The index · 122 entries
Browse gender terms by category and origin
The complete catalogue. Narrow it by what a term names or by where the word came from, or pick a category to open its own page. Filtering by origin is the view no other glossary offers: the terms attested before the twentieth century, and the ones that can be traced to a dated post, side by side and neither ranked above the other.
122 entries
- AbinaryA cover term for genders unrelated to maleness or femaleness and nowhere between them, first recorded in a 2016 Tumblr post that was coining a different word.
- AgenderAbsence rather than an unusual answer, dated by the OED to a 1996 newspaper article, and first recognised in law by an Oregon court ruling in 2017.
- AgenderfluidAgender as the base, with other gendered feelings coming and going around it, and a community record thin enough to carry a notability warning.
- AgenderfluxFully agender at the core while the felt level of masculinity or femininity rises and falls, and a definition the community has not yet settled.
- Akava'ineAn old Cook Islands word now carrying a much newer identity, shaped by Polynesian communities in New Zealand and carried back home to Rarotonga.
- AmbigenderTwo genders held at once and held still, the static case bigender also covers, attested in a transgender community magazine as early as 1993.
- AndrogyneA gender blending or falling between male and female, in English since at least the sixteenth century, and the outlier among terms that reject the binary.
- AndrogynosA rabbinic category for a person with both sets of genitals, ruled like a man in some respects and like a woman in others. Greek word, Talmudic use.
- AporagenderA gender separate from male, female and anything between them, coined on Tumblr in 2014 to replace aliagender and used as one gender and as an umbrella.
- ApwintThe Burmese word for people assigned male at birth who live openly as women, paired with apone for those who do not, and counted by nobody yet.
- AutigenderA gender inseparable from being autistic, naming a relationship with gender rather than a gender made of autism. Coined on Tumblr in August 2014.
- AylonitA rabbinic category assigned at eighteen or twenty, glossed in the Talmud as ram-like, and argued to be borrowed from the description of the eunuch.
- BabaylanThe shamanic office of the pre-colonial Philippines, held mostly by women and by asog, and documented by Spanish chroniclers from 1569 onward.
- BaklaA Filipino gender term paired with tomboy, meaning indecisiveness in Old Tagalog, a slur by the time of the war, and no longer one since the 1990s.
- BigenderTwo gender identities held together or in turn, with a record that starts in 1990s community magazines and a Merriam-Webster entry behind it.
- BinabinaaineA Gilbertese word borrowed into Tuvaluan for a third-gender role recognised in later childhood, glossed as becoming a woman and counted by nobody.
- BissuThe ritual specialists of the Bugis and the fifth gender of South Sulawesi, an office reached by initiation, with six left in Pangkep Regency in 2019.
- BurrneshaA role in the Albanian highlands taken by oath: celibacy sworn before elders in exchange for a man's standing under the Kanun. About twelve remained in 2022.
- ButchMasculine presentation out of the 1940s working-class lesbian bar culture, and the unsettled argument over whether it is a style or a gender.
- ChibadosDiviners of the Ndongo who lived as women, advised on war and buried the dead, and whose entire surviving record was written by the Portuguese.
- CisgenderA word invented in 1994 to name the default, because prose contrasting trans women with women has already decided which of the two counts as real.
- Cross-dresserA word for wearing another gender's clothing that refuses to say why, adopted in place of transvestite, and dated by decades of dictionary disagreement.
- DemiboyPartly male and partly something else, from a half-serious 2010 asexuality forum post, with a printed record that does not begin until 2015.
- DemifluxOne part of the gender holds still while another rises and falls in strength, under a name that replaced genderpivot and predates its own flags.
- DemigenderThe umbrella over demiboy, demigirl and their relatives, coined on an asexuality forum in August 2010 and written into Washington state law in 2018.
- DemigirlPartly a girl and partly something else, recorded on an asexuality forum in December 2010, with a definition that broadened between 2011 and 2014.
- Drag kingA stage role dating from 1972, with roots in music-hall male impersonation, and a scene that reached television decades after the drag queens did.
- Drag queenA performance role, not a gender: the New York term from the 1950s that began as a boundary between amateurs, street queens and paid impersonators.
- EgogenderA gender so personal that the only description of it is the person holding it, coined on Tumblr in June 2014 in a post that made seven words at once.
- EnareeScythian diviners who lived as women and read the future in plaited linden bark, known only through the Greek writers who disapproved of them.
- EunuchA castrated man, and for most of history castrated by someone else. Court office, harem guard, castrato, and a disputed clinical chapter since 2022.
- Ey/emEy, em, eir, eirs, emself: coined by Christine Elverson in 1975, named after Michael Spivak, and put into working code on LambdaMOO in 1991.
- Fa'afafineA Samoan gender role held inside an extended family, not a translation of transgender, and a morphology that repeats right across the Pacific.
- Fa'afatamaSamoans assigned female at birth who live in the manner of a man, counted as a fourth gender by some sources and a third by others, and never counted at all.
- Fae/faerFae, faer, faers, faerself: a noun-self pronoun with three dated uses between 2016 and 2022, and no record at all of who proposed it or when.
- FakafifineNiue's word for people assigned male at birth with a feminine expression, and the final F in an acronym a Niuean activist assembled in 2011.
- FakaleitiIn the manner of a lady, with the lady borrowed from English, naming a Tongan group far wider than any single translation is willing to admit.
- FemboyA feminine presentation worn by a boy or young man, in print since 1981 and general use since 2020, and not an answer to what anyone's gender is.
- FemmeFeminine presentation out of 1940s working-class lesbian bar culture, the paired term to butch, and the argument over who may claim the word.
- FemminielloA Neapolitan third-gender role understood as male in a feminine part, held to bring luck, with named duties at the Montevergine and Torre Annunziata feasts.
- GalaLamentation priests of Inanna in Sumer, singing in eme-sal, the dialect of female gods. Proverbs call them effeminate; the ledgers give them wives.
- GalliSelf-castrated priests of Cybele in yellow women's dress and jewellery, adopted by Rome in 204 BCE and last recorded at her temple in AD 390.
- Gender benderDeliberate subversion of expected gender roles and dress, out of gay liberation and glam rock in the 1970s, where it was first called genderfuck.
- Gender questioningA state rather than a stage: the dictionary sense, why the sources refuse the youth-only framing, and how English schools guidance turned it into a category.
- Gender variantAn institutional heading rather than a label anybody picks: who writes it, why no dictionary dates it, and what it costs to file it beside the identities.
- Gender-nonconformingExpression that departs from the norms expected of a gender, dated by Merriam-Webster to 1991, and used far more by institutions than about oneself.
- GenderfaeA fluid gender bounded so that it never reaches the masculine, an anonymous 2014 coinage, and the community objection that produced genderdoe and genderthil.
- GenderfaunA fluidity that stops short of the feminine, coined in May 2017 as the deliberate complement to genderfae, with a flag that argues its case by omission.
- GenderfluidA gender that shifts rather than settles, one of the few terms here with a dictionary of record, and the one that genderflux is confused with.
- GenderfluxIntensity rather than direction, and a 1994 newsletter attestation that makes the word two decades older than the coinage most sources give it.
- GenderlessAn absence rather than a neutral, and a void rather than a blank: the three ordinary dictionary senses, and the 2014 Tumblr coinage of gendervoid.
- GenderpunkConscious resistance to gender normativity carried over from punk subculture, treated by its own sources as both a culture and a gender, and never dated.
- GenderqueerOlder than non-binary, nearly identical in definition, and kept by the people who want the political charge that the newer word deliberately dropped.
- GraygenderA weak or ambivalent connection to gender and its expression, coined by the Tumblr user invernom in March 2014 on the model of graysexuality.
- He/himPrescribed for everybody from the eighteenth century until the 1960s, written into an act of Parliament in 1850, and dropped by the style guides by 2020.
- HijraAn organised community with a lineage system and a ritual economy, registered as a criminal tribe in 1871 and recognised as a third gender in 2014.
- IntergenderTwo coinages sixteen years apart, one intersex-only and one not, and a live argument about who the word belongs to. Both senses dated, both reported here.
- IntersexA fact about bodies that nearly every gender list files as an identity, and two prevalence figures thirty times apart from one single source.
- IpsogenderAn intersex person who identifies with the binary sex they were assigned at birth, and the gap in cisgender that made the word necessary in 2015.
- It/itsThree shapes for five forms, a paradigm settled by the seventeenth century, and one modern use that the reference record barely documents at all.
- JuxeraA whole gender standing near female rather than a fraction of one, coined on Tumblr in July 2014 and dated two different ways by its own sources.
- KathoeyA Thai category covering trans women and effeminate men, avoided by most Thai trans women, and rendered in English by a word that tourism made.
- KhanithAn Omani and Emirati social position between men's and women's roles, held with a man's legal rights, and reversible through marriage and public proof.
- Khawaja siraPakistan's third-gender community, named from a Mughal court title, recognised by the courts from 2009, and still arguing over what the word covers.
- MahuIn the middle, not in the manner of a woman: a Hawaiian and Tahitian healing role suppressed after 1820 and reclaimed again since the 1990s.
- ManA word that meant any person until Middle English, a category that holds cisgender and transgender men together, and a slang sense that inverts it.
- MaveriqueA present, specific gender independent of male, female and neutral, coined on Tumblr by Vesper H. in June 2014 and named after an unbranded calf.
- MaxigenderA large claim with a ceiling written into it: as many genders as one life reaches. Proposed against pangender, and documented only in other terms' entries.
- MetagenderA word coined independently several times for definitions that do not agree, from a spiritual gender of the late nineteen-nineties to a gender modality of 2020.
- MetiA Nepali term for a feminine person assigned male at birth, inside the third gender recognised in 2007. The 2011 census offered it and lost the data.
- MultigenderThe umbrella over bigender, trigender, polygender, pangender and ambigender: more than one gender identity, held all at once or taken in turn.
- MuxeA Zapotec gender category in Juchitán, Oaxaca, defined by duty to Zapotec custom rather than by presentation, and first attested in English in 1985.
- MxThe courtesy title that states no gender. Dated to 1977 by the OED, accepted on council forms in Brighton and Hove in 2013, and argued over since.
- NádleehíThe Diné word translates as changing one, not feminine male. Four genders, a creation story, and a category the two-spirit umbrella covers imperfectly.
- NeopronounThird-person pronouns coined rather than inherited. The label dates from the 2010s; the sets it covers run back to 1789, and over two hundred are recorded.
- NeurogenderThe umbrella for genders describable only in the context of being neurodivergent. Coined on Tumblr in 2014; an unrelated sense dates to 1997.
- NeuroqueerCoined by Nick Walker in 2008 as a verb, for queering norms about minds and about gender at once. Its own authors refuse to give it a fixed definition.
- NeutroisA neutral gender coined by one named person in 1995, and the clearest proof on this whole site that changing a checkbox changes the answer sixfold.
- Non-binaryAn umbrella term and an identity at the very same time, and the reason its two headline figures are not remotely comparable with one another.
- Non-binary manA paired label for people who hold a binary gender and a non-binary one at once, measured by the Gender Census but never dated to a first use.
- Nounself pronounA pronoun made from an ordinary noun: bun, buns, bunself. The first is dated to late 2013 on Tumblr; the label first appears in print three years later.
- OmnigenderAlmost every gender rather than all of them, plus an older adjective meaning unisex and a 2001 theology book. Three senses, and glossaries rarely mark which.
- OutherineAn umbrella for gender qualities separate from masculinity, femininity, androgyny and neutrality, coined on Tumblr in January 2019 by a disputed hand.
- PalopaA Tok Pisin word taken from Jennifer Lopez and dated to about 2005, adopted in Port Moresby in place of English words heard as stigmatising.
- PangenderA vast range of genders rather than literally all of them: the sources limit the range to a person's own culture and experience, and argue about it.
- PolygenderSeveral genders rather than one, though nobody agrees how many. It was an umbrella for everyone outside the binary in 1998 and has been rare in print since.
- Pronoun setThe five forms one pronoun takes, and why a set is named by the first two. The 2017 Gender Census asked for all five, one sentence at a time.
- ProxvirA whole gender near male rather than a fraction of one, coined on Tumblr in July 2014 alongside juxera, and read three different ways by its own sources.
- Queer (gender)Queer as an answer to a gender question rather than an orientation: the 1510 Scots attestation, the 1894 letter, and an unfinished reclamation.
- QuoigenderFrom the French quoi, meaning what: a refusal of the gender question itself, coined on Tumblr in 2014 after quoiromantic and measured once, in 2022.
- RaeraeA Tahitian category that appeared in the 1960s, defined against the older māhū role by presentation, by medical transition and by the city of Papeete.
- SarisA rabbinic category for a person assigned male at birth who develops no male characteristics, split by cause, with a different marriage rule for each.
- She/herThe only English pronoun with no agreed etymology: her covers two cases, and the descent of she from Old English has never been satisfactorily settled.
- SipiniqAn Inuit category for a child held to have changed sex at the moment of birth, then raised as the sex they were first, by name, clothing and work.
- SistergirlAboriginal and Torres Strait Islander words for gender-diverse people with a female or male spirit. Community-defined, area-specific, and wider than trans.
- StaticgenderA xenogender described as television static: fuzzy, complicated, incomprehensible. The coiner is unknown and the earliest dated record is a flag from July 2016.
- They/themSingular they is dated to the fourteenth century rather than the twenty-first, and its reflexive cell still holds two spellings that authorities split over.
- Third genderThe comparative term for the gender positions outside man and woman, and why counting up to three is the part that its critics object to most.
- ThonCoined in 1858 from a Scots demonstrative, printed by its inventor in 1884, and carried by Merriam-Webster from 1934 until it was dropped in 1961.
- TomboyA word that meant a boisterous boy in 1533 and an immodest woman in the 1570s before it settled on girls, and has held that sense for four centuries.
- Trans manA compound dated to the closing 1990s, the term it replaced, why the closed spelling is contested, and what the published counts actually measure.
- Trans womanWhere the compound was recorded, the medical word it replaced, why the closed spelling is rejected, and the categories other languages use instead.
- TransandrogynousCoined with a flag on one dated day in 2017, the androgynous member of a trans alignment set, and documented by community wikis and nothing else.
- TransfeminineA word proposed in a 1985 magazine article to be silent about surgery, lost for twenty-five years, and now naming a direction rather than a gender.
- TransgenderAn umbrella carrying a 1965 medical coinage and a 1994 antonym, and one of the very few figures in this subject that is a population estimate.
- TransmasculineA word in institutional use from 2000 and in print from 2011, covering trans men and masculine non-binary people because it names a direction.
- TranspinayA Tagalog blend of trans and Pinay, coined by a Filipino trans organisation to separate trans women from bakla. No source dates its first use.
- TranssexualA German coinage of 1923, an English one of 1949, why transgender displaced it, who still claims it, and what Blanchard's typology actually said.
- TransvestiteCoined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910, a psychiatric diagnosis for most of the twentieth century, and now largely replaced in English by cross-dresser.
- TravestiA South American identity reclaimed from an insult, kept because it holds the class history and policing that activists say transgender discards.
- TrigenderThree gender identities, held together or taken in turn, with any three genders allowed. Fourteen people claimed the word in the 2019 Gender Census.
- TumtumA rabbinic legal category for a person whose sex cannot be determined. Seventeen occurrences in the Mishnah, and a ruling term, not a claim.
- Two-SpiritAn English umbrella coined at a 1990 Winnipeg gathering to replace berdache, closed to non-Indigenous people, and translating no older word.
- VakasalewalewaThe one Pacific category rejected by many of the Fijians that it names, who find it old-fashioned and use the broader word qauri in its place.
- WariaIndonesia's word for trans women, built by a government minister in 1978 out of woman and man, and still argued over by the scholars who describe it.
- WhakawahineA te reo Māori word built from whaka- and wahine, defined by New Zealand glossaries rather than scholarship, with no article on English Wikipedia.
- WinkteA Lakota word contracting winyanktehca, wants to be like a woman. Not a synonym for the 1990 pan-Indigenous umbrella, and now usually meaning a gay man.
- WomanA compound of wif and mann that once meant woman-person, a category holding cisgender and transgender women, and a plural whose spelling fits nothing.
- X-genderA Japanese term out of the Kansai queer scene of the 1990s, defined in a magazine glossary in the year 2000, and unrelated to the X on a passport.
- Xe/xemXe, xem, xyr and xemself: the set printed in UU World on 1 May 1973 and credited to Don Rickter, plus the xyr against xir spelling nobody settled.
- XenogenderAn umbrella for genders described through animals, colours, textures or concepts instead of male and female. Coined on Tumblr by Baaphomett in 2014.
- Ze/hirZe, hir, hirs and hirself, with the zir variant beside them, and the century-wide gap between the OED dating of 1864 and Dictionary.com's 1970s.
