Non-PC

[trixibell]

There was a survey at work, the usual How Is Everybody? corporate questionnaire, and one of the "diversity" questions had the options Straight [heterosexual] or Lesbian, Gay, Transgender or anything else. This made me really uncomfortable. The word Straight has negative connotations in my mind anyway, but when put that way it kinda came across as

Comments

[odacamilla]

I feel bad about writing Bi, and equally bad about writing hetero. Especially for statistical purposes, those groupings are way inaccurate in small samples.

So I end up saying "Rather not say", simply because I do not want to mess up their stats...

[spacelem]

Not really interested in this as a political argument, but as a semantics argument, here goes:

Technically, I think it should be "sexuality: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual" and gender should include "gender: male, female, m to f, f to m, other". "Gender" and "sexuality" should be two separate fields, and I'm never sure why they group transgendered (which is self perception of gender) with the list of sexual preferences. If you want to be really PC, you could even order these alphabetically, in order to show no prior assumptions. Also gender is separate from "what combination of X and Y sex chromosomes do you have?", but that's getting really complicated.

The words "gay" and "lesbian" are slang for "homosexual and homosexual woman" respectively, just as "straight" is slang for "heterosexual", the only difference being that we are now probably more familiar with the slang than the official words. Straight presumable does mean "not bent", but I think that definition is changing somewhat.