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. The Westport Library's guide reproduces the same definition word for word, which is how a community wiki's clause becomes the standard public gloss. 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, and records pangendered as a variant adjective.

What pangender does not include

The restriction came from a dispute inside the community rather than from criticism outside it. Some Tumblr users who do not use the word argued that claiming all genders necessarily claims culturally specific and neurotype-specific ones, which cannot be claimed by people outside those contexts, and maxigender circulates as the replacement they proposed, built on maximum instead of everything.

Both positions are held by people using the word, and the Nonbinary Wiki records the argument in the body of the entry. Its culture-and-experience clause is the settlement: the range is bounded by what a person has actually lived among, so the claim is large without being universal. A reader who takes the prefix at face value and a reader who has met the clause are looking at two different terms, and most of the confusion around the word comes from that gap.

How far back pangender goes

Two senses share the spelling, and they need separating first. The older is a plain adjective meaning encompassing all genders, said of things and not of people, and Wiktionary's quotation file for it opens in 1988. The newer is the identity, and the Nonbinary Wiki puts it at least in the 1990s, citing 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.

The switch is visible in the kind of publication as much as in the wording. The three older quotations come from academic and trade books using a word that needed no gloss; the three newer ones come from student journalism, where the word is being reported as something people call themselves. The 2012 citation from Sex and the Steel City records somebody who identifies as transfeminine or pangender, and the school-paper citation from November 2012 quotes a self-description that stacks pangender with seven other labels, which is the register the term arrived in.

Where pangender has been written down since

The later markers are firmer than the early ones, and they are institutional rather than literary. Pangender was listed among non-binary identities in the 2013 text Sexuality and Gender for Mental Health Professionals. It is named in the Washington state rule that defined the X gender marker in 2018, in a list that runs from intersex and agender through Bigender, Demigender, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, Neutrois and pangender to third sex and Two-Spirit, which is the closest thing to a legal enumeration any of these words has. The Daily Dot published an explainer under the title What it means to be pangender on 16 June 2020. Cosmopolitan reported that the Oxford English Dictionary took the word in June 2022, alongside multisexual.

Mainstream use runs through one recurring peg, which is the gender field on Facebook. Dictionary.com's own example sentences are a Guardian piece from March 2018 counting more than fifty designations from genderqueer through intersex to pangender, and a BBC piece from April 2019 counting more than seventy, including bigender, pangender, non-binary and two spirit. The 2014 student citation is about the same list.

The only figure in the material is the Nonbinary Wiki's own frequency box, which puts pangender at 0.4 per cent. That figure counts people who answered a community survey of gender-diverse respondents, and the wiki does not say which year it comes from.

Fiction has one clear instance. The Nonbinary Wiki names Adsila Waters in Zero-G: Book 1, the science fiction thriller by William Shatner and Jeff Rovin, described repeatedly as pan-gender, with both he and she used for the character across the book.

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.

The wiki adds a second variable. A pangender person's genders may sit at different intensities from one another and may fluctuate in intensity, so a description of the identity has to carry a number, a set of weights, and a rate of change, and the word fixes only the first of the three. That is also why the Nonbinary Wiki files pangender under Multigender as the umbrella and puts Polygender beside it as a related identity, without anywhere fixing the point at which several genders becomes a vast number of them.

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. None of the three senses is marked when the word appears in a glossary.

The three words are therefore not interchangeable in a sentence about numbers. A survey counting omnigender responses may be counting people making a claim about themselves or people describing a policy, and the aliases collected under this entry, pangender, pan-gender, omnigender and maxigender, are collected because they name one identity; none of them can be substituted for another without a check.

What the pangender flags disagree about

There is no single flag, and the two in circulation disagree about the one thing a flag of this kind has to decide, which is how to picture a large number of genders at once. The Nonbinary Wiki's version is pale on purpose: yellow for gender without reference to the binary, light red for transition to genders related to female and male, light violet and pink for the combination of female and male, and white for the blend of all of them, with the wiki noting that the colours are very light because white is what all colours combine into. The flag Cosmopolitan describes, credited to Pangender.net, runs the opposite way, in eight stripes of three colours repeated twice, deliberately bright so that the brightness stands for multiplicity.

Pronouns are decided per person and the sources agree there is no default. The Nonbinary Wiki notes that a pangender person may use any set or vary between sets according to how they identify at the time. Cosmopolitan's contribution is a piece of practical grammar that the written form obscures: a person listing pronouns as they/she is asking for both to be rotated, without offering a choice between them.

Pangender Pride Day falls on 19 June.