Intergender

The Intersex Wiki records the word working in two grammatical positions at once. It is used as a modifier, as in an intergender woman, and as a gender in its own right. Both uses are visible from the earliest posts under the newer sense.

How the newsgroup used intergendered

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. The same charter makes room for people who place themselves outside the gender categories entirely, lists the presentations that tended to go with the identity, androgyny, partial crossdressing, genderbending, and part-time cross-gender living, and warns readers not to confuse intergendered with intersexed. Intersex people were welcome in the group. The charter states in the same breath that the group is not an intersex support forum.

Matthews described the position in October 1998 as a gendered state between the polar endpoints of man and woman, both and neither at the same time, held by people with no particular interest in passing as either and wanting only to be who they are without choosing between two extremes. By October 2006 Matthews was writing under the heading of Genderqueer instead.

The word did in the 1990s what Non-binary came to do in the 2010s, and it accumulated the ordinary furniture of a 1990s internet identity on the way. Some participants used the pronoun set xe/hir/hirs. There was an intergender webring, which at the time was how a reader found personal sites on a subject at all. Deird Duncan, also perisex and intergender, coined interdressing in 2000 for intergender expression in clothing, without any necessary intention to be read as a particular gender. A LiveJournal community was created in March 2004 by the user badoingdoing for people who did not fit masculine or feminine roles, or wanted to express both; it had forty-eight members when the Nonbinary Wiki last checked, and its final post was in July 2008. A 2010 SAGE reference work, the Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies, files intergender on page 894 as one of the androgyne identities, beside pangender, bigender, ambigender, nongendered, agender, and gender fluid.

Why Aeshling coined intergender again

In July 2014 the word was coined a second time, independently, by an intersex Tumblr user posting as Aeshling, whose personal account was QuietlyLoud-Intersex and who moderated the group blog ActuallyIntersex as Mod A. 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 exactly that, and Aeshling posted the coining to their personal Tumblr soon afterwards.

The coining post carried the etymology and the restriction together: a gender that is between and among male and female, from the Latin prefix inter, meaning between and among, and for intersex individuals only, not for dyadic people to use. The definition is the older one almost word for word, and what is new is the restriction. The Nonbinary Wiki notes that the post shows no awareness of sixteen years of prior use. The conflict comes from that unawareness, and both senses still agree on the literal reading while disagreeing on everything else.

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 repeatedly suffered. Against that, the label was open to any birth sex for the longer part of its life, and the Nonbinary Wiki sets out both positions without choosing between them. Some perisex people who would otherwise use it defer to Bigender or Androgyne instead, neither of which carries a claim on intersex experience.

A second argument runs alongside the first. Some perisex non-binary 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, the date of Raphael Carter's The Angel's Dictionary, which is the source the Nonbinary Wiki cites for it. Intersex writers have objected that wanting to become intersex is appropriative, given the specific forms of oppression intersex people face. Altersex has been proposed as a respectful option for perisex people in that position, and the Intersex Wiki's glossary states flatly that nobody can transition into being intersex, because it is a property somebody is born with.

What each side is arguing from is easiest to see in what each sense put on the record.

Which coinages sit closest to intergender

Two neighbouring coinages sit close enough to be mistaken for it. Amalgagender was coined in 2015 by the Tumblr user InterMisogyny-Blog, for the case where being intersex is part of somebody's gender identity, and MOGAI Lexicon gave it a similar definition in 2016, a gender affected by or mixed into an intersex identity. It has largely fallen out of use as intergender spread. Integender is a respelling from 2020 by the Tumblr user AutisticAgitha, adopted for one purpose only, which is to keep the intersex sense clear of the other one. The Intersex Wiki treats all three as names for the same label.

Under the intersex sense a set of compounds has grown, each naming an existing term as it is held in connection with being intersex: interandrogyne, interfluid, interdemigender, interneutrois for Neutrois, internon for non-binary, and intertransgender. Two of the compounds go further than that. Intersexgender names a gender that is simply intersex, and neutroix names one left completely gender neutral as a result of being intersex.

The flags follow the same lineage and reproduce the same argument. The first, from 2014, was a collaboration between moderators C and D of ActuallyIntersex, and it was built on the Natalie Phox intersex flag, a base since made controversial by its conflation of intersex with bigender. An alternative was posted in 2020 by the Tumblr users InterFemMasc and DeafBlindDisaster, working from the Carpenter intersex flag instead. A simplified version by the Tumblr user Ipso-Faculty followed in 2024, inspired by the 2020 redesign, and it was the first intergender flag released under a free licence, into the public domain. That is why it is the one the combination flags are built from.

Why intergender is also an ordinary adjective

Wiktionary lists the adjective first and the identity noun second, which is a fair reading of the corpus. As an adjective, intergender means taking place between people of opposite genders, and its ordinary collocations are intergender friendship and intergender wrestling. The earliest citation Wiktionary carries is dated 1999, from Joanna Lynn McAfee's Differences in Intergender Communication Within Task-oriented Dyads. The noun is marked rare and glossed as a person whose gender identity is midway between male and female, which is the newsgroup sense, not the intersex one, and intergendered is listed as a rare synonym of the adjective. Both senses go into French as intergenre. The morphology is unremarkable: inter-, from Latin inter, on gender, from Latin genus by way of Old French gendre.

The adjective is still being put to new technical work, at a distance from any of this. A paper by Yadam Ram Kumar, received in March 2023 and published that July, coins intergender conflict as a sociological term for disagreement between two opposite genders, paired with intragender conflict for disagreement within one. Neither has any connection to either identity sense.

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 respondents, alongside 167 who wrote in intersex itself as their gender, in a survey where a respondent could write in more than one term. Those samples are overwhelmingly perisex, which is the wrong population for a term whose principal sense is intersex-only. The Nonbinary Wiki prints a frequency of 0.1 per cent for the term without saying which survey the figure was taken from.

The intersex-specific figures are thinner still and come from Tumblr polls. A 2024 poll asking which intersex-exclusive labels people used, permitting one answer each, put intergender or integender at 5.1 per cent of 414 respondents. A 2023 poll found about half of intersex respondents saying that being intersex strongly influenced their gender, which measures the experience the 2014 coinage was made for rather than the take-up of the word made for it. The Intersex Wiki attaches the same caveat to both: Tumblr carries a far higher proportion of genderqueer, non-binary, and transgender people than the general population, and is not a representative sample of intersex people.