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Genderqueer

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Genderqueer is an identity and umbrella term that encompasses queer and non-normative gender experiences and identities. Genderqueer could also be, and has turned into, its own gender identity. It is a term for people who are queer in the gender way, in a sense.

It is sometimes used as a similar term for non-binary, identifying as neither strictly, exclusively male, nor as strictly, exclusively female. Perhaps identifying as partially one or the other, both, or neither.

While the more modern and widely known definition of Genderqueer as a standalone gender identity has often been interchangable with Nonbinary, the term can and has also included binary people (Cisgender, Transgender, Other) as well. It can been used by anyone who feels they have a non-normative experience with gender or gender presentation.

Pronunciation

Definitions

  • It’s about all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersexed, transsexuals, transvestites, transgendered, transgressively gendered, and those of us whose gender expressions are so complex they haven’t even been named yet. - Riki Anne Wilchins, 1995[1]
  • A term for people who feel that they have a queer or non-normative experience with gender, either through their gender identity, their gender presentation, or other experiences of gender. - LGBTA Wikia

History

Genderqueer was first used in the 1990s as "gender queer", used by anyone who experienced or expressed gender with the non-normative connotations of the Queer Movement. The earliest known use of "genderqueer" as a single word and identity is by Riki Anne Wilchins in the Spring 1995 newsletter of Transexual Menace to describe anyone who is gender nonconforming.

It's about all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersexed, transexuals, transvestites, transgendered, transgressively gendered, intersexed, and those of us whose gender expressions are so complex they haven't even been named yet. More than that, it's about the gender oppression which affects everyone: the college sweetheart who develops life-threatening anorexia nervosa trying to look "feminine," the Joe Sixpack dead at 45 from cirrhosis of the liver because "real men" are hard drinkers. But maybe we genderqueers feel it most keenly, because it hits us each time we walk out the front door openly and proudly.
— Riki Anne Wilchins, 1995[2]


By 1999 and 2000, online communities were using the term genderqueer as an umbrella to unite a number of non-binary identities and identifications. Over the next decade, genderqueer developed as a standalone identity with particular connotations.

Sources

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