Gender, sexual and other kinds of identity often play big parts in our lives and our experiences living in the world, our sense of self, our sexualities, and our interpersonal relationships. Here’s information on gender, including transgender and gender-expansive identities, intersex, gender roles, expression and navigating gender in relationships, sexual orientation, including the asexuality spectrum, and other kinds of sexual identity, as well as other aspects of identity to help you find your own way around your own identity and figure out what it all means for you.
Identity
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Articles and Advice in this area:
Advice
- Heather Corinna
This is as fine a place to ask as any. :) You know, this is the case with most people with any kind of emotional maturity who knows that people are more than two-dimensional and sex is about people, not appearances or our ideas about people based on appearance. Of course, we can look at someone in a…
Advice
- Heather Corinna
What if it’s not about her coming out of her shell, but about the fact that she is NOT strongly attracted to girls, or attracted to girls at all? A person’s gender identity doesn’t determine their sexual orientation. In other words, very “girly” girls can be and are attracted to women (or people of…
Advice
- Heather Corinna
It is okay to have a desire to explore sex with the same gender; it is okay to have a desire to explore sex with people of a different gender. We also don’t need to view any of that exploration as an “experiment,” nor is same-gender sex somehow more of an experiment than mixed-gender sex is. I mean…
Advice
- Heather Corinna
Hey there, Hartley. We DO know – experientially and statistically speaking – that young adults do tend to be less selective when it comes to their attractions and/or partners than older adults. Why is that? That’s where we don’t have such solid answers. By all means, you guys do have a lot more…
Advice
- Susie Tang
Hi Miguel, it looks like you’re fighting some serious peer pressure. Despite all of our progress towards gender equality and rights, we still have some pretty wacked double-standards in our society. There’s the double-standard that says that women who have lots of sex are whores, and men who abstain…
Article
- Jacob Mirzaian
I want to be accepted for who I am, not what I am. I don’t want to be straight if it’s just a VIP pass for friends.
Advice
- Heather Corinna
There’s nothing like starting to put together all of the myriad complexities, preferences and desires of our sexuality to point out how silly it really is to suggest that human sexuality, sexual orientation or gender can be easily divided into such tiny boxes, is there? The short of it is that I…
Advice
- Heather Corinna
(Charleten’s question continued) Last summer, I came out as a lesbian to my family and friends, because after about a year and half of questioning and soul-searching and doubting and ALL that fun stuff, I concluded that I was romantically and emotionally (and sexually, though again I just am not…
Advice
- Heather Corinna
For most people, whether we’re talking about sexual orientation or something else, trying to live a life as anything but yourself is more painful than living a life working to come to peace with something about yourself that you or others are uncomfortable with. Really, if you read the stories of…
Advice
- Heather Corinna
There are a couple of common reasons why someone might hate being a girl: you might hate it for one of them, or you might hate it for all of them. Regardless, you get to feel however you feel and there’s nothing patently abnormal or wrong about being uncomfortable with your own sex or your gender…
