LGBTQIA
LGBTQIA stands for lesbian, gay, bi-plus, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual. These terms mean the following:
- Lesbian and gay. These are examples of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation indicates whom a person is sexually attracted to. Homosexual means that a man is only attracted to men, or that a woman is only attracted to women. In everyday language it is common to talk about ‘gay men and lesbian women’, but Statistics Netherlands (CBS) uses the term ‘homosexual men and women’.
- Bi-plus. A person who is attracted to more than one gender. Previously the term ‘bisexual’ was used, but bi-plus is a broader and more inclusive term.
- Transgender. A person is transgender if their gender identity (i.e. the gender that they feel they are) does not fully (or not always) match the gender they were assigned at birth. Sometimes a transgender person does not feel unambiguously male or female, in which case the term used is non-binary/gender queer (NBGQ). The opposite of transgender is cisgender: this means that a person’s gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
- Queer. An umbrella term for gender identities and sexual orientations that deviate from cisgender and/or heterosexual norms.
- Intersex. An intersex person is someone who was born with both male and female sexual characteristics. Sometimes this is evident at birth, but sometimes it does not become clear until later in a person's life, and it is possible that a person never finds out about this.
- Asexual. When a person experiences little or no sexual attraction to other people.
The community that comes together under the ‘rainbow flag’ has assumed various names over the years, often based on abbreviations of the groups associated with it. Currently, the most commonly used and inclusive abbreviation is LGBTQIA+, where the plus sign represents all other forms of sexual orientation or gender identity that are not covered by the rest of the abbreviation. In this article the plus sign has been omitted because the survey only asked about the groups covered by the letters LGBTQIA.