X-gender

Where x-gender was first defined

The expression is associated with the Kansai region, where it appeared again and again through the 1990s in publications by queer groups. The exact origin is unknown.

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 classified under the term, though the word itself appeared only in the glossary. One of the group's founding members took part in several interviews and documentaries afterwards, and the term settled through those, then spread further through social media as public discussion of gender widened.

The route from a regional scene to a national word has been traced through three contact zones: the queer communities of Kansai, printed material and the media, and the internet. That account, published in issue 31 of Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific in December 2012, is the standard English-language introduction, and it qualifies itself unusually hard. It calls itself a tertiary historiography at best, says it should by no means be taken as authoritative, and gives the reason plainly, which is that research and publication on the term barely existed when it was written. It was framed as the backdrop to interview work that had not yet appeared.

No population figure for x-gender is carried here. Japan runs no census question on gender identity, and no survey figure for the term resolves to a page that states it. The absence is a fact about Japanese data collection and about the age of the scholarship, not about how many people use the word.

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 hardly 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 by far the dominant one, and two dates mark its arrival: the first legally recognised sex reassignment surgery took place in 1998, and the popular television drama Sannen B-gumi Kinpachi-sensei put a transgender teenager on screen in 2001, which spread the term and brought it into public awareness. Since then it has lodged itself firmly enough that most ways of not being explicitly female or male have been absorbed into it.

The loanword toransujendā only became known in Japan after the wave of queer and queer studies work that arrived in 1996, carrying with it a post-structural way of framing such identities. That is a statement about vocabulary rather than about people: identities of that kind existed before, and simply were not called that.

How Japanese names the middle ground

The older vocabulary for androgyny is built on sei, a morpheme covering biological sex, social gender, or both at once, with no prerequisite distinction between them of the sort English draws. Three compounds recur in the discourse around x-gender, and the readings given for them by scholarship and by current usage do not line up.

Jennifer Robertson's account names ryōsei and chūsei as the two terms most frequently encountered in writing on androgyny in Japan. Musei is the third that recurs. None of the three maps onto an English term, and which one a person reaches for depends on the person rather than on a settled definition.

Why x-jendā stays untranslated

The 2012 study keeps the Japanese form throughout and declines to render it as x-gender in English. 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 a form asking for personal information asks instead for seibetsu, a word covering physiological sex and social gender without separating them.

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.

The same study sets out why so little had been written. Genders that are neither female nor male have been a standing subject of Western academic research where they are traditional or folkloric, Hijra in India, Two-Spirit in North America, Kathoey in Thailand. English-language work on newly made genders, by contrast, has been done almost entirely in an American setting. X-gender falls between the two, being neither a folkloric category nor an Anglophone one, and that is part of why it went undescribed for so long.

What the X on a passport means

A second, unrelated X causes regular confusion. From 11 April 2022 United States passport applicants could select X as their gender marker, which made the State Department the first federal agency to offer one on an identity document. The definition adopted, after qualitative research conducted with the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and interviews with a demographically diverse group, 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 state-issued identification cards and licences with self-attestation, meaning no clinician has to certify the choice, joining nine other states and the District of Columbia, with Colorado to follow. Several countries offer the option, among them the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Thailand, Pakistan, Argentina, India and Canada.

What the marker is for is documented in the same place. The 2015 US Transgender Survey found that 69 per cent of transgender and gender-expansive respondents living in Maryland had no identification at all matching their name and gender, and that 24 per cent had been verbally harassed or assaulted, asked to leave, or denied a benefit or service after presenting identification whose marker did not match how they presented. The first person in the District of Columbia to receive an X marker on an identity document was represented in 2017 by the legal service that had set up a name and gender change clinic there in 2012.

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.

Where the English form appears separately

The English string is attested on its own, and not in this sense. Wiktionary records xgender as an English adjective formed from x- and gender, and its citations are all from usenet. The earliest is dated 7 March 1995, a personal advertisement in alt.personals by a writer describing himself as an XGender dresser. A post to soc.bi on 13 September 1996, titled X-gender & bi's, uses the hyphenated form while asking whether people whose gender expression is not fixed find openness in the bisexual community, and notes that x-gender is independent of sexual orientation. A February 2004 post to a stock-market group, arguing about something else entirely, explains the letter as the common shorthand for trans or cross, as in a level crossing or a transatlantic flight. A 2007 personal advertisement is the last citation given.

Nothing in that record connects to the Kansai coinage. The English formations are ad hoc, built from a prefix and a noun by people who needed a word for an afternoon, and they left no lexical descendants.