Overview
What enbyflux means.
Enbyflux is genderflux with the gender named. Boyflux is maleness at a changing volume; girlflux is femaleness. Enbyflux is a non-binary gender at a changing volume — strongly, unmistakably non-binary some stretches, barely gendered others, and for many people all the way down to agender.
The LGBTQIA+ Wiki entry puts it this way: one may move from feeling strongly gendered, in a gender that is not strictly male or female, to being agender, to anywhere in between. Along the way the quieter readings have their own names — paragender, demigender, libragender — and some enbyflux people use those as waypoints. Some slide between levels. Some jump.
What it is not: genderfluid, where the gender itself changes. An enbyflux person is broadly the same non-binary thing throughout; what moves is how much of it there is. It is not agender with occasional noise, either. If the gender always comes back, the coming back is the point. The wiki says the exact coining date is unknown and dates the earliest reference it can find to a 2018 Tumblr post. There is no research behind it and no count of who uses it.
Genderflux with a non-binary anchor: the gender's intensity rises and falls between fully non-binary and nothing.
Enbyflux in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
No individual coiner is recorded for enbyflux; the LGBTQIA+ Wiki entry notes only that the earliest reference it has found dates to June 2018, with the actual coining date unknown. It was built as a specific case of the earlier umbrella term genderflux (which describes gender intensity fluctuating rather than gender itself changing), the way boyflux and girlflux name flux experiences anchored to maleness and femaleness respectively.
"Enby" itself comes from the phonetic spelling of the initialism NB (non-binary), popularised in non-binary community shorthand earlier in the 2010s; joining it to "-flux" gives a non-binary gender that varies in strength rather than in kind, from strongly felt to faint to, for many who use the word, agender.
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
Some weeks you are so plainly not a man or a woman that the binary forms feel absurd. Other weeks the same form is just a form.
You have been read as agender by someone who met you in a quiet month, and felt misfiled rather than seen.
You have a name, a look or a pronoun that fits at full strength and feels like fancy dress at ten per cent.
You went to a non-binary meet-up on a faint week and spent it wondering if you belonged there. Then the next week arrived.
Being called they has, on different days, felt like the only correct thing and like nothing at all.
You have never doubted which gender you are.
You have often doubted how much of it there was.
Somebody asked whether you were genderfluid and you said no — it doesn't change, it fades.
Pronouns
Pronouns
Most enbyflux people keep one set through every level, often they/them, because it holds at full volume and at none. Some add a second set for the faint stretches. There is no enbyflux pronoun, and the word says nothing about which you use.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1The gender you keep coming back to is a man or a woman. That is boyflux or girlflux.
- 2What changes is which gender, not how much. Genderfluid is next door.
- 3It went quiet once, slowly, and has not come back. That may be agender, or something arriving, rather than a fluctuation.
- 4Only the discomfort moves. A non-binary person whose dysphoria spikes and settles is non-binary the whole time.
Close by
Related identities
Genderflux
The umbrella. Same dial, gender unspecified. If you know the gender that fades is non-binary, enbyflux is the tighter word; if you would rather not say, genderflux covers you.
ReadBoyflux
The masculine counterpart. Maleness at a changing volume. Same mechanism, different station.
ReadGirlflux
The feminine counterpart. Femaleness fading and returning. If what comes back has a binary name, one of these is closer.
ReadGenderfluid
Changes station rather than volume: a woman on Tuesday, something else on Friday. Enbyflux stays put and turns up and down.
Read
Agender
The zero on the dial, permanently. If your zero always lifts, that is the flux. If it never has, look at agender.
ReadQuestions people ask
Frequently asked questions
Is enbyflux the same as genderflux?+
It is a kind of genderflux. Genderflux says the volume moves; enbyflux says the gender at full volume is non-binary. Use whichever level of detail you want to give people.
Can I be enbyflux and genderfluid?+
Yes. Some people's gender both moves and fades. Fluidflux is the word some use for both at once; others just say both and let people keep up.
Where does the word come from?+
The LGBTQIA+ Wiki's earliest findable reference is a June 2018 Tumblr post; it says the exact coining date is unknown. It is a community word, not a clinical one. Nobody at your GP's surgery will know it.
The flag
Six competing designs; the original by Zatruc-Neigea (2018-06-19) is a PNG with no hex values on record.
Sources
- Enbyflux — LGBTQIA+ Wiki Fetched. Definition (genderflux with a non-binary gender, from strongly gendered to agender), counterparts boyflux and girlflux, earliest reference June 2018 with coining date unknown, flag history.
- Genderflux — LGBTQIA+ Wiki Fetched. The umbrella term: intensity fluctuates, gender does not change; genderflux and genderfluid should not be used interchangeably.
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