Gender-nonconforming

It is filed here as an expression term, and unusually for this catalogue the filing is uncontroversial: the sources themselves separate the two things. A gender-nonconforming person may be a woman, a man, non-binary, trans or something else, and the phrase reports nothing either way.

How the phrase entered the record

Merriam-Webster dates the first recorded use to 1991, in a passage by Lisa M. Diamond, Susan B. Bonner and Janna Dickenson that sets gender identity, meaning the internal psychological experience of being male or female, against gender nonconformity, meaning the degree to which appearance, behaviour, interests and self-concept depart from conventional norms for masculinity and femininity. That separation is the whole of the term's usefulness.

Neighbouring words carry much of the same load. Wikipedia lists gender-variant, gender-diverse and gender-atypical beside it, and notes that gender variance is the form preferred by scholars in psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and gender studies, as well as by advocacy groups. In Australia gender-diverse is the term used in current regulations, and the National LGBTI Health Alliance published an inclusive language guide in July 2013 that keeps bodily and identity groups apart.

Why institutions use it more than people do

The phrase does most of its work in clinical and policy writing. A 2015 review in Current Opinion in Pediatrics by Carly Guss, Daniel Shumer and Sabra L. Katz-Wise uses the initialism TGN, transgender and gender nonconforming, throughout, and defines gender nonconformity as a gender identity, role or expression that is not typical of others assigned the same sex in a given society and historical era. Paired with transgender in that way, the phrase functions as a coverall for a population being studied rather than as something a person calls themselves.

Healthline makes the point that on the broad reading almost nobody conforms fully, since very few people meet every expectation attached to their gender, and that in practice the term is reserved for people who subvert those expectations on purpose. The same piece observes that some treat gender nonconformity as part of an identity while others treat it as a decision and an action.

What gender nonconformity does not mean

It is not a synonym for Transgender. Wikipedia, citing GLAAD, notes that not all gender-variant people identify as transgender and that many transgender people identify simply as men or women rather than as gender-variant. A Cisgender man wearing eyeliner is gender nonconforming and nothing follows from it about his gender. Non-binary people are often described as gender nonconforming by definition, on the argument that they do not conform to a binary in the first place, and whether the description fits is left to the person.

The norms in question are also local and dated. Wikipedia observes that nonconformity among people assigned male at birth is policed more strictly in the West than nonconformity among people assigned female at birth, credits the success of second-wave feminism with widening what women in the West may wear and do, and notes that dress remains regulated by law in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

What the surveys record about gender nonconformity

The Gender Census had gender nonconforming selected by 36.0 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2025, and the Trevor Project reported 27 per cent among the non-binary young people it surveyed in 2021. Both are shares of self-selected or recruited samples of people who are already gender-diverse, and neither is a share of any general population.