Neurogender

What the neurogender umbrella covers

The strategy behind it 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 gets 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.

Two limits sit on the face of the definition. The Nonbinary Wiki says plainly that not everyone who is neurodivergent sees themselves as having a neurogender, and that some neurogenders are only for people with a particular neurotype, which makes a few of them closed terms. Lyric Rivera, writing on 9 August 2023, states the other limit in three flat sentences: autism is not a gender, neurodivergence is not a gender, and the terms exist in order to discuss how a neurodivergent experience affects a person's relationship with gender. Rivera's definition of the umbrella turns on degree, describing neurogender as neurodivergence influencing the experience of gender so far that the two cannot be pulled apart.

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. The half of the compound that is not gender is older than the coinage: neurodivergent comes out of the neurodiversity movement, which the Nonbinary Wiki dates to autistic rights activists in the late 1990s.

What the wiki demands before it will list a term is the nearest thing this shelf of vocabulary has to an evidence rule. An identity is listed only where two separate external sources show its origin and show that somebody has used it as their own gender, with a Gender Census result, a news article or a published book of nonfiction all counting as the second. A pride flag design counts for neither. A blog written by the person who coined the term does not count as evidence of use, and a dead link with no archive behind it does not count at all.

Why the older sense of neurogender 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 the cross gendered, those 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 appears in the sources for this entry.

A third use of the morpheme is nobody's gender at all. The NeuroGenderings Network, founded on 15 September 2012 at Uppsala by Isabelle Dussauge and Anelis Kaiser, is an international group of neuroscientists and gender studies researchers working under the label of neurofeminism. Its target is what Cordelia Fine named neurosexism in her 2010 book Delusions of Gender, meaning uncritical bias in neuroscientific research and in public perception of it. The first conference, NeuroGenderings: Critical Studies of the Sexed Brain, met at Uppsala in March 2010, and the biennial meetings that followed ran in Vienna in September 2012, in Lausanne in May 2014 and at Barnard College in March 2016. Nothing connects the network to the identity term except the morphology, and a search for one word reaches the other.

Which terms sit under the neurogender umbrella

Autigender, also written autgender and autismgender, is the largest of them. The Nonbinary Wiki dates it to on or before 25 August 2014 and credits the Tumblr users autismgender and esperancegirl, again through MOGAI-Archive submissions, with the definition that autism is part or whole of a gender identity, a gender that can only be understood in the context of being autistic. Bordergender, also written borderfluid, was coined by the Tumblr user izayaorihahaha in 2014 for a fluctuating gender experienced by people with borderline personality disorder, and its coiner was explicit about what the claim is not: not that borderline is a gender, but that it has an effect on gender the way it has an effect on the rest of a life. Skhizeingender does the same work for schizophrenia. Gendervague came out of autistic community writing and sits alongside these rather than strictly beneath 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.

The flag carries the same structure. Its coloured bars stand for the range of neurotypes and gender identities that neurodivergent people have, and the infinity symbol stands for neurodiversity.

What the Gender Census counted under neurogender

Nothing directly. The umbrella itself has not been surveyed, and the Nonbinary Wiki's infobox carries a bare frequency of 0.2 per cent without naming the survey it came from. What has been counted is autigender, and the Nonbinary Wiki records its write-ins across three surveys.

The spread of spellings behind the 2020 total is the more useful half of that table. Seven forms of one word were written in, which is what an open box records and a checkbox would have flattened into a single count or dropped entirely. The Nonbinary Wiki notes that several of the 2019 respondents added explanations of their own, saying either that autism was their gender or that it had a significant effect on how they understood gender. The Gender Census is a self-selected survey of gender-diverse respondents, so 0.59 per cent is a share of that sample and of nothing wider.

How neurogender appears in print

The printed uses arrive from three directions. A 2019 journal article by Erin A. Vogel lists neurogender among the write-in answers a survey received, alongside genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, bigender, androgyne and two-spirit, which puts the word in a methods section, and not in an argument. 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 on disability in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves in 2022, report that neurogender and autigender people are often met with 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. That co-occurrence is what the term's users point at when asked why the vocabulary exists. Lange reports that autistic people are more likely to be trans or gender-nonconforming than non-autistic people and that trans and gender-nonconforming people are more likely to be autistic than cisgender people, while noting that most autistic people are probably still cisgender and most trans people probably not autistic. The association looks strongest among people identifying as non-binary or Genderqueer, and among binary trans people it looks stronger in trans men than in trans women. Lange also records that researchers have looked for a biological cause common to autism and gender dysphoria without finding compelling evidence for the link. Rivera cites a study across five datasets covering 641,860 people, which found transgender and gender-nonconforming people three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people, with two of those datasets also showing raised rates of ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, learning disorders and schizophrenia.