The Vocabulary of the 1990s

Seven words, all first attested between 1992 and 1996, and between them most of the framework that later discussion has run on. The decade matters because it precedes the general internet. These terms were made in zines, newsletters, conference rooms and books, they spread slowly enough to be argued about while spreading, and every one of them has a date attached that somebody wrote down at the time.

Cisgender is the pivotal one and it was built to fill a hole: coined in 1994 as an antonym so that the ordinary case had a name and being trans stopped being a deviation from an unnamed default. Non-binary in its inclusive sense is traceable to at least 1992, with Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw in 1994 the book most often named as the point it reached a general readership. Genderflux is the surprise, appearing in a Queer Pagans newsletter in 1994 in a sense closer to what fluid now covers, two decades before the popularity most sources record as its coinage. Agender closes the decade with the best paper trail of any word here, dated by the Oxford English Dictionary to a 1996 article in The Independent. The set is ordered by attestation, earliest first. It excludes the culture-specific categories, which are older by centuries, and the microlabel wave of 2013 to 2015, which is a separate story with a separate platform behind it.