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SOGIE is an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression, which are three ordinary things that every person has. That goes for you and me, and it goes for the guy who’d put the flyer down the second he saw the word on it. It’s a word for describing people, about as political as the word “handedness,” and you can’t really be for or against it any more than you can be against somebody being left-handed.
People apologize to us for not knowing what it stands for, usually in the same breath they ask, as though not knowing were some kind of offense. We’d love to take the mystery out of it for good, because that mystery does far more damage than four letters meaning something this plain ever should.
Sexual orientation is who a person is physically, emotionally, or romantically attracted to, gender identity is a person’s own sense of their gender, and gender expression is how they show that gender to the world. Expression covers everything from clothes and hair to a person’s voice, their name, and the way they stand at a counter.
Those are the definitions we’ll be using on the twenty-first, and they’re deliberately boring, because the most useful thing about them is that they describe three separate dials that each move on their own. A man in a pink shirt has told you something about his expression and hasn’t said a word about who he loves. In the same way, a woman who runs a crew and wears steel toes all week has shown you her expression without telling you a thing about her gender. Most of the confusion people carry around on this subject comes from those three dials getting wired together into a single switch, and just about every argument we get pulled into starts right there.
Picture a man who’s been married to a woman for thirty years, drives a truck, and has never spent more than four seconds thinking about any of this. He has a sexual orientation, since he’s straight, and he has a gender identity, since he’s a man and so settled in it that it’s never once struck him as a fact about himself. That’s exactly how it feels when your own sense of who you are lines up with what everybody assumes about you. His gender expression shows up in the boots and the handshake and the haircut he’s had since 1994, and in his certainty that he’d feel ridiculous in that pink shirt even though he couldn’t tell you why.
That man has a complete SOGIE, and he’s simply never had to say it out loud, because nobody’s ever asked him to account for it, or doubted him when he did, or put it on the agenda at a public meeting. The only real difference between him and the people this word usually gets attached to is how often somebody has made them explain themselves. That’s why we teach SOGIE as the one word that finally includes everybody, and the first time that lands in a room you can actually watch people’s shoulders come down.
We’d rather be honest about this part, since pretending it doesn’t happen would insult everybody who’s ever said it to us, and we hear it constantly. It comes in lines like why does everything have to be about this now, or nobody talked like this when I was growing up and we all turned out fine. Other times it’s that this is being pushed on kids, or that somebody’s got nothing against anybody and just doesn’t want to be told what to say. The one we hear most often is also the shortest, usually said with real feeling behind it, that it’s all just too much.
It shows up in emails and comment threads and across folding tables at community events. Sometimes it comes from somebody kind who genuinely wants to understand and is nervous about how the question’s going to sound coming out of their mouth, and other times it isn’t kind at all.
I mean this without a drop of sarcasm when I say that most of the people pushing back got handed a whole new vocabulary somewhere in the middle of their lives, with no instructions attached. They also picked up a strong impression that there’d be a penalty for getting it wrong, and so they steer around the subject altogether. Steering around something long enough turns it into distance, and distance has a way of turning into suspicion, which other people find very easy to put to use, so nobody in that chain has to hate anybody for it to end badly.
Some of it comes from a harder place, and we know that, though most of it is fear and confusion, which means most of it can be reached. The turn almost always comes at the same moment, when somebody works out that they’re allowed to ask the question they think is stupid. The look on a person’s face when they find out that gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things, and that they haven’t been quietly failing some test for the last ten years, is most of the reason we keep doing these nights.
What we’re really up against is fear plus missing information, and the thing that actually helps is handing people that information in a room, in plain words, with permission to ask.
Understanding SOGIE is a free community presentation from the Rochester Rainbow Coalition and the South Coast LGBTQ+ Network on Monday, September 21, at 6:00 PM at the Rochester Council on Aging, 67 Dexter Lane, and it runs about ninety minutes. We’ll walk through the three words, a pediatrician will speak to the medical side, and someone who works in mental health will speak to that side of it. After that we’ll open it up for real questions, the kind you don’t have to phrase perfectly before you’re allowed to ask them.
It’s free and limited to 50 seats, and you can hold one at sclgbtqnetwork.org/sogie, where there’s also a Zoom option if you’d rather not be in the room, with the link sent to you when you RSVP.
The evening is for adults, 18 and over, because the people we’re trying to reach are the grownups in a kid’s life, like teachers and coaches and grandparents and neighbors. What a kid who’s different needs most is for the adults around her to have already had this conversation.
Absolutely, and the first of our reasons is simply that Rochester asked. The Rochester Rainbow Coalition is a group of neighbors with no national chapter behind it and no paid staff, and they invited us into their town to teach this. That matters to how we work, since we only come into a community when we’ve been asked, and the people who did the asking stand up front with us.
Rochester has also been having this conversation out loud for a good while now. Some towns on the South Coast keep all of this polite and unmentioned, while in others it’s on the agenda at public meetings and under every local news post, and Rochester has been that second kind of town. A town that’s already talking about it is the best possible place to bring clear information, because the conversation’s happening either way, and it can happen with a pediatrician in the room or without one.
And then there are the signs you can see from the road, YOU BELONG HERE, going up in front yards around town on ordinary houses on ordinary streets, and that’s a town telling you something about itself that deserves an answer. We picked Rochester on purpose because Rochester has been asking, out loud and in its own front yards, and this is us answering.
Everything up to here is the shallow end, and I’d rather say so than let a web page pretend it’s finished the job. I can hand you three definitions and a truck driver to hang them on, and that’s worth something, but this is a people subject. What really matters is whether the person across from you will answer your question without making a face.
That’s what the room is for, and the people at the front of it are there to talk with you, to teach you what they know, and just as much to listen to you. That means listening to your question, or to your discomfort if you’ve got some, which plenty of people do, or to your kid or your student or your grandson or your congregation. It also means listening to the thing you’ve been turning over for two years and have never once said out loud in front of anybody. Bring all of it, since nobody’s grading you on how you word it, and the question you’re most embarrassed by is usually the one the whole room needs somebody to ask first. None of that stops after Monday, either, because there are people here the rest of the year who’ll gladly take your call.
The part we most want on the record is that we’ll bring this presentation to any community on the South Coast that wants it. That could be a library meeting room, a church basement, a senior center, or a business that would like its people to know what these words mean before the subject shows up on its own terms. Wherever we bring it, it’ll come in plain language, with plenty of room for the awkward questions.
We’ll come in the name of education and understanding, to take the myths apart one at a time and to share the common ground that’s usually sitting right there in the middle of the room once the fear’s out of it. We’ll also come ready to listen to whatever your town actually wants to say about all of this. Rochester’s on the twenty-first, and if your town wants to be next, tell us and we’ll get a date on the calendar!