What You Need to Know About LGBTQ+ Folks to Make Inclusive Products

June is PRIDE month! It's a vibrant celebration of the LGBTQ+ community, honoring our history of resilience and the ongoing fight for inclusion and equality, while embracing the diversity of our identities with pride and joy.

In honor of Pride, I'm writing about a subject near and dear to my heart: designing inclusive products. I'm not going to teach you all about gender, sex, and queer identity. Instead I am imparting to you a list of insights and recommendations you can keep in mind to create products that are inclusive to the queer community and queer users.

Some of these tips are useful for any product where you might be tempted to ask a user's sex/gender, while others are specific to building products in healthcare, family planning, wellness, femtech, or relationship spaces. In the latter case, you should also be doing your own user research to make sure you are addressing inclusion in a manner most suitable for your userbase.

These insights can help you build more inclusive products from both the start of development and the start of the user journey. The most common place to be collecting personal info like names and genders on your users is onboarding. It's crucial to make a positive first impression by ensuring the process is inclusive.

Why you should care

• Inclusion can increase loyalty to both brand and product.
• Asking the wrong questions or making the wrong assumptions during onboarding can cause drop-off of both queer and allied users.
• Over 7% of the US population identifies as under the LGBT+ umbrella. The number increases as you look to younger generations with almost 20% of Gen Z identifying as LGBT+.
• Gen Z is often cited as caring more about authenticity, personalization, individual truth, and caring even more than previous generations about human rights, identity, and sustainability.
• 76% of Gen Z will stop buying brands and spread word about brands they view as homophobic.
• It's more efficient to design data storage and manage data transmission through the tech stack up from the start than to update this later. For instance, avoid using Boolean fields for gender or sex.

What to Know

Gender

• There are more than two genders.
• Most non-binary genders do not fit neatly into a box.
• People can have more than one gender at a given time (think checkboxes not radio buttons).
• People can have genders that change from day-to-day.
• There are more pronouns than she/her, he/him, and they/them.
• Even within that set of pronouns, people often use more than one (I express my pronouns as she/they meaning I identify with and am comfortable with either she/her or they/them).
• Many people don't want to disclose either their gender or pronouns. Always make this information optional and give a "Prefer not to answer" option.
• Targeting and segmenting users by behavior and with AI is better (and rapidly getting better) than targeting based on input from a demand for them to input their gender during onboarding.
• Think hard about why you need it before you ask for things like gender.

Biology

• Gender and sex are NOT the same. Don't use the terms interchangeably. Sex is for biology. Gender is for identity.
• Neither gender nor sex is binary.
• Intersex people are estimated to make up about 1.7% of the population. Any sex traits (hormones, reproductive organs, chromosomes) can be intersex meaning they don't fit into the typical binary male and female sexes.
• When people take hormone replacement therapy (HRT), have had various gender affirming surgeries, have intersex traits, or have a hormonal condition... their biology is not the same as their assigned sex. (Example: a trans woman who has had an orchiectomy or HRT will not have the same biology as a "biological man.")
• Any gender can get pregnant, menstruate, breastfeed, or impregnate others.
• The hormones that affect cis women during menstruation have similar effects on trans women. They can experience menstrual symptoms such as cramps on that same periodic cadence.

Language

• Never deadname users. Deadnaming is using the former name of a trans person instead of their chosen name. If you absolutely need to collect a legal name, ask for a preferred name too. Always use that preferred name in communicating with the user unless there is a regulatory requirement to use a legal name. Note that people who change their names often go through a period of experimentation and may want to change their name more than once in your product.
• Use they/them when you don't know someone's gender. Not he/her or he/she or (s)he.
• Avoid terms like "feminine hygiene/health." Any gender can menstruate. It's "menstrual hygiene/health".
• Again, gender and sex are NOT the same. Don't use them interchangeably.
• "Birthing parent" and "pregnant person" are more inclusive than mom/mom-to-be.
• Many queer people are comfortable with the term queer and strongly identify with it. A subset of folks do not like the term and prefer LGBT(QIA)+.
• LGBTQIA+ can be shortened to LGBT+ or LGBTQ+. Never shorten to LGB as that term is used to exclude trans people.

Relationships

• Asexual and aromantic people make up 1-4% of the population.
• Any gender of people can form a relationship.
• There are many variations of polyamory and non-monogamy. Don't assume a user is in an intimate relationship with just one person.
• Bisexual people are still bisexual even if they are in a heterosexual (ie man and woman) relationship.

Conclusion

By recognizing and accommodating the diverse gender, sex, and relationship experiences of your users, you can develop superior products. This approach not only enhances user satisfaction and loyalty but also positively impacts your business performance, particularly among Gen Z and Millennial users. Embracing inclusivity benefits both your users and employees, fostering a more supportive and innovative environment.

Heather Arbiter (she/they) is a Product Manager and Games/Gamification Designer. They identify as queer with niche identities under the umbrellas of non-binary and bisexual. Heather has spent a year working at a startup in "queerTech" creating financial services and family planning product for a dominantly queer audience. She has been a moderator of an online queer community space of over 100k members for 5 years granting additional insights into the larger LGBT+ community. They're happy to talk to you about offering LGBT+ DEI training for your team and consult on how to best support queer users in your product decisions.

Disclaimer: ChatGPT was used in the editing process in proofing, tweaking some sentence structure, and revising the conclusion and intro. Gemini AI was used for some elements of the header image.