Translations:Gender-variant identities worldwide/3/en

Third gender, or third sex, is not a satisfactory label for all the identities on this page, because it has meant many things. Third gender is a concept in which individuals are categorized, either by themselves, by their society, or by outsiders to their society, as not fitting into the Western ideas of binary gender and heterosexual roles. The phrase "third gender" has been used for a wide variety of meanings: intersex people whose bodies do not fit outdated Western medical concepts of binary sex, hundreds of indigenous societal roles as described (and often misrepresented) by Western anthropologists (including indigenous identities such as south Asian hijras, Hawaiian and Tahitian māhū, and Native American identities now called Two-Spirits), transgender people who are nonbinary, homosexual people (even those who are white and in Western societies), and women who were considered to be gender-nonconforming because they fought for women's rights. Some people self-identify as third gender, especially in communities of people of color in the United States. In the 2016 Nonbinary/Genderqueer Survey, 84 of the respondents (2.75%) called themselves third gender. In the 2019 Worldwide Gender Census, 244 of the respondents (2.17%) called themselves third gender.