Inclusive language is language that includes everybody, as you might guess, by the term. But it is particularly important when it comes to medical things, research around sexual and reproductive experiences, things like this. Because they can be a very scary topic for people to talk about. And people can be very easily ostracized from the process, if language for their identity is used incorrectly. When we're trying to get a group of very different people together, that can be very complicated. It can feel like a big ask for a researcher to figure out that language. It feels...sometimes it felt like to me like a whole learning experience I wasn't expecting. But it also felt like a huge opportunity to learn how to connect with my participants in the right way. I wanted everybody to feel comfortable to feel safe in the space with me and with a group. And it was of the utmost importance to make sure I was using inclusive language as a part of that process. So before I started this research, I knew a little bit about inclusive language, something that I had been integrating more in my personal life, understanding pronouns. And I had done some previous research on a project about queer and trans youth. And so I had already been learning about it. Within this specific research, I really saw a lot of complicated issues in how I would refer to people, and what language we could use within the topic of sexual and reproductive experiences.

So first of all, within recruitment, I really struggled to understand how to refer to the people that I was attempting to recruit. So the obvious answer to some people might be...ask for women. So I'm recruiting women, but not everybody thinks of themselves as a woman. And many people have experiences with their sexual and reproductive health, that relate to, you know, having a uterus going to the gynecologist, but don't identify as a woman. And I wanted to definitely get those perspectives, didn't want to leave those behind. And I wanted those people in the room, I wanted women and non binary people. But I also wanted to open the opportunity for transgender people to participate. So trans masc people who were assigned female at birth. And so that brought me to the idea of saying people assigned female at birth. And maybe...maybe that gets at, you know, the very medical, intense, serious way of talking about our genitalia. But that doesn't tell you anything about someone's gender identity. And those are very separate things. So in my recruitment, I ended up with the phrase women, non binary and transgender people assigned female at birth. And I used all of these terms in order to try to avoid ostracizing anybody. I wanted people to understand that there might be many gender identities included in the research, especially because it's a group session. But I also didn't want people who do identify as a woman to get turned off by the whole assigned female at birth part. Because a lot of people maybe haven't thought about that term. I've never heard that term. It's not part of their identity that they think of all the time. So I ended up with all of the terms. And I felt like it worked. I feel like it was the best option. But there was a lot of research that went into choosing that phrase for my recruitment.

So there's a lot of different terms happening in the medical space for inclusive language. And in my research to figure out how to be inclusive in my recruitment, and during my sessions, I explored a few different terms. Some resonated more than others. Obviously, I went with individuals assigned female at birth, but there was a lot that came along with it. I'm looking at you article that mentioned the term "front hole". Very interesting, very interesting. Every person that I've ever described that term too, has laughed and become very uncomfortable. Because I think it does pretty much everybody a disservice. But it's a really good example of maybe trying too hard, maybe trying to be inclusive and then losing any identity we have with our body parts. And I think that was a big reflection for me.

I wanted to make sure that I was being inclusive to as many people as possible, but also not prescriptive. I didn't want people to feel uncomfortable using the language that they already use in their daily lives. So this looked like having sections in my focus group script that talk a lot about making sure we can all get on the same page about the language we're going to use and making it clear that we can change that language at any time. So if someone becomes uncomfortable with a phrase, or a term, or a word, that someone in the group is saying, I wanted to make it clear that they could advocate for themselves. And we would change the word—we could choose a new one together that worked for everybody. Because, thankfully, within sexual and reproductive experiences, there's a ton of words that we can use, we all kind of use different ones, and different ones make us uncomfortable or more comfortable. So this was a way to try to bring people into that process.

So to summarize, I ended up feeling like it would be wrong for me to just decide what language we use. And so the best way that I could think of was to give people the chance to tell me what they would like to use. And this inclusivity is really important. It is, to me the basis of making a safe space. If someone is using language that it feels harmful to you, triggering to you, you're never going to feel safe in that space, you're never going to be able to truly be comfortable and work as a group, and imagine futures. Which is already a hard thing to ask people to do. In a way, we were co-designing a language. We were co-designing what was inclusive to the group.