The taxonomy
11 categories
A category cuts across the five entry types, so one page can hold an identity, a pronoun set and a concept on the same theme. Each group prints the rule for what files there, so a reader can predict where a term will land before opening it, and each holds the terms filed elsewhere that belong here too.
- Agender & Neutral GendersThe genders defined by absence, and the ones defined by neutrality, which are not the same claim. [[agender]] means having no gender: the a- prefix is the Greek privative, as in amoral, and the people who use it often describe the question of their gender as not connecting to anything rather than as having a hard answer. [[neutrois]] means a neutral or null gender, frequently with a wish to neutralise gendered physical features, and that relationship to the body is what separates the two words for the people who distinguish them.
- 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.
- Gender Around the WorldThe largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender.
- 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.
- Intersex & Sex CharacteristicsA small group carrying one large correction. [[intersex]] describes variations in chromosomes, gonads, hormones and anatomy, and it is not a gender identity, yet it appears on almost every published list of gender identities.
- Multiple GendersHolding more than one gender, at once or in alternation.
- Partial & DemigendersDegree of connection rather than which gender.
- Trans & Binary IdentitiesMan, woman, trans and cis: every term for the relation between a person and the sex recorded for them at birth.
- 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.
- Xenogenders & NeurogendersThe genders described through a frame borrowed from outside gender. [[xenogender]] is the umbrella and its own sources give the reason plainly: a binary society supplies roles and vocabulary for men and women and very little for anybody else, so some people describe their gender by reaching for animals, nature, concepts, aesthetics or sensations instead. [[staticgender]] is the concrete case, a gender described as the noise on an untuned screen, fuzzy and complicated and hard to resolve. [[neurogender]] and [[autigender]] borrow from a different place, the person's own neurology, and autigender names a gender whose experience is inseparable from being autistic.