NIH Style Guide Recommends Lowering the T in LGBt for Inclusivity

Washington, D.C.—In the last several years there have been many important updates to style guides for medical writers in the United States. One notable example is the switch from pregnant woman to birthing person since new research shows that human men can now give birth and nurse babies. And once again the medical literature must be updated to accommodate new issues in the LGBt community, and more specifically the transgender community.

“In our research, we found that people in the ’t’ spectrum of the rainbow often either have low T and/or have removed their t’s completely,” Dr. Juan Tatas said in a press conference. “It would be unethical for us to continue recommending upper case T’s in medical writing regarding the LGBt community.”

The trans community has been split over this change.

“After years of being attacked by Nazis like Charlie Kirk, we are finally safer tonight knowing that medical research only a handful of people will ever read addresses the amount of T in our community,” said Meghan Smalldee, who transitioned from male to female last year, hoping to birth her first child.

While most in the community have low T, there are still plenty of people with higher than normal levels of T that feel they are underrepresented now.

“I’m not sure that I’m fully on board with this change,” said Justia Guy, “some of us are high T women, and now our letter of the alphabet doesn’t really fit with our reality.”

But doctors argue that these represent a small minority and that changing the case is warranted.

“Look, honestly, it’s really hard to label people in this group, even though they embrace all sorts of labels. Ze, zir, zim, zam, zotsky, furperson, whatever. To be clear, ‘whatever’ was a pronoun…I wasn’t dismissing pronouns,” said Dr. Tatas. “Unfortunately, they often don’t like labels that are given to them. But if we gave them a choice, we’d have to add more letters, numbers, and symbols to the literature, and it would take years for doctors and people with too much time on their hands to ever read any of these papers.”

Dr. Tatas is correct. Their counterparts at the NHS in the UK published only a few articles last year. One of those articles ended up around 500 pages due to using the full LBGt name that the NHS Style Guide requires. A single mention of the group was ten pages on its own. Another article went to publication in October of 2024 and it’s still being printed now, almost a year later.

Moving forward, the Daily Defamer will be using LBGt in print and in any audio or video content, we’re following new NIH guidance as well. That requires you to really hit the ‘L’ really hard, then say ‘G’ and ‘B’ normally, finally finishing with a whispered, but breathy ’t.’

Brosé Sanchez

America First voice from Florida. Shares bold takes on culture, hypocrisy & history. Pronouns are: I, you, he/she, we, you, they. You should've learned that in grade school.

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