Question
What is sexual orientation?
Answer
Sexual orientation refers to who you feel sexually and romantically attracted to. Sometimes people think it is what you feel between your legs. Your gender identity is the gender that you feel you are in your brain and has nothing to do with your genitalia. So that is what you feel between your ears.
Another way to think about this, sexual orientation is who you want to go to bed with. Gender identity is who you want to go to bed as, and gender expression is what you choose to wear to bed. It's really common that people kind of mix these up in their brain, that happens often because we have this collective group of LGBT+. We do that because each one of those groups individually would be so small, that it would be really hard to have any sort of voice to speak up and to gain any sort of legal rights or protections, so the group has collectively come together, but those are very different categories of people within these groups. In addition to it being different categories, their life experiences, and the things that they may struggle with can also be very different.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the webinar, A Social Worker's Introduction to Gender Minorities, presented by Kryss Shane, MS, MSW, LSW, LMSW.
