Queer (gender)

Part of the appeal in the sources is that the word declines to specify. Somebody who says their gender is queer has said less than somebody who says Non-binary, and in most cases has meant to.

How queer got its sexual sense

The word is far older than any of this. Wiktionary attests it in Scots from about 1510, meaning oblique or off-centre, probably from Middle Low German or German quer, diagonal, though the Oxford English Dictionary argues against that derivation on the grounds of the semantic distance and the date.

The sexual sense arrives at the end of the nineteenth century. The earliest recorded use in that sense is a letter written in 1894 by John Douglas, ninth Marquess of Queensberry, read aloud at the trial of Oscar Wilde. By the early twentieth century it was in mainstream use as an insult alongside fairy, and inside the gay male subculture the historian George Chauncey found it working as a self-description for men who saw themselves as conventionally masculine and wanted distance from the fairy. That internal sense collapsed after the Second World War as gay spread, and by the late 1940s younger men were correcting older ones for using it. In England it held on much longer: the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks writes that to say "I am queer" in the 1950s and 1960s was to state a position in relation to normal society.

What Queer Nation did with the word

Reclamation dates from the 1980s and it happened in a specific setting. In the United States it belongs to the response to the AIDS crisis, and the activist organisation Queer Nation used the word confrontationally against people hostile to LGBTQIA+ communities. The people reclaiming it were often those who wanted distance from a gay politics they read as assimilationist, which is why it carried a political charge from the start that gay did not.

Academic use followed rather than led. Queer theory and queer studies take their names from it, and Judith Butler's 1999 preface to Gender Trouble uses queer as an ordinary adjective for a context. Merriam-Webster's usage note records the outcome without smoothing it: the adjective is now commonly a positive or neutral self-descriptor and a neutral broad descriptor, and its long history of pejorative use continued into the present century.

Who objects to the word and why

The reclamation is not universal, and the objections are not all of one kind. Wikipedia's article separates them: community members who associate the word mainly with its derogatory use, people who want distance from queer radicalism, and people who find it too amorphous or too fashionable. Wiktionary's usage note adds a detail that explains some of the pattern by age, noting that the pejorative fell mainly on people assigned male at birth who were read as homosexual or effeminate, while the reclaimed word is used by people of any sex or gender.

Both dictionaries mark the word rather than leaving it neutral. Merriam-Webster labels the adjective and the noun as sometimes disparaging and offensive, and observes that the noun is likely to be taken as offensive from somebody who does not identify as queer. Medical News Today gives the same point as practical guidance, advising that a person be asked before the word is used of them.

How queer differs from genderqueer

Genderqueer is the compound and it takes the narrower definition, which Merriam-Webster gives as a person whose gender identity cannot be categorised as solely male or female. The dictionary's citation for the verb sense dates the compound to the 1990s and describes it as covering people who queered gender by defying gender norms in the course of binary-defying activism.

Bare queer as a gender carries no such construction. It commits the speaker to no particular position between or outside the binary categories, and it is available to somebody who is also Transgender, also non-binary, or neither. That is the difference in one line: genderqueer describes where a gender sits, and queer declines to.

How large the queer share actually is

The Gender Census recorded 56.1 per cent of gender-diverse respondents describing their gender as queer in 2025, which makes it one of the most-selected words in that survey. It is a share of people who had already chosen to answer a survey about gender diversity. It is not a share of any population, and the two get quoted interchangeably.

Wikipedia's article gives the range from other recent surveys as 5 to 20 per cent of non-heterosexual people and 21 to 36 per cent of transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming people identifying as queer. Those samples are also drawn from inside a category, and most of the distance between the two sets of figures is a difference in who was asked rather than a difference in the word.