X-gender

Where x-gender was first defined

The expression is associated with the Kansai region, where it appeared repeatedly through the 1990s in publications by queer groups. The exact origin is unknown, which is what a term that circulates in a scene before anybody writes it down usually looks like.

The first sustained definition sits in an issue of Poco a poco, the magazine of the Kansai group G-Front Kansai, published in 2000. That issue carried several articles about people who would now be filed under the term, though the word itself appeared only in the glossary. One of the group's founding members took part in interviews and documentaries afterwards, and the term settled through those, then spread further through social media as public discussion of gender widened.

How x-gender differs from transgender

Speakers of the term describe themselves as FtX, MtX or XtX, built on the same model as the MtF and FtM used by transgender people: sex assigned at birth, then the destination. On that pattern x-gender is often treated as a subgroup of transgender rather than as an alternative to it.

The Japanese context makes the comparison awkward. Transgender is barely used in popular discourse in Japan. What circulates instead is seidōitsuseishōgai, the translation of Gender Identity Disorder, along with nyū-hāfu, okama and onabe. The diagnostic framing has become dominant: the first legally recognised sex reassignment surgery took place in 1998, and the television drama Sannen B-gumi Kinpachi-sensei put a transgender teenager on screen in 2001, after which the disorder terminology lodged in public awareness firmly enough to absorb most ways of not being male or female. Toransujendā as a loanword only became known following the wave of queer studies that reached Japan in 1996.

How Japanese names the middle ground

The older vocabulary for androgyny is built on sei, a morpheme covering sex and gender without the distinction English draws between them. Chūsei is middle-sei, ryōsei is both-sei, musei is no-sei. Jennifer Robertson's reading takes ryōsei as possessing both sets of genitals or both sets of characteristics and chūsei as androgynous, neutral, in between.

Internet usage has moved. Ryōsei is now often used for having periods of feeling male and periods of feeling female, or of holding both sets of attributes; chūsei covers an androgynous appearance and the sense of being not quite either; musei comes closest to neutrality, a refusal of being gendered at all. None maps onto an English term, and usage varies by speaker rather than being fixed.

Why the term stays untranslated

The 2012 study of the term in Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific keeps the Japanese form throughout and declines to render it as x-gender in English. The reasons given are worth repeating. Although jendā looks like a loanword, x-gender is not used in cultural contexts outside Japan, which suggests the compound is an original Japanese term rather than an import. And jendā itself does not carry the same weight as English gender: outside academic and political writing it is barely used, and forms asking for personal information ask instead for seibetsu, a word that covers physiological sex and social gender without separating them.

The consequence for a catalogue is direct. Rendering x-jendā as non-binary imports a distinction between sex and gender that the Japanese word does not make, and implies a lineage from English-language identity politics that the term does not have.

What the X on a passport means

A second, unrelated X causes regular confusion. From 11 April 2022 the United States Department of State allowed passport applicants to select X as their gender marker, the first federal agency to offer one. The definition adopted, after research conducted with the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is unspecified or another gender identity. Applicants had already been able to self-select their gender without medical documentation since the previous June.

State-level markers followed the same pattern. Maryland approved an X marker for identification cards and licences with self-attestation, meaning no clinician has to certify the choice, joining nine other states and the District of Columbia. Several countries offer the option, among them the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Thailand, Pakistan, Argentina, India and Canada. None of this is the Japanese term. The document marker is an administrative category with a legal definition; x-jendā is a self-description that arose in a regional queer scene and has no legal standing in Japan.

No population figure exists for x-gender itself. Japan runs no census question on gender identity, the surveys that do exist are commercial panels rather than official statistics, and none of them is on file here with a resolvable citation. The absence is a fact about Japanese data collection rather than about how many people use the word.

Where the English form appears separately

The English string is attested on its own, and not in this sense. Wiktionary records xgender in Usenet postings from 1995 and 1996, in one case a personal advertisement by a cross-dresser and in another a discussion of bi-gender expression alongside bisexuality. A 2004 posting explains the X as the common shorthand for trans or cross, as in a level crossing. These are English formations from x- and gender, and nothing in the record connects them to the Kansai coinage.