Genderflux

What genderflux changes and what it does not

Fluid changes which gender, flux changes how much. That is the distinction from Genderfluid, and it is the thing sources get wrong most often. The Nonbinary Wiki states it as variation in the intensity of a gender identity rather than necessarily in the gender identity felt, and the LGBTQ+ journalist Mira Lazine, writing as the expert contributor on wikiHow's guide, describes a feminine aspect that is sometimes very strong and sometimes barely present but always in place.

The two are not exclusive. A flux is often conceptualised as fluidity between an Agender identity and one or more other genders, which is why the same page files genderflux under the genderfluid umbrella as a narrower case of it, and under the non-binary and trans umbrellas as well. wikiHow adds Genderqueer to that list and draws the practical consequence: genderflux is the most specific of the words, so one person may use it alone, another may use genderfluid alongside it, and a third may take neither.

How girlflux and boyflux work

The compound takes a gender in front of it, and the prefixed forms are used more often than the bare word. Girlflux is a fluctuating connection to being a girl and boyflux the same for being a boy. Both the Nonbinary Wiki and wikiHow picture the range as a percentage: a hundred per cent female one day and five per cent a week later, with the gender itself never exchanged for another. The bottom of that range is where two vocabularies meet, since a person at zero is describing agender and genderflux at the same moment.

The vocabulary extends from there. Ashley Mardell's The ABC's of LGBT+ uses poly-genderflux in 2016 for several genders fluctuating at once, and a 2017 thesis by Johann S. Koehle records biflux for a genderflux identity with two specific gender aspects, which puts it beside Multigender rather than under it. Grammatically the word works as noun and as verb: a person experiences a genderflux, or says that they genderflux.

Why genderflux is older than it looks

Most sources date the coinage to Tumblr in 2014. Genderflux appears in a Queer Pagans newsletter in 1994, where it meant shifting between genders, closer to what fluid now covers, and wikiHow's account has the word applied to the musician Marilyn Manson in 2003 in that same older sense.

What happened in 2014 was a redefinition. The Tumblr user deergoths, also known as bigendeer, gave the word its present meaning of variation in the intensity within a gender identity, and the catalogue blog mogai-archive carries that entry with an original date of 20 July 2014. Both senses survived the change. Wiktionary marks the word rare and defines it as a gender identity that fluctuates either in intensity or between multiple genders, which keeps the 1994 reading alongside the current one. wikiHow's judgement is that the newer sense has become the commoner of the two, on the grounds that other words already cover shifting between genders.

Popular coverage followed quickly on the redefinition. wikiHow records a Teen Vogue piece in 2016 on the growth of gender and sexuality terminology that included genderflux, and the activist and fashion blogger Elliott Alexzander launched a clothing line called GenderFlux in 2015, with dapperQ covering its crowdfunding campaign for a genderless fashion collection in April 2016.

Who designed the genderflux flag and when

Nobody knows, and the record is unusually precise about not knowing. Two proposals reached the Tumblr flag blog pride-flags-for-us on 4 December 2014. The user nopadsnohelmets submitted a square gradient based on the demigender flag at 00:39 UTC; the six-stripe design that became standard followed two hours and twenty-six minutes later, from a contributor the record does not name, whose note said only that it was a genderflux flag made at a friend's suggestion. No surviving source says the second drew on the first. The blog described itself as a safe place for those without flags, and usually without recognition, to create something to represent themselves.

The meanings were published with the flag: pink and blue for female and male, pale pink and blue for Demigirl and Demiboy, grey for agender or gender-neutral, and yellow for identities outside the binary. The stripes run from feminine shades through a neutral grey centre to masculine ones, with the yellow set apart at the bottom. Two things circulate about the design that the primary record does not support. The reading of the grey centre stripe as the zero-intensity point of a flux is a later guide interpretation, and no hex values were ever creator-issued, since the December post names its colours in words.

The attributions have gone wrong twice. An uncited institutional guide credits a user called campcounseling around 2012 and describes a five-stripe design, both contradicted by the primary record, and Wikimedia Commons credits deergoths, which conflates the person who defined the word with the person who drew the flag. Reference works dating the design to 4 July 2015 are reading a DeviantArt upload in another time zone: the archive account Pride-Flags published a master copy late on 3 July 2015 Pacific time, crediting the Tumblr blog with an "I think" attached, and posted a seven-stripe variant ten seconds afterwards. Variants kept arriving, and by July 2016 the catalogue blog pride-color-schemes had documented seven genderflux designs in circulation.

Where genderflux turns up in print

Better than most of its neighbours in this catalogue. Angela N. Tharp used the word in Gender Spectrum Theory at the University of New Haven in 2016, with the observation that a genderflux person will usually identify as a man or a woman on any given day. A character in Ann Roberts's 2019 novel In the Silences describes themself as genderflux femme and glosses it on the page as being more and less femme.

The rung above that is a clinical one. The European Society for Sexual Medicine's position statement in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in April 2020 lists genderflux beside genderfluid as a gender identity changing and shifting over time, which is a document neither Genderfae nor Genderfaun reaches. Dictionary.com had illustrated its genderflux entry with the flag by October 2018, the Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents ran an interview with a genderflux person about the identity in November 2015, and the design has left the internet as well: it appeared on button-making material photographed at Mendocino Pride in Hopland, California, in May 2023.

How often genderflux is chosen

The Trevor Project's research brief on non-binary youth counts the word directly. It found that one in four of the LGBTQ young people in its sample, twenty-six per cent, identified as non-binary, and it listed the labels that group used within the umbrella.

The shares add to well over a hundred, so respondents were plainly taking more than one label each, and the 4 per cent for genderflux in 2021 measures how many chose it rather than how many the word fits. The Nonbinary Wiki's own summary box gives the frequency as 1.1 per cent. Both count people who had already answered a survey about gender, so neither figure reaches beyond the people asked, and the distance between the two is largely a distance between question wordings.

The Gender Census counts genderflux on a different instrument again, as one of the identity words on its checkbox list. That survey publishes its own measure of what moving a word onto that list does to it, and puts the rise for genderflux at a factor of 7.3 against a mean of 10.1, which is the same point in another form: a share collected from a list is not the same measurement as a share collected from a blank box.