Rainbow people use a range of words and names to talk about their identities and experiences. Language is shifting and evolving all the time.
To understand a person’s identity, the most important thing is not to learn a list of terms, but to listen, connect and ask respectful questions about the language that they’re using.
A good guiding principle is to reflect the language that a person uses about themselves, and respect the words they ask you to use. For example, use the pronouns (he, she, they, etc) that the person asks you to use. We’ve made resource pages to share more advice about pronouns and titles.
The words we use to talk about rainbow people, populations and issues are evolving all the time. No terms are perfect, but it’s useful to understand the background and context of different words when choosing which ones to use. We’ve made pages to share our thoughts about language to talk about rainbow populations, and people who are intersex or have an innate variation of sex characteristics.
In this section: