GENDERSpec · 82 entries · revised 28 Aug 2026
An A–Z of genders and gender identities
Every gender term in one place, defined in plain language and sorted by what it names: an identity, a way of presenting, a pronoun set, a category belonging to one culture, or an idea the rest of the vocabulary is built on. Each entry says where the word came from, who first used it, and where the record stops.
The basics
How many genders are there?
There is no closed list, and a page that prints a number has counted something it never defined. Gender vocabulary is a living lexicon: words enter it, shift, fall out of use and are revived, and several of the terms in it name the same thing in different decades or different communities. What a catalogue can honestly say is how many terms it documents and how well attested each one is. This one holds 82 entries, and each says where its word came from and where the record stops.
- Identity
- What a person is. Non-binary, agender, trans man: the term names somebody’s own sense of their gender, not how they dress and not how a stranger reads them.
- Expression
- How gender is presented. Butch, femme, androgynous: a style, a set of codes, a way of being read. A person of any identity can use any of them, which is exactly why the two are not the same field.
- Pronouns
- What somebody is called in the third person. A pronoun set is grammar rather than identity: two people who share an identity may take different sets, and one set is used by people whose identities have nothing else in common.
Browse genders by category
Every entry files under one of 11 categories, decided by what the term names: an identity, a way of presenting, a pronoun set, a category belonging to one culture, or an idea the rest of the vocabulary is built on. Each category prints the rule for what belongs in it. The eight largest are below.
- Gender Around the WorldThe largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender.
- Trans & Binary IdentitiesMan, woman, trans and cis: every term for the relation between a person and the sex recorded for them at birth.
- Distinct Nonbinary GendersThe microlabels here share one insistence, and their sources make it in almost the same words every time: this is not a partial gender, not a blend, and not a point between two poles.
- Fluid & Changing GendersGenders that move.
- Multiple GendersHolding more than one gender, at once or in alternation.
- Umbrella & Spectrum TermsThe words whose job is to contain other words. [[non-binary]] is the largest of them and the most used term in this catalogue, covering everything that is not exclusively male or female. [[genderqueer]] does almost the same work with a political charge the newer word dropped, which is why both survive rather than one replacing the other. [[third-gender]] is different again: a comparative term applied from outside by anthropologists, to categories that already have their own names.
- Gender Expression & PresentationWhat these gender expression terms report is presentation, stance and the scene a person comes from, rather than an answer to the question of what their gender is. [[butch]] is the clearest case: Wikipedia files it inside the lesbian subculture, with its own traits, behaviours and styles, and the word grew out of working-class bar culture in the 1940s rather than out of any theory of identity.
- Partial & DemigendersDegree of connection rather than which gender.
Gender term collections
Every set here is ordered by hand and deliberately incomplete, cutting across the taxonomy rather than filling a slot in it. Each one says what it leaves out and why, and the note beside every entry says what earned it its place.
- The Pairs People Mix UpFour pairs of gender terms that get mixed up constantly, and what each pair actually turns on: the body, the axis, the register, or a plain category error.
- Categories That Resist TranslationSeven gender categories routinely given as the local word for transgender, and the specific reason each of those renderings fails.
- The Vocabulary of the 1990sSeven words first attested between 1992 and 1996, made in zines and newsletters before the general internet, carrying most of the framework still in use.
- The Numbers That Get MisquotedSix figures quoted constantly without the sentence that makes them mean anything, including one that fell sixfold because a checkbox was removed.
- Where the Law Drew a LineSix gender categories with a date, a jurisdiction and a document behind them, from a criminal tribe in 1871 to a third gender in 2014.
- Words That Changed MeaningSix terms whose current sense is not their first, with both senses dated. A dictionary gives where a word ended up; this gives the distance travelled.
- MVPFAFF: The Pacific Names ItselfSeven Pacific gender categories grouped under an acronym their own communities coined, and the differences the grouping deliberately does not hide.
- Words With a Known AuthorFour gender terms whose coinage has a person, a date and a place attached, and why almost nothing else in the vocabulary does.
Common questions
Questions about genders and gender terms
The eight put most often to a search box, answered from the record rather than from an opinion about it. Every date, name and publication below is one a reader can check.
What is the difference between gender identity and gender expression?
Identity is what a person is; expression is how they present. Non-binary and trans woman are identities. Butch, femme and androgynous describe a way of dressing, moving and being read, and a person of any identity can use any of them. Conflating the two is what most confused searches about this vocabulary are actually about, and it is why every entry here is filed as one or the other before anything else is said about it.
What is the difference between sex and gender?
In the vocabulary as it is now used, sex refers to bodily characteristics and gender to the social and personal category a person belongs to or identifies with. The distinction is a twentieth-century one: John Money introduced gender role in 1955, and Robert Stoller separated sex from gender identity in Sex and Gender in 1968. The terms have moved since, and the entries record what each one meant when it was coined as well as what it means now.
Where do gender terms come from?
This catalogue records the answer for every term. Some come from clinical and academic writing. Some sit in the written record before the twentieth century. Some were coined inside a community and used for decades before anybody wrote them down. Some were coined online and can be traced to a dated post. Some belong to a specific living culture and predate the English vocabulary entirely. The origin is a descriptive field on every entry, and it is never a ranking.
Is singular they grammatically correct?
It has been in written English since the fourteenth century, several hundred years before anybody objected to it. What changed recently is its use for a specific known person rather than an unspecified one: the American Dialect Society named singular they its word of the year for 2015 and its word of the decade in 2020, and Merriam-Webster added the non-binary sense to its entry in September 2019.
What is a neopronoun?
A pronoun set coined deliberately rather than inherited from the language. They are much older than the internet: thon was coined in 1858 by the American lawyer Charles Crozat Converse, and Funk and Wagnalls printed it in their dictionary from 1898 until 1964. What the recent sets share with it is the same problem and the same solution, roughly a century and a half apart.
Is Two-Spirit an ancient word?
No, and the entry says so in its first line. Two-Spirit is an English-language umbrella term proposed at an Indigenous gathering in Winnipeg in 1990, adopted to replace an anthropological label that Indigenous people had not chosen. It stands in for many distinct roles in many distinct nations, each with its own name in its own language, and it is not available to non-Indigenous people. A reference work that prints it as an ancient word is describing something else.
Why does GENDERSpec describe terms instead of ranking them?
Because a rank would be a score attached to a person. Nothing here counts how many people use a term, how established it is, or how seriously it should be taken, and no entry carries an index or a percentage of legitimacy. What each entry carries instead is descriptive: what the word names, who first used it, when, in what publication, and how much of a record exists behind it. Those fields say everything useful a score would have claimed to say, and they can be checked.
Does GENDERSpec give medical or legal advice?
No, and both exclusions are deliberate. Terms like gender dysphoria get an entry saying what the term means and which document defines it, and no entry discusses transition, hormones, surgery or eligibility for anything. There is no register of what the law says in any country, no self-assessment, and no quiz that hands somebody a verdict about their own identity. The full list of refusals, and the reasoning, is on the about page.