Overview
What galaxygender means.
Galaxygender is a xenogender. The nearest honest word for the gender is not man, woman or a point between them, but something people do not usually treat as a gender at all — here, a galaxy and everything in it. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki describes it as feeling connected to stars, planets, moons, black holes, the Milky Way and anything else that is part of a galaxy.
Two things set it apart from the other space words. First, on the record it is neutral by default and open to anyone, with two named leanings: galaxygirl or galaxyfeminine, where the connection feels feminine, and galaxyboy or galaxymasculine, where it feels masculine. Second, its history is unusual and worth being honest about: the same record says the word had been an internet joke for some time before a Twitter user reclaimed it and coined it as a term in June 2020. If you have seen it used as mockery, that is why. It does not make the people using it seriously any less serious.
What it is not: a love of astronomy, an aesthetic, or astrology. If the galaxy is decoration on top of a gender that already has a name, the name underneath is doing the work.
A xenogender felt as a connection to the contents of a galaxy; galaxyboy and galaxygirl are its gendered versions.
Galaxygender in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
Galaxygender is dated by the LGBTQIA+ Wiki to 27 June 2020, coined on Twitter. No individual coiner's name is preserved in the record. Unusually for a xenogender, the wiki notes the word started life as a joke about space-themed gender words before being taken up and used sincerely — a reclaiming rather than a straightforward coinage.
It belongs to a wave of space and colour xenogender coinages that spread through Tumblr and Twitter MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Gender identities, And Intersex) communities from the mid-2010s onward, alongside galaxyboy and galaxygirl as its gendered counterparts.
- First recorded
- 2020
- Where
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
Asked what your gender is, the honest answer is a place, not a person — and the place is crowded, not empty.
One star is too small.
The whole sky is too much. What fits is a system: things orbiting things.
You feel a lean — towards the masculine, or the feminine — inside something that is still plainly not a man or a woman.
You saw the word used as a joke first and hated how much it fitted anyway.
Words like orbit, pull, dense, distant and lit describe your gender better than masculine, feminine or neutral do.
You tried non-binary.
It was not wrong. It was a form with the interesting fields left blank.
You can say "non-binary" to a colleague and cannot say this one to anyone who might laugh, because you know exactly how it sounds out loud.
Pronouns
Pronouns
No pronoun set comes with this. Galaxygirl and galaxyboy people often use she/her or he/him alongside they/them, and the neutral version leans they/them or neopronouns. Pronouns are a separate decision from gender; one is not evidence of the other.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1You love space and "man", "woman" or "non-binary" already describes you accurately. That is a person with a good interest.
- 2You are using it as the joke. That is fine as a joke; it is not this page.
- 3The lean is the whole story — you are simply a man or a woman who likes the imagery. Then the lean is the gender, and the galaxy is decoration.
- 4What you feel is nothing where gender should be. Agender describes absence far better than a galaxy does.
Close by
Related identities
Astralgender
Space too, but wider and without gendered variants: stars, the dark, the universe as a whole. Galaxygender is what is inside a galaxy, and it comes in boy and girl versions. If the masculine or feminine lean matters to you, galaxygender is the better fit; if the lean is beside the point, astralgender is.
ReadStargender
One star, or being like one. The best-documented space word. If a single burning point describes you better than a system of objects, start there.
ReadSpacegender
Another space word in the same cluster, with its own thin record. The cluster overlaps heavily and people pick by which image lands first.
ReadCosmicgender
Described as a gender too vast to take in at once. A galaxy is large but has edges. If the defining feature is that yours does not, that is the other word.
ReadXenogender
The umbrella. Galaxygender is one specific answer inside it. If you know the gender is not people-shaped but the image has not settled, read the umbrella first.
ReadQuestions people ask
Frequently asked questions
What does galaxygender mean?+
A xenogender felt as a connection to what makes up a galaxy — stars, planets, moons, black holes — rather than to man, woman or a midpoint. On the LGBTQIA+ Wiki record it is neutral by default, with galaxyfeminine (galaxygirl) and galaxymasculine (galaxyboy) as its leaning versions.
Isn't galaxygender a meme?+
It was, and the record says so: the wiki notes the word had been an internet joke before a Twitter user reclaimed and coined it in June 2020. A word can be a punchline in one place and a real description in another. Whether it fits you is the only test that matters here.
What is the difference between galaxygender and astralgender?+
Scope and structure. Astralgender is space as a whole, with no gendered variants on record. Galaxygender is the contents of a galaxy, and comes with masculine and feminine versions. Many people would fit either; pick the image that arrives first.
The flag
Designer (bl0ss0mdance) and date (2020-06-27) on record, but the flag is a JPG/PNG and the archived tweet gives no hex values.
Sources
- Galaxygender — LGBTQIA+ Wiki Definition, galaxyfeminine/galaxymasculine variants, and the record that the word was an internet joke before being reclaimed and coined on Twitter on 27 June 2020. Fetched and read.
Still figuring things out?
Twenty questions, four minutes, and a few words worth trying on.