Genderfae

What genderfae covers and where it stops

Set against Genderfluid, which sets no boundary at all, this is a bounded range. Both community wikis treat it that way. The Nonbinary Wiki files genderfae under the genderfluid umbrella outright, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki calls it a non-masculine subset of fluidflux, the term for a gender that is fluid and varies in intensity at the same time. The mechanism is ordinary genderfluidity and the word is a claim about its range. Nothing in the definition fixes a speed: Spectrum-ID records both extremes among people using the term, shifts that arrive within hours and shifts that take weeks or months, and notes that a shift in gender does not oblige a shift in presentation.

The word most often confused with it is not a variant of it at all. Faegender is a gender that changes with the seasons, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki prints the warning against conflating the two on the genderfae page itself.

The rest of the family divides the same territory along different lines.

Genderfaun is the mirror term and the one a reader is most likely to have arrived from. The others narrow the same idea by degrees: genderfaer and genderfaunet exclude only a binary endpoint, and genderflor excludes both. The Nonbinary Wiki dates the two names for that last one separately, genderflor to an anonymous submission to the Tumblr blog beyond-mogai-pride-flags in March 2018 and gendervae to the Instagram user runawingism in January 2021.

Three more sit off that axis. Demifae is partly static and partly fluid, with the fluid part held inside the genderfae range and the static part unrestricted. Faeflux, also called doeflux, is the same boundary applied to fluidflux, and the wiki gives faunflux and florflux as its masculine and neutral counterparts. Greyfae is genderfae in a person whose sense of gender is mostly shaped by being Graygender. Genderselkie, which both wikis list here, is fluid between genders that are often xenic, which describes the genders themselves and says nothing about a boundary.

Where the word genderfae came from

Both wikis give the same account and neither documents it. The term was submitted anonymously to the MOGAI-Archive blog in 2014, on a blog that is now defunct. Nobody is named, no archived post is cited, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki words it as supposition rather than record.

The Nonbinary Wiki's own footnotes show the shape of that record. Its references for the article are an archived copy of the LGBTA Wiki entry retrieved on 23 January 2021, an archived Tumblr post, the Gender Census report of 31 March 2019, and a 2020 paper by Elizabeth Kersey and Matthew Voigt whose contribution is one sentence: genderfae is a type of genderfluidity that is never male or masculine. A definition arrives from a peer-reviewed journal; the coinage does not.

The flag is dated more firmly than the word. The DeviantArt user Superpopcorn101 drew it on 9 January 2017, which puts three years between the term entering circulation and the term acquiring the object most microlabels are known by.

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. Both wikis record the objection, and neither says who raised it or when. Two alternatives followed for people who would rather not use the word: genderdoe, proposed by another user according to Spectrum-ID, and genderthil. All three names cover the same gender, and the Nonbinary Wiki lists them as straightforward synonyms in its first line.

The LGBTQIA+ Wiki goes further and describes a current effort to settle on genderdoe or genderthil and drop fae altogether. That effort has produced flags: a genderdoe design by the Twitter user strwbryfemme, formatted after the genderfluid flag, and a genderthil flag in the wiki's gallery. It has not yet produced citations. Every printed use Wiktionary collects is of genderfae, and no published use of either alternative has been traced.

How the genderfae flag states the exclusion

The flag is a definition drawn in colour, which is unusual even among microlabel flags. Seven equal horizontal stripes run pastel light green, pastel chartreuse, pastel yellow, white, pastel pink, pastel lilac and pastel lavender. Blue is left out deliberately, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki gives the reason as the exclusion the word is built on: the palette says what the gender never includes. The pastel treatment was chosen to give the flag a fae feeling.

What the individual stripes mean is where the sources part. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki states that the colours have no individual meanings and that only the absent blue is significant. Spectrum-ID assigns a meaning to every stripe: light green for growth, chartreuse for curiosity and playfulness, yellow for gender nonconformity, white for a personal perception of gender, pink for femininity, lilac for love and beauty, lavender for spirituality. It also credits the design jointly to Superpopcorn101 and the Pride-Flags account, not to Superpopcorn101 alone. Neither page says where the stripe meanings came from, and the two accounts have circulated side by side since.

Alternates exist and none has displaced the original: a second design by strwbryfemme, a version by JuliQP called Sunset Genderfae, and one the LGBTQIA+ Wiki calls Amberfae, by the Tumblr user nyaambxr.

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 circulated among gender-diverse people, and a write-in of that size sits near the floor of what such a survey can measure at all.

The Nonbinary Wiki's own page does not agree with itself. Its infobox gives the frequency as 0.3 per cent while the demographics section under it gives 0.21 per cent for 2020, and the page does not reconcile the two.

What happens to a figure like this afterwards is visible in one of the Wiktionary citations. In a 2021 University of Northern Iowa thesis by Bekah Bass, the written-in answers of transfem genderfluid and genderfae were condensed with trans women, trans men and non-binary respondents into a single category labelled Trans, Non-Binary, or Genderqueer. The word was recorded and then absorbed.

How genderfae reached print

Wiktionary carries genderfae as an adjective, marks it a neologism, holds a recorded American pronunciation for it, and collects citations from 2021 and 2022 only.

The news uses are incidental and they come from opposite directions. Carol Morris, writing in The Valley Journal Advertiser of Hants County, Nova Scotia, on 29 June 2021, reported that a Green Party candidate named Kang identifies as a nonbinary genderfae human and uses they and them pronouns. Jo Bartosch quoted the word in Spiked on 19 July 2021 in a piece hostile to the Green Party, and Jack Wright used it in The Daily Mail on 31 May 2022 inside a student's self-description. In each the word appears in a list somebody gave about themselves, and the article is about something else.

The academic uses are the same shape. Robin C. Ladwig's 2021 study of trans and gender-diverse work experiences names genderfae among the identities her participants reported; Kersey and Voigt name it as an example of the small identity labels a student might pick; Goodyear and colleagues in The Journal of Sex Research in 2022 and Dromer and colleagues in SSM - Qualitative Research in Health that December both quote participants who used it alongside other terms. Benjamin Hanckel and Shiva Chandra, writing in 2021 about social media use during COVID-19, record a respondent who gave their gender as genderfae and glossed it in the same breath as fluid between Agender and Demigirl.

Genny Beemyn is the exception. Writing in The Tribune of the Bahamas on 22 August 2022, Beemyn explained the term for a general readership as a gender that can be fluid between feminine genders, nonbinary genders and genderlessness without encompassing masculine ones. For a microlabel eight years old that is an unusually full paper trail, and almost all of it dates from a two-year window.