQ+ be-in with self-guided tours and historical reenactments. BYOP (Bring your own picnic!)

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'I Just Feel Like Myself': A Nonbinary Child And Their Family Explore Identity

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It's 7:30 a.m. on a school day. Two parents are racing to get their three young children dressed, fed, packed for the day, into coats and out the door when 6-year-old Hallel runs downstairs, crying. Ari, Hallel's father, is the first to intercept the distraught child and ask "what's wrong?"

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This mini-episode contains: One VERY excited little girl awaiting Santa, news of the big changes coming to our lives, my plans for the future of this podcast, and... a miracle!

Dee Yan-Key, "Santa on Tour" (licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Borrtex, "Buying Presents" (licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0)

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How to Be a Girl is an audio podcast I produce about life with my six-year-old transgender daughter. It stars the two of us -- a single mom and a six-year-old "girl with a penis" -- as we attempt together to sort out just what it means to be a girl.

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Welcome to the Compass Home Page!

Compass is a support, information, and social group for people assigned female at birth who feel that is not an accurate or complete description of their gender.

We meet on the first Thursday of every month, from 7:00-9:00pm, in Boston. Please contact us for more information.

© 1999-, Compass

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Compass is a support, information, and social group for people assigned female at birth who feel that is not an accurate or complete description of their gender. We meet on the first Thursday of every month, from 7:00-9:00pm, in Boston. Please contact us for more information. © 1999-, Compass

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Gender fluidity

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Toilets, bowties, gender and me | Audrey Mason-Hyde | TEDxAdelaide

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Intimacy-positive week is continuing with a guest post from my bisexual friend Sana Al-Badri. My own comments are in the footnotes

Welcome to my very bi dating advice, from a bi woman to bi women (and of course, to readers who are curious about bisexual dating). This article is about authentic encounters with the same sex. I will outline what behaviors and mindset will help you improve communication as well as eliciting attraction. I will also outline the current dating landscape for bisexual women and help you set clear expectations. My focus is to address bisexual women, who are already out and are looking to date women.

Because I believe that data orientates us towards the truth, here in quantitative terms a quick picture of female bisexuality:

These numbers tell you a few things, in particular: Your dating pool is small!

Further, it seems that a degree of non-monogamy can increase your chances for sex, meaning that other bisexual women may have a male partner and/or want to continue to date men. Overall it seems realistic and more likely for a bisexual woman to have a sexual experience with a woman in her life (as compared to romantic relations).

Whether you will find a woman will heavily depend on your own initiative, because women generally don't ask others out.

Although you can't change how other people act, you can shape up and make an effort to stand out in the competition for women. This will be a fierce competition. I believe it's good to be aware that your opportunities in life are probabilistic encounters, so let's max out the ones you have!

Now that we covered the stats, let's go over some evolutionary theory, as this helps illuminate many underlying motivations and desires at play. I'm also specifically not covering socio-cultural dynamics because I know that many of you bi girls are fit on feminist literature.

Further theories of the evolution of homosexuality clearly show it is advantageous to survival on a kin-selection level. It is different from heterosexuality in many aspects and manifests differently in different contexts. Scientists have found that homosexuality in men can be predicted from epigenetic tags that are preparing the individual for a family with older brothers and/or very fertile female relatives. Such gay men, it seems, were meant to support the child rearing of their relatives rather than have children of their own.

Bisexuality unfortunately is not studied well enough to outline its adaptiveness in such detail but I would assume that the co-parenting hypothesis would hold true. According to that theory, bisexuality has evolved to reduce tension and increase cooperation between women in polygamous arrangements, which humans are mildly predisposed to. These polygamous arrangements were the framework under which several women, some of whom had romantic relationships with each other, would help raise each other's children, often from the same men. Researchers have also found that men (from a cross-cultural sample) prefer women with same sex attraction over straight women. This also seems to support the adaptiveness of cooperative and romantically affiliated women when raising a man's child.

Just to note, regardless of the adaptiveness of bisexuality in women, consenting individuals should be free to love however they desire. However, the fact that there is an evolutionary backbone will make dating same-sex individuals a lot more intuitive. The key here is that women being attracted to other women is very natural and has its place in human mating. That should make it much more easily to harness and cultivate in your life. Despite this, same sex dating in women is still so rare for mostly social and structural reasons. However, as with most revolutions, private and public, you have to start with your very own liberation.

In the current dating environment, dating women will require you to change and grow genuine confidence and assertiveness. Skills that will not only help you attract hot babes but will, as a nice side-effect, also raise your salary and career prospects.

So here is what has worked for me:

Dating men exclusively is not an option (well it is, but many of you, my bisexual friends, are unhappy about this.)

The best thing about being a bi girl is that you can date men and the worst thing about it is that you can date men. This will make sense, just follow me here: Most bi girls have never seriously dated a woman. Just think about how nervous and awkward you felt when you were a teenager starting out with your first boyfriend. And then imagine you are an adult and similar feelings start creeping up when you are with a woman. It scares you even more now because you should be all grown up and more confident about sex and romance. These feelings of doubt and confusion are difficult to handle, they throw you out of the moment and into a state of anxiety.

This is when most women quit. Secretly and not-so-secretly, dating men is the easier option. For the bisexual women that don't get over their fears, dating men is their only option. However, it's important to realise that these feelings are normal at the beginning and that you can grow to become the woman women really want (ahh, doesn't sound as catchy!) The avoidance coping mechanism works a bit like this: Your system is trying to avoid negative feelings (perceived punishments) and seek pleasure (perceived rewards). This is our most basic motivational structure. Let me illustrate this in the case of dating men compared to women. Dating men means that you feel a lot more confident in your skills, in pleasuring them sexually and knowing how to attract them. Your social circle will be more open and you get to be straight passing and experience hetero privileges. And on top of it, finding willing men is easy, they are basically all waiting in line trying their luck. When you even show the slightest interest they reward it tenfold with even more interest. With men the rewards are neatly lined up. Your brain will just choose the path of least resistance and with the greatest rewards, aka immediate gratification.

Compare this to women. You feel insecure about your abilities in attracting them. You don't really know how to be sexual with them, nor what will turn you on. Your social circle will be confused and society will find your relationship less valid. On top of it, women rarely reply to your messages and you will have to deal with a lot of rejection. At this point you might question your level of interest in other women. As you can see, the rewards are not clear and the effort required is high. It's only normal that you are less motivated to seek out romantic relations with a woman.

Let's look at the same scenario again, but now imagining that you've grown in confidence and experience. At that point you know what dating women is like and you have developed strategies to make the most out of every message you send and receive. In particular, you will start to notice how many bisexual women are starved for attention from women who can reciprocate their attraction. You learned how to please same sex partners and what you desire from them. Your friends and family have come to terms with your bisexuality and protect you from judgement you may receive.

This is a very different picture, in which there are plenty of touch-points for rewards.

Being aware of your current pleasure to pain ratio can help you get over the initial hurdles. Continuing to date only men won't help you get any better at dating women and will not allow you to grow within the spectrum of your sexuality.

I want to highlight that I really have empathy for those who are just beginning their journey. Confidence really doesn't grow on trees, it's something you have to earn through practice and experience. It takes a serious time investment to improve your dating skills with women. Keep in mind that it often took the men you date today several years and relationships to become the attractive person they are today.

If it helps to hear, I will gladly share my first experience. I remember my first date with a woman. I was so nervous, more nervous than I've ever been on any date before. When I saw her, she was this petite blonde girl, even smaller than me. I found it so strange to feel bigger when holding hands. It felt unfamiliar and thus confusing. I honestly didn't know how to flirt and whether my advances were understood as flirting at all. Was this romance or just friendship? I was lucky that she was quite forward which sometimes made me even more insecure. Despite it all, I kept on making sure we see each other and she turned out to be my girlfriend for over a year.

From my conversations with bisexual women I know they are looking for both emotional and sexual connection to other women. But they are scared and they don't know how. My advice here is, feel the fear and do it anyway.

She is attracted to you and wants you to approach her

If you encounter a woman who is looking to date women (say online) and she replies to your messages or has even messaged you first, then she is interested! If she wants to meet you, I can assure you: SHE IS INTERESTED IN YOU.

I know this seems hard to accept. In most cases she is not initiating conversation, barely complimenting you, and might be hesitant to meet up. And then there is the lack of female suitors - there aren't dozens of other women matching you... I know it looks like women aren't interested but trust me they are! Just for reference, this is how most straight men feel when online dating, so expect to encounter the same. Tinder online experiments and academic studies show that similarly attractive men compared to women get far fewer messages and matches. So in order for them to find someone they HAVE to message first. Additionally, those who message (or approach) you first , often think you are more attractive than themselves. As such it also makes strategic sense to move first.

I am very well aware that as a woman, you usually learn to say 'no' and to fend off unwanted attention from men - catcalling, staring and being followed in clubs - showing any sign of friendliness gets easily confused for attraction. Understandably, we learn to be very careful in showing our interest. Often a smile towards a man is more than enough to get his attention.

What dating has taught most women is that you have to be receptive to advances (if you wish) but you don't have to GO OUT THERE and sweat and fret not knowing what to say first. So a bisexual woman will display a higher degree of coyness than you are used to from men. She will look to select among her suitors, so you have to stand out at minimum by making clear you exist and are interested. Definitely don't be scared to initiate kissing and sex. Above all else, show persistence!

So my advice here: Keep going! Message first, initiate first, suggest things to do first. Don't be disheartened by the lack of replies, this is normal.

You ARE bisexual enough

As bisexual women, we are often grouped together with either straight or gay people. This frequently occurs in media representation as well. Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones who in the books has sexual relations with both men and women is portrayed as exclusively straight in the TV production.

I "discovered" I was bi in my early twenties. By that point I had almost exclusively dated men and feared that I wasn't bisexual enough to date women and to proclaim my attraction publicly. This felt especially true because I've never seen a vagina other than my own up close. It seemed "unfair" to date women unless I was absolutely sure. In the LGBTQAI+ community, acceptance and awareness of bisexuality is not a given. We are often not accepted among lesbians. They can be afraid of dating us and many simply refuse to. In part this is understandable, given that many bi women are fearful and uncertain about their desires. On the other hand, we are also not understood by heterosexuals. When men realize I'm bisexual they usually view it in purely sexual terms or feel threatened when my attraction to women is just as strong. So we feel like we are not "allowed" to be bisexual. As a result, some of us feel the need to hide and suppress our desires which makes us a contributor to the erasure of our own identities. This is not to mention that with men, we are "allowed" to experiment. Failed relationships and loss of attraction to a man is not seen as questioning our very attraction to men entirely. With women the stakes are very high, as each and every woman we meet seemingly has the power to define whether we are truly bi or not. These worries can place heavy weights on our feelings of romance and attraction, often stifling them as soon as they arise. It's easier just not being bisexual at all. However, research shows that bisexual women remain bisexual throughout their lives . Knowing this might give you confidence in your sexuality. It's really not just a phase.

So my advice here is to go out and date a woman. It's absolutely normal to meet a woman and then not feel attracted to her, in the same way you can meet a man for the first time and don't feel any attraction to him. Discovering your taste in dating is a journey. And your bisexual journey will also be about discovering what kinds of women you find attractive. Don't worry, you are definitely bisexual enough for that.

Be entertaining

Making someone laugh is very important! So if you are a bi woman making her laugh is key. Being able to joke shows off confidence; unfortunately many women I've met don't attempt to make jokes. I think this is because we believe that being silly and outspoken is too embarrassing. We will stand miles away from anything that might detract from our physical beauty. We rather laugh at jokes (and only make sarcastic comments in our heads).

The gender expectation is that men have to be funny and women need to laugh at good jokes.

Being entertaining, of course, is more than just cracking jokes. It also means being a good conversationalist and telling compelling stories. In my experience, women I've dated are on average quite shy, leaving me to guide the conversation. It's no debate, many of the women I dated were interesting, but how can anyone possibly know how interesting you are if you don't show it?! Put differently, if you want to captivate a woman's attention you HAVE to show her very clearly what you've got going for you. Be it your creativity, humor, kindness, intellect, sexiness, or all of it combined. So if you find yourself on a date, and there is silence between the two of you, ask her something about her life. Give a compliment, or share more of yourself, especially if you've noticed that you haven't been sharing very much. You can also use this space to validate shared values or interests by asking her opinion on topics you care about. My advice here, feel free to voice your clever comebacks, share your thoughts and show your passions openly!

Further, being entertaining company is a skill you can learn and the men that have wooed you on dates have for sure done a lot of work on themselves. They have probably spend countless hours talking to their mates, watching videos, listening to talks and reading books about what women find attractive. Some of the best advice I've received on how to be fun and interesting on dates came from my boyfriend. I recommend speaking to men in your life about their dating experiences. Further there's a lot of good dating advice out there, specifically looking at sources aimed to improve men's dating experience with women. A book I can recommend is Mate: Become the Man Women Want (2015) by Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller.

Really walk out of the closet

In Western society we strongly believe that we are self-directed individuals. We like to think we don't care what others say or do. To each their own. Whatever floats your boat, live and let live. Be yourself. Find your own way.

This is definitely incorrect, as social psychologists will gladly tell you. If you haven't ever introduced a woman as your girlfriend, you might be still insecure about what others think of your bisexuality.

Most likely, you know that introducing a woman to your friends and family will elicit curiosity and surprise. You might have to explain yourself and others might have the need to assure you that they, of course, love you regardless of your choices. Introducing a man won't result in these social dynamics. The focus will be on getting to know him rather than dealing with shattered expectations.

For these reasons, many bisexuals only tentatively come out, they are comfortable going to pride, twittering on bi visibility day and may occasionally have casual sex with women. However, they usually don't fall in love with a woman. This leads to an unfortunate cycle in which bisexuality is something people never see, and thus are not open towards, which in turn compels bisexual individuals to minimize their same sex attractions. Exposing others to bisexuality, by simply being openly bisexual, is exactly what will help in shifting romantic norms.

My advice here is to notice yourself. Notice whether you put up boundaries between yourself and other women in a situation that would lead to greater intimacy. Consider allowing yourself to truly experience feelings of romance.

Find acceptance in both your feelings and actions

I know that for many bi girls hearing that they don't have to be with a woman to know that their feelings of attraction are real and valid is a relief and a revelation. To be bisexual is to simply be attracted to both men and women. You don't need to kiss a woman, sleep with a woman or date a woman to be bisexual. This narrative implies that bisexuality can be entirely epiphenomenal and not connected to our actions. I see merit in this view, as it can be important for young women to learn that their attractions are meaningful. I remember how important this was for me to hear, at a time when I felt uncertainty and doubt.

But as I grew in both my dating experience and confidence, this narrative was no longer helpful nor was it illuminating. There are situations where this view of bisexuality is limiting and harmful to genuine self-expression. At times I pointed out the limitations of this view and was frequently labelled as biphobic. I have witnessed situations where bisexual individuals "excuse" their lack of dating experience by finding comfort in their bisexual identity. However those very same individuals feel extremely insecure about their desires, insisting that they don't need to act on same sex attractions for them to be genuine. They feel the need to blame society, be it lack of diversity, openness or media representation.

This is not entirely false of course, but I believe that if we want society to be really open to our bisexuality, we need to be comfortable and fearless with our sexual and romantic attractions first. This is not an easy process, but after going through it, I'm so glad that I did. You will make sense of the basics (like you did with men) and then you can live the rest of your life dating women to the extent that you want. Learn to listen to what you want; as women this will be very liberating.

The Author

Sana studied psychology and cognitive sciences at the University of Sussex and works in the field of UX design and product development. Her knowledge in psychology and user research manifests itself in all aspects of her life. She spends a lot of time analyzing relationships and human behavior, especially polyamorous love and bisexuality. In addition, she has published blog articles for various online magazines, as well as start-up blogs in Berlin.

Currently, she is founding her own start-up in the fintech sector, using her knowledge of human nature to help people make better financial decisions. She also models for independent fashion and lifestyle photographers in Berlin.

Footnotes

[1] These numbers paint a picture of female bisexuality that is more of a fluid spectrum than a clear category. It also means that within selected groups, the dating pool for a woman seeking women can be much larger than 7%.

In my survey, 32/85 women (38%) were romantically attracted to women. This number reached 20/36 (56%) among non-monogamous women.

[2] In my interview with Diana Fleischman she elaborated on the theory that homosexual intercourse is used for affiliation - making friends. Bisexuality and non-monogamy are strong correlated of s ociosexual orientation, which seems to be a general measure of the inclination to use sex as a tool for connection and exploration outside a long-term romantic relationship.

[3] As I wrote before, being proactive with messaging is almost always a good idea, regardless of how many messages you receive. There are advantages to being the first one to apply selection criteria, rather than just choosing among people who selected you first.

[4] I think that the same is true of polyamory. Like bisexuals, poly people can live for a long while pretending to be "normal", which looks like frustrating serial monogamy. They rarely "have to" come out, and many don't, and then they are left wondering why there is so little representation or acceptance of polyamory. This realization is part of the reason why I decided to be more publicly out there about being poly.

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The Bisexual Woman's Guide to Dating Women

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Intimacy-positive week is continuing with a guest post from my bisexual friend Sana Al-Badri. My own comments are in the footnotes Welcome to my very bi dating advice, from a bi woman to bi women (and of course, to readers who are curious about bisexual dating).

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Just Juliet by Charlotte Reagan
Lena Newman is 17, her best friend’s a cheerleader, her boyfriend’s a football player, and as far as everyone is concerned, her life is sorted. But that’s before she befriends the new girl. Juliet is confident, slightly damaged, drop-dead gorgeous and a lesbian.
Lena realizes that her interest goes beyond just friendship. She sets off on a path of self-discovery where the loyalty of those closest to her will be tested.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Bejamin Alire Saenz

This is one of the most well-loved queer YA books out there, and it’s easy to see why. Aristotle and Dante is beautifully written and dripping in atmosphere. The narration is from inside Ari’s head, and it is heartbreaking to see his pain so clearly, even when he is unaware of it. Ari and Dante are also both Mexican-American, and they discuss what that identity means to them. This is a raw and honest story that envelops you in Ari’s life. There is anti-gay and transmisogynistic violence described, as well as an outing, so be prepared for that.

The protagonist of Little & Lion is black, bisexual, and Jewish, and all these aspects of her identity affect her everyday life, manifesting in microaggressions that never fail to rankle. But those labels aren’t what’s at the heart of the story: Suzette’s brother has recently been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and during that time, she was sent away to school. Now that she’s back, there is a gulf between them, and they struggle to find the ease and closeness they had before. This a skillful narrative that crafts fully realized characters with all their flaws and vulnerability.

Odd One Out by Nic Stone

If you loved this author’s first book, Dear Martin, you might already know about this one coming out in October. It features three characters—all three of whom are teens of color!—in a love triangle, but tackles this worn trope in a fresh way. In particular, Stone focuses on the intersections of race and sexuality, as well as the sometimes-blurry lines between friendship and romance. Courtney “Coop” Cooper has recently been dumped; to top it off, his queer girl BFF is ignoring him. Jupiter Charity-Sanchez, said queer girl BFF, is worried about losing this girl she’s super into to Coop. Rae Evelyn Chin is the new girl at school who is, perhaps unfortunately, very into Coop andJupiter.

Ship It by Britta Lundin

This debut novel written by one of the staff writers for Riverdale is about fandom, slash fan fiction, and geek culture. The main character is 16-year-old Claire, whose journey as a questioning teen I really appreciated reading about—we shouldn’t expect teens in YA books to always have their sexual identities figured out! But more important is the story of Claire going to extremes to get her m/m ship of the new supernatural show Demon Heart to go canon, by any means necessary. Along the way she falls in love with a really awesome Black girl named Tess who is a fellow fan. Tess identifies—on the page!—as homoromantic pansexual.

Leah on the Off Beat by Becky Albertalli

This companion novel to the beloved Simon Vs. the Homosapiens Agend a follows Simon’s best friend Leah as she finally gets to be front and center in her own story! The title refers to the fact that Leah is a drummer, but playing a band isn’t all she’s got going on. For one, she’s struggling with being the only one of her friends with a single parent and a lot less money. She hasn’t told any of her friends that she’s bisexual, even her gay BFF Simon. And with college and prom on the horizon and changing dynamics, her friend group is fracturing. How can Leah help her fighting friends, especially when she realizes she’s not only keeping her identity a secret from her friends, but also her more than friendly feelings for one of them?

It’s Not Like It’s a Secret by Misa Sugiura

Sixteen-year-old Sana Kiyohara has too many secrets. Some are small, like how it bothers her when her friends don’t invite her to parties. Some are big, like the fact that her father may be having an affair. And then there’s the one that she can barely even admit to herself—the one about how she might have a crush on her best friend.
When Sana and her family move to California, she begins to wonder if it’s finally time for some honesty, especially after she meets Jamie Ramirez. Jamie is beautiful and smart and unlike anyone Sana’s ever known. There are just a few problems: Sana's new friends don't trust Jamie's crowd; Jamie's friends clearly don't want her around anyway; and a sweet guy named Caleb seems to have more-than-friendly feelings for her. Meanwhile, her dad’s affair is becoming too obvious to ignore. Sana always figured that the hardest thing would be to tell people that she wants to date a girl, but as she quickly learns, telling the truth is easy…what comes after it, though, is a whole lot more complicated.

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Greater Boston PFLAG | Greater Boston PFLAG

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Flamingo Rampant is producing feminist, racially-diverse, LGBTQ positive children's books, in an effort to bring visibility and positivity to the reading landscape of children everywhere. We make books kids love that love them right back, bedtime stories for beautiful dreams, and books that make kids of all kinds say with pride: that kid's just like me!

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For thirty years, COLAGE has been the only national organization expressly dedicated to supporting people with one or more LGBTQ+ caregivers, uniting them with a network of peers and supporting them as they nurture and empower each other to be skilled, self-confident, and just leaders in their communities.

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For thirty years, COLAGE has been the only national organization expressly dedicated to supporting people with one or more LGBTQ+ caregivers, uniting them with a network of peers and supporting them as they nurture and empower each other to be skilled, self-confident, and just leaders in their communities.

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National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network - NQTTCN is a healing justice organization that works to transform mental health for queer and trans people of color.

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The National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN) is a healing justice organization committed to transforming mental health for queer and trans people of color (QTPoC). We work at the intersection of movements for social justice and the field of mental health to integrate healing justice into both of these spaces.

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We believe LGBTQ+ youth deserve access to high-quality, barrier-free mental health therapies. We offer four distinct mental and behavioral health therapies, all of which are free for LGBTQ+ youth ages 25 and under, and do not require proof of insurance or identification.

You can help keep these services free for LGBTQ+ youth by donating today!

BAGLY Tea Time

BAGLY Tea Time is a confidential, drop-in therapy session with a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW). Sessions do not require you to show proof of insurance or identification.

While the center is closed, we've moved our Tea Time program from in-person to online sessions every Wednesday afternoon from 3PM-7PM for all Massachusetts Residents.
If you are a new client, before participating, fill out this intake form, and email it to Jesse Begenyi (LICSW).
If you have any questions about BAGLY Tea Time email Jesse Begenyi (LICSW), BAGLY's Mental and Behavioral Health Consultant.

Peer Mental Health Meetings are back! Join the HEARRT Team every 2nd Monday of the month from 5-6PM.

The BAGLY Peer Mental Wellness Meetings are peer-led, adult-supported groups that address the unique challenges LGBTQ+ youth face in the mental health system and daily life. As a brave space for conversations around healing, wellness, and personal growth, meetings are open to all queer youth under 25 and do not require proof of insurance or identification.

For any questions, email Ben Sullivan, BAGLY's Health Programs Manager.

BAGLY Peer Mental Health Meetings do not require you to present proof of insurance or identification.

Narrative Art Therapy: Every fourth Tuesday of the month!

BAGLY Narrative Art Therapy uses creative expression to separate one's own identities from problem-saturated stories to explore and enhance one's resilience.

Narrative Art Therapy meets every 4th Tuesday from 5:00PM-6:30PM on Zoom.

Many people find that being outside in places like the forest, or by the water, or outside in a park can be healing for them. Do you have a place outside where you feel most comfortable? This can be anywhere that makes you feel emotionally restored. For this month, we will be creating art to express these spaces of comfort and restoration and why they matter to us. All artistic modalities are welcome so pick whatever method of expressing yourself you wish.

We will be meeting as a group to share our work on Tuesday, August 23rd from 5pm-6:30pm.

Open to all LGBTQ+ youth ages 25 and under, you must register here first.

If you have any questions about BAGLY Narrative Art Therapy email Jesse Begenyi (LICSW), BAGLY's Mental and Behavioral Health Consultant.

Group Therapy

*BAGLY Group Therapy program is currently on hold for the time being*

BAGLY Group Therapy is a program where youth meet once a week for six consecutive weeks to discuss a specific topic.

In this session, participants will work together on exploring complex trauma and how it has impacted their lives. Participants will explore personal narratives and experiences, learn coping skills, and ultimately work towards healing.

This group is for LGBTQ+ youth ages 25 and under who have experienced traumatic events and currently feel emotionally and physically safe to talk about, and explore, these experiences in a group setting.

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Mental and Behavioral Health - bagly, inc.

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We believe LGBTQ+ youth deserve access to high-quality, barrier-free mental health therapies. We offer four distinct mental and behavioral health therapies, all of which are free for LGBTQ+ youth ages 25 and under, and do not require proof of insurance or identification. You can help keep these services free for LGBTQ+ youth by donating today!

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Located in Boston, MA, we're a theater company presenting liberating art by, for, and about queer and trans people of color that transcends artistic boundaries, celebrates cultural abundance, and dismantles oppression.

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TQBIPOC | Trans Resistance MA | United States

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Trans Resistance was formed in June 2020 by Athena Vaughn, Chastity Bowick, and a collective of trans and queer activists in the Boston area who work to represent the magical TQBIPOC community in Boston.

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TEF is currently experiencing an unusually extreme increase in requests for assistance this summer. Unfortunately this is forcing us to put a pause on applications for rental and utilities assistance until further notice. Given the barriers of our budget, we are only able to provide $100,000 annually towards rental and utilities assistance.

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BAGLY is a youth-led, adult-supported social support organization committed to social justice, and creating, sustaining and advocating for programs, policies and services for the LGBTQ youth community.

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Youth on Fire (YOF), a program of AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, is a drop-in center for homeless and street-involved youth, ages 14-24, located in Harvard Square, Cambridge.

Over 3,000 youth have benefitted from YOF since the program opened its doors in the Spring of 2000.

The primary goals of Youth on Fire are to:

Respond to the basic and urgent needs of homeless and street-involved young adults at highest risk of communicable diseases and victimization.

Connect homeless and street-involved youth to age-appropriate services including on-site behavioral health and medical care through strengths-based case management.

Create safe and supportive relationships and a sense of community through activities, events and groups

Partner with community and civic organizations, local businesses, public officials and advocacy groups to address the short and long-term effects of youth homelessness.

YOF provides a broad spectrum of vital services, supports and opportunities based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Positive Youth Development principles. Core elements of YOF's three-tiered service delivery system include the following:

Tier 1 Services: a) hot meals; b) showers; c) laundry; d) lockers; e) voice-mail and phone; and f) computers in a safe and welcoming drop-in center.

Tier 2 Supports: a) behavioral health services; b) medical care; c) HIV, STI and viral hepatitis screenings; d) housing search; e) enrollment in health insurance and benefits; f) educational workshops; and g) supported referrals for other self-identified needs.

Tier 3 Opportunities: a) Peer Outreach and Education program; b) Youth Advisory Board; c) Speaker's Bureau; d) art and talent shows; e) Hiring Committee; and f) Community Give Back Days, in which members clean up the surrounding neighborhoods of Youth on Fire and Harvard Square.

Annually, Youth on Fire serves over 200 young adults who make over 3,000 visits to the center, and connects members to:

4,000 meals and snacks

2,376 check-in conversations

216 HIV/STI tests

123 housing support referrals

50 Narcan/Overdose prevention enrollments

To see photos of the space and our activities, please go to our Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/YouthOnFireMA
Contact Information:
Phone: 617.661.2508
Fax: 617.661.2805
Email: yof@fenwayhealth.org

Currently, Youth on Fire is seeking donations to help support many of its free services. In the last two years, the number of clients served has doubled, while funding has decreased.

Can you support their work with a donation? Whether it's $10, $100 or $1000, your donation will make a real difference in the life of a homeless young adult.

We thank you and our members thank you.

To make a donation to support Youth on Fire's work, contact AIDS Action's Development Department at 617.424.9255 or email information@fenwayhealth.org.

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Over 3,000 youth have benefitted from YOF since the program opened its doors in the Spring of 2000. The primary goals of Youth on Fire are to: Respond to the basic and urgent needs of homeless and street-involved young adults at highest risk of communicable diseases and victimization.

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est. 2009 Donate Now

We build confidence, resilience, and community for
transgender and non-binary youth and their
families through camp experiences.

Building community

At Camp Aranu'tiq (a-ra-NOO-tick), campers meet and forge strong bonds with those who are, like them, navigating an often-difficult journey. Kids come from across the country and around the globe to form our very tight-knit community. Aranu'tiq friends are the ones they will lean on for life. As our camp song goes, "This Harbor is safe, this harbor is warm, this harbor is where I can weather a storm. This harbor begins and ends with you and me and there's no place I'd rather be."

Learn More

Having fun is just the start!

Summer camp is all about making pals, getting outdoors, and playing from morning till night. Days are filled with exciting activities, scrumptious meals, and lots of time to hang with old and new friends. Fun at Aranu'tiq is different from any place else; here, we truly understand one another. It is with this foundation that our campers are able to "let go" and just be kids. Come see what we're about! Learn More

Get ready for one amazing summer!

X Click here to Register for our Newsletter!

X Close

Join our Newsletter!

(sent a few times per year)

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Camp Aranu'tiq of Harbor Camps for Transgender Youth

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est. 2009 Donate Now We build confidence, resilience, and community for transgender and non-binary youth and their families through camp experiences. At Camp Aranu'tiq (a-ra-NOO-tick), campers meet and forge strong bonds with those who are, like them, navigating an often-difficult journey. Kids come from across the country and around the globe to form our very tight-knit community.

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We see a world in which intersex people make their own choices about their bodies. interACT advocates for children born with unique sex traits.

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If we provide a social-emotional environment, peer leadership, and opportunities to build connection, then API LGBTQ+ youth will have improved resilience, low risk of suicide, increased access to resources, strengthened social structures, and a positive impact on their community.

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If we provide a social-emotional environment, peer leadership, and opportunities to build connection, then API LGBTQ+ youth will have improved resilience, low risk of suicide, increased access to resources, strengthened social structures, and a positive impact on their community.

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info@lgbtasylum.org | 1-774-261-8199 ​

My father sent me to boarding school to get a good education. There I began to explore my sexual orientation and found that I was attracted to women. I got in trouble for that and was bullied a lot. I did well in school. I loved math. I am good at numbers. I dreamed of growing up to be a successful accountant. In my dreams, I imagined sharing my life with a woman, but I knew that was impossible in Nigeria. After I graduated from high school, my father began to pressure me to marry. I resisted. Finally, I told my father I was lesbian. He beat me for the very first time in my life. It broke my heart...

Join us for our monthly community dinner/planning sessions- 2nd Monday of every month, 6:00 p.m., at Hadwen Park Church, 6 Clover St. Worcester, MA 01603.​​​

Put your money where your heart is! Make a secure online donation today

The LGBT Asylum Task Force is a ministry of Hadwen Park Congregational Church, UCC that welcomes LGBTQ people of all faith traditions. We provide housing, food, and connection to legal, medical and mental resources at other local agencies.

Asylum seekers are not allowed to work for up to 2 years after arriving in the US. Our vital ministry provides comprehensive support for the entire duration of that two-year period in which it is needed.

For more information on the asylum process and how you may assist with our mission, please review our brochure here.

​Help with our social media campaigns! Follow us onFacebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Help reach more people and raise more money for asylum seekers. ​​​

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LGBT Asylum Task Force - Supporting New Beginnings

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info@lgbtasylum.org | 1-774-261-8199 ​ My father sent me to boarding school to get a good education. There I began to explore my sexual orientation and found that I was attracted to women. I got in trouble for that and was bullied a lot. I did well in school. I loved math.

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MTPC works to ensure the wellbeing, safety, and lived equity of all trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive community members in Massachusetts.

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WELCOME TO THE NETWORK/ LA RED!

The Network/La Red is a survivor-led, social justice organization that works to end partner abuse in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, BDSM, polyamorous, and queer communities. Rooted in anti-oppression principles, our work aims to create a world where all people are free from oppression. We strengthen our communities through organizing, education, and the provision of support services.

Join our staff!

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The Network/La Red is a survivor-led, social justice organization that works to end partner abuse in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, BDSM, polyamorous, and queer communities. Rooted in anti-oppression principles, our work aims to create a world where all people are free from oppression. We strengthen our communities through organizing, education, and the provision of support services.

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Vamos a empezar en el camino de ayudar y proteger el bienestar de nuestros niñes y jóvenes lesbianas, gay, bisexual, transgénero, queer (cuir) y de otras identidades de la diversidad (LGBTQ+).

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Vamos a empezar en el camino de ayudar y proteger el bienestar de nuestros niñes y jóvenes lesbianas, gay, bisexual, transgénero, queer (cuir) y de otras identidades de la diversidad (LGBTQ+).

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El recurso de la Fundación HRC Salir del Clóset: Vivir auténticamente siendo latinx y LGBTQ está diseñado para ayudar a las personas latinx o de origen latinx que viven en Estados Unidos a enfrentar los desafíos de dicha interseccionalidad en el proceso.

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Click to access this resource in English, Spanish, and Portuguese!

This guide is specifically about trans and gender non-conforming persons, and it is intended for persons and families who want to respond in a more affirming way to them. Whether you are an LGBQ+ person, trans or gender non-conforming, a parent or friend, we hope that the following information will help you be more positive and supportive of your loved ones.

Available online in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

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Welcoming Your Trans Family Member: A Resource for Latinx Families & Communities In English, Spanish, and Portuguese!

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This guide is specifically about trans and gender non-conforming persons, and it is intended for persons and families who want to respond in a more affirming way to them. Whether you are an LGBQ+ person, trans or gender non-conforming, a parent or friend, we hope that the following information will help you be more positive and supportive of your loved ones.