Neurogender

The strategy behind that is the one shared across this whole shelf of terms. A gender binary society supplies roles and descriptions for men and women and very little for anybody else, so a description has to be assembled out of borrowed material, and here the material is a person's own neurology rather than an animal or a colour. The Nonbinary Wiki files these terms under both Non-binary and the xenogender umbrella for that reason: they are not defined in relation to male or female.

Where the word neurogender came from

The Nonbinary Wiki attributes the coinage to the Tumblr user Baaphomett in 2014, in a submission to the MOGAI-Archive blog, the same person and the same blog it credits with xenogender. Wiktionary derives the form plainly from neuro- and gender.

How an older sense of the word differs

Wiktionary records a separate and earlier sense with no connection to the community term: the gender of one's brain. Its first citation is Nancy Ordover's Science Fictions, 1997, quoting Murphy on people whose neurogender, glossed there as the gender or sex of the brain, is not the same as the morphological one. That sense was in print seventeen years before the Tumblr coinage, and no line of descent between the two is recorded in the sources for this entry.

What sits under the neurogender umbrella

Autigender, also written autgender and autismgender, is the largest of them: a gender that can only be understood in the context of being autistic. Bordergender was coined by the Tumblr user izayaorihahaha in 2014 for a fluctuating gender tied to borderline personality disorder, and its coiner was explicit that the claim is influence rather than equivalence, that the condition has an effect on gender rather than being one. Skhizeingender does the same work for schizophrenia. Gendervague came out of autistic community writing and sits alongside them: the activist Lydia X. Z. Brown has described being gendervague as being unable to separate gender identity from neurodivergence, with autism not causing the gender but bound up in how it is understood.

What the printed record shows

Maxfield Sparrow's Spectrums: Autistic Transgender People in Their Own Words, 2020, defines neurogenders as genders specific to neurodivergent people whose experience of gender relates to their neurotype, and the contributor endever corbin uses the word as an adjective in the same book. Sarah Cavar and Alexandre Baril, writing in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves in 2022, report that neurogender and autigender people meet anger and prejudice, some of it from trans and gender-expansive people who read such terms as a threat to trans respectability. The psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, quoted by the Nonbinary Wiki from The Gender Creative Child, takes the co-occurrence of gender nonconformity and neuro-atypicality as gender and something else rather than gender as a symptom of something else.

Lyric Rivera, writing in 2023, states the boundary the word is most often read past. The claim is that neurodivergence shapes the experience of gender, not that neurodivergence is a gender.