Maverique

What maverique claims and what it refuses

The Nonbinary Wiki's wording is that maverique is a present feeling of gender, completely independent from male, female, neutral, or anything derived from any of them. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki adds two words, autonomy and inner conviction, and insists that a maverique person has a distinct and firm sense of gender despite the independence. Vesper's own June wording distinguishes maverique from genderlessness and from a neutral gender in the same breath, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki lists what the unbranded identity stands apart from: androgyny, neutrality, non-applicability, apathy and revolt.

Being maverique on its own is possible in the way being solely a man or solely a woman is. It also combines. A maverique person can be Multigender with their other genders related to maleness, femaleness or neutrality, a genderfluid person can hold maverique as one of their genders, and someone who identifies only partly with it can say demimaverique. What the word cannot do is serve as a heading over others: both wikis are explicit that maverique is a single, specific gender rather than an umbrella term.

How Vesper H. named the gender

Vesper H., posting as queerascat on Tumblr and later at a site of their own, put up a rough first definition on 1 June 2014 and labelled it a draft. A second wording, marked v2.0, followed on 15 June, the same day the flag went up at 13:28 UTC. A third, v3.0, came on 21 June and simplified the wording again, and a further post on 25 June expanded the reasoning behind the flag's yellow while still inviting feedback. The flag post itself carries the tag "rough draft" and closes by asking for commentary, criticism and suggestions.

The LGBTQIA+ Wiki dates the coinage instead to 31 May 2014, a day before the earliest surviving post, and that is the only disagreement between the sources on file.

The word is Franglais: the English maverick joined to the French ending -ique, pronounced mav-REEK to rhyme with antique, or mav-uh-REEK. The ending means similar to, not identical. A maverique is maverick-like without being a maverick, because where maverick implies a conscious, rebellious unorthodoxy, being maverique is neither a chosen stance against the gender binary nor a political position but an inherent feature of the person. The English word descends from Samuel A. Maverick, a Texas cattle owner who became known for neglecting to brand his herd, and it originally named a calf or yearling found without an owner's brand. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki keeps that unbranded sense deliberately in play.

Why the maverique flag leaves out pink

Vesper published three equal horizontal stripes, yellow over white over orange, and stated each colour's meaning in the same post.

Vesper's analogy is to subtractive colour: yellow is a primary in CMYK, so it cannot be obtained by combining cyan or magenta, which is offered as the perfect analogy for the relationship maverique has to male and masculinity and to female and femininity. The exclusions are stated as deliberately as the inclusions. Vesper made a point of leaving out blues, pinks and purples, on the grounds that those carry set gender associations which have nothing to do with maverique except that they describe things maverique is not.

The white was kept despite a reservation. Vesper noted that white can suggest genderlessness, which is the reading the word exists to refuse, and retained the stripe because the assigned meaning of autonomy resonated anyway. One small inconsistency survives in the files: the post states the yellow as #FFF344, while the image Vesper exported measures #FFF433. The stated values are treated as the palette, and the vector redrawing a Wikimedia Commons contributor named Nikki released under CC0 on 28 June 2020 uses them at a proportion of its own choosing instead of the sixteen by nine of the original.

Why maverique is not neutrois

Neutrois is the word Vesper tried first. Where neutrois means having no inner sense of gender, maverique is its opposite; where it means a present but neutral gender, maverique still refuses the neutrality. The Nonbinary Wiki draws a second boundary against Aporagender, coined within weeks of maverique and covering similar ground, on the grounds that aporagender works as an umbrella and can take in a neutral gender while maverique is one gender and is not neutral. Dictionary.com, which covered both words in an article of June 2023 and quoted Vesper's own FAQ definition, files them beside each other for the same reason.

A third boundary runs against Third gender, and the objection to that mapping is twofold. Third gender is often used to lump together many different gender experiences from a wide variety of cultures, and it carries a restriction maverique does not, since the Nonbinary Wiki holds that anyone of any race or ethnic background can use maverique where it fits.

Grammatically maverique works as either a noun or an adjective, and the Nonbinary Wiki gives a worked example of each. That sets it apart from Juxera and Proxvir, terms the same wikis insist are adjectives only.

Which symbols maverique has carried

The flag came first and the symbol took nearly three years. The first proposal was the astrological sign for the sun, dropped after criticism that the sun is associated with binary genders in many cultures. A comet was also suggested and is still occasionally used, although it doubles as a general non-binary symbol. The design that stuck came from the Tumblr user Sneer in February 2017: an outer circle for the gender binary and a filled inner circle for maveriques not being any part of it, with the sun shape somewhat incorporated after all.

A second flag arrived a decade after the first. The Maverique Prism flag was created by AsherTheTrans on Reddit, requested and defined by a user called moibi, and published on 21 August 2024, the prism standing for the way several aspects of one identity refract into a spectrum.

Where the record for maverique stops

At two community wikis, a flag archive and a dictionary site's article. There is no academic literature under the word and no dictionary of record carries an entry for it, which is the ordinary position for a microlabel of this age and says nothing about the people using it. What exists instead is unusually well dated, because the coiner published on a platform that timestamps posts and because the archives kept the pages.

The one figure on file comes from a 2017 survey of 9,932 non-binary participants, in which 0.6 per cent entered maverique as their identity word. The Nonbinary Wiki gives 0.3 per cent as a typical frequency. Each is the share of a community survey's own participants who wrote the word, and neither source offers it as anything more. The 2014 flag post carried 187 notes when the flag archive read it, which measures circulation on one platform and nothing beyond it.