Omnigender

Two further senses share the spelling and neither is an identity. Wiktionary's first definition is an adjective meaning treating all genders as one or the same, not discriminating or distinguishing between them, and its gloss for that is unisex. The third is a book: Virginia Ramey Mollenkott used Omnigender as the title and the organising term of a work of theology, and the term travelled through twenty years of religious and academic writing in that sense before any glossary listed it as something a person could be.

Where omnigender was first written down

Wiktionary keeps the senses in separate files and the separation does most of the work. Its oldest dated quotation for the adjective is from 2006, in Raymond Lowry's guide to Italian words that resemble English ones, where the omnigender term nipote is glossed as covering a grandchild of either sex as well as a niece or a nephew. That use is grammatical and carries no claim about anybody. Above it sits an undated line from Ashoke Kumar Chatterjee's biography of Shama Churn Lahiree, using Omnigender of a deity to whom no pronoun should be ascribed, which Wiktionary flags with a request for a date.

The identity strand has a firmer opening date because it opens with a book. Pilgrim Press, associated with the United Church of Christ, published Mollenkott's Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach in May 2001, and Chris Paige's account of it records the book as the first on transgender theology from a mainstream press. It won the 2002 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender and Bisexual category, and a revised and expanded edition followed in November 2007.

That second edition sets a dating trap, and it has already caught a scholarly source. Nancy A. Naples, writing in 2020, describes a new omnigender paradigm as coming from Mollenkott's 2007 book. The 2007 volume is the one on most shelves; the argument is six years older than the citation makes it look.

What Mollenkott meant by an omnigender society

Mollenkott had published thirteen books before this one, beginning with Is the Homosexual My Neighbor?, written with Letha Scanzoni in 1978. Paige's account argues that a long-established lesbian-feminist Christian author lending her credibility to the subject in 2001 mattered as much as the argument she made, at a point when transgender studies was still obscure and few transgender religious leaders were widely known.

The proposal is for a society in which gender is not the deciding factor. Mollenkott's omnigendered society is built to hold Intersex, Transsexual, crossdresser, gay, lesbian and bisexual experience together under a single word, and the biblical chapters work through the Genesis creation narratives, the cross-dressing prohibition in Deuteronomy and the traditions around eunuchs. The introductory material draws on Kate Bornstein and Gianna Israel. Paige is candid that the strength of the book is also its weakness, since connecting that many identities and traditions at once is what the whole argument rests on.

The word then travelled in that register for two decades. Carter Heyward wrote in 2010 of omnigender lives being lived in black and white churches; Elaine Graham in 2013 listed female, male, transgender and omnigender as categories about which she declined to make essentialist or comparative claims; Megan DeFranza in 2015 used the phrase a nonhierarchical omnigender paradigm; Mary Jo Iozzio and Patricia Beattie Jung wrote in 2017 about bathroom access for trans and omnigender people.

It travelled to writers arguing against the proposal as well. Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley used the word in 2016 and again in 2020 for the position they reject, that a fixed sense of gender should be replaced with an infinite variety of identities. Their quotations sit in the same Wiktionary file as the others.

How omnigender became a gender label

The glossaries pick the word up in the middle of the 2010s and almost all of them treat it as a synonym. Ashley Mardell's The ABC's of LGBT+, 2016, runs pangender and omnigender as one headword and glosses them together: people who recognise that current knowledge of gender is limited and that genders may exist which are not yet known. Lee Harrington's Traversing Gender, the same year, lists dual gender, Multigender, omnigender, pangender, Polygender and mixed gender side by side and says each carries its own perspective on what the chosen term means.

Misty Ginicola and colleagues, in 2017, define pangender and name omnigender and polygender as its synonyms. Madison-Amy Webb's counselling guide, 2019, pairs omnigender with polygendered and offers the oddest gloss in the material, describing a gender identity that encompasses all genders and calling it not so much a combination of male and female as their greatest common denominator. Chloe O. Davis's The Queens' English, 2021, gives no identity sense at all and defines the adjective: treating all genders as one, without distinguishing from or discriminating against one or the others.

The community record points somewhere else entirely. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki credits the identity coinage to a Tumblr user, victomofrebellion, and the flag to hyaenahart, dates neither, and marks both with a request for a date; its own supporting reference is an archived Tumblr post about omnisexual, omniromantic and omnigender pride. Nothing on file connects that coinage to Mollenkott's book, and the wiki does not mention her.

What separates omnigender from pangender

The Nonbinary Wiki treats the two as one entry with two names, and the Westport Library's public guide reproduces that entry word for word. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki keeps them apart and is unusually honest about the state of the distinction: omnigender is sometimes used interchangeably with pangender and sometimes not, and there is no consistent definition either way.

Where that wiki does draw a line it draws two of them. The first is about quantity. The most common definition of omnigender is somebody who experiences almost every gender but not quite, and a second common one is somebody who experiences all genders but holds them as a single gender, or as building blocks of one whole, with the parts sometimes differing in intensity from each other. The second line, which the wiki notes is not commonly used, is about attitude: pangender people are typically ambivalent about their gender and about which category it falls into, and omnigender people typically still care.

All three carry the same limit and it is the limit that makes the word usable. The genders in question are only those inside the person's own culture and life experience, because a gender belonging to a particular people requires a connection to and a knowledge of that people, and nobody can live inside every culture at once. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki states this as part of the definition itself.

Why the adjective still means unisex

The older sense is alive and has no identity claim in it. Beyond Lowry's Italian grammar, Wiktionary carries Patricia Hawley in 2010, writing critically about Mollenkott's theology, describing an omnigender society in which bathrooms would be undifferentiated; and Lawrence P. Jackson in 2012, in My Father's Name, on the not-female and not-male omnigender role that enslavement forced on black women. Jackson's use is the sharpest thing the word has attached to, because it describes a position imposed rather than a position claimed.

The practical consequence is that a glossary line reading omnigender says nothing on its own. It may be reporting an identity, a policy of treating all genders alike, or a theological paradigm from 2001, and none of the three sources that carry those senses marks which one is meant.

Why nobody has counted omnigender

No figure exists for the word under its own name. The frequency of 0.4 per cent that circulates belongs to the Nonbinary Wiki's combined pangender entry, which covers whatever its respondents wrote, and nothing on file breaks that out.

The counting problem is worse than a missing survey. A form offering omnigender as an option gathers three different claims into one row, and the sources do not mark the sense, so the row cannot be read afterwards. Wiktionary's citation file is the only measurement anybody has taken, and it measures print rather than people: the dated quotations run from 2003 to 2021, and most come from theology, gender studies and counselling handbooks rather than from anyone describing themselves.