Juxera

Why juxera is not demigirl

The contrast with demigirl is the reason the word exists, and both community wikis that carry juxera make it in their opening paragraph. Demigirl, on the Nonbinary Wiki's account, usually describes a combination: partly female and partly agender, or partly female and partly some other gender. Juxera describes no combination at all. Juxera people do not partially identify with anything else, because juxera is a gender in and of itself, and that is the claim the term was made to carry.

The LGBTQIA+ Wiki puts the same point from another side. Juxera is relative to female and separate from it, and it is not outside the gender spectrum. For some people it is strongly connected to or aligned with femininity without being woman aligned, which that wiki files as fingender but sometimes not fiaspec. Because juxera is a whole gender, the Nonbinary Wiki notes that juxera people may also describe themselves as Third gender.

The plainest statement of the difference in the material is not from a wiki at all. Answering somebody on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network in August 2018, a poster called Celyn wrote that the demi- genders "imply that they are only partly a girl/boy, whereas juxera was coined to show that it's a whole gender", and then suggested demigirl and bigender as labels that might suit the person asking better. A word coined to make one distinction, used four years later by a stranger to make that same distinction, is the clearest evidence of uptake a term this size tends to leave.

How the juxera pair was made

Wulfgendur, who uses he/him and xe/xem pronouns, posted both words at once in July 2014 under a heading offering some new gender terms, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki cites the archived post along with a second one carrying possible flags for the pair. The morphology is symmetrical by design. Jux- is the Latin adverb juxta, near, and -era is a feminine Latin noun for a lady, mistress, or goddess; prox- is the Latin adjective proximus, also near, and -vir the masculine noun for a man.

The flags repeat the symmetry, and their reading is unusually explicit for a microlabel. Both are pentagons. Pink and blue at the ends stand for the girl and boy genders, the blueish grey, navy, and purple between them stand for the body of the gender spectrum, and a green triangle marks where the gender falls along it, pointing toward pink on the juxera flag and toward blue on the proxvir one. The Nonbinary Wiki counts six alternative juxera flags; the one it dates is a lined version of the original by the Tumblr user felix-makes-flags, made on 20 July 2021.

Which year the juxera record supports

July 2014, on both wikis, both citing the archived coining post. Dictionary.com's gender and sexuality glossary, in an entry dated 21 November 2018, gives 2016 instead, and gives it twice.

That entry then undercuts its own date. Among the usage examples it prints is a post from December 2015 in which somebody reads a profile listing "demi-amphiromantic nycto-pansexual juxera demigirl" and says that only two of those words mean anything to them. A word cannot be quoted in December 2015 and coined in 2016. The entry also carries a standing note saying it is an informal word summary and not a formal definition of the sort the site's dictionary entries are.

The divergence is not only about the year. Dictionary.com glosses juxera as "feminine but not a female, like a girl but not a girl", which either wiki would accept, and then adds that people who identify as juxera "consider themselves to have feminine characteristics but with aspects of maleness or of another nonbinary identity". That is the partial-identification reading both wikis were written to rule out. This catalogue follows the wikis on the date, and records the gloss as a disagreement.

How juxera is used in a sentence

As an adjective, and both wikis are firm about it: a person is juxera in the way a person is male or female, not a juxera. Dictionary.com gives the pronunciation as juhks-eer-uh.

Where the word circulates is easier to establish than how often. Dictionary.com reports that discussion of juxera happens primarily on Tumblr, and names Reddit, X, and the Asexual Visibility and Education Network alongside it. The two places the word can be watched in use in the material match that description. The December 2015 post shows it in the wild, stacked with three other labels in a profile line and read by somebody who recognised none of them. The August 2018 forum answer shows the opposite mode: one person explaining the label carefully to another who is choosing between it and its neighbours.

Dictionary.com attaches a caveat to its own account of who uses the word, noting that people who identify as juxera at one point may not always do so. That describes labels of this kind in general, and it applies to the single survey figure below, which counts a moment and not a membership.

What the surveys record for juxera

One figure, from one instrument, reported at second hand. The Nonbinary Wiki gives 13 respondents to the 2020 Gender Census, 0.05 per cent, and puts the term's overall frequency below 0.1 per cent. The same wiki's page for proxvir reports 13 respondents in 2019 at 0.1 per cent and 22 in 2020 at 0.09 per cent, so the pair can be set beside itself for the one year both were counted.

Each percentage is a fraction of the people who filled in a community survey about gender that year, and since the wiki gives no sample size for either year, the fraction cannot be read back into a head count. The Nonbinary Wiki also carries a banner on the page saying that very few people are known to use the term.

Why the juxera record stops where it does

No academic literature covers juxera and no dictionary of record carries it. What exists is two community wikis, one popular glossary entry that describes itself as informal, and two dated posts by named users on a platform that has since reorganised itself around them.

The shape of that record is the reverse of the usual one. The provenance is sharp: a named coiner with stated pronouns, a month, an archived post, a flag with a documented reading, and a counterpart term made in the same act. Everything downstream of the coinage is thin or absent. The Nonbinary Wiki lists juxera as a base gender within something it calls the Circa Binary, and the link that would explain what that is has gone dead.

A term like Hijra fails in the opposite direction. The category is old, the record around it is deep, and there is no coinage date at all, because nobody was present to write down the moment a word that old began.