Intergender: Difference between revisions

During the 1990s, usenet newsgroups were informal public discussion groups on the Internet that were oriented around topics of interest, such as hobbies, fandoms, and LGBT issues. Starting sometime before 1998, people who identified as intergender created a discussion group in the alt.support.intergendered newsgroup, which was created by an intergender and non-intersex person named Donna Lynn Matthews.<ref name="Matthews_Genderqueer"/> The [http://cydathria.com/ms_donna/asig_charter.html charter (last updated in 1998) for that newsgroup] explains its purpose, and what intergendered means:   

In 2000, a non-intersex and intergender person named [http://cydathria.com/ms_donna//interdressing.html Deird Duncan coined the word "interdressing,"] meaning intergender [[gender expression]] in clothing, possibly without any intention to be seen as any particular gender.<ref>Deird Duncan, “Interdressing.” 2000-04-10. http://cydathria.com/ms_donna/interdressing.html  [https://web.archive.org/web/20211029113308/http://cydathria.com/ms_donna/interdressing.html Archived] on 17 July 2023</ref>

In 2014, one intersex intergender person named Aeshling (Tumblr usernames quietlyloud-intersex, indonintersex) independently coined the word "intergender," with the rule that this word is for the use of intersex people only. Otherwise, the word's meaning is the same as it had been when it had been coined and used by non-intersex transgender people. Aeshling's definition of it is "A gender that is between and among male and female."<ref name="Aeshling_Mogai" /> Aeshling's post didn't show awareness that the word had already been in use for people of any birth sex for at least sixteen years.

Some non-intersex people interested in calling themselves "intergender" may choose to defer to intersex people by using a different label with a similar meaning instead, such as [[bigender]] or [[androgyne]], which are open to people of any birth sex. On the other hand, non-intersex people may be no less entitled to calling themselves intergender, because the label "intergender" was open to people of any birth sex for many years longer. There is also the matter that some nonbinary people who were born non-intersex describe their [[transition]] as the intention to make their body more intersex, and call themselves female-to-intersex or male-to-intersex [[transsexual]]s, which goes back to at least 1996.<ref name="Carter_Angels">{{cite web|first=Raphael|last=Carter|title=The Angel's Dictionary|date=14 July 1996|url=http://www.chaparraltree.com/raq/angels.shtml|archive-date=8 March 2005|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050308185631/http://www.chaparraltree.com/raq/angels.shtml|access-date=4 December 2020|url-status=live}}</ref> Some intersex people have argued that it is appropriative for non-intersex people to say that they want to become intersex or intersex-like, given that intersex people face unique types of social oppression.