As part of my learning journey, and because I want to be inclusive, I’ve updated my website’s notation for the romantic pairings in my books. Yes, it’s standard in romance to use mf for straight books, mm for gay, and ff for lesbian, however the use of ‘f’ implies biological gender which isn’t very inclusive to trans people. And since a trans woman is a woman and a trans man is a man, I’ve changed ff to wlw (woman loving woman), I’ve left mm the same (but in my head it means man not male), and mf (or fm because I tend to put the heroine first) to man/woman or wm or mw.

On my books page, I’ve used sapphic rather than wlw because it’s even more inclusive, and if someone knows of a term I could use for man/woman romances that includes queer people, that would be fabulous. Most of my man/woman romances aren’t straight as they have bisexual characters (some on page and some not*). The ones that aren’t explicitly on the page are older books that were queer before I was deliberately writing queer (yes, this is a journey of discovery). And yes, one of my older books uses the word ‘female’ in the tagline (written by the publisher) and I am aware that it’s not a great choice. One day it will get updated.

This is all imperfect and my goal is to be as inclusive as possible without accidentally hurting or exclusing people.