Gender identity vs sexual orientation vs gender expression

Gender identity is who you are: your inner sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither or something else. Sexual orientation is who you are drawn to, romantically or sexually. Gender expression is how your gender shows on the outside, through clothes, hair, voice, name and manner. The three are separate, so a trans woman can be a lesbian, a cis man can wear eyeliner, and someone who looks conventionally feminine can be non-binary and asexual.

Three questions, three answers

Glossaries word them differently, but LGBTQ+ organisations such as GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign agree on the split:

• Gender identity answers the question of who you are. GLAAD's media reference guide defines it as a person's internal, deeply held knowledge of their own gender, and adds that everyone has one.
• Sexual orientation answers the question of who you are attracted to. The Human Rights Campaign describes it as an enduring emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to other people.
• Gender expression answers the question of how your gender shows. GLAAD lists a person's name, pronouns, clothing, haircut, voice and behaviour as the usual ways it comes across.

Planned Parenthood puts the first two in one line: sexual orientation is about who you want to be with, gender identity is about who you are. Expression is the third layer, and the only one a stranger can actually see.

Many guides add a fourth line to the chart: sex assigned at birth. GLAAD describes it as the M or F written on a birth certificate after a look at a baby's external anatomy, and notes that sex is not strictly binary. For trans people, that entry is the one that does not match their gender identity.

Gender identity: who you are

Gender identity lives on the inside. GLAAD's guide is blunt about it: you cannot look at someone and see their gender identity.

For most people it matches the sex they were assigned at birth, which is what cisgender means; for trans people it does not. Many people's gender identity is woman or man; for others it falls outside those two categories, and non-binary is the umbrella word many of them use. GLAAD notes that many non-binary people also call themselves transgender, while others do not.

No medical step defines it either. GLAAD's guide says that being transgender does not depend on physical appearance or medical procedures, and that a person can call themself transgender from the moment they realise their gender differs from the sex they were assigned. Some trans people take no transition steps at all; others want to and cannot, because of cost, health or fear of how family or employers would react.

If you are working out your own answer, Am I trans? takes the question slowly, one step at a time. There is no deadline.

Sexual orientation: who you are drawn to

Orientation is about attraction. Straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer and asexual are all answers to the same question: who, if anyone, you are drawn to.

Most of those labels quietly depend on your own gender. Lesbian means a woman who is drawn to women; straight means being drawn to a gender other than your own. So a trans person's orientation label is measured from their gender, not from the sex on their birth certificate. GLAAD's guide tells journalists not to confuse or conflate orientation and gender identity, and illustrates the point with exactly this case.

Behavioural science has two older words that sidestep the problem. Gynephilia means attraction to women or femininity, and androphilia means attraction to men or masculinity. They describe who someone is drawn to without saying anything about the gender of the person feeling the attraction.

Trans people have every orientation cis people have. In the 2015 US Transgender Survey, run by the National Center for Transgender Equality with 27,715 respondents, the most common answers were queer (21%), pansexual (18%), and gay, lesbian or same-gender-loving (16%), followed by straight (15%), bisexual (14%) and asexual (10%). No single answer came anywhere near a majority.

Asexuality shows that orientation has layers of its own. Planned Parenthood notes that asexual people feel little or no sexual attraction, and that many of them still feel romantic attraction. The same page says it is fine not to want a label at all, and that only you can decide which one, if any, fits.

Gender expression: how it shows

Gender expression is the outside layer: your name, your pronouns, your clothes, your hair, your voice, the way you move. What counts as masculine or feminine is not fixed. GLAAD's guide points out that it changes over time and between cultures, and gives the example of cultures where long hair on men is a sign of masculinity.

Expression is not evidence of identity. A cis woman can keep her hair short, wear men's suits and be a woman with no footnotes. People whose expression does not follow what is expected of their gender are often described as gender nonconforming, and GLAAD stresses two things about that word. Many cis people are gender nonconforming. And many trans people are not, because plenty of trans people present in ways that are conventionally masculine or feminine.

Expression is not evidence of orientation either. The feminine gay man and the butch lesbian exist, but they are not rules. A woman in work boots can be straight, and a man in nail polish can be married to a woman.

Of the three, expression is the one that moves most easily. Plenty of people adjust it by setting, softer at a family lunch and sharper at a job interview. For trans people those adjustments are often about safety as much as style.

Six people, three answers each

Here is how the three axes combine in practice. Everyone below is made up, and every combination is ordinary.

• Maya is a trans woman who is attracted to women, so she calls herself a lesbian. She mostly lives in jeans and band T-shirts.
• Daniel is a cis man, straight, married to a woman, and wears eyeliner and painted nails at the weekend.
• Sam is non-binary and asexual, falls for people of any gender, and dresses in a way most people read as feminine. Their look says nothing about their gender, and nothing about who they fall for.
• Jo is a cis woman and bisexual. She is butch: short hair, men's shirts, no make-up.
• Alex is a trans man who is gay. He keeps his hair long and wears it in a bun.
• Priya is a cis woman, straight, whose style is conventionally feminine. She has a gender identity, an orientation and an expression too; hers simply match what people expect, so nobody asks.

Change one line and the other two stay where they are. That independence is the whole reason for having three words instead of one.

Why the three get mixed up

For a long time they were treated as one package. Stereotypes still run on it: if you know someone's body, the thinking goes, you know their gender, their look and who they will love. Each of the three words exists to break one link in that chain.

Human rights texts have been separating them step by step. The Yogyakarta Principles were adopted by 29 experts from 25 countries after a meeting in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in November 2006. They defined sexual orientation and gender identity side by side, and folded expression (dress, speech and mannerisms) into their definition of gender identity. A follow-up text, the Yogyakarta Principles plus 10, adopted on 10 November 2017, went further and named gender expression and sex characteristics as distinct grounds in their own right.

Keeping them apart has a practical point too. People get harassed for their expression by strangers who know nothing about their identity or orientation. A trans person's orientation gets quoted as if it proved something about their gender. Three separate questions make it harder to use the answer to one as a verdict on the others.

What this changes when you date

On a dating app the three axes do different jobs. Identity tells you who someone is. Orientation tells you whether you are among the people they might want. Expression is what you see in the photos, and it is the least reliable guide to the other two.

So do not work backwards from a picture. A match with short hair and a deep voice could be a woman, a man or non-binary, and could be looking for almost anyone. Even on T4TSpace, a dating app by and for trans and non-binary people, a shared word like trans tells you nothing about who someone hopes to meet.

When a profile states gender and orientation separately, read both. If it does not, asking once, plainly and politely, beats guessing. And if a word on someone's profile is new to you, our glossary has a page for it.