Gender identity

Novigender

Your gender is there, it is specific, and no word that currently exists carries it — so you stopped waiting for one to arrive.

Non-Binary
Category
Non-Binary
Pronouns
Any set
Read
6 min

Overview

What novigender means.

Novigender describes a gender that is present, felt clearly from the inside, and cannot be compressed into any existing word. Not absent. Not undecided. Untranslatable, at the current state of the language.

Some honesty first, because you will not get it elsewhere. The word is small. It was coined on Tumblr in June 2014 by a user called Creativeflipflop, and since then it has mostly lived on wikis and glossary pages. There is no research behind it, no memoirs, no meetups, no famous person who uses it.

What the word points at is not small. Reading every label, recognising a piece of yourself in four of them, and landing on none is an extremely ordinary experience. The term is niche. The situation is not.

People also disagree about what it covers. Some use it strictly — my gender cannot be described at all. Others use it loosely — I can describe it, but only at length, and no single word does the job. Some treat it as a final answer, others as an honest holding position. All three uses are in circulation and nobody owns the term.

It sits under the non-binary umbrella. Whether it is a gender in its own right or a statement about vocabulary is a fair question, and the people who use it split on that too.

A gender too complex and unique to fit into any existing categories. A truly individual experience.

Novigender in one line

Origin

Where the word comes from

Novigender was coined in June 2014 on the Tumblr blog pride-color-schemes (also known as ask-pride-color-schemes) by a user going by houisa, describing a gender experience too complex or unclear to compress into a single existing term. It was framed from the outset as sitting under the broader 'pomogender' umbrella — genders defined partly by refusing or exceeding standard labels.

The flag was created at essentially the same time as the term and carries assigned meanings: grey for neutrality and confusion, the two blues for varying degrees of clarity a person might feel, and orange for individuality. No official hex codes were ever published, so the exact shades used across sites and fan-made recolours vary.

Coined by
Tumblr user houisa
First recorded
2014
Where
Tumblr (pride-color-schemes blog)

Signs people describe

Common experiences

None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.

01

Someone asks what your gender is.

You start talking. Four minutes later you have not answered, and you know you have not.

02

You read the glossary.

Then the obscure pages. Then the pages linked from the obscure pages. Nothing clicked into place.

03

You can say what your gender is near.

You cannot say what it is.

04

You explain it with metaphors — a temperature, a chord, a room, a colour that is not on the wheel. Not for effect. That is the closest register you have.

05

On forms, non-binary is the truest box available and still feels like giving your postcode when someone asked for your address.

06

Every label you tried was wrong in a different direction, which is somehow worse than all of them being wrong in the same one.

07

When someone finally describes something close, the feeling is not relief. It is nearly.

08

Your gender is not vague to you.

It is vague out loud.

09

You stopped correcting people mid-conversation, because the correction takes longer than the thing you were actually talking about.

10

You quietly envy the friend whose word does the whole job in two syllables and needs no follow-up.

11

There is a paragraph about yourself in your notes app.

You have rewritten it four times and sent it to nobody.

12

You have wondered whether you are overcomplicating something simple.

Then you tried the simple version and it did not hold.

Day to day

What it looks like on a normal Tuesday

Most of a day has nothing to do with it. Then the small things stack up. A shopkeeper says love or sir. An email opens with Dear Mr. An automated system picks a title from your name and gets it wrong in a way you cannot be bothered to fix.

The form appears somewhere between morning and lunch. Male, female, non-binary, prefer not to say. You choose one knowing it is a rounding, and you move on, because there is no box for a paragraph.

Then somebody asks what it means. You have three versions ready: the ten-second one, the two-minute one, and the real one. You almost never use the real one. Deciding which to give is its own small tiring calculation.

In the evening, alone, it is fine. Your gender is not a problem when nobody is asking you to name it. That is worth knowing about yourself — the difficulty is in the translating, not in the thing.

Across the parts of a life

Open the area you came here for.

Straight answers

What people get wrong

You just haven't found the right word yet.

Sometimes true — people do land later. But plenty search for years, read everything, and conclude the gap is real. Keep looking stops being helpful when it is used to end the conversation.

If you can't define it, it isn't real.

You can define it. You could talk about it for an hour. What you cannot do is compress it into one word, which is a fact about English, not about you.

It's the same as agender.

Agender is nothing there. This is something there with no name on it. From the inside those feel completely different, and mixing them up is the most common error people make about you.

It's a made-up internet word.

It is. Every word is made up, and this one has a date on it: June 2014, Tumblr. The experience it points at is far older than the label.

You're doing it for attention.

This is the most expensive word in the room. It costs more explaining than any other option available to you. Nobody picks it as a shortcut to seeming interesting.

So you're just non-binary then.

Non-binary is true, and it is the umbrella. It tells people what you are not. This says there is something specific underneath that has no name.

You must be confused.

Confusion is not knowing what you are. This is knowing and not being able to hand it over. Those are different problems with different solutions.

Take care

On the hard days

The tiredness has a specific shape. It is not being misgendered — everyone in this part of the map gets that. It is that even the correction has no ending. You fix the wrong word and there is no right one to put in its place.

There is also no room to walk into. Barely any others online, no local group, nobody who says oh, me too within four seconds. And sometimes the pushback comes from inside LGBTQ spaces: that's not a gender, that's just being confused. That one lands harder than anything a stranger says.

Then the 2am version: what if they are right and I am making this up. Almost everyone who uses this word has had that thought at least once. Having it is not evidence of anything except that you are up too late reading about yourself.

What holds is smaller than a definition. You do not have to win an argument in order to have an experience. The word only has to get you called the right thing and treated decently. It does not have to satisfy a stranger who has decided to be annoyed.

And if it goes past tiredness — if you are not safe with yourself tonight — that is not a vocabulary problem and it will not be fixed by finding the correct label. Text a crisis line, wake a friend, ring a doctor. The word can wait. You cannot.

Pronouns

Pronouns

Novigender tells you nothing about pronouns. People who use it use he, she, they, neopronouns, several sets at once, different sets in different rooms, or none they are happy with yet.

Some are precise about it and will correct you every time. Some genuinely do not mind. There is no pronoun rule here — the word describes what your gender is like, not what to call you.

If nobody has ever asked, you are allowed to pick something and test it quietly for a month before telling anyone.

All pronoun sets →

Consider another path

This might not be your word if…

  • 1There is a word that fits and you dislike the people who use it. That is a feeling about a community, not a description of your gender.
  • 2There is nothing there. If the honest answer to what does your gender feel like is blank or silence, read agender and neutrois first.
  • 3You are still actively trying words and expecting one to fit. Questioning is more accurate, far cheaper to explain, and nobody will argue with it.
  • 4You are a man or a woman who dresses, works or moves in ways people find unexpected. Presentation is not gender. Plenty of very gender-nonconforming men and women are simply men and women.
  • 5What has no name is who you want, not what you are. That is an orientation question and there is a separate set of words for it.
  • 6Your gender shifts too fast to pin down. That is genderfluid or genderflux — moving, not unnameable.
  • 7You can describe your gender in a paragraph and nothing is lost in the description. Then the problem is that words are slow, not that they are missing, and plain non-binary probably serves you better.
  • 8The appeal is that it sounds rare. Novelty wears off in about six weeks, and then it is just a thing you explain at every doctor's appointment for the rest of your life.
  • 9You hoped it would save you from explaining. It is the most explaining-intensive word on the shelf.

Questions people ask

Frequently asked questions

Is novigender just non-binary with extra steps?+

Non-binary is the umbrella and yes, this sits under it. Non-binary says not simply a man or a woman. Novigender adds that there is something specific there and no word covers it. Most people use both — non-binary in public, novigender for themselves. That is not a contradiction, it is resolution: one is low, one is high.

What's the difference between novigender and agender?+

Agender is an absence: there is no gender there. Novigender is a presence with no name attached. This is the mix-up people make most often, and the two feel nothing alike from the inside. Quick test: if someone asked what your gender feels like and the true answer is nothing, or blank, agender is your page and it is a better fit than this one.

Is there a novigender flag?+

Yes. Four horizontal stripes — dark grey, blue, dark blue, orange — made in June 2014 by the same Tumblr user who coined the word, about a week after the term itself. Grey stands for neutrality and confusion, the two blues for the different degrees of clarity people have, orange for individuality. Recoloured versions circulate and no official colour codes were ever published, so shades vary between images.

How do I know it's this and not just questioning?+

Mostly time, and the shape of the feeling. Questioning has forward motion — you are trying words expecting one to fit. This is what some people say once the motion stops: not I don't know yet, but I know and there isn't a word. If you are two weeks into reading glossaries, you are questioning, and there is nothing wrong with that. People also move between the two for years, in both directions.

The flag

Four stripes made in June 2014 by the same Tumblr user who coined the word: dark grey for neutrality and confusion, two blues for degrees of clarity, orange for individuality. No official colour codes were ever published, so these shades are approximate and recoloured versions circulate.

Sources

Still figuring things out?

Twenty questions, four minutes, and a few words worth trying on.

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