Genderfaun

The word was built as a mirror. Genderfae had already named the fluidity that never reaches the masculine, and this is the reverse of it, which is why the two are almost always defined against each other, with Genderfluid as the umbrella over both.

What genderfaun excludes and what it allows

The exclusion is the definition and everything else is open. Both community wikis put the movement across masculine genders, unaligned genders and genderlessness, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki names Agender as an example of the last of those, so a genderfaun person's gender may be absent on a given day without leaving the range. Wiktionary carries the word as both a noun and an adjective and defines each as a genderfluid identity that excludes feminine gender identities or presentations, which extends the boundary to presentation as well as identity.

The Nonbinary Wiki files genderfaun under the genderfluid umbrella; the LGBTQIA+ Wiki hedges the same point, saying some may consider it a non-feminine subset of genderfluid. What the term adds to genderfluidity is a floor, not a mechanism. The same wiki names genderfae as the feminine counterpart and genderflor, a fluidity that reaches neither male nor female, as the neutral one, which makes the three a set.

Two nearby words draw a narrower line. Genderfaunet is never a binary woman but may experience feminine genders, and demifaun describes a gender that is genderfaun in part and something else in the rest. That distinction is where the sources fall out of step: the Taimi article states that people who identify as genderfawn fall under the genderfaunet umbrella, while both wikis treat genderfawn as nothing more than an alternative spelling of genderfaun. The two community wikis agree with each other against it, and no source on file repeats the Taimi reading.

Who coined genderfaun and when

The Nonbinary Wiki dates the coinage to May 2017 and names the Tumblr user shadowofthedude, citing a post of 6 May that year. The post is an accident of the format: it is an ask sent to another blog, opening with the sender explaining that the message was not meant to go out anonymously and that they are the genderfaun coiner. That is the whole of the primary evidence, and it survives as an archived copy.

The same account has shadowofthedude calling the word a synonym of gendermars and a complementary term to genderfae. Gendermars is the older name. The blog mogai-lexicon posted about it on 20 February 2016 without indicating whether it was new at the time, which leaves the term dated by a mention, with no coinage on record. Encycloflaggia notes that the flag post which carried genderfaun into circulation does not treat gendermars as part of the definition at all, so the synonymy rests on the coiner's assertion and one wiki's repetition of it.

The platform is disputed and the person is not. Encycloflaggia and the Nonbinary Wiki both give shadowofthedude as a Tumblr user; the LGBTQIA+ Wiki gives a DeviantArt user of that name; the Taimi article gives an unnamed DeviantArt user and the year alone.

Why the flag leaves out pink and red

The flag was published on 1 June 2017 by the Tumblr blog pride-color-schemes, framed there as a complement to the genderfae flag. Seven equal stripes run orange, yellow-orange, light yellow, white, mint green, greenish purple and lavender. The post states the reasoning in one line: pinks and reds are purposely avoided to show the lack of femininity. The palette is the definition, stated as an absence, which is the same argument the genderfae flag makes from the other side by leaving blue out.

The design credit on the original post is anonymous, and Encycloflaggia treats the consequence as a documentation problem: secondary sources that turn shadowofthedude into the flag's designer are going beyond what the post says, which credits the coinage to shadowofthedude and the design to nobody in particular. Encycloflaggia also records the ordinary condition of a flag like this, that its colour values are sampled from the artwork rather than issued by a designer, and that its own published palette was corrected on one band after checking against the original file.

Two variants circulate beside it. A simplified version is credited to the FANDOM user DeathByGlamourrrr, and the Twitter user strwbryfemme drew an alternate formatted like the genderfluid flag. Neither has displaced the 2017 design, which Encycloflaggia records as carrying 92 notes on the original post at the time it was consulted.

Which words grew out of genderfaun

For a term with almost no printed record, genderfaun has an unusually well dated family around it, because each derivative was coined on a platform that timestamps posts and each was written down by the LGBTQIA+ Wiki as it appeared.

The flags follow the same logic as the words. The librafaun design takes its black, grey and white from the libramasculine flag and its middle stripes from the genderfaun flag; the greyfaun design, posted by Kuirlizate on the day the term was coined, takes its greys and dark blue from an alternative Graygender flag and its middle from genderfaun again. The common faunflux flag is credited to groveflags on 13 November 2020, and themogaidragon posted the neurogenderfaun flags on the same July day as the word. Neurogenderfaun is recorded as modelled on the earlier terms neuroboy and neurogirl.

Faunflux sits beside that list without a coiner attached to it. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki and the Taimi article both define it as the non-feminine subset of fluidflux, a gender that fluctuates in intensity as well as moving, and neither says who made the word. What the wiki does date is a collision: a different term of the same name, coined by hello-sleepy-queer on 28 April 2019, for a gender shifting between agender and binary man, close to boyflux and without the other nonbinary identities in it. Both senses circulate under one spelling.

What the surveys recorded about genderfaun

Eleven respondents to the 2019 Worldwide Gender Census gave genderfaun. In 2020 the figure was 50 respondents, reported as 0.203 per cent of the total. Those are counts inside a survey circulated among gender-diverse people, and both come from the Nonbinary Wiki's demographics section, which cites the Gender Census worldwide report of 31 March 2019 for the earlier of them.

The Nonbinary Wiki's infobox gives the frequency as 0.3 per cent, which is neither of the figures its own demographics section prints. The genderfae page carries the same discrepancy in the same place, so the rounding appears to belong to the wiki's template.

Where genderfaun has been written down

Wiktionary records genderfaun as a neologism in both parts of speech and collects three citations, one from 2022 and two from 2024.

The earliest is a piece of self-description inside a linguistics dissertation. Katrina Callaway's 2022 University of Georgia dissertation on gender-neutral pronouns quotes an anonymous respondent explaining that their second favourite nounself pronoun set is faun and fauns, chosen because it sounds like their gender, which is genderfaun. The word and the pronoun are doing different jobs in one sentence, and the respondent connects them by sound.

The second is a gloss written for people outside the term. Genny Beemyn, in a 2024 chapter on how trans and nonbinary students are changing the nature of gender, explains genderfae and genderfaun in a single parenthesis each, giving genderfaun as a gender fluid between male and nonbinary genders. The third is reportage: Erin Allday, writing in the San Francisco Examiner on 29 August 2024 from a shelter for LGBTQ young people in Texas, records that a young person named Olivur was genderfaun for a while, and quotes the explanation as never feeling like a girl.

Nothing older is on file. Wiktionary's citation table for the noun sense begins in the twenty-first century column and holds a single year in it, and no dictionary outside Wiktionary carries the word at all.