Gender terms

How this list of terms is organised

The terms are in four groups. The first group contains labels for people who do not describe themselves as a man or a woman, or not only so, such as demiboy, genderflux and neutrois. The second group consists of abbreviations that indicate a direction of transition or the sex at birth: AFAB, AMAB, FTM and MTF. The third group contains terms from specific cultures, and the fourth broad words such as gender diverse and gender neutral. The best-known identity labels, including transgender, non-binary and cisgender, have their own overview under identities.

Where the words come from

The terms in this list have very different roots. Some come from medicine. In 2013 the manual of psychiatric diagnoses DSM-5 replaced the diagnosis 'gender identity disorder' with gender dysphoria, and since 2022 the international classification of diseases ICD-11 has spoken of 'gender incongruence', which no longer falls under mental disorders. Others come from academia and activism: the word cisgender dates from the 1990s and came into wider use in the 2010s. A third part originated online. Labels such as xenogender and genderfae were coined on social media and forums and have never been clinically or scientifically defined.

That difference in origin is important. A diagnosis is laid down in a manual and has criteria; a self-chosen label means what the user intends by it, and two people with the same label may understand it differently.

Terms from other cultures

Some words in this list describe social roles that have long existed in a particular society. The hijra form a community of their own in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; India recognised a third legal category in 2014. The fa'afafine belong to Samoa, the muxe to Zapotec culture in the south of Mexico and the kathoey to Thailand. Such roles are sometimes cited in the Western debate as proof that there are more than two sexes. However, they are social positions with their own rules, expectations and often also restrictions, which do not coincide with Western concepts such as transgender or non-binary.

Abbreviations for birth sex

AFAB and AMAB stand for 'assigned female at birth' and 'assigned male at birth'. The expression comes from the care for children with an intersex condition, in whom the sex is sometimes not immediately clear at birth. In current usage it is applied to everyone. Critics find 'assigned' misleading, because the sex of a child at birth is in virtually all cases observed and recorded, not chosen. The older abbreviations FTM (female to male) and MTF (male to female) describe the direction of a transition.

Why word choice matters

Words steer the conversation. Someone who says 'sex assigned at birth' chooses a different starting point from someone who says 'birth sex' or 'biological sex'. Someone who says 'gender-affirming care' expresses a judgement about that care that is absent from 'medical transition'. Those who know the origin and the connotation of a term can better follow what is actually being claimed in an article, a policy document or a conversation. An introduction to the underlying ideas can be found under the basic information.