Abinary

Where the word abinary came from

No coinage post claims it. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki traces the first mention to a post coining a different word, midbinary, written by the Tumblr user nothorses, then posting as starmashine, on or before 25 October 2016. The word arrived as a by-product of another coinage, which is unusual in a vocabulary where terms are normally announced.

Two later synonyms were deliberate. Apisgender was coined by the Tumblr user arco-pluris on 21 August 2018, as a version carrying the -gender suffix, and aphorian by restings4dface, now soong-type-delta, on or before December 2021, as a version carrying no binary in it at all. Arco-pluris also made the flag, through the Tumblr blog beyond-mogai-pride-flags, on 18 May 2018; the wiki records no stated meaning for its colours, only that yellow is conventionally used for abinary because it belongs to neither of the binary flags.

Why abinary means unaligned rather than genderless

The distinction the sources hold to is alignment. Some non-binary people describe themselves as man-aligned or woman-aligned without being men or women, and abinary names the people who are neither, which is why it is used interchangeably with unaligned non-binary and neutrally aligned non-binary. An abinary person may have a strong sense of gender that simply bears no relation to the binary, so Agender sits inside the category rather than defining it.

The LGBTQIA+ Wiki sorts abinary genders into three kinds: agender and genderless identities, Neutrois and other neutral-aligned genders, and xenogenders unconnected to the binary ones. The opposite term is allobinary, and being both at once is allabinary.

How abinary shows up in research

Rarely, and only as a write-in. A study of 489 transgender and non-binary adults in the United States, summarised by Palo Alto University, reports that eight per cent of participants wrote in a self-label outside the options offered, and names abinary, demiboy and demigirl as the examples. TransInterQueer, a Berlin organisation, lists abinary alongside enby as a self-description that has taken over in recent years from Genderqueer and Genderfluid among the people it works with.

Neither source defines the word, and neither is writing about it. No dictionary of record carries abinary and no survey has counted it, which leaves two community wikis and two passing mentions as the whole of the record.