Alyssa Colvin

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We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay even after your assignment is finished! Thegooduser Life Begins With a Smile :) 🍁 21:12, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

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Welcome!

Hello, Alyssa Colvin, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:01, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Changes

Sexual orientation-talks about only a few different sexes My addition- add other sexes for expansion and saw why they are discriminated against Alyssa Colvin (talk) 23:53, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Discrimination

Alyssa, I reverted your edit at Discrimination because you didn’t provide a source. See WP:V, WP:RS, and Help:Footnotes. Your training modules probably go over this in detail. Adding Shalor (Wiki Ed). Mathglot (talk) 01:42, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

• Thank you Mathglot! Going into slight more detail, here's a general overview:

1. Avoid using scare quotes around words, as this can be seen as putting more emphasis on things and can actually make something non-neutral just by adding the quotes.
2. This absolutely needs sourcing to back up claims, especially as discrimination is inherently a heavily debated topic. Sexuality and gender are also topics that are frequently debated. The module on sourcing covers this in more depth.
3. There's a big difference between sexuality, gender, and sex. Gender deals with the mental and emotional aspects of how one identifies, whereas sex is traditionally defined by physical characteristics. Sexuality is defined by the type of sexual attraction the individual feels (or the lack thereof), to whom, and under what circumstances. The three terms cannot be freely exchanged for the other. As such, transgender is not a type of sexuality per se, although how they identify as far as their sexuality goes may depend on how they approach their transition. For example, someone who was born with male sexual organs (or assigned male, depending on your viewpoint) may identify as a gay male since they are sexually attracted to men. At some point through their life they realize that although they initially identified as a man, they actually identify as female and may begin their form of transitioning. (This may or may not include medical procedures such as surgery and hormones, changes in name and gender pronouns, clothing and mannerisms, or none of these aside from their own declaration of being a woman.) After identifying as a transgender woman, they may consider themselves straight because they're a woman who is attracted to men. Basically, gender identity and physical sex characteristics are not the same thing as sexual orientation. Sexuality may be used as a banner term by some, but you need to be very, very careful about how things are written.
4. Don't automatically assume what people know. For example, people may know more about transgender and pansexual people than you think. You may also find that topics like asexuality are discussed far less than the topic of transgender people. By that same extension people may know that bisexual people exist without really giving any true thought to what this means. For example, there are many within the LGBT world who look down upon bisexual people and assume that they're in denial of being gay, that they're "greedy", that they will always cheat, and so on, which lead to many saying that they feel excluded from both the straight and gay communities.
5. Finally, you mostly just defined the various topics. This isn't really needed, since there will typically be other articles that will expand on the topic and explain what the terms mean in more depth.

I hope that this helps explain things a bit more! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:07, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Her course appears to be nearly over, but hopefully she'll get the message. Mathglot (talk) 00:03, 24 April 2019 (UTC)