How We Write This Guide: Editorial Policy

This page explains how the GenderGender Reference Guide is written, checked and corrected. It covers where our information comes from, who reviews it, how often, how to tell us we are wrong, and why we do not tell anyone which word they should use for themselves.

Who writes this guide

The guide is written and maintained by the editorial team at GenderGender, a shop based in Belgium. Each entry has a named editor and a last review date on file, and we are in the process of surfacing both at the foot of every entry.

We are not a medical organisation, a charity or a research institute. We are a shop that decided the reference material available in Dutch, French, German and English was thin, and set out to write better. That means two things. We have no funding conflict pushing us to say anything in particular about identity. And we are not a substitute for a clinician, a lawyer or a helpline, and we say so on the pages where that matters.

Where our information comes from

We use sources in roughly this order of preference:

Primary documents. Court judgments, legislation, the original coinage post for a term, the original design post for a flag, the text of a standard of care.
Peer-reviewed research and academic monographs, particularly for anything about prevalence, health outcomes or history.
Community sources from the community concerned: AVEN and Ace Archive for the ace spectrum, AUREA for the aromantic spectrum, Gender Census for non-binary vocabulary, and for the culturally specific entries, sources from those cultures rather than general LGBTQ+ references written elsewhere.
Established reference works and reputable journalism, where the above do not cover it.

Two things we try to avoid. We do not build an entry on a single crowd-edited wiki, because those are frequently unsourced and copy each other. And we do not cite an American general-purpose LGBTQ+ glossary as the authority on a tradition from somewhere else, which is a mistake we made on several pages and have since fixed.

Every entry lists its sources. If an entry does not, it is not finished.

What we do when we are not sure

We say so, on the page, in the place where the fact would otherwise go.

A lot of identity vocabulary was coined in online spaces that no longer exist, and a lot of flags were posted to platforms that have since deleted the posts. Where the coiner or designer of something is not documented, we write that the origin is not documented rather than repeating an attribution we cannot check. Where two published figures disagree, as with intersex prevalence, we give both and explain what produces the difference rather than picking the friendlier number. Where scholarship is genuinely contested, as with several of the culturally specific entries, we say it is contested and describe the argument.

This makes some of our pages less quotable than our competitors'. We think an entry that admits a gap is worth more than one that fills it with something plausible.

How often entries are reviewed

Every entry is reviewed at least once every twelve months.

Some material is reviewed more often because it moves faster. Anything about law, legal gender recognition or healthcare access is checked more frequently and carries a warning that it may already be out of date, because it frequently is. We would rather you verify a legal claim against a primary source than trust us on it.

Our position on words

We do not tell anyone which word to use for themselves. This is the closest thing we have to a rule.

Identity vocabulary is a set of tools for being understood, including by yourself. A word is doing its job if it makes your experience easier to talk about, and it is not doing its job if it does not, and no external authority gets a vote on that. So our entries describe what words mean, where they came from and what people commonly mean by them. They do not tell you whether you qualify.

In practice that means:

We describe usage rather than prescribing it, including where usage is inconsistent.
We do not gatekeep. Nobody needs to have had a particular experience to use a word.
Where a term is genuinely closed, as Two-Spirit and māhū are, we say so plainly. That is not gatekeeping, it is respecting a boundary the community concerned has set.
We report arguments inside communities as arguments, rather than declaring a winner.
We describe people the way they describe themselves.

Translation

The guide is published in English, Dutch, French and German. English is our source language. Translations are reviewed against the source and against local usage, because identity vocabulary is not consistent across languages and a literal translation is frequently wrong. Where a term has no established equivalent, we say so rather than inventing one.

Telling us we are wrong

Please do. Corrections are the fastest way this guide gets better, and we have made real mistakes: a flag dated to the wrong year, a word credited to the wrong person, a tradition given a third of the space it needed.

Useful things to include, if you have them: the page, the specific sentence, what it should say, and a source. A source is helpful but not required. "I am hijra and this page is wrong about my community" is a legitimate correction on its own and we will take it seriously.

We aim to reply within ten working days. If a correction is clear-cut we make it immediately and update the review date. If it is contested we say so on the page rather than quietly picking a side.

What we do not do

We do not give medical advice. Pages touching on binding, tucking, hormones or surgery describe what is generally understood and cite the research. They are not a consultation.
We do not give legal advice. Legal material is a summary with a date on it.
We do not diagnose anybody, and nothing on this site is a test.
We do not use your reading of this guide for advertising. See our privacy policy.

If you need support rather than a definition

This guide is a reference, not a helpline. In Belgium:

Lumi, for questions about gender, sex and sexual orientation, by phone and chat. lumi.be
Awel, free and anonymous for children and young people, by phone on 102 and by chat. awel.be
1712, for questions about violence, abuse and child abuse. 1712.be
Zelfmoordlijn 1813, for suicidal thoughts, day and night. zelfmoord1813.be
Télé-Accueil 107, French-language listening line, day and night. tele-accueil.be