Trigender

That openness is why the word is easier to define than to picture. A trigender person may hold a masculine, a feminine and a third gender at once, may move among three depending on mood or situation, or may feel the three as a single combination. The Mid-South Pride description of the flag adds that the presence and the intensity of each of the three can vary independently, which means two people using the same word may be describing arrangements with very little in common.

Where the trigender word first appears

The Nonbinary Wiki records trigender in use at least before 1999, and cites Leslie Feinberg's Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, published that year, for the dating. No source on file names a coiner, and none carries a first use earlier than that.

The next dated appearance is fourteen years later. Sexuality and Gender for Mental Health Professionals: A Practical Guide, published in 2013, lists trigender among non-binary identities a clinician might encounter. Between Feinberg and the handbook nothing has been traced at all, though the word was in print at both ends of the gap.

That record is thin by the standards of this catalogue, and it is thin in an unusual direction: the word was in print before the platforms that produced most of the microlabels it now sits beside, and it accumulated less documentation than several of them have managed in a decade.

How trigender differs from genderfluid

Genderfluid describes movement and trigender describes a count, so the two overlap without making the same claim. A trigender person who moves among three genders is fluid as well, and the Nonbinary Wiki files that case under both words. A trigender person who holds three at once is not fluid at all, and nothing in the definition prefers one arrangement over the other.

Genderflux is a further step away. Flux is a change in how strongly a gender is felt, not in which gender is present, so a trigender person can hold three genders steadily while any of the three waxes and wanes in intensity. The Mid-South Pride account allows exactly that, describing the intensity of each gender as variable, which makes flux and trigender independent of each other.

The same reasoning separates trigender from Bigender and Polygender. Those differ from it in the number and in nothing else, which is why the Nonbinary Wiki names both as the related identities and files all three under Multigender. None of the three says anything about whether the genders alternate, and none says anything about how strongly each is felt.

What the trigender count leaves open

Popular explainers do not hold the count steady. A retail guide published by The Pride Shop describes trigender as a combination of three gender identities in one paragraph and as three or more in the next, and the second reading dissolves the distinction the prefix exists to make, since it would take in polygender and pangender as well. The same guide separates trigender from genderfluid on the grounds that fluidity is limited to two identities, which no other source on file supports.

The community sources keep the count at three and send anything above it elsewhere. Rainbow and Co, a British retailer whose glossary is otherwise close to the wikis, gives three distinct genders, either simultaneously or moving fluidly between them, and notes that trigender people may also identify as transgender, non-binary or multigender. A parenting guide takes the shortest route of all and defines bigender, trigender and pangender in one line as people who feel they are two, three or all genders, shifting between them or holding all of them at once.

Both readings are on the record. The disagreement runs between shopfront glossaries and the wikis rather than inside either, and no source on file argues the point directly with another.

What the trigender flag encodes

The flag is the most detailed piece of description the word has. Mid-South Pride reads its five horizontal stripes in order: pink at the top for femininity and the connection to a female gender identity, white for the presence of all genders and the movement between them, purple in the middle as the blend of pink and blue signifying the coexistence of male and female identities, black for the absence of gender or an agender identity, and blue at the bottom for masculinity.

The arrangement is doing something the definition does not. Three of the five stripes name specific genders, and the remaining two name the ways the three can relate, which encodes both the count and the arrangement in a single object. It also fixes a particular reading of the count, since a flag with a pink stripe, a blue stripe and a black stripe implies that the third gender is an absence and not a fourth possibility. Nothing in the written definitions requires that.

Why the trigender record stays thin

The Nonbinary Wiki heads its own article with a notice that the identity is not widely used among gender-variant people and that very few people are known to use the term. That notice is unusual, and it is the wiki being careful about its own evidence.

The measured record is small enough to state exactly. In the 2019 Worldwide Gender Census, 14 of the 11,242 respondents described themselves as trigender, about 0.1 per cent. For scale, the same survey and the same wiki article record 244 respondents, 2.17 per cent, choosing third gender. Both figures are shares of the same census respondents, and at fourteen responses trigender sits near the floor at which a term can be counted at all.

No dictionary entry for the word has been traced, no academic literature covers it under this name, no coiner is recorded, and the two dated appearances stand fourteen years apart with nothing between them. The sources that do carry it are one community wiki and three glossaries written to sell merchandise or to brief parents, and none of the three adds a date, a figure or a name the wiki does not already have.