Intergender

Both wikis that hold the term report the conflict rather than resolving it, and one of them says plainly that the intersex record is too patchy to establish whether the word ever had an intersex origin.

How the newsgroup used the word

The earlier sense is documented on usenet. Before 1998 a perisex intergender person named Donna Lynn Matthews created the newsgroup alt.support.intergendered, whose charter, last updated in 1998, defines intergendered people as those who gender themselves neither as men nor as women but somewhere in between, as a mix of masculine and feminine qualities, or outside the categories entirely. The same charter warns readers not to confuse intergendered with intersexed and states that the group is not an intersex forum.

Matthews described the position in 1998 as a gendered state between the polar endpoints of man and woman, both and neither at once, with no particular interest in passing as either, and was writing under the heading of Genderqueer by 2006. The word did in the 1990s what Non-binary came to do in the 2010s, and it accumulated the ordinary furniture of a 1990s identity along the way: a webring of personal sites, the pronoun set xe/hir/hirs, a coinage for its own dress sense in interdressing, from Deird Duncan in 2000, and a LiveJournal community founded in March 2004 that reached forty-eight members and stopped posting in July 2008. A 2010 encyclopedia files intergender as a type of androgyne.

Why Aeshling coined it again

In July 2014 the word was coined a second time, independently, by an intersex Tumblr user posting as Aeshling, who moderated the group blog ActuallyIntersex. The immediate context is on record. ActuallyIntersex had posted that intersex is not a gender, out of frustration at perisex people claiming it as one, and intersex commenters replied that their own gender was in fact bound up with being intersex. An anonymous comment dated 25 June 2014 proposed intergender for that, and Aeshling posted the coining soon afterwards, defining it as a gender between and among male and female and marking it for intersex people only.

The Nonbinary Wiki notes that the coining post shows no awareness of sixteen years of prior use. That is where the conflict comes from rather than a fault inside it, and both senses agree on the literal reading: a gender between and among female and male.

Who may call themselves intergender

Many people in the intersex community hold that intergender is an intersex-only label and that perisex use of it is a co-option of the kind other intersex-specific terms have suffered. Against that, the label was open to any birth sex for the longer part of its life, and some perisex people who would have used it defer instead to bigender or androgyne, which carry no such claim.

A second argument runs alongside. Some perisex people describe a transition intended to make their body more intersex and have called themselves female-to-intersex or male-to-intersex since at least 1996, and intersex writers have objected that wanting to become intersex is appropriative given the specific oppression intersex people face. Altersex has been proposed for that position instead, and the Intersex Wiki's glossary states flatly that nobody can transition to become intersex, because it is a property somebody is born with.

What integender and amalgagender name

Two neighbouring coinages sit close enough to be mistaken for it. Amalgagender was coined in 2015 by the Tumblr user InterMisogyny-Blog for a gender that is part of, or mixed into, an intersex identity, and MOGAI Lexicon gave it a similar definition in 2016; it has largely fallen out of use as intergender spread. Integender is a respelling from 2020 by the Tumblr user AutisticAgitha, meant to keep the intersex sense clear of the other one.

The other one is not only the 1998 identity. Intergender is also an ordinary English adjective meaning between people of different genders, attested in intergender wrestling and in the title of a 1999 thesis on intergender communication, and Wiktionary lists that sense first. It has nothing to do with either identity.

What the write-in counts show

The Gender Census does not offer intergender as an option, so every count of it is a write-in. In 2025, 72 respondents out of 43,096 wrote it in, about 0.2 per cent; in 2024 the figure was 40 write-ins among 48,645, alongside 167 who wrote in intersex itself as their gender. Those samples are overwhelmingly perisex, which is the wrong population for a term whose principal sense is intersex-only.

The intersex-specific figures are worse and come from Tumblr polls. A 2024 poll of 414 respondents, permitting one answer each, put intergender or integender at 5.1 per cent of people using any intersex-exclusive label. A 2023 poll found about half of intersex respondents saying that being intersex strongly influenced their gender, which measures the experience rather than the word. The Intersex Wiki says outright that Tumblr is not a representative sample of intersex people.