WellesleyWeston Magazine

SUMMER 2017

Launched in 2005, WellesleyWeston Magazine is a quarterly publication tailored to Wellesley and Weston residents and edited to enrich the experience of living in two of Massachusetts' most desirable communities.

Issue link: https://wellesleywestonmagazine.epubxp.com/i/819093

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 94 of 219

The terminology (see sidebar on page 94) can be confusing to those without context or knowledge. As thoughtfulness for people with gender incongruence becomes increasingly common, sophisticated, and detailed, profes sionals and the community struggle to keep pace with providing a sensitive and descriptive lexicon. Preferred terms evolve and descrip tors change, which makes educating the com munity even more challenging. The prevalence of transgender people in the overall population is in the range of 0.3 to 0.5 percent, notes Dr. Joshua Safer, endocri nologist at Boston Medical Center (BMC), and medical director of The Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at BMC. "In the scientific community, we are quite clear that there is a biological basis for gender identity," Safer notes. It is important to understand that gender identity and sexual orientation are completely separate from each other, though the two are often erroneously conflated. Simply put, sex ual orientation is about who you are attracted to and fall in love with; gender identity is about your own sense of yourself. One often gen der i den ti ty sexual orientation 93 W e l l e s l e y W e s t o n M a g a z i n e | s u m m e r 2 0 1 7

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of WellesleyWeston Magazine - SUMMER 2017