Metagender

Why metagender has no agreed definition

Because it kept being made, in circles that did not overlap. The Nonbinary Wiki and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki both trace the word behind its use by LGBT people to a technical term dating to at least the 1980s, concerned with what sits outside or transcends binary gender, whether of imagery, perspectives, data or people. That sense never stopped, and both wikis record it running into the 2020s alongside every identity coinage made since.

Between those entries sit uses that never became coinages. In a 1999 interview printed in Femme Fatales the musician and film-maker Phoebe Legere said she was metagender, metasexual, not a man or a woman. Katie Cercone listed metagender in a 2004 zine as a term for gender-bending. A 2006 book defined it as people who do not identify as either male or female. An anonymous interviewee in a 2018 thesis described it in three words as an identity beyond gender.

What the spiritual metagender identity claims

The coinage this catalogue files under identity was made by Rook Hine by 1997 and developed by Phillip Andrew Bernhardt-House, who set the definition down in a 2003 anthology. Bernhardt-House's wording is a wholly other third, fourth or later gender category, derived from no combination of the familiar ones, and carrying a spiritual component. The 2003 definition described the experience as close to being a third gender in a culture that has no such concept, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki reads it as sitting near the terms under the Aporagender umbrella, with the religious element as the difference. Inside neopaganism it settled into a social gender that comes into play in spiritual and religious contexts, which is how P. Sufenas Virius Lupus has described it since 2008.

Lupus has published the fullest statement of what the identity claims, and most of it is a list of refusals. Metagender in this sense is not androgynous and not any combinatory gender, not neuter or neutral, not agender and not a negation of gender, and not gender-fluid, since Lupus describes it as fixed and definite while allowing wide variation in expression. It is presented as a subset of the non-binary identities that carries a sexual orientation with it, and the religious component is stated as a necessary feature: the gender is not negotiable when Lupus is serving deities or a religious community. Lupus also frames it as an alternative to borrowing. Many cultures have had a gender-variant spiritual role for shamans or priests, and metagender is offered as one way of occupying that role without claiming descent from a culture that has one.

The pronouns went with it. Lupus uses the Old Spivak set, e, em, eir, eirs and emself, and credits its recent circulation to Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, whose author met the set through Jaina Bee, a fellow metagender person and co-religionist.

Bee is also the source of the line about the word that the Nonbinary Wiki quotes. At least two people spoke about their metagender identity at a roundtable on gender diversity at Pantheacon in 2015, a neopagan convention, and Bee wrote afterwards, on 15 March, that metagender is a label that is no particular gender but is not agender either, a gender that evades every attempt to define it. Asking nine metagender people what the word means, Bee added, produces twelve answers.

How Tumblr users recoined metagender

Four separate proposals were made on Tumblr in 2014 alone, none of them referring to the others. In February unquietpirate offered meta-gender as a label for a person's relationship to the gender assigned at birth, a sense close to what is now called gender modality, and gave Cisgender, Transgender and Genderqueer as examples. In June collectivetey offered metagender as another word for pangender. In July autisticlapis-blog, agenderchrismclean and lordmoriarty coined it for identifying around or beyond a gender, where the identity is almost that gender but not quite and also extends past it, with meta-boy, meta-girl and meta-nonbinary as forms. In November arquus-malvaceae coined it for a tangential or tenuous connection to the concept of gender, identifying with a label rather than identifying as it, with metawoman, metaman and metaqueer as forms.

The 2020 coinage came from outside Tumblr and answers a different question. In July of that year Evey Winters, Tenacity and others proposed metagender as a gender modality for people who are not cisgender and do not identify as transgender, alongside isogender and absgender. The Nonbinary Wiki quotes one non-binary person on the appeal: an acknowledgement of being technically transgender, alongside a sense that the label still carries binary expectations.

The flags belong to the separate coinages, not to the word. Tumblr user imoga-pride made a metagender flag on 1 December 2018 and gave it no defined meaning, metawire made another on 20 December 2019 in which the circle stands for around and beyond, and the modality flag went up through the Facebook group in July 2020, taking black and white from the non-binary and agender flags.

Where metagender turns up in scholarship

Print use is mostly academic and mostly not about an identity at all. Wiktionary's citations run from 2003 to 2017: Finding the Real Me in 2003, on the body types a metagender person may have; Africa After Gender? in 2007, arguing that gender and metagender need separate conversations; Negotiating Boundaries? in 2009, using metagender for the assumption that a person's gender attributes all sit in one box; Doing Feminist Research in Political and Social Science in 2010, calling gender mainstreaming a metagender equality strategy; Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England in 2013, where Rhonda McDaniel traces a metagender in Ambrose that transcends male and female alike and is open to saints of either sex who pursue virginity; and a 2017 Shakespeare volume calling the playwright an exponent of metagender beliefs. Only one citation is about a person: Brandy Williams, reviewing Abraxas 5 on 5 May 2014, noted that one contributor identifies as metagender.

Theology carries the largest share. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki records meta-gender as a transcendent ideal in scholarship on Daoism, Buddhism and Christianity, and as a description of divine beings, angels in Islam and the Christian God among them. The most developed case is the virgin saint. Theorised in the writings of the Latin Doctors in the fourth and fifth centuries, the metagendered virum perfectum encompassed and transcended masculine and feminine to become an angelic gender that any sex could reach through virginity and devotion to scripture, and some Christians use the word for that state today. Aegean archaeologists have borrowed it as well, arguing that meta-gender conveys the genderless aspects of Minoan culture better than calling them genderless does. One neopagan deity, Paneros of the Tetrad++, was created as a metagendered deity outright.

The one substantial body of first-person writing is Maxfield Sparrow's. Sparrow has spoken about coming out as metagender in 1992 and wrote about it across the 2010s, describing in a 2017 blog essay how hard the identity is to define and how close it runs to gendervague, then writing in a 2018 anthology that metagender expresses feeling outside the entire paradigm of gender.

Why anthropologists call bissu a meta-gender

Because Bissu is described as combining and transcending the genders Bugis society recognises rather than being one of them. Bugis society in Indonesia recognises three sexes and four genders, women, men, calabai and calatai, plus bissu as a fifth category, and the Nonbinary Wiki dates the arrangement across six centuries into the present day. The anthropologist Sharyn Graham applied meta-gender to bissu in 2001, in the sense of a category occupying a space above any single gender identity. Wiktionary's separate meta-gender entry carries three citations of that reading, from 2012, 2014 and 2016, the first of them quoting Graham directly.

The loan then travelled back. Both wikis record that the word was taken into Bahasa Indonesia after Graham's coinage, so Bugis people now use metagender themselves, for genders that transcend gender roles and for transcending gendered power relations in order to reach higher powers.

What the surveys record about metagender

Almost nothing, and what there is cannot be sorted. One respondent called themselves metagender in the 2019 Gender Census and four did in 2020. A Metagender and Questioning group on Facebook, founded after the modality coinage, had 506 members on 28 December 2020, an unknown number of them metagender. No source on file separates the coinages inside those counts, so a write-in cannot be assigned to the spiritual identity, to the modality, or to any of the four Tumblr senses. Nothing counts the academic users at all, and that is the sense with by far the deepest printed record.