Overview
What biogender means.
Start with the honest part. Biogender is a small word. It came out of online xenogender spaces, it is used by a very small number of people, and there is no settled definition behind it. No research, no history, no elders. Anyone who tells you what it 'officially' means is telling you what their corner of the internet decided.
The most common use: a gender that feels connected to nature and living things. Not as a hobby. More that when you go looking for your gender, what you find is closer to a season, a tide, a growing thing, than to man or woman.
A second use exists and it clashes with the first. Some people use biogender for a gender tied to the body's own biology — hormones, cycles, physical processes. Neither camp is more correct. If someone uses the word at you, ask which one they mean.
It is not bigender. One letter apart, constantly confused, entirely different thing. Bigender means two genders.
Nothing here is a claim about science. Nature is being used as a description, the way someone else might say their gender feels like static, or like an empty church at 4pm.
Because the term is thin, this page is short. You will not find an ordinary-day section thick with detail that nobody has actually lived. What follows is what people using the word tend to describe, and where it stops.
A gender connected to nature, plants, animals, or natural phenomena.
Biogender in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
Biogender was coined by an anonymous Tumblr user on 25 July 2016, in a post that also introduced a matching flag by the Tumblr blog Pride-Color-Schemes on the same day. It emerged from the same wave of Tumblr MOGAI (Marginalised Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex) coinages that produced most xenogender vocabulary, and it is generally treated as one entry under the broader xenogender umbrella alongside narrower terms like floragender and faunagender.
No organisation, researcher or named individual is credited beyond the original anonymous post, and no survey has ever measured how many people use the word. A second, alternate flag was made later by a wiki editor in January 2021. As with most xenogender terms, there is no formal history beyond these scattered Tumblr and wiki records.
- First recorded
- 2016
- Where
- Tumblr
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
Asked whether you are a man or a woman, the honest answer that surfaces first is a season, or a kind of weather, or something with roots. You bin it before it reaches your mouth.
Masculine and feminine do not feel wrong so much as irrelevant.
Like being asked what colour your gender is, in kilograms.
You have felt more correctly gendered alone outside — a field, a greenhouse, a wet car park at dusk — than in any room with people in it.
Your sense of yourself moves with light and temperature, and you have stopped calling that a coincidence.
Long before you had a word, the names you picked for yourself in games and forums were plants, animals, weather. Never people's names.
You could explain your gender in three sentences to a stranger online, and not one of those sentences would survive being said at work.
When you read the standard nonbinary descriptions, they are close but they describe a position between two points. Yours does not feel like a position between anything.
If the second definition is the one that fits you, it shows up differently: your gender feels welded to your body's own processes, and separating the two is not something you can do even in theory.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
Most of the day, this changes nothing. You get up. The form still says M or F. You tick the one that keeps the appointment.
Where it shows up is smaller than people expect. The ten extra minutes home past the trees, because you come back into yourself on that stretch. A grey wet Tuesday that sits right in a way a strip-lit office at 3pm never does.
Seasons do a lot of work. Some months you feel legible to yourself and some months you do not, and the pattern repeats reliably enough that you have noticed it.
The word itself gets used maybe twice a year, with one person, usually typed rather than spoken. The rest of the time you use whatever shorter word gets you through the conversation.
Across the parts of a life
Open the area you came here for.
Straight answers
What people get wrong
Biogender means biological sex.
No. The 'bio' points at living systems — growth, weather, ecology. Separately, older trans slang used 'bio' to mean cis, as in 'bio woman'. That usage is dated and disliked, and it has nothing to do with this word. The overlap is unfortunate and it will get you misread.
It just means you like nature.
Liking forests is a hobby, and a good one. This is about what you find when you go looking for your gender. If 'woman' or 'man' answers that question cleanly and you also love hiking, you love hiking.
It's a typo for bigender.
It isn't, though autocorrect and other people's eyes will make that mistake constantly. Expect to spell it out.
Xenogenders were invented to make trans people look ridiculous.
The word did come from Tumblr-era spaces. That tells you where it came from, not whether the description fits you. Plenty of ordinary language for inner states started somewhere unserious.
You need a matching aesthetic — moss, mushrooms, the whole visual set.
Some people do that and enjoy it. It is a look, not a qualification. You can be biogender in a suit and hate camping.
Using a word this obscure means you're not really trans or nonbinary.
Most people using this word also use a broader one in daily life. Having a specific private word does not cancel the general one.
Take care
On the hard days
The mockery is real and it comes from inside as well as outside. Screenshots of xenogender posts get passed around for laughs, sometimes by other trans people who think words like this are why nobody takes them seriously. That lands hard when it is your word.
Then there is the loneliness of the thing. A term used by a handful of people means no local group, no one at the meetup who nods, nobody who has been through it and can tell you what happens next. You are largely on your own with it.
And the 2am version: what if I made this up. What if I read a list and picked something.
Here is the only test that holds. Set the word aside completely and ask whether the experience is still there — the field, the seasons, the thing that surfaces before you censor it. If it is, the experience is real whatever it is called. If it evaporates the moment the word goes, that is useful information too, and no loss.
You can drop this label at any point and keep every bit of what it was pointing at.
Pronouns
Pronouns
Biogender says nothing about pronouns. People who use the word turn up with he, she, they, it (chosen, not thrown at them), and neopronouns — a few drawn from nature, most not. Plenty keep the pronouns they were raised with, because the word describes where their gender lives, not how they want to be addressed in a shop.
If the term interests you but nature-based neopronouns make you wince, skip them. They are one option some people took, not an entry requirement.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1You love nature deeply, and 'man' or 'woman' still answers the gender question fine. Then you are someone who loves nature. That is a whole good thing on its own.
- 2You have two genders. That is bigender, and you will find far more company there.
- 3Your gender moves between man, woman and other points. That is genderfluid.
- 4There is nothing where your gender should be. That is agender.
- 5You mean sex assigned at birth. Most spaces will read that as the older, disliked usage and it will go badly. Say what you actually mean instead.
- 6You want a word that makes life easier. This one makes conversations longer and gets you laughed at by strangers. It buys you accuracy and nothing else.
- 7You are twenty minutes into a wiki and it sounded lovely. Sit with it for a month. Nothing expires, and the description is either still true in October or it is not.
- 8You are hoping it will be taken seriously by a gender clinic, a school, or a court. It will not do that work. Use the broad word for those rooms.
Close by
Related identities
Bigender
Two genders, either at once or alternating. One letter away in spelling and nothing like it in meaning. If you have two genders, this is your word and it is far better documented.
Read
Xenogender
The umbrella term for genders described through things that are not man, woman or a mix of the two. Biogender is one term underneath it. If the general idea fits but nature specifically does not, look at the umbrella instead.
ReadEcogender / naturgender
Broader terms for gender connected to nature or the environment. People use them almost interchangeably with biogender, and the boundaries are genuinely unsettled. Pick whichever word you like the sound of; nobody is checking.
Floragender
Narrower — plants specifically. If yours is green and growing and never animal, this may fit better.
Faunagender
Narrower — animals specifically. If what you find is creaturely rather than botanical, start here.
Read
Agender
No gender at all: an absence where the question should go. Biogender is the opposite shape — something is present, it just does not answer to human categories.
Read
Genderfluid
Movement between genders, often man and woman and points around them. Biogender can shift with seasons, but the material stays the same; genderfluid is about what it shifts into.
ReadNonbinary
The broad, well-understood word most biogender people also use. This is the one for the doctor, the form, and your aunt.
Questions people ask
Frequently asked questions
Is biogender the same as bigender?+
No. Bigender means having two genders. Biogender, in its most common use, means a gender connected to nature and living things. They are separate words that look nearly identical, and people will mix them up constantly — including autocorrect. If you have two genders, bigender is what you want, and it is much better established.
Does biogender mean biological sex?+
Not in the usual sense. The 'bio' points at living systems, not at sex assigned at birth. There is a second, less common use where people mean a gender bound up with their body's own biology — hormones, cycles — and that is a real disagreement in how the word is used, not a settled matter. Separately, 'bio' was once used in trans communities to mean cis, as in 'bio woman'. That usage is dated and widely disliked, and it is not what this word is doing.
Can I use this if I still use he or she, or if I'm also a man or a woman?+
Yes on pronouns — this word says nothing about them, and plenty of people using it kept what they had. On also being a man or a woman: some people describe a gender that is nature-shaped and also sits alongside a binary one. Others would say that is a different term. Nobody has authority here, so it comes down to which description you can live inside.
Is biogender a real thing or just made up online?+
It came from online communities and is used by a small number of people. That is honestly where it stands, and anyone claiming a deep history for it is inventing one. What that does not settle is whether the experience it points at is real for you. Words for inner states get made up somewhere by someone. The test is not the word's pedigree, it is whether the description keeps being true when nobody is watching.
The flag
The original biogender flag and symbol were posted by Pride-Color-Schemes on 25 July 2016, and an alternate flag was added by wiki user Robinary on 3 January 2021, but no reliable hex values are published for either version, and it isn't clear the community settled on one. Printing a guessed set of colours risked being wrong, so none are given here.
Sources
- Biogender — LGBTQIA+ Wiki Definition, coinage date (25 July 2016) and flag history; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Xenogender — LGBTQIA+ Wiki Confirms biogender's place as a subcategory of the xenogender umbrella; fetched 2026-09-06.
Still figuring things out?
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