Egogender

What egogender names and what it excludes

The claim inside the word is narrower than it looks. Egogender does not say that its holder's gender is unusual, or private, or difficult to explain. It says that the gender's only accurate name is the person who has it, which is why the Nonbinary Wiki records that no two egogender individuals have the same gender although they have the same gender label. The word marks a naming problem rather than a shared experience.

The Nonbinary Wiki files the term under the Xenogender umbrella, on the reasoning that a gender describable only as oneself bears no relation to the concepts of female or male. That is a statement about reference rather than about content, and the wikis leave room for the content to point somewhere familiar: they carry the narrowed forms egoguy, egogirl and egononbinary, each of which keeps the me-gender claim and adds a rough direction to it. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki adds that egogender may be either xenine or ipsine depending on the individual, and expands on neither term on that page.

Two synonyms circulate. Charagender is the commoner, and the flag reference Encycloflaggia notes that it is unrelated to the character Chara from Undertale, a misreading evidently common enough to need the note. The other is an open form, written [name]gender, in which the holder substitutes their own name: a person called Sam might write samgender. Combined with Genderflux, which the Pride-Flags account defines as a gender that changes in intensity and describes as fluid between gendered and agender, egogender becomes egoflux or charaflux. That account published a flag for the compound on 23 January 2018, drawn by Mod Hermy at a reader's request and described as a reworking of the egogender flag to show the fluctuation. Its coined-by line is left blank. Encycloflaggia lists autogender, narkissigender and skelogender as terms in the same neighbourhood.

Where the word egogender came from

The root is Latin and the making is Tumblr. Ego is the Latin for I; the LGBTQIA+ Wiki puts it more loosely, that the prefix translates as self in several languages, and adds that chara- was probably taken from character.

The post is a batch. Encycloflaggia dates it 20 June 2014, credits the Tumblr user queerspike, and quotes its opening line, in which the author says they look through lists of prefixes and get inspired. Egogender arrives there alongside ambigender, apogender, brevigender, hemigender, histrigender and paragender, and the post closes on the thought that there can never be too many words for describing oneself. The definition it gives is a gender based solely on the person who holds it, one that no words seem to define other than me-gender or [name] gender. Encycloflaggia notes that a second Tumblr user, flynneleh, is also credited as co-coiner.

For a term of this age that is an unusually complete origin, and it is complete because somebody archived it. The record behind the coinage is an archived copy of a blog post, which is what the provenance of a 2014 microlabel normally consists of.

Which date the sources give for egogender

Two dates, and the difference between them is a reblog. The coining blog is deactivated, and the post survives through a reblog by the blog genderdefinitions dated 10 July 2014. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki gives that July date as the coinage and credits queerspike with it; Encycloflaggia traces the surviving copy back to an original of 20 June. The surviving copy of a deleted post is what carries the date, and neither wiki is wrong about the document in front of it.

The Nonbinary Wiki's reference for its definition is a third artefact of the same kind, a post on the blog nandbaremyfavouriteletters archived on 17 July 2023, whose title begins with the phrase a gender identity that feels unique to. Three of the four documents standing behind the term are archived Tumblr posts, and the fourth is a DeviantArt upload.

How the egogender flags differ from each other

No flag is agreed. Three designs circulate, none of which replaced the one before it, and they share no colour. Helkie-three, posting as same-memes, published the first on 4 November 2014 together with egoguy, egogirl and egononbinary versions that differ from it only in the bottom stripe, and identified themself as egogender in the posting; the Nonbinary Wiki describes the designer as an egogirl. The pastelmemer design is the one the wikis usually show, and it is known through a Pride-Flags rendering that Encycloflaggia dates to 22 August 2015 and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki to on or before 23 August. The last was made at an anonymous requester's prompting and is the only one whose creator said what the colours are for.

Encycloflaggia adds a caveat that applies to the whole set: no creator has published hex values for any of the three designs, so the colour codes printed on flag reference sites are sampled from the artwork rather than issued by the designer. It also records correcting its own published palette for the 2019 design after discovering that an earlier version had taken the values from the blog's theme header instead of the flag.

Who has described a gender this way

The Nonbinary Wiki collects self-descriptions that fit the definition without using the term, which is the closest thing the word has to a usage record. The writer and poet Eileen Myles is quoted as saying "I'm the gender of Eileen", from a piece by Diana Wichtel published in Noted on 30 May 2018 about Myles and personal pronouns. The drag artist and actor Valentina told Mathew Rodriguez, in an interview for out.com dated 14 January 2019, "I feel like I'm my own gender". Neither used the word egogender.

The same page quotes guidance from Gender Spectrum, retrieved in April 2014, describing children who answer the question of whether they are a boy or a girl by giving their name instead, and who draw themselves as rainbows or unicorns when asked for a self portrait. That passage predates the coinage and does not use the term, which makes it an illustration of the idea rather than an attestation of the word.

One fictional use is on file. Addie, a character in the unreleased dating sim The Office Type, is specified as egogender in a profile and takes they/them pronouns or none.

What has been counted about egogender

The Nonbinary Wiki gives the frequency as under 0.1 per cent and carries its standing notice that the term is not widely used among gender-variant people. Encycloflaggia reports the only counts on file: the Gender Census recorded four respondents identifying as egogender in 2020, and four again in 2021.

The same page sets a larger figure beside them. In the 2021 census, more than 1 per cent of respondents described their identity as "I'm just me" or in similar phrasing, which Encycloflaggia reads as the egogender idea arriving without the egogender label. The two figures measure different things: the word is rare, and the description it was built for is not.

The Gender Census is a self-selected survey circulated among gender-diverse respondents, so four is the number of people who found the survey and wrote the word into it, and the under 0.1 per cent is a share of that same self-selected group. No dictionary records egogender, and no academic literature on file uses it.