Xenogender

Wiktionary defines it as a non-binary gender defined not in relation to male or female but by characteristics connected to a thing or concept. That is a claim about method rather than a position on the binary, which is what separates it from a term like Genderqueer or Neutrois. Genderqueer says something about where a person stands in relation to man and woman. A xenogender term declines to use that axis at all, and borrows its description from somewhere else entirely.

Where the word xenogender came from

The affix xeno- means alien or strange. LGBTQ Nation traces the term to the Tumblr user Baaphomett, who first used it in 2014, and the Nonbinary Wiki adds that the use was a submission to the MOGAI-Archive blog, a Tumblr account that collected identity coinages sent in by readers. Baaphomett's own wording describes a gender "more concerned with crafting other methods of gender categorization and hierarchy such as those relating to animals, plants, or other creatures/things".

Two features of that origin shape everything that followed. The first is that the coinage was a reader's submission, so the word entered circulation as a category label with no gatekeeper attached, and anyone could file a term under it. The second is that the coinage arrived with a stated purpose. Both the Nonbinary Wiki and LGBTQ Nation frame xenogender as an answer to a lexical gap, the linguistic term for a meaning a language has no word for. LGBTQ Nation's illustration is the Tagalog gigil, the feeling of being overwhelmed by something cute, for which English has a sentence and no word. Xenogender terms are offered as words for gendered experiences that English otherwise leaves to paraphrase.

The vocabulary spread quickly. The Nonbinary Wiki cannot find the original coining post for astralgender, a gender described as feeling connected to space, but records that the term appears on a list of definitions published on 6 September 2015, which puts it within roughly a year of the umbrella itself.

How a xenogender gets described

The Nonbinary Wiki sorts the descriptions into three groups, and the sorting is by source material. Nouns and archetypes cover genders given as an animal, an imaginary being, a part of nature or a symbol: abimegender, defined through the abyss and glossed as a gender that is profound, deep and infinite, sits here, and so does astralgender. Aesthetic and synaesthetic descriptions use texture, size, shape, time, light or sound, qualities most people do not attach to gender at all, and the wiki names the analogy explicitly, comparing the method to synaesthesia without claiming it as a case of it. The third group is neurodivergence, where the description is built out of a person's own neurotype, and those terms are filed separately as neurogenders.

Coinages inside the umbrella are usually attributable, which is unusual for online vocabulary. Aesthetgender, a gender experience derived from or embodying an aesthetic, is credited to the Tumblr user curiosityismysin and functions as a small umbrella of its own. Aliengender, described as an interpretation of gender from a nonhuman perspective, is credited to genderghoul. Astrumgender, a gender connected to stars and constellations, is dated precisely: the Nonbinary Wiki gives the Tumblr user angelknivesmogai and 21 June 2020. LGBTQ Nation's own list runs through biogender, caelgender, colorgender, daimogender, digigender, ethegender, firegender, gendercosm, gendervoid, hydrogender, lamingender, seagender and witchgender, and states plainly that the list keeps growing.

LGBTQ Nation makes the grammar of the thing explicit. The objects named work as metaphors for a relationship with gender rather than as claims to be the thing itself. Somebody who calls a gender hydrogender is saying it behaves like water, taking new forms, and asserting no chemical composition.

The Nonbinary Wiki also records where the method turns up outside the vocabulary that names it. Quoting Gender Spectrum's guidance, it notes that children who describe themselves as neither a boy nor a girl often answer the question by giving their name, or by naming an animal, and draw self-portraits as rainbows or unicorns. The description is the same manoeuvre performed without any of the terminology.

What pronouns go with a xenogender

Pronouns are a separate question from the gender term, and LGBTQ Nation answers it separately. Neopronoun sets are common, among them ze and zir, ey and em, and xe and xem, alongside singular they, which is by a distance the most used of the group.

The subset that belongs to this vocabulary specifically is the nounself pronoun, built from an existing word instead of a pronoun paradigm. A person whose gender term draws on animals might take bun, buns and bunself, or wol, wolf and wolfself. The construction mirrors the construction of the gender term: an ordinary noun is taken out of its usual grammar and put to work naming something about a person.

What the record holds for xenogender

Printed attestation begins three years after the coinage and comes from professional literature, none of it written by the communities that produced the word. Wiktionary's citation file opens on 15 May 2017 with Han Leng's The Best Parents Handbook, which lists most xenogenders among the neutral or unrecognised gender identities. Michael Beattie and Penny Lenihan's Counselling Skills for Working with Gender Diversity and Identity uses it adjectivally in 2018. Two books follow in 2019: Finn V. Gratton's Supporting Transgender Autistic Youth and Adults, and Joseph T. Catalano's Nursing Now, which lists xenogender beside Intergender, Agender, Genderfluid and Demigender as identities the non-binary umbrella covers.

The survey record is thinner than the size of the vocabulary suggests. Counts come from the Worldwide Gender Census, a self-selected annual survey of gender-diverse respondents, so every figure below is a share of the people who chose to answer.

The pattern is consistent: the umbrella collects a modest write-in count while the individual terms beneath it are counted in single figures, and the Nonbinary Wiki says outright that many of them appear to have been proposed and never used by anybody. Thirteen respondents in 2020 wrote in "alien" without the suffix, which the wiki tracks alongside aliengender as a separate answer. The wiki's own summary box carries a frequency of 1.75 per cent for the umbrella and does not name the year that figure comes from.

Two dates fix the term's public life. Xenogender Visibility Day was first held on 15 May 2021, and the first flag was designed by the DeviantArt user Pastelmemer, in the seven rainbow colours rendered in pastel with the astronomical symbol for the asteroid Iris at the centre. Later variants keep a yellow stripe, a colour long associated with non-binary identity, and purple for androgyny.

Why xenogender is argued about

Both directions are on file, and they disagree about what the vocabulary is for rather than about what it says. The New Discourses glossary, edited by James Lindsay and revised in 2020, reads the terms as an activist project to deconstruct the category of gender, treats the lexical gap as a problem of the speakers' own making, and points at the size and the branching of the taxonomy as the evidence: it counts the terms in the hundreds, notes that caelgender subdivides as far as a particular nebula or a particular star, and files the whole vocabulary beside otherkin. Its stated worry is that terms tied to a mental illness make that illness inseparable from an identity.

LGBTQ Nation's 2022 explainer records an objection raised inside LGBTQ communities, that the terms undercut other non-binary identities, together with the answer given by people who use them, that the words exist to describe gendered feelings the available vocabulary does not reach. The same explainer disposes of the assumption that most often accompanies the objection, that the vocabulary belongs to neurodivergent people alone. The association is real and the wiki documents it in the neurogender grouping, but the term carries no such requirement.