Polygender

How many several is depends on the source, and the sources disagree. The Nonbinary Wiki's own article says more than one; the same wiki's umbrella article narrows it to four or more; the printed quotations count nothing at all and simply list it beside genderqueer and genderless. What is consistent is the ordering. Polygender sits above bigender, and below pangender, which reserves itself for a range approaching everything.

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 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 but living as both, or as neither, or as something else again, and the document asks what happens when somebody in that position walks into a clinic. 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, Genderqueer.

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. It reached 115 members. The last post was made in 2011, and the FAQ it linked to has since gone off the web entirely.

The decline is documented rather than inferred. 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. A word that started as the umbrella ended as a rare label under somebody else's.

Why the survey share has barely moved

The Gender Census has counted polygender three times on file, and the interesting figure is the one that did not change. Seven respondents chose it in 2016, at 0.23 per cent; 24 chose it in 2019, at 0.21 per cent; 48 chose it in 2020, at 0.20 per cent. The raw count grew nearly sevenfold across four years while the share edged downward, because the survey itself was growing faster. A count and a proportion tell opposite stories here, and only the proportion is a share of gender-diverse respondents rather than of any population.