Abinary

What abinary rules out and what it allows

The line the sources hold to is alignment rather than intensity. Some non-binary people describe themselves as man-aligned or woman-aligned without being men or women, and abinary names the part of that group standing apart from both, which is why the wiki treats unaligned non-binary and neutrally aligned non-binary as interchangeable with it.

Strength of gender is deliberately left out of the definition. An abinary person may feel a strong sense of gender, and the wiki says so in as many words; what makes that gender abinary is that it bears no relation to the binary ones, not that it is faint or missing. This is the most common misreading of the word, and it is why Agender sits inside the category rather than defining it.

A complication is written into the wiki's own definition. Some abinary people are described as cross-aligned, holding a gender alignment that is not itself abinary while the gender identity is, so alignment and identity are treated as two things that can come apart in the same person. The same page carries a set of shorthands for the idea applied to the texture of a gender rather than to a person. A gender abinary or abinarine in nature, shortened to ABIN, is one that is neither masculine nor feminine in nature and neither male nor female in nature, which the wiki in turn shortens to MIN, FIN, MAIN and FEIN. Very little of that vocabulary appears anywhere outside the page that defines it.

Which kinds of gender abinary covers

The wiki sorts the identities it files under the term into three kinds: agender and genderless identities; Neutrois and other neutral-aligned genders; and xenogenders and xenic-aligned genders that are not associated with binary genders. The grouping does taxonomic work. A Xenogender named after a colour or an animal and an agender person with no gender at all have almost nothing in common except the one thing the term is built on, which is that neither is positioned by reference to man or woman.

The word has both an antonym and a hybrid, recorded on the same page. Allobinary is the opposite, covering genders that do stand in some relation to the binary, and allabinary names being abinary and allobinary at once. Neither has a coiner or a date attached to it on that page.

How abinary arrived by accident

No coinage post claims the word. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki traces the first mention to the post in which the Tumblr user nothorses, then posting as starmashine, coined a different word, midbinary, on or before 25 October 2016. The word arrived as a by-product of another coinage, which is unusual in a vocabulary where a term is normally announced with a definition, a flag and a date, all in the same post.

Other words surfaced in the same stretch and did not travel. The wiki names exterbinary and off-binary as terms that appeared alongside abinary, dates neither, and defines neither. What separated abinary from them is not recorded.

The morphology is the least interesting part of the word and the wiki keeps it to a line: the prefix a-, which it identifies as Latin and glosses as without or not, in front of binary, so the whole reads as not binary.

Why abinary carries several names

Two later synonyms were coined on purpose, and each was made to fix a different complaint about the original. Apisgender came from the Tumblr user arco-pluris on 21 August 2018 as a version carrying the -gender suffix, which brings it into line with the shape most microlabels of that period take. Aphorian came from restings4dface, now posting as soong-type-delta, on or before December 2021, as a version that does not carry binary inside it, so that a word for genders unrelated to the binary need not name the binary in order to say so.

The wiki gives the three as synonyms, and records nothing about one displacing another. All three head the same page, and the community that maintains it treats the choice between them as a matter of how the word sounds.

What the abinary flags record

Flags are where the record of a microlabel is usually densest, and abinary has a run of them. The first was made by arco-pluris, the coiner of apisgender, through the Tumblr blog beyond-mogai-pride-flags on 18 May 2018. The wiki records no stated meaning for its colours, only the convention that yellow does duty for abinary because it belongs to neither of the binary flags, which are blue and pink. Two alternates by Clear.Skyes, dated on or before 15 December 2020, have no confirmed meaning either.

The flag by the Tumblr user dollomine, from 5 March 2022, is the only one with a published reading of its colours, and the reading is the nearest thing the term has to a statement about itself: vermillion for strength and autonomy, tangerine for joy, pride and gender creativity, cream for solidarity between genderlessness and neutrality, grey for ambiguity and the rejection of the binary, and midnight for reinvention and for using midbinaryness in an abinary way. That last stripe points back at the post the word came out of.

Two later flags work by subtraction from the non-binary flag instead. The one by the Tumblr blog werenicorn, from 30 April 2026, is the Non-binary flag with the purple stripe replaced by green. A recolour of it by scarfflag, from 8 July 2026, takes its colours from the non-binary flag directly and makes the green the exact inverse of the purple stripe it stands in for. A further flag is credited to pissoups on Twitter with no date. A symbol for the term, as against a flag, was added on 1 May 2023, credited on the same page to a Tumblr user.

Where abinary shows up in research

Rarely, and never as the subject. The closest thing is a 2025 paper in the Journal of Counseling Psychology by Zakary A. Clements and Sharon S. Rostosky, which surveyed 489 transgender and non-binary adults in the United States, aged 18 to 61 with a mean age of 26.32, recruited through Prolific Academic in 2022. The identity shares reported for that sample add up to well over the sample itself, so participants were naming more than one label each: non-binary 68 per cent, transgender 60 per cent, Genderqueer 26 per cent, trans man 24 per cent, agender 14 per cent, trans woman 11 per cent, and Two Spirit or third gender 1 per cent. Eight per cent wrote in a self-label the survey did not offer, and abinary is the first of the three examples the paper prints, alongside Demiboy and Demigirl. The paper is about basic psychological needs and well-being and has no interest in the word; abinary appears in a parenthesis inside its sample description and nowhere else.

The other place the word turns up as something people call themselves is the organisation TransInterQueer, whose page on non-binary identity notes that in recent years more people have named their gender explicitly as non-binary, or as enby or abinary, and that those self-descriptions have in some cases taken the place of Genderqueer, Genderfluid and the German neither-nor formulation that names the organisation's own weder noch group. Nothing on that page defines abinary, and it is listed there as a live self-description.

Beyond those two, the record is a glossary line. A United States vital-records site lists abinary first among the more specific identities people reach for when non-binary on its own does not do the job, and does not say what it means. No dictionary of record carries the word and no survey has counted it.