Gender Expression & Presentation
Gender Expression & Presentation · 11 entries
What 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, not out of any theory of identity. Genderpunk and gender bending belong here for a related reason, since both describe an active stance against a norm.
Every entry in this group carries a required note saying plainly that the term is not an identity, and that note is the reason the group exists separately. It is also the most contested filing decision on the site. A great many butch people describe butch as a gender in its own right, and they are not making a mistake about what they mean. The catalogue files by what a word primarily reports, records the disagreement in the entry, and does not pretend the boundary is clean. What is not in doubt is that these terms carry histories that identity language on its own would lose: a bar, a decade, a class position and a set of rules about who was safe with whom.
In this category
All 11 gender expression & presentation
11 entries
- ButchMasculine presentation out of the 1940s working-class lesbian bar culture, and the unsettled argument over whether it is a style or a gender.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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-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.
- 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.
- 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.
- TransvestiteCoined by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910, a psychiatric diagnosis for most of the twentieth century, and now largely replaced in English by cross-dresser.
Keep going
The other categories
- Gender Around the WorldThis is the largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender.
- Pronouns & Forms of AddressThe words in this group do not name a kind of person.
- 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.
Common questions
Questions about gender expression & presentation
Why separate expression from identity?
Because a great deal of harm comes from reading a presentation as a claim about somebody's gender. A masculine woman is not making a statement about being a man, and a feminine man is not making one about being a woman. Keeping the two apart lets the catalogue describe how somebody looks without inventing what they are.
Is butch really not an identity?
Many butch people say it is one, and the entry records that. The filing decision reflects what the word primarily reports, which is presentation and stance, and it is a decision about cataloguing rather than a ruling about anybody's life.
Do these terms belong to particular communities?
Mostly yes, and that is part of their meaning. Butch and femme come out of lesbian bar culture, stud is used chiefly by Black lesbians, and treating any of them as free-floating style words detaches them from the histories that gave them their weight.
Can somebody use an expression term and an identity term together?
Routinely, and most people in this group do. Butch and non-binary, femme and trans woman, gender nonconforming and man are all ordinary combinations, because the two kinds of word answer different questions.