Gender Identities:
Sorting out the Players
by Professor William C. Summers
In the interest of providing a brief guide to the more common sexual and gender identities, the following glossary is provided to our readers. It is not exhaustive and only includes terms that relate to an individual human being. Terms primarily relating to practices, fellatio, or devices (e.g., dildos) are not included. Likewise, well-known terms, archaic terminology (e.g., invert, fey), and terms common outside the North American English-speaking world (e.g., poof, bent) are not included. For some of the terms, usage is fluid, contextual, and regional.
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Bear: Gay and bisexual men with stocky or heavyset builds, outwardly masculine in appearance, and usually with hairy bodies and facial hair. Typically contrasted with twinks.
Bottom or Catcher: Receptive sexual partner (i.e., a partner who is penetrated), especially involving anal sex among gay men. Counterpart is a top.
Boi: Boyish and relatively young gay male, especially somewhat effeminate, or one who wishes to distinguish himself from heterosexual boys. Deliberate misspelling of boy.
Butch (variants: Stone Butch, Hard Butch, Soft Butch): Usually applied to lesbians or gay men, less commonly to straight men and women. Most often used to describe certain lesbians exhibiting short-cropped hair, overtly masculine clothes, deliberate machismo attitudes, chivalry, or sometimes rudeness. Butch lesbians may be described as a “bulldyke” or simply just “dyke,” though the latter usage has widened to encompass lesbians generally. Stone applies to a person who does not want to be sexually touched, but prefers sexually satisfying others.
Cisgender: Not transgender; a gender identity or performance role that matches the usual societal expectation for one’s sex.
Down-low (DL): An American sub-culture of men who have sex with men, but who identify themselves as neither homosexual nor bisexual.
Drag (variants: Drag Queen, Drag King): Usually refers to the wearing of clothing associated with one gender role when worn by a person of the other gender. Often taken as synonymous with cross dressing. Drag is practiced by people of all sexual orientations and gender identities. Males who dress in typically female garb are Drag Queens, and females who dress in typically male attire are Drag Kings, with the expected gender inversions.
Dyke (variants: Bulldyke, Diesel-dyke, babydyke): Some-times pejorative slang term for lesbian. Bulldykes are aggressively butch (op-posite of lipstick lesbian), diesel-dykes are said to like to drive trucks, and babydykes are young, recently-out lesbians.
Faggot (or Fag): Generally pejorative North American term for gay men. Somewhat reclaimed within the LGBT community and is used in a non-pejorative way similar to the word dyke.
Femme (or Fem; variant: Stone Femme): A person who approximately adheres to traditional feminine gender roles respectively within a same-sex relationship. Stone applies to a person who prefers to sexually satisfy others rather than being sexually touched.
Flamer: A femme gay man.
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