Gender variant

The commoner wording now is gender diverse, and the two do the same work. Both are institutional vocabulary, and this entry is filed as a concept for that reason, away from the identities, where a reader would reasonably expect to find something somebody had chosen.

What the institutions mean by it

The wording differs from body to body and the meaning does not. The Government of British Columbia's schools page defines gender-diverse as an inclusive term for multiple types of gender identity falling outside cisgender or binary understandings of gender. A Gender Agenda, a Canberra advocacy organisation, defines gender diversity as an umbrella term for gender identities that demonstrate a diversity of expression beyond the binary framework. Healthify, the New Zealand health information service, uses gender diverse the same way and files takatāpui, MVPFAFF, Two-Spirit and kuà xìngbié under it alongside the English terms.

Two things are true of all three definitions. The descriptor is defined against cisgender, so it is a residual category and takes its shape from what it is not. And each definition is followed immediately by a list of the identities it stands in for, The phrase does not describe; it collects.

Guidance travels with the word, and it is guidance about other people's words. A Gender Agenda states that the singular they is widely recognised as an existing structure courteous of gender diversity without always being considered ideal, names fae and eir among the other gender-neutral pronouns in use, and concludes that the pronoun to use is the one the person asks for. Healthify adds ia to the same list. Neither is telling anybody what to call themselves; both are telling an institution what to do with the answer.

Which wordings do the same work

The variation is between organisations, and it tracks the country the document was written in more closely than anything else.

The last row is the informative one. The Trevor Project, running the largest survey in this material, does not reach for an umbrella descriptor at all: it names two identity categories and pairs them. Where an organisation is reporting numbers, the general wording turns out to be avoidable, which suggests the descriptor is doing administrative work.

The British Columbia page makes the same division explicit without commenting on it. Having defined gender-diverse as the inclusive term, it lists gender non-conforming, Genderqueer and Agender separately as terms individuals may use for themselves. One set is what the document calls people; the other is what people call themselves.

Why gender variant is not a self-description

The identity terms in this catalogue are chosen, argued over and defended by the people using them. Non-binary is chosen and its edges are disputed from below; agender is chosen and its users draw the line against neighbouring words themselves. Gender variant changes when a policy is redrafted, and nobody outside the drafting process is consulted.

That is not a defect in it. An organisation writing an anti-discrimination clause needs a category covering everybody the clause protects, and no self-chosen word does that job, because a self-chosen word can always be declined by somebody the clause is meant to cover. The British Columbia page is written against a specific legal frame, naming Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canadian Human Rights Acts and the B.C. Human Rights Code, the last of which names gender identity and expression among its protected grounds. A term that appears in the same paragraph as a statute has to be broad enough to survive contact with it.

A Gender Agenda draws the distinction from the other direction. Umbrella terms such as non-binary, genderqueer or X gender, it says, are adequately broad descriptors for gender diverse people, while individuals may use more specialised personal terms within their own peer groups and safe spaces. That is the same two-column picture: a wide word for the document, a precise word for the person.

How the descriptor treats cultural categories

The strain shows when the umbrella is opened over categories that were never identity labels. Healthify's list runs the Māori terms takatāpui, irawhiti, irahuhua, tangata ira tāne, whakawahine and tahine; the Pasifika group MVPFAFF with māhū, vaka sa lewa lewa, palopa, fa'afafine, akava'ine, fakaleiti and fakafifine inside it; the South Asian Hijra; the Chinese kuà xìngbié; and then an English list containing genderqueer, gender-fluid, gender non-conforming, Intersex, non-binary, trans and transgender. Everything from a Tongan social role to a British adjective sits under one heading.

Outright International's commentary of June 2023 does the same and says so. Having listed muxe, nádleehí, Two-Spirit, akava'ine, Fa'afafine, fakaleitī, Mahu and Bissu beside lesbian, gay, transgender and intersex, it notes that people of third or more genders are often seen more as a communal role and less as an individual identity, and adds that the article was written in English and that its descriptions may not carry the full cultural meaning of the terms in it. A heading covering both a kinship role and a Western identity label says very little about either, and the honest version of the heading says so in the same breath.

Why a descriptor is needed at all

The scale problem behind the usage is real. The Trevor Project's national survey of 2019 drew more than 34,000 respondents and reported them across more than a hundred gender identities and more than a hundred sexual orientations, from all fifty states. Something has to name that group in a sentence, in a funding application, in a clause of a code of conduct, and the alternative to a descriptor is a list that cannot be finished.

A Gender Agenda takes up the other half of that argument, observing that reports of hundreds of genders are often exaggerated by counting very niche and specialised terms or very personal explorations of gender, and that most people have no need to know every gender identity in circulation. Whether that is a fair account of the vocabulary is a separate question, and the organisation is not neutral on it. What it does show is that a body using the descriptor is usually also making a judgement about how much of the vocabulary belongs underneath it, and that judgement is rarely written down.

What is missing from the record

No dated first use is traceable in the sources on file, and no dictionary of record carries the phrase as a gender term. That is unusual here, where a microlabel coined in a single post from the twenty-tens usually still has the post attached to it. A wording written into policy by many organisations at once has no coiner and no first appearance to find, which is a fact about how institutional language spreads.

No identity survey tracks it either. The prevalence tier on this entry reads as not measured, and that is the correct reading: a question asking respondents whether they are gender variant would be asking them to adopt somebody else's filing category, and the surveys in this material do not ask it. What can be counted is how often organisations use the phrase, and nobody has counted that.