Ambigender

Why ambigender rules out shifting

The static requirement is the whole point of having a separate word. Genderfluid describes a gender that changes which it is. Genderflux describes a gender that changes how strongly it is felt. Ambigender describes two genders that do neither: both are present, and they stay.

The Nonbinary Wiki's multigender article sets out the family in a way that shows where the line falls. Bigender covers two gender identities held at once or moved between, and in the second case, the wiki says, bigender is a specific kind of genderfluid identity. Ambigender takes the first case and only the first. Abigender, which sits directly above it in the same list, takes two distinct genders either simultaneously or at different times while the connection to each is loose or vague, so it varies the strength of the attachment where ambigender fixes it.

That leaves ambigender as the narrowest of the three, and it explains why raising the count does not produce a bigger version of it. Trigender and Polygender add genders without saying anything about movement, so neither is ambigender with a third gender added.

Which definitions of ambigender compete

Four readings are on file and they are not variants of one another. The first is the static two-gender definition above, which both community wikis lead with. The second is the LGBTQIA+ Wiki's addition: an ambiguous gender, or a sort of gender ambivalence, which is a claim about vagueness rather than about a count. The third, recorded on the Nonbinary Wiki's multigender page, is that ambigender is like being ambidextrous, only with gender. The fourth, recorded on the same page, is that it is simply a synonym for bigender, which would make the term redundant.

Outside the community wikis the word behaves differently again. A word-game dictionary that carries it gives the definition as of both male and female genders and lists androgynous among its synonyms, which is the sense a general reader is likeliest to arrive with. Wiktionary supplies no gloss of its own, only the part of speech, the etymology from ambi- plus gender, and two quotations.

The LGBTQIA+ Wiki marks its own page as partially unverified, warning that some of the information on it could not be checked by its staff and that the article may contain false statements. The Nonbinary Wiki marks its history section as lacking content and asks editors to source what they add. Both notices are unusual: the two pages a reader is most likely to land on say in their own words how far they can be trusted.

Where ambigender appears in the printed record

Earlier than most terms of this shape, and in company that has nothing to do with the internet. The earliest citation on file is from March 1993, in Anne Blackwood's column Cogito Ergo Fem in Cross-Talk: The Transgender Community News and Information Monthly, issue 41, page 4. The line the Nonbinary Wiki quotes is an argument against fussing over the vocabulary: bigender, ambigender, transgender, contragender, femmiphile, gendervert, and it makes no difference what the greater communities are called so long as everyone knows what the term means.

The sentence shows the word already circulating as one of a set in 1993, in a printed monthly, among terms that mostly did not survive, and it shows a writer of the period treating the proliferation of labels as a thing to be shrugged at rather than defended.

The 2010 encyclopedia entry is the one both wikis lean on, and its sentence groups ambigender with Pangender, bigender, nongendered, Agender, gender fluid and Intergender as androgyne identities. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki calls that appearance a 2010 dictionary and says the word started circulating in online communities soon afterwards; the link it gives for the claim points at the same encyclopedia entry the Nonbinary Wiki cites.

The two Wiktionary quotations are the odd pair. Craker's book on baby names uses ambigender as an ordinary adjective for name options, with no interest in gender identity at all. The counselling textbook by Manivong J. Ratts and Paul B. Pedersen defines androgyny as the presence of male and female characteristics in one person and then states that androgynous people describe themselves as ambigender, polygender or genderless, which puts the word in people's mouths rather than recording anybody using it.

How ambigender travelled into online lists

By being one item among many, which is also how it has mostly been read since. The Nonbinary Wiki's own references show the trail: a March 2014 piece in Everyday Feminism by Kaylee Jakubowski surveying non-binary identities, and a Tumblr post from 7 March 2018 answering an anonymous question about the difference between ambigender and bigender.

The looser use is visible too. An undated post on the blog The Third Word lists ambigender alongside intergender, bigendered, non-gendered, Androgyne, third gendered, gender-fluid and genderfuck, and says on the authority of Wikipedia that all of them basically mean the same thing. That is the reading the wikis are written against, and it is the one a reader is most likely to have met first.

Both flags on file are dated to 2015, four months apart. The DeviantArt account Pride-Flags posted one on 17 August 2015, and an alternative design was submitted to the Tumblr blog pride-flags-for-us on 25 April 2015. For a term this small the graphic record is often the part with days and months attached to it, while the definition is not dated at all.

What the ambigender numbers show

Almost nothing. The Nonbinary Wiki puts the frequency below 0.1 per cent and reports that four respondents to the 2020 Gender Census called themselves ambigender. Four is a count, and the Gender Census recruits a self-selected sample of gender-diverse people, so the figure cannot be turned into a share of anybody.

The page carries a banner saying the identity is not widely used among gender-variant people and that very few people are known to use the term, which is the wiki reporting its own thinness in advance of a reader noticing it. The word-game dictionary supplies a different kind of negative evidence: ambigender is not in the Scrabble word list for North America, not in the Collins international list, and not in the Words With Friends list, so the three reference works that decide whether an English word counts for scoring have all left it out. No page on file names a coiner, and the earliest citation the record holds is a columnist listing the word among five others in the course of an argument that the list did not much matter.