Gender Affirming Care Glossary

All vocabulary is from HRW's "They're Runining People's Lives: Bans on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Youth in the US" report.

Aiding and Abetting Clauses: Provisions in numerous pieces of legislation banning gender-affirming care that outlaw providers from facilitating gender-affirming care, sometimes interpreted to include providing medical records or referrals, discussing out-of-state treatment options, refilling prescriptions, or running lab tests.

Cisgender: The gender identity of people whose sex assigned at birth conforms to their identified or lived gender.

Conversion Practices: Deliberate efforts to change someone's sexual orientation or gender identity, rejected as harmful by leading medical organizations. These practices, which can occur in medical, religious, or commercial settings, have been linked to severe mental health consequences.

Deadnaming: The act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by their birth name or previous name after they have transitioned.

Detransition: To stop receiving gender-affirming care and return to living as one’s gender assigned at birth.

Disinformation: False information designed to deliberately mislead people.

Dysphoria: A significant distress from the discordance between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.

Doxxing: Publishing personally identifiable information about an individual without their consent, sometimes with intent to provide access to them offline, exposing them to harassment, abuse, and possibly danger.

Gender: The social and cultural codes used to distinguish between society’s conceptions of “femininity” and “masculinity.”

Gender-Affirming Care: A set of social, medical, and psychological interventions that help transgender and non-binary individuals align their physical bodies with their gender identity.

Gender-Affirming Care Bans: Laws that severely restrict or criminalize the provision of medically facilitated gender-affirming care.

Gender-Affirming Care Provider: A medical professional who offers a range of services to affirm the identities of transgender and non-binary people. Gender-affirming care providers come from a variety of medical disciplines. Some providers treat patients at clinics dedicated to the provision of gender-affirming care, while others integrate gender-affirming care into their wider practice.

Gender Euphoria: A feeling of happiness, joy, or relief individuals experience when their gender is presented and/or received in accordance with their gender identity.

Gender Expression: The external characteristics and behaviors that societies define as “feminine,” “androgynous,” or “masculine,” including such attributes as dress, appearance, mannerisms, hairstyle, speech patterns, and social behavior and interactions.

Gender Identity: Social and cultural codes used to distinguish what a society considers “masculine” and “feminine” conduct and/or characteristics. Gender is also an identity and refers to a person’s internal, deeply felt sense of being female, male, both, or something other than female or male. It does not necessarily correspond to the sex assigned or presumed at birth.

Gender Non-Conforming: Behaving or appearing in ways that do not fully conform to social expectations based on one’s assigned sex at birth.

Grandfather Clause or Grandfathered Patients: Exemptions in multiple state gender-affirming care bans that allow youth who were receiving gender-affirming care prior to the enactment of the law to continue accessing this care in-state.

Hormone Therapies or Hormone Replacement Therapies (HRT): Medical treatment where individuals take sex hormones (estrogen, testosterone blockers, or testosterone). Hormone therapies are used to treat a variety of medical conditions and can be used as a part of gender-affirming care.

Intersex: An umbrella term that refers to a range of variations in chromosomes, gonads, and/or genitals that vary from what is considered typical for female or male bodies. A former medical term, “intersex” has been reclaimed by some as a personal and political identity. Intersex is not the same as transgender, which describes individuals whose gender differs from the sex they were assigned or presumed at birth.

LGBT: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender; an inclusive term for groups and identities sometimes also grouped as “sexual and gender minorities.” The acronym may also include “I” for “intersex” or “Q” for queer.

Misinformation: The inadvertent spread of false information with no specific intent to harm.

Misgendering: The act of intentionally or unintentionally referring to a person with language, such as a name or pronoun, that does not align with their gender identity.

Non-Binary: The gender identity of people who identify as not exclusively men or women. Non-binary people may identify with a mix of genders, somewhere in between them, or neither. They may use a range of pronouns.

Outing: The act of disclosing a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender person’s sexual orientation or gender identity without that person’s consent.

Passing: When someone is perceived as a gender they identify with.

Puberty Blockers: Medications, primarily gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists, that temporarily pause puberty by suppressing the body’s production of sex hormones. They are used to treat a variety of conditions and can be used as a part of gender-affirming care.

Sex: Classification of bodies and people (often at birth) as female, male, or other, based on biological factors such as external sex organs, internal sexual and reproductive organs, hormones, and chromosomes.

Stealth: A transgender person choosing to live as the gender they identify with without making their transgender status public.

Telehealth: The provision of health care remotely by means of telecommunications technology.

Transgender: The gender identity of people whose sex assigned at birth does not conform to their identified or lived gender. A transgender person usually adopts, or would prefer to adopt, a gender expression in consonance with their gender identity but may or may not desire to alter their physical characteristics to conform to their gender identity.

Transgender Men or Boys: Persons designated female at birth but who identify and may present themselves as men or boys.

Transgender Women or Girls: Persons designated male at birth but who identify and may present themselves as women or girls.

Transmasculine: A broad term used by people assigned female at birth who identify with masculinity, regardless of their gender identity. The term may be used by non-binary people, gender non-conforming people, transgender men, and others.