How many genders are there?
There is no fixed number, and anyone who gives you one is simplifying. Gender identities are words people use for themselves. New ones get coined, old ones fall out of use, and two careful people writing a list of all gender identities on the same afternoon will end up with different totals. That is not a failure of the lists. It is what happens when you count language instead of objects.
So when you see “76 genders”, “72 genders” or a “100 genders list”, you are not looking at a count of how many genders exist. You are looking at one person’s list, on one day, using their own rules about what counts. Ours has rules too, and they are written below so you can see exactly what our number is made of.
What the count depends on
- Whether you count ways of presenting as genders. Words like tomboy, femboy, drag queen or masc describe how somebody looks, dresses or comes across — not what they are underneath. Lists that fold these in get a bigger number. We keep them separate.
- Whether you count regional and cultural terms. Two-Spirit, hijra, muxe, fa’afafine and others come out of specific cultures with their own history, and several are not open to outsiders to claim. Include them and the list grows; leave them out and you are quietly deciding that only English-language terms count.
- Whether you count umbrella terms. Non-binary, genderqueer and third gender each cover dozens of more specific identities. Count the umbrella once, or unpack everything under it, and you get two very different totals from the same set of people.
Our count, and what is in it
This site lists 138 gender identities across 9 categories, each with its own page written in plain language. 136 of those are the ones the test can return as a result — the two it leaves out are umbrella words that describe a whole group rather than one identity, so handing them back as “your answer” would tell you nothing.
A further 10 terms on this site are ways of presenting, not genders, and are listed separately for that reason: crossdresser, drag queen, femboy, futch, gender nonconforming, genderfuck, masc, soft butch, stone butch, tomboy. Anyone can be any of these and any gender at the same time. Adding them to the total would give you 148 — which is how numbers like these drift upward from list to list.
None of this makes 138 the true number of types of gender identity. It is the number of words we could describe honestly, with sources, without padding the list to look thorough. If a term you use is missing, that is a gap in our list, not in you.
9 categories. 138 identities.
Start somewhere close to how you feel, and follow it from there.
Binary
2 identities
Gender identity that lines up with the sex assigned at birth. Cis is a description, not a default.
Transgender
7 identities
Gender identity that differs from the sex assigned at birth. An umbrella, not a single experience.
Non-Binary
28 identities
Identities outside the man/woman binary. Both, neither, in between, or something else entirely.
Demigender
9 identities
A partial connection to a gender. Some of it fits, and the rest is something else.
Fluid
23 identities
Gender that moves. The identity itself shifts, or its intensity does, or both.
Agender
17 identities
The absence of gender, in its various shapes — none, null, void, or simply not applicable.
Xenogender
27 identities
Genders described through things other than man and woman: light, sound, weather, growth, colour.
Cultural
22 identities
Third and other genders recognised within specific cultures, most of them older than the word "transgender".
Exploring
3 identities
Working it out, or deliberately declining to. Both are places to stand, not waiting rooms.
The test
Not sure which of these fits?
Twenty questions, four minutes, nobody watching. You’ll come out with a word that might fit — and five more worth reading.
Take the 4-minute test →Questions people ask about the number
How many genders are there?
There is no fixed number, and anyone who hands you one is simplifying. A gender identity is a word people use for themselves, and people keep making new ones, retiring old ones and disagreeing about which count. What you can say honestly is how many a given list holds and why. Ours holds 138 identities across 9 categories, plus 10 more terms that describe how someone presents rather than what they are.
Is there an official list of gender identities?
No. No government, dictionary or medical body keeps one, and the lists you find online — including this one — are editorial choices about what to include. Some terms are used by thousands of people, some by a few dozen, and umbrella words like non-binary or third gender cover many identities at once. Treat any list, ours included, as a map rather than a census.
What are the 76 genders?
"76 genders" comes from a list that circulated on social media and got copied around; so did "58", "72" and "100 genders". None of them is authoritative, and they mostly differ over the same three questions: whether ways of presenting count, whether regional and cultural terms count, and whether umbrella terms are counted once or unpacked. The numbers are snapshots of one person's list on one day, not a count of how many genders exist.
Identipedia: Every identity, from A–Z.
The full identity library.
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