Pangender

The Nonbinary Wiki states the limit as part of the definition. A pangender person's genders include only genders within that person's own culture and life experience, and the example the wiki gives is that they would not include Fa'afafine unless the person were Samoan, or bordergender unless they had the condition it belongs to. Dictionary.com, taking no position on the limit, defines the word as a person whose gender identity is not limited to one gender and who may feel like a member of all genders at the same time.

What pangender does not include

The restriction came from a dispute inside the community rather than from criticism outside it. Some Tumblr users argued that claiming all genders necessarily claims culturally specific and neurotype-specific ones, which cannot be claimed by people outside those contexts, and proposed maxigender as a replacement built on maximum rather than on everything. Everyday Feminism reports the same argument and the same outcome: many pangender people describe themselves as identifying with all available genders, and some moved to maxigender instead.

Both positions are held by people using the word. The Nonbinary Wiki's culture-and-experience clause is the settlement, and it is written into the definition rather than appended as a caveat.

How far back pangender goes

The Nonbinary Wiki puts the identity use at least in the 1990s and cites the preface to The Flock, a 1992 book by Lynn Wilson, which mentions gender-nonconforming individuals who call themselves androgynes, pan-gender or non-binary. Wiktionary's earliest quotations are older, from 1988 and 1996, but they belong to the other sense of the adjective: pangender morality, pangender magnetism, meaning encompassing all genders and said of things rather than of people. Wiktionary dates the personal sense to 2012.

The later markers are firmer than the early ones. Pangender was listed in the 2013 textbook Sexuality and Gender for Mental Health Professionals, named in the Washington state rule that defined the X gender marker in 2018, and, as Cosmopolitan reported, taken into the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2022 alongside multisexual.

Why pangender is not the same as fluidity

Genderfluid names movement between genders and pangender names their number, so the two describe different axes and often coincide. The Nonbinary Wiki says a pangender person may be genderfluid or Genderflux as well, and the compound panflux exists for the second combination. A pangender person who holds a single all-encompassing identity is neither: nothing changes, and nothing rises or falls.

What omnigender means beside pangender

Omnigender is used as a straight synonym, and also with a hedge, meaning experiencing almost all genders, which concedes exactly the point the maxigender argument makes. It has a third use with no identity claim in it at all, meaning gender neutral or treating all genders equally. Three senses in one word is worth knowing about before reading it in a glossary, because none of the three is marked when it appears.