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 Everyday Feminism 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, and its definitions of the members do not always match those terms' own pages. Polygender is narrowed there to four or more genders where its own article says more than one. Ambigender appears both as two static genders and as a plain synonym for bigender. Abigender and demiflux are listed alongside them, the first for two genders each loosely connected, the second for a pair in which one gender is static and the other varies in strength.

A reader is better served knowing that the boundaries inside the umbrella are argued about than by a tidy list that hides it. The count is what distinguishes these terms from each other, and the counts are exactly where the sources disagree.

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 rather than compete. A multigender person may hold three genders steadily for years, move among them daily, or hold two while a third comes and goes.

Everyday Feminism 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. That is why genderfluid appears both as a member of the umbrella and as a separate answer to a different question.

Why the appropriation argument keeps returning

Because an umbrella that admits any gender admits culturally specific ones. Everyday Feminism gives Two-Spirit as the clear case, a set of genders belonging to particular North American Indigenous contexts and not available from outside them, and argues that if one gender inside a multigender identity is appropriated the whole identity is affected. 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.

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. 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.

The lexical record is thinner than the survey record. Wiktionary defines multigender as of, or pertaining to, more than one gender, and its earliest quotation is a 2007 New York Times article about workplace teams, where the word means a team of men and women rather than a person of more than one gender. 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; the general word for the group forms afterwards, without an occasion anybody writes down.