Metagender

What the spiritual coinage claims

That coinage was made in 1997 by Rook Hine, who described the identity as a conscientious objector in the war of the sexes, and it was developed by Phillip Andrew Bernhardt-House, who set the definition down in a 2003 anthology. The wording is this category's argument in its strongest form: a wholly other third, fourth or eighty-seventh gender category, derived from no combination of the familiar ones, and carrying a spiritual component that the standard Third gender description does not. Inside neopaganism it became a social gender that comes into play in religious contexts, which is how P. Sufenas Virius Lupus has described it since 2008.

Speakers used the word at a roundtable on gender diversity at Pantheacon in 2015, a neopagan convention. Priestx Jaina Bee wrote afterwards that metagender is a label of no particular gender that is also not agender, and that asking nine metagender people what the word means produces twelve answers.

Why metagender has no single definition

Because it kept being made. In 1998 Lisa Voldeng and Laura Kloppenberg coined metagenderism in a BITCH magazine essay, Metagender and the Slow Decline of the Either/Or, defining it against Sandy Stone's transgenderism as the unlimited superset of all possible genders and gender identities. In a 1999 interview with Femme Fatales the musician and film-maker Phoebe Legere said she was metagender, metasexual, not a man or a woman. A 2004 zine used the word for gender-bending, a 2006 book for people who identify as neither male nor female, and a 2012 glossary for a gender that no existing terminology describes.

Four separate proposals were made on Tumblr in 2014 alone. In February unquietpirate offered meta-gender for a person's relationship to the gender assigned at birth; in June collectivetey offered it as another word for pangender; in July autisticlapis-blog, agenderchrismclean and lordmoriarty coined it for identifying around or beyond a gender; and in November arquus-malvaceae coined it for a tenuous connection to gender, giving metawoman and metaman as forms. In July 2020 Evey Winters, Tenacity and others coined it again, this time as a modality for people who are neither Cisgender nor Transgender.

How metagender reached print

Through the academic sense rather than the identity. Wiktionary's citations run from 2003 to 2017 and are almost all scholarly: a 2009 book using metagender for the assumption that a person's gender attributes all sit in one box, a 2010 book calling gender mainstreaming a metagender equality strategy, a 2013 volume on Anglo-Saxon saints tracing a metagender that transcends male and female alike. Maxfield Sparrow, who has written about coming out as metagender in 1992, described it in a 2018 anthology as expressing a feeling of being outside the entire paradigm of gender.

Where the Bugis reading came from

From anthropology. Bugis society in Indonesia recognises four genders plus a fifth, bissu, and the anthropologist Sharyn Graham labelled bissu a meta-gender in 2001, meaning a category that combines and transcends the others. The word was later taken into Bahasa Indonesia as a loan, so Bugis people now use metagender themselves for genders that transcend gender roles. Wiktionary's separate meta-gender entry carries three citations of that sense, dated 2012, 2014 and 2016.

Counting is almost nothing. One respondent called themselves metagender in the 2019 Gender Census and four did in 2020, and a Metagender and Questioning group on Facebook had 506 members in December 2020, an unknown number of them metagender.