Gender Identities · 51 entries
Gender Identities
An identity term answers what somebody is. It does not describe how they dress, how a stranger reads them across a room, or which pronouns they ask for, and every entry filed here says so where the confusion is likely. This is the largest group in the catalogue and the most uneven one: it holds Transgender and Non-binary, which national statistics agencies count in the millions, alongside labels whose entire documented history is one dated post on a blog that no longer exists.
That unevenness is the point of filing them together rather than the reason to separate them. A word used by two thousand people is not a lesser word than one used by two million, but it is a differently documented one, and a reader deciding whether a term is a recognised category or a personal coinage is asking a question about the record rather than about the people. Each entry answers it in the same three places: the dated first use, the coiner where one is known, and the survey figure where anybody has counted. Agender and Xenogender sit at opposite ends of that scale and both are here in full.
Of this kind
All 51 gender identities
51 entries
- AbinaryA cover term for genders unrelated to maleness or femaleness and nowhere between them, first recorded in a 2016 Tumblr post that was coining a different word.
- AgenderAbsence rather than an unusual answer, dated by the OED to a 1996 newspaper article, and legally recognised once, in Oregon in 2017.
- AgenderfluidAgender as the base, with other gendered feelings coming and going around it, and a community record thin enough to carry a notability warning.
- AgenderfluxFully agender at the core while the felt level of masculinity or femininity rises and falls, and a definition the community has not yet settled.
- AmbigenderTwo genders held at once and held still, the static case bigender also covers, attested in a transgender community magazine as early as 1993.
- AndrogyneA gender blending or falling between male and female, in English since at least the sixteenth century, and the outlier among terms that reject the binary.
- AporagenderA gender separate from male, female and anything between them, coined on Tumblr in 2014 to replace aliagender and used as one gender and as an umbrella.
- AutigenderA gender inseparable from being autistic, naming a relationship with gender rather than a gender made of autism. Coined on Tumblr in August 2014.
- BigenderTwo gender identities held together or in turn, with a record that starts in 1990s community magazines and a Merriam-Webster entry behind it.
- CisgenderA word invented in 1994 to name the default, because prose contrasting trans women with women has already decided which group is real.
- DemiboyPartly male and partly something else, from a half-serious 2010 asexuality forum post, with a printed record that does not begin until 2015.
- DemifluxOne part of the gender holds still while another rises and falls in strength, under a name that replaced genderpivot and predates its own flags.
- DemigenderThe umbrella over demiboy, demigirl and their relatives, coined on an asexuality forum in August 2010 and written into Washington state law in 2018.
- DemigirlPartly a girl and partly something else, recorded on an asexuality forum in December 2010, with a definition that broadened between 2011 and 2014.
- EgogenderA gender so personal that the only description of it is the person holding it, coined on Tumblr in June 2014 in a post that made seven words at once.
- Gender questioningA state rather than a stage: the dictionary sense, why the sources refuse the youth-only framing, and how English schools guidance turned it into a category.
- GenderfaeA fluid gender bounded so that it never reaches the masculine, an anonymous 2014 coinage, and the community objection that produced genderdoe and genderthil.
- GenderfaunA fluidity that stops short of the feminine, coined in May 2017 as the deliberate complement to genderfae, with a flag that argues its case by omission.
- GenderfluidA gender that shifts rather than settles, one of the few terms here with a dictionary of record, and the one flux is confused with.
- GenderfluxIntensity rather than direction, and a 1994 newsletter attestation that makes the word two decades older than the coinage most sources give it.
- GenderlessAn absence rather than a neutral, and a void rather than a blank: the four ordinary dictionary senses, and the 2014 Tumblr coinage of gendervoid.
- GenderqueerOlder than non-binary, nearly identical in definition, and kept by the people who want the political charge that the newer word deliberately dropped.
- GraygenderA weak or ambivalent connection to gender and its expression, coined by the Tumblr user invernom in March 2014 on the model of graysexuality.
- IntergenderTwo coinages sixteen years apart, one intersex-only and one not, and a live argument about who the word belongs to. Both senses dated, both reported here.
- IpsogenderAn intersex person who identifies with the binary sex they were assigned at birth, and the gap in cisgender that made the word necessary in 2015.
- JuxeraA gender near female rather than a fraction of one, coined on Tumblr in July 2014, with a record that stops at two community wikis.
- ManA word that meant any person until Middle English, a category that holds cisgender and transgender men together, and a slang sense that inverts it.
- MaveriqueA present, specific gender independent of male, female and neutral, coined on Tumblr by Vesper H. in June 2014 and named after an unbranded calf.
- MetagenderA word coined independently several times for definitions that do not agree, from a spiritual gender of the late nineteen-nineties to a gender modality of 2020.
- MultigenderThe umbrella over bigender, trigender, polygender, pangender and ambigender: more than one gender identity, held all at once or taken in turn.
- NeurogenderThe umbrella for genders describable only in the context of being neurodivergent. Coined on Tumblr in 2014; an unrelated sense dates to 1997.
- NeutroisA neutral gender coined by one named person in 1995, and the clearest proof on this whole site that changing a checkbox changes the answer sixfold.
- Non-binaryAn umbrella term and an identity at the very same time, and the reason its two headline figures are not remotely comparable with one another.
- Non-binary manA paired label for people who hold a binary gender and a non-binary one at once, measured by the Gender Census but never dated to a first use.
- OutherineAn umbrella for gender qualities separate from masculinity, femininity, androgyny and neutrality, coined on Tumblr in January 2019 by a disputed hand.
- PangenderA vast range of genders rather than literally all of them: the sources limit the range to a person's own culture and experience, and argue about it.
- PolygenderSeveral genders rather than one, though nobody agrees how many. It began in 1998 as an umbrella for everyone outside the binary and shrank from there.
- ProxvirA whole gender near male rather than a fraction of one, coined on Tumblr in July 2014 alongside juxera, with a record of two wikis and one dictionary site.
- Queer (gender)Queer as an answer to a gender question rather than an orientation: the 1510 Scots attestation, the 1894 letter, and an unfinished reclamation.
- QuoigenderFrom the French quoi: not a gender of none but a refusal of the question itself, coined on Tumblr in 2014 after quoiromantic, and measured once, in 2022.
- StaticgenderA xenogender described as television static: fuzzy, complicated, incomprehensible. The coiner is unknown and the earliest dated record is a flag from July 2016.
- Trans manA compound dated to the closing 1990s, the term it replaced, why the closed spelling is contested, and what the published counts actually measure.
- Trans womanWhere the compound was recorded, the medical word it replaced, why the closed spelling is rejected, and the categories other languages use instead.
- TransandrogynousCoined with a flag on a single dated day in 2017, the androgynous member of a trans alignment set, and documented by community wikis alone.
- TransfeminineA word proposed in a 1985 magazine article to be silent about surgery, lost for twenty-five years, and now naming a direction rather than a gender.
- TransgenderAn umbrella with a 1965 medical coinage, a 1994 antonym, and one of the very few gender figures that is a genuine population estimate.
- TransmasculineA word in institutional use from 2000 and in print from 2011, covering trans men and masculine non-binary people because it names a direction.
- TranssexualA German coinage of 1923, an English one of 1949, why transgender displaced it, who still claims it, and what Blanchard's typology actually said.
- TrigenderThree gender identities, held together or taken in turn, with any three genders allowed. Fourteen people claimed the word in the 2019 Gender Census.
- WomanA compound of wif and mann that once meant woman-person, a category holding cisgender and transgender women, and a plural whose spelling fits nothing.
- XenogenderAn umbrella for genders described through animals, colours, textures or concepts instead of male and female. Coined on Tumblr by Baaphomett in 2014.
Keep going
The other kinds of term
- Culture-Specific GendersRoles belonging to particular peoples, recorded on their own terms rather than as versions of a Western category.23
- Gender ExpressionPresentation, not identity. The distinction that most confused searches about this vocabulary are really about.5
- Concepts and TerminologyThe words that appear inside the definitions of other words, with their defining documents named.3
Common questions
Questions about gender identities
What counts as a gender identity?
A term that names what a person is rather than how they present or what they are called. The catalogue files a word here when the sources describe people using it for themselves as a statement of gender, and files it under expression instead when the sources describe it as a way of dressing, moving or being read.
How many gender identities are there?
There is no closed list, and a page that prints a number has counted something it never defined. Gender vocabulary is a living lexicon: words enter it, shift, fall out of use and are revived, and several terms name the same thing in different decades or communities. What this catalogue can say is how many it documents and how well attested each one is.
Is a rarely used identity term less real than a common one?
The catalogue makes no such judgement and its facets are built to avoid implying one. What it records is provenance and documentation: when a word was first written down, who coined it where that is known, and whether any survey has counted the people using it. A term can be well documented and rare, or widely used and barely recorded.
What is the difference between an identity and an umbrella term?
An umbrella covers other terms rather than naming one position. Non-binary is both: people use it for themselves, and it also covers dozens of narrower labels. Where a term functions mainly as a cover, the entry says which terms sit under it, and the entries underneath name the umbrella they belong to.