Multigender

Multigender identities sit under Non-binary and under Transgender. The Nonbinary Wiki notes that a multigender person may or may not seek any physical change, and Jenny Crofton, writing for Everyday Feminism in February 2017, makes the point from the other direction: a person can identify with the gender assigned at birth and with one or more others, and is included on the strength of the others.

What the multigender umbrella covers

The Nonbinary Wiki lists bigender, trigender, polygender, pangender, genderfluid and possibly androgyne beneath the word, then adds abigender, ambigender and demiflux to the same page with definitions of its own. The count is what distinguishes the members from each other, and the counts are exactly where the sources disagree.

Two of those entries are unstable on the page itself. Ambigender is given both as two static genders and as a plain synonym for bigender, and the wiki's own qualifier on pangender, that a person can only identify with genders of their own culture, is applied there to every non-binary gender rather than to pangender alone.

Crofton's list of further members runs well past the wiki's. It includes amorgender, a gender that changes in response to a romantic partner's; mirrorgender, one that changes to reflect the people nearby; cyclogender, one that changes with hormonal cycles; chaosgender, one that is highly unpredictable; domgender, several genders with one dominant over the rest; fissgender, genders far apart from each other; collgender, too many genders to describe without being pangender; endogender, several genders all relating to one construct; demifluid, some fluid and some static; and gendervex, several genders none of which can be identified. Crofton states plainly that no comprehensive list of multigender terms could be found.

How multigender relates to the binary genders

Not in one way. Crofton separates four cases. Some multigender identities relate only to the two binary genders, androgyne being the example, meaning male and female. Some include one binary gender and not the other. Some include both along with one or more additional genders. And some sit entirely outside the binary and relate to neither.

The members need not be positive genders either. A multigender identity can include agender or neutrois, which name having no gender; demigender, which names having a partial one; and antigender, the opposite of another gender, as in antigirl. There is no ceiling on the number. On pronouns Crofton gives one instruction and it is a practical one: where a person names more than one set, use all of them rather than the easiest, and where one is preferred over the others, use that one more.

Why multigender is not the same as fluidity

Genderfluid and genderflux both describe change. Genderfluid changes which gender is present; genderflux changes how strongly it is felt. Multigender describes a number instead, and the two axes cross. A multigender person may hold three genders steadily for years, move among them daily, or hold two while a third comes and goes.

Crofton states it as a plain either-or: some multigender identities involve several genders that each do not change, and others involve movement through single genders one at a time. Genderfluid is used for the second case, but it also covers movement between whole multigender states, and a person can go from several genders to one and back. Flux is narrower again, describing gender identities experienced only very briefly before they change. That is why genderfluid appears both as a member of the umbrella and as a separate answer to a different question.

Which genders are closed to outsiders

Because an umbrella that admits any gender admits culturally specific ones, and some of those are not available from outside. Crofton gives Two-Spirit as the clear case, a set of genders belonging to particular North American Indigenous contexts, and argues that if one gender inside a multigender identity is appropriated then the overarching identity is affected too. The practical result is visible in the pangender entry of every glossary: all genders becomes all available genders, or the word maxigender is used instead.

Culture is not the only closed door in that account. Intergender is described as available only to intersex people. Gendervague, which names being unable to make out one's gender because of neurodivergence, along with Autigender and fascigender, is described as belonging to neurodivergent and specifically autistic people. Crofton's instruction is to look into an identity before claiming it.

The same essay records how multigender identities are treated, and reports rather than measures. Crofton describes them as made invisible, trivialised and dismissed, says the degree varies with a person's other identities, and singles out genderfluid and genderflux people, whose presentation may change from one day to the next, as facing the sharpest social marginalisation. No figure accompanies any of that.

Where multigender turns up in surveys

The umbrella is counted less often than its members. The Nonbinary Wiki records a frequency of 0.7 per cent and cites the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, in which about 1,108 respondents, 4 per cent, were multigender, the figure appearing on page 44 of the complete report. Both are shares of gender-diverse samples: the 2015 survey covered people who are not Cisgender, and the wiki figure comes from a community census.

Multigender also shows up as a write-in where a survey leaves room for one. Sarah Marsh's Guardian survey of March 2016, which asked young people to define their own gender, drew 914 replies from 65 countries, 302 of them from the United Kingdom, 209 from the United States and 78 from Canada, at a median age of 22. The replies ran from people comfortable with the gender they were assigned to people who described themselves as agender, trans and multigender. No count is given for the last group, which is the ordinary limit of an open question: it records that the word was used without recording how often.

What the dictionaries record about multigender

Less than the surveys do, and not the same sense. Wiktionary defines multigender as an adjective, of or pertaining to more than one gender, and derives it from multi- and gender. Its single quotation is a 2007 article by Kelley Holland in the New York Times about diversity in workplace teams, quoting Ilene H. Lang of Catalyst on multicultural teams being like the multigender teams of yesterday. The word there means a team of men and women, not a person of more than one gender.

The separate citations page is thinner still. Its only entry is a 2002 essay by Adam and Linda Parascandola, collected in the fifth edition of The Experience of Philosophy, which describes transgender people who refuse to identify as male or female or who identify as both, and lists the vocabulary then in circulation. The essay never uses the headword. Nothing on file dates the identity sense, which is the ordinary position for an umbrella term: the specific words underneath it get coined and dated, and the general word for the group forms afterwards, without an occasion anybody writes down.