The Gender Spectrum
I believe that the gender spectrum is the most important to understand because once you fully understand the gender spectrum, everything else becomes easier to understand. Gender is based on your masculine and feminine energy. Throughout history people have only focused on the masculine energy being linked to male and the feminine energy being linked to female, creating a binary world. As societies progress through feminism, dealing with racism, lgbt rights and so on, it leads to more people being vocal about gender as well. The fight for lgbt+ rights itself started with drag queens throwing bricks at the police.
In a binary world, there are only male and female, so people who define themselves outside of this are non-binary. Non-binary or genderqueer is the umbrella term used. There are also a lot of different terms used and a lot of different forms that come from mixing different terms. It is a bit complicated but once you know the basics you can understand more complex terms. You’ll also see that many terms are interchangeable or similar. I believe this is because this is a newer topic in society but the concept of more than two genders has been around for ages, so smaller groups created different terms and now it is all coming together in the modern age of connectivity.
Transgender flag: Transgender is when you are born a certain sex but do not identify with that sex personally. Often this term is used for when someone transitions from male to female or vice versa, which it is but it isn’t only that. Transgender can refer to any gender identification that differs from the sex you were born. Transsexual is actually the correct term for when some one transitions from specifically male to female or vice versa, especially with medical intervention such as hormones and surgery. However, Transgender is just the term that is popularised.
Agender pride flag: This is when you define as genderless, or no gender. Neither female nor male. On a scale this would be neutral and another term for agender is gender neutral however this term is less used because of the idea of gender neutrality, which is the concept that no laws should discriminate against any gender.
Genderfluid pride flag – Gender fluidity is when your gender changes, it is fluid. One day you may wake up feeling more masculine, put on some colone and eyebrows, other days you’ll feel more feminine and throw on some girly pants or put some blush on. A great way to understand a genderqueer person is with bracelets. One colour represents femininity and they wear it when they feel feminine, another would be another colour to represent masculinity and another would represent neutrality. Then you know what to refer to them as (he/she, him/her, them/they.) At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if you were like “this is crap,” but so many people are so vastly different, how can you not simply accept the way some one chooses to express themselves? Especially if they find happiness in it. I’m all for whatever makes you happy as long as you don’t harm another living thing. These people are not here to hurt you, they just want to live their best lives.
Genderqueer pride flag – As mentioned earlier, this is the umbrella term used for someone who is non-binary.
Non-binary pride flag – Umbrella term used for some one who is genderqueer.
I found a “partial list” on this website http://keepmyncsafe.com/gender-spectrum/ and compiled it into a list. Some terms were not related to gender so I removed them.
| Agender Neither Neutrois | Neither male nor female. Defining with no gender. |
| Androgynous | Mixture of both male and female. |
| Bigender | Mixture of two gender identities (e.g feminine and androgynous or agender and masculine.) |
| Cis Cisgender | Cis and Cisgender is when your sex correlates with your birth sex and your gender correlates with your birth gender (in a binary world cisgender would only apply to a female identifying as feminine and a male identifying as masculine. It is important to remember that a cis person can still be a part of the lgbt+ community if they are gay etc. |
| Female to Male FTM Male to Female MTF | Transgender/transsexual terms. |
| Gender Fluid | Your gender changes. |
| Gender Nonconforming | Not matching typical gender norms. |
| Gender Questioning Gender Variant | Unsure of your gender. |
| Genderqueer Non-binary | Umbrella term |
| Pangender | Identify as a mixture of all genders. |
| Transfeminine Transmasculine | A person who was born a male but identify more with female expression but won’t call themselves a woman or a person born female but identify more with male expressions but won’t call themselves a man. |
With these topics, there is always more to explain but this covers my blog on gender. The final blog will expand further on sexuality, which will be easier to understand now that gender has been covered.
Peace,
– A
A's Explanations 
