Genderflux
Genderflux describes a gender whose intensity rises and falls. The direction is not what moves. A person may be a woman strongly on one day, faintly on another and not at all on a third, without ever becoming a man or anything else. One person quoted by the Nonbinary Wiki puts it as a matter of volume: "The idea is that my gender, and by extension my presentation, is sometimes a really, really loud version of itself and sometimes it's quiet, but it's always there."
Featured in
- CollectionThe Pairs People Mix UpFour pairs of gender terms that get mixed up constantly, and what each pair actually turns on: the body, the axis, the register, or a plain category error.8 entries
- CollectionThe Vocabulary of the 1990sSeven words first attested between 1992 and 1996, made in zines and newsletters before the general internet, carrying most of the framework still in use.7 entries
- CollectionWords That Changed MeaningSix terms whose current sense is not their first, with both senses dated. A dictionary gives where a word ended up; this gives the distance travelled.6 entries
That is the distinction from Genderfluid, and it is the thing sources get wrong most often. Fluid changes which; flux changes how much. The two are not exclusive: a flux is often described as fluidity between a gender and Agender, which is why the word is sometimes filed under genderfluid as a narrower case of it.
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 the wikiHow guide picture it 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 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 flux 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
The obvious guess about a term like this is that it was coined on Tumblr in 2014, and the record says otherwise. 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 rather than a coinage. 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.
Who designed the 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: a square gradient from the user nopadsnohelmets at 00:39 UTC, and the six-stripe design that became standard, from a contributor the record does not name, two and a half hours later. The submitter's note said only that it was made at a friend's suggestion.
The meanings were published with it: 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. Two later attributions are wrong. One institutional guide credits a user called campcounseling around 2012, which the primary record contradicts, and Wikimedia Commons credits deergoths, which appears to conflate 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 archive upload in another time zone.
Where genderflux turns up in print
Better than most of its neighbours in this catalogue. Angela N. Tharp's Gender Spectrum Theory used the word in 2016, a character in the 2019 novel In the Silences describes themself as genderflux femme, and 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. That last is a clinical document rather than a glossary, which is not true of Genderfae or Genderfaun. Elliott Alexzander, an activist and fashion blogger, launched a clothing line called GenderFlux in 2015.
How often genderflux is chosen
The Gender Census put genderflux at 7.6 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2022, and the Trevor Project found 4 per cent among non-binary young people in 2021, in a survey where genderfluid took 24 per cent and agender 15 per cent. The Nonbinary Wiki's own summary box gives the frequency as 1.1 per cent. All three are shares of people who had already answered a survey about gender rather than shares of any population, and the distance between them is largely a distance between question wordings.
Told apart
Often confused with Genderflux
Common questions
Questions about Genderflux
- What is the difference between genderflux and genderfluid?
- Flux changes intensity and fluid changes direction. A genderflux person stays the same gender and feels it more or less strongly over time, sometimes down to nothing at all. A genderfluid person moves between different genders. The combination is called fluidflux.
- What does girlflux mean?
- A fluctuating connection to being a girl, with the strength of it rising and falling over time and sometimes reaching nothing at all. Boyflux is the same for being a boy, and these prefixed forms are used more often in practice than the bare word genderflux.
- When was genderflux coined?
- It appears in a Queer Pagans newsletter in 1994, in a sense much closer to what genderfluid now covers. The current meaning of fluctuating intensity is a later narrowing of that, and the term became widely used in 2014, which is the date most sources give as its coinage. Reporting the popularity as the origin is a common error with words from this period.
- Can someone be genderflux and agender?
- Yes, and it is common. The bottom of a flux is frequently agender rather than a weaker version of the gender, so both words describe the same experience from different angles.
- Who made the genderflux flag?
- An unnamed contributor submitted the six-stripe design to the Tumblr blog pride-flags-for-us on 4 December 2014, saying only that it was made at a friend's suggestion. Later credits to a user called campcounseling and to deergoths are both contradicted by that primary record.
Added 2026-08-28 · Revised 2026-08-28
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- GenderfluidA gender that shifts rather than settles, one of the few terms here with a dictionary of record, and the one flux is confused with.
- AgenderAbsence rather than an unusual answer, dated by the OED to a 1996 newspaper article, and legally recognised once, in Oregon in 2017.
- AgenderfluxFully agender at the core while the felt level of masculinity or femininity rises and falls, and a definition the community has not yet settled.
- AmbigenderTwo genders held at once and held still, the static case bigender also covers, attested in a transgender community magazine as early as 1993.