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SOGIE is an acronym for three ordinary things: sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. That is the whole word. It is not a movement, it is not a curriculum, and it is not a position you can be for or against, any more than you can be for or against the word “handedness.” It is a way of naming three parts of a person that every person has, including you, including me, including the man who would put the flyer down if he saw the word on it.
People apologize to us for not knowing it. They ask what it stands for and then say sorry in the same breath, as though not knowing were itself a kind of offense. So let us take the mystery out of it, because the mystery is doing a lot of damage for four letters that mean something this plain.
Sexual orientation is who a person is physically, emotionally, or romantically attracted to. Gender identity is a person’s own sense of their gender. Gender expression is how a person presents that gender to the world: the clothes, the hair, the voice, the name, the way they stand at a counter.
Those are the definitions we will be using on the twenty-first, and they are deliberately boring. The useful thing about them is that they are three separate dials rather than one, because orientation is not identity and identity is not expression. A man in a pink shirt has told you something about his expression and nothing whatsoever about who he loves. A woman who runs a crew and wears steel toes all week has told you about her expression and nothing about her gender. Most of the confusion people carry around on this subject is really just those three dials getting wired together into one switch, and almost every argument we get pulled into starts right there.
Picture a man who has been married to a woman for thirty years, drives a truck, and has never once thought about any of this for longer than four seconds. He has a sexual orientation: he is straight. He has a gender identity: he is a man, and he is so settled in it that it has never presented itself to him as a fact about himself at all, which is exactly what it feels like when your own sense of yourself and everybody else’s assumption about you line up perfectly. And he has a gender expression: the boots, the handshake, the same haircut since 1994, the certainty that he would feel ridiculous in that pink shirt without being able to tell you why.
That man has a complete SOGIE. He has simply never had to say it out loud, because nobody has ever asked him to account for it, or doubted him when he did, or put it on the agenda at a public meeting. That is the only real difference between him and the people this word usually gets attached to, and it is not whether you have these three things, it is whether you have ever been made to explain them.
That is why we teach it this way. SOGIE is not a category for other people. It is the category that finally includes everybody, and the first time that lands in a room you can watch shoulders come down.
I want to be honest about this part, because pretending it does not happen would insult everyone who has ever said it to my face. We hear it constantly, in lines like why does everything have to be about this now, or nobody talked like this when I was coming up and we all turned out fine, or this is being pushed on kids, or I have nothing against anybody and I just do not want to be told what to say. And then there is the short one, the one that arrives most often and usually with real feeling behind it, which is that it is all simply too much.
It comes in emails and in comment threads and across folding tables at community events. Sometimes it is delivered kindly, by somebody who wants to understand and is afraid of how the question is going to sound coming out of their mouth. Sometimes it is not kind at all.
Here is what I think is usually happening, and I say it without a drop of sarcasm. Most of the people pushing back are not cruel. They are people who got handed a new vocabulary somewhere in the middle of their lives, were given no instruction in it, and picked up a strong impression that there would be a penalty for getting it wrong. So they steer around the subject. Avoidance becomes distance, distance becomes suspicion, and suspicion is very easy for other people to put to use. Nobody in that sequence has to hate anybody for it to end badly.
Some of it is not fear and not confusion, and we are not naive about that. But most of it is, and most of it is reachable, and the turn almost always comes at the same moment: when somebody works out that they are allowed to ask the question they think is stupid. The look on a person’s face when they learn that gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things, and that they have not been quietly failing a test for the past ten years, is most of the reason we keep doing these nights.
Fear plus missing information is what we are actually dealing with. You do not fix that by winning an argument. You fix it by handing people the 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. It runs about ninety minutes. We walk through the three words, a pediatrician speaks to the medical side, and someone who works in mental health speaks to that side of it. Then we open it up for questions, and we mean real questions, not the kind you have to phrase perfectly before you are allowed to ask them.
It is free, it is limited to 50 seats, and you can hold one at sclgbtqnetwork.org/sogie. If you would rather not be in the room, there is a Zoom option, and the link comes to you when you RSVP.
It is 18 and over.
The evening is 18 and over because children are not the ones who need it. Their teachers, their coaches, their grandparents and their neighbors are.
A kid who is different does not need a vocabulary lesson. She needs the adults around her to have already had one.
Absolutely, and we have reasons for it, though probably not the reasons the question expects.
The first is that Rochester asked. The Rochester Rainbow Coalition is a group of neighbors, not a chapter of anything and not a staffed organization, and they invited us into their town to teach this. That matters to how we work. We do not turn up in a community uninvited to tell it what to think. We get asked, and then we come, and the people who did the asking stand up front with us.
The second is that Rochester has been having this conversation out loud. There are towns on the South Coast where all of this stays polite and unmentioned, and there are towns where it is on the agenda, in the minutes, and under the local news posts. Rochester has been the second kind for a while now. A town that is already talking about it is not a hard place to bring clear information. It is the best possible place to bring it, because the conversation is happening either way, and it can happen with a pediatrician in the room or without one.
The third reason is the one you can see from the road. Signs have been going up in front yards around town that say YOU BELONG HERE, on ordinary houses on ordinary streets. That is a town telling you something about itself, and it deserves an answer.
So yes, it is on purpose, not as a verdict on Rochester but as an answer to Rochester.
Everything up to here is the shallow end, and I would rather say so than let a web page pretend it has finished the job. I can give you three definitions and a truck driver to hang them on, and that is worth something, but it is not the same as the thing itself. This is a people subject. It does not really live in a paragraph. It lives in whether the person across from you will answer your question without making a face.
That is what a room is for. The people standing at the front of it are not there to read you a policy. They are there to talk with you, to teach you what they know, and, the part that matters more, to listen to you, to your question, to your discomfort if you have some and plenty of people do, to your kid or your student or your grandson or your congregation, and to the thing you have been turning over for two years and have never once said out loud in front of anybody. Bring it. Nobody is grading you on how you word it, and the question you are most embarrassed by is usually the one the whole room needs asked. Somebody has to go first.
And none of that is limited to Monday. There are people here the rest of the year too, and they will take your call.
This is the part we most want on the record, because it is the whole point of working this way. We will bring this presentation to any community on the South Coast that wants it, whether that is a town hall, a library meeting room, a church basement, a senior center, a staff room, or a business that would like its people to know what these words mean before the subject shows up on its own terms. It is the same three words, the same plain language, and the same welcome for the awkward question wherever we take it.
We are not coming to win anything. We are coming for education, for understanding, for taking the myths apart one at a time, for listening to whatever your town actually wants to say about this, and for the common ground that turns out to be sitting right there in the middle of the room once the fear is out of it. It usually takes about ninety minutes to find.
Rochester is on the twenty-first. If your town is next, tell us, and we will get a date on the calendar!