Polygender

How many several is depends on the source, and no source on file fixes it. The Nonbinary Wiki says more than one gender identity and stops; Bowen's 1995 gloss says multiple genders and stops; the printed quotations count nothing at all and simply list the word beside genderqueer and genderless. What is consistent is the ordering, and not the number. Polygender sits above Bigender and Trigender, and below Pangender, which reserves itself for a range approaching everything a person could hold.

Where polygender was first written down

Gary Bowen's A Dictionary of Words for Masculine Women, dated 15 May 1995, glosses polygender as expressing characteristics of multiple genders and deliberately refuting the concept of only two genders. That places the word in use by 1995 at the latest, and a dictionary of that kind records a word already circulating, so the coinage is earlier than the entry and no source on file says how much earlier.

Writing in the Guardian in 2010, Stephen Whittle placed it differently, calling polygender a late 1990s Californian invention used to describe a state of being multiple genders. The two accounts are a few years apart and neither cites the other. Whittle's piece is a chronology of the vocabulary, dating transvestite to 1910, transsexual to 1949, transgender to 1971 and trans to 1996, which makes the placement of polygender an aside in a list. No source in this material names a coiner at all.

How polygender began as an umbrella

In 1998 the word carried a job it no longer has. A document called the Polygender FAQ, written by Danica Nuccitelli on 26 May that year for an internet transgender community named Sphere, used polygendered as an umbrella for anyone whose gender fell outside the binary: people who identify as bi-gendered, non-gendered or third-gendered, who may feel they belong to more than one gender, have no gender at all, or be their own gender, something neither male nor female.

The FAQ drew its contrast with binary transition rather than with singular gender. Its authors were not switching from female to male or the reverse but living as both, or as neither, or as something else again, and the document runs through what that means in practice: a different name from the one given at birth, dress that does not match the birth gender, hormones or operations to modify the body, and then the specific difficulty of asking a clinic for either. Somebody in a city with a strong queer community and an anti-discrimination ordinance, it argues, still gets a hostile reception the moment the request stops fitting a familiar shape.

The same text used queergendered interchangeably with polygendered, which the Nonbinary Wiki reads as an early permutation of the word that later took the job.

How genderqueer took polygender's job

That successor has a documented history of its own, and the two arcs cross. Wikipedia's account has genderqueer first appearing in queer zines of the 1980s and early 1990s, then gaining prominence in the mid 1990s through activists including Riki Anne Wilchins, who used it in a 1995 newsletter for a list that ran from diesel dykes and stone butches to people whose gender expressions were so complex they had not been named yet. That is the same umbrella job the Polygender FAQ was doing three years later, described in the same register, and both words were doing it at once.

Genderqueer had the stronger position. It carried the anti-assimilationist charge of the recently reclaimed queer, it reached a wider readership through the 2002 anthology GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary, and it was itself displaced in the early 2010s by Non-binary, which is generally credited with a more neutral and less political connotation. Polygender did not participate in either of those two handovers. It kept a narrower sense, several genders instead of any position outside the binary, and it kept it in a much smaller number of places.

Where polygender was used online

In November 2002 two LiveJournal users, just_plain_zac and sometimes_nate, created a community called polygender-ppl and described it as a space for bi-gendered, polygendered, genderqueer, third-gendered and transgender people and their significant others, friends, families and allies. It reached 115 members. The last post was made in 2011, and the Polygender and Genderqueer FAQ it linked to has since gone off the web entirely, with no copy in the Internet Archive.

The decline is documented. The linguists Lal Zimman and Will Hayworth analysed journal entries and comments from the genderqueer LiveJournal community covering 2001 to 2008 and found polygender the least common of the terms for a person outside the binary in their data, appearing only in the first few years of it. The same pattern showed in their material from a second community drawn largely from trans men, many of whose members had genders outside the binary.

What print has recorded about polygender

The printed trail is thin and it is not a community trail. Wiktionary's two quotations are both from professional handbooks. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Ageing, by Richard Ward, Ian Rivers and Mike Sutherland in 2012, uses it in a parenthesis for people whose gender identity or expression is at odds with conventional understandings of dichotomous categories, listing it between gender-neutral and genderqueer. Counseling for Multiculturalism and Social Justice, by Manivong J. Ratts and Paul B. Pedersen in 2014, files it under androgyny, saying androgynous individuals describe themselves as ambigender, polygender or genderless.

Both quotations put the word in a list of three and neither defines it separately. Neither carries a date, a count or a person, and Wiktionary records no earlier printed use than 2012, seventeen years after the dictionary gloss that dates the word.

The dictionary treatment is correspondingly bare. Wiktionary derives polygender from poly- plus gender and stops there, offers no separate noun sense for a polygender person despite polygendered being the form the earliest documents use, and adds no usage label. Set against the entries for terms of the same age, that is an unusually short article, and there is not much printed use to describe.

Why the survey share has barely moved

The Gender Census has counted polygender three times, and the interesting figure is the one that did not change.

The raw count grew nearly sevenfold across four years while the share edged downward, because the survey itself was growing faster than the term was. A count and a proportion tell opposite stories about the same word here. The proportion is the one to quote, and it is a share of the gender-diverse people who chose to answer a survey. The Nonbinary Wiki rounds the same figure to 0.2 per cent in its infobox. No other count of the word exists in this material, and none of the three years was drawn to represent anybody but the respondents themselves. Seven responses, in the 2016 row, is close to the point at which a percentage stops carrying information at all.