What is the difference between genderfae and genderfaun?

The boundary runs the other way. A genderfae gender moves among feminine, neutral and unaligned genders and genderlessness, and never reaches masculine ones. A genderfaun gender does the same on the masculine side and never reaches feminine ones. The words were coined three years apart and the second was written as a complement to the first.

Why do some people use genderdoe or genderthil instead?

Because the word fae has been objected to. It has been said that naming a gender after the fae is disrespectful to cultures and religions in which fae or faeries are revered, and genderdoe and genderthil were coined for people who share that objection. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki reports a current effort to settle on one of the two alternatives.

Who coined genderfae?

Nobody is named. Both community wikis record an anonymous submission to the MOGAI-Archive blog in 2014, with no archived post cited and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki wording the account as supposition rather than documentation.

How many people describe themselves as genderfae?

Twelve respondents gave it in the 2019 Worldwide Gender Census and 53 gave it in 2020, which the census reported as 0.21 per cent of respondents that year. Both are counts inside a survey of gender-diverse people, not shares of a general population.

Is genderfae the same as faegender?

No. Faegender is a gender that changes with the seasons, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki warns against the confusion. The similarity is in the spelling and nowhere else.

Genderfae: Meaning, Origin & Who Uses It

Genderfae

Genderfae describes a fluid gender that never includes masculine ones. The movement runs among feminine genders, neutral or unaligned genders such as aporagender, and genderlessness. Where the range stops is the whole of the definition, and the Nonbinary Wiki adds one qualification to it: a male-aligned gender is excluded unless that gender is female-aligned as well.

Set against Genderfluid, which sets no boundary at all, this is a bounded range rather than an open one. The mirror term genderfaun draws the same line on the opposite side, and the two are treated on the community wikis as subsets of genderfluidity rather than as separate mechanisms.

Where the word genderfae came from

Both wikis on file give the same account: an anonymous submission to the MOGAI-Archive blog in 2014. Nobody is named, no archived post is cited, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki reports the coinage rather than documenting it. The flag is dated more firmly. The DeviantArt user Superpopcorn101 drew it on 9 January 2017 in pastels, with blue deliberately left out so that the palette states the exclusion the word is built on.

Why some people prefer genderdoe or genderthil

It has been said that genderfae is disrespectful to cultures and religions in which fae or faeries are revered. Two alternatives were coined for people who would rather not use the word: genderdoe, and genderthil. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki describes a current effort to settle on one of those two, and treats all three names as covering the same gender. Both wikis record the objection and neither says who raised it.

What the surveys recorded about genderfae

Twelve respondents to the 2019 Worldwide Gender Census wrote in genderfae. In 2020 the figure was 53 respondents, reported as 0.21 per cent of that year's total. Both counts come from a survey of gender-diverse people rather than of any general population, and a write-in of that size sits at the floor of what such a survey can measure.

How genderfae reached print

Wiktionary carries genderfae as an adjective and collects citations from 2021 and 2022. Among them are a report in a Nova Scotia local paper on a Green Party candidate, a University of Northern Iowa thesis, and the study by Kersey and Voigt of queer and transgender students in mathematics and other STEM fields. Genny Beemyn, writing in 2022, glossed genderfae as a gender that can be fluid between feminine genders, nonbinary genders and genderlessness. For a microlabel that is an unusually full paper trail.

Common questions

Questions about Genderfae

What is the difference between genderfae and genderfaun?: The boundary runs the other way. A genderfae gender moves among feminine, neutral and unaligned genders and genderlessness, and never reaches masculine ones. A genderfaun gender does the same on the masculine side and never reaches feminine ones. The words were coined three years apart and the second was written as a complement to the first.
Why do some people use genderdoe or genderthil instead?: Because the word fae has been objected to. It has been said that naming a gender after the fae is disrespectful to cultures and religions in which fae or faeries are revered, and genderdoe and genderthil were coined for people who share that objection. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki reports a current effort to settle on one of the two alternatives.
Who coined genderfae?: Nobody is named. Both community wikis record an anonymous submission to the MOGAI-Archive blog in 2014, with no archived post cited and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki wording the account as supposition rather than documentation.
How many people describe themselves as genderfae?: Twelve respondents gave it in the 2019 Worldwide Gender Census and 53 gave it in 2020, which the census reported as 0.21 per cent of respondents that year. Both are counts inside a survey of gender-diverse people, not shares of a general population.
Is genderfae the same as faegender?: No. Faegender is a gender that changes with the seasons, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki warns against the confusion. The similarity is in the spelling and nowhere else.

Added 2026-08-28 · Revised 2026-08-28