Engaging Diverse Voices through Research & Resources

Gender has been included as a question on the U.S. Census since its inception, making demographic data broken down by gender relatively easy to find. However, it should be noted that to this day, the only options provided are “male” and “female,” which is not an accurate representation of the gender spectrum. This question's binary phrasing forces nonbinary people to choose between either misgendering themselves or not being counted in the Census at all. 

In July 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau did begin asking about sexual orientation and gender identity, which they refer to as SOGI, on their Household Pulse Survey (HPS), an experimental survey designed to measure the impact of COVID-19 on American households (source). This marks the first time that the U.S. Census Bureau has ever officially collected data on Americans in a way that allows for nuanced gender identities; however, the small and experimental nature of the HPS limits the impact of its findings. 

Please see the "U.S. Census & Data Collection" section on the LGBTQ+ page for more details on this topic. 

The following terms were commonly used in the past, and may still be found in classification systems and/or medical terminology. However, they are generally now considered to be offensive, and often reflect inaccurate and outdated understandings of gender, sex, and sexual orientation. Use with extreme caution. 

• Outdated terminology related to transgender
  • "transvestite"
  • "sex change operation" or "sex reassignment surgery"
    • Use the terms gender confirmation surgery or gender affirmation surgery instead.
  • "pre-operative"/"pre-op" and "post-operative"/"post-op"
    • Referring to transgender people as "pre-op" and "post-op" implies that transgender people must transition surgically, or at least desire surgical intervention, in order to be valid. Not all trans people want to undergo gender confirmation surgery or medical interventions, and that in no way erases the validity of their transness.
• Outdated terminology related to intersex
  • "hermaphrodite" and "pseudohermaphrodite"
    • These terms are widely considered to be both offensive and scientifically inaccurate. While the term "hermaphrodite" has some legitimate uses in the scientific community when discussing plants and non-human animals, it should not be used to describe humans.
    • Use the term intersex instead.
  • "disorders of sex development" or "DSD"
    • Although these terms are still in common usage in the DSM-5 and medical community, they are considered offensive by the intersex community due to their pathologization of intersex variations. Some intersex people will occasionally use "differences of sex development" instead of "disorders" when attempting to communicate with medical professionals who are already attached to the "DSD" acronym; however, this is usually a strategic workaround used out of necessity rather than preference, and the general concept of "DSD" should be avoided whenever possible.
    • Use the terms intersex, intersex traits, or intersex variations instead. Read more about intersex terminology. 

Theories of gender grew out of the efforts of feminist scholars in the 1970s to explain and determine the origins of women's oppression. These writers understood “gender” to refer to the socially and culturally imposed images of and roles for women, differentiating it from “sex,” a biological category that locked women into particular roles and relationships by virtue of their reproductive capacity.

A system of ideas that takes gender as its central focus and attempts to explain differences and inequalities. Until the late twentieth century such differences and inequalities centred predominantly on the relative positions of women and men, but from the 1980s onwards questions of otherness enmeshed with inequality, for instance on the basis of race or sexual orientation, became equally prominent within feminist theory. There are many different kinds of feminist theory, dependent on their specific focus.