Gender terminology

Our ethos & understanding gender terminology.

A warm welcome to our community!

We believe that everyone deserves to feel completely comfortable, confident, and at one in their presentation and individuality. Hair removal is often so much more than just a personal choice, where permanent results can be life-changing for many different reasons. No matter your background, we provide a welcoming, respectful, and safe space for your unique journey.

To help all of our visitors navigate our services, here is a quick, friendly guide to some of the terms you may see across our website:

• Transgender: An umbrella term for individuals whose internal gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. For example, a transgender woman is someone who was assigned male at birth but knows herself to be a woman.
  
• Cisgender: Someone whose inner gender identity naturally matches the sex they were assigned at birth. If you have always identified as the sex on your original birth certificate, you are cisgender.

You might wonder where these terms come from, and looking at their history actually helps show how interconnected they are.

• While they might feel quite modern, the prefixes "trans-" and "cis-" actually share a beautifully balanced history that goes back thousands of years to ancient Latin. In Latin, "trans" means "across" or "on the other side of." We use it all the time in everyday English words like transport (to carry across) or transatlantic (across the Atlantic).
  
• Its natural Latin opposite is "cis," which means "on this side of." Ancient Romans used these two words as geographical partners to describe the world around them. For example, they called the land on their side of the Alps "Cisalpine Gaul," while the land on the other side of the mountains was "Transalpine Gaul."
  
• By pairing these ancient, equal building blocks with the word "gender," we get a beautifully balanced way to describe our experiences. It shows that being cisgender and transgender are simply two different sides of the same human journey—neither is the "default," and both are completely natural ways of being yourself.

Other terms you may see on our website:

• Assigned Sex: The biological classification (usually male or female) recorded on an infant's birth certificate based on physical characteristics.
• Gender Identity: A person's internal, deeply felt sense of who they are, which can be male, female, or another identity entirely.
• Non-Binary: A term for people who do not experience gender as strictly male or female. Their identity might blend elements of both, sit somewhere outside the traditional binary, or mean they do not identify with a gender at all.
• Transition: The unique personal process a trans person goes through to align their outer life, body, or appearance with their true gender identity. For some, this includes social steps like changing their name or pronouns. For others, it involves medical steps like hormone therapy, gender-affirming surgeries, or permanent hair removal.