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.
We use rainbow as an umbrella term to describe people whose sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics differ from majority, binary norms. This includes people who identify with terms like takatāpui, lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, transgender, queer, non-binary or fa’afafine, as well as people who don’t use specific words for their identity, people whose identity changes over time, and people who are in the process of understanding their own identity and may not have ‘come out’ to themselves or others. It’s estimated that people under the rainbow umbrella make up between 6 and 15% of New Zealand’s population.