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In this episode of InQueery, our web series where we delve into the his, er, themstory of our favorite queer words, nonbinary author Jacob Tobia examines the origins of the term “genderqueer.” The word has a nuanced backstory, and the video takes us on a journey from the term’s obscure beginnings in zines from the ‘70s and ‘80s to its blossoming popularity in today’s digital age. Check out the full video and the script below to learn more about how the word has evolved over time.
From its start in ‘90s activist circles to the movement for a third-gender option today, the word “genderqueer” has made a big impression in its short life. And, it’s a word with infinite gender possibilities. So, how much do you really know about the history of the word “genderqueer”? Let’s find out.
For the past 25 years, the word “genderqueer” has been an inclusive term that refers to individuals whose identities exist beyond the binary. It can be an umbrella term for anyone between or outside male and female; refer to someone who alternates between the two, and ecompass folks who identify as a third gender, genderfluid, androgynous, Two-Spirit, pangender, and agender, just to name a few.
The search for an all-inclusive term that existed beyond binary gender categories started in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when queer and transgender people were challenging ideas about gender and sexuality in their writing and activism.
In 1987, Sandy Stone helped lay the groundwork for the term in the The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto. Stone wrote that trans folk needed to “speak from outside the boundaries of gender” to challenge discrimination.
During this decade, there were other terms that pointed to a defiance of gender norms including the word “gay.” For working class LGBTQ+ folks and queer people of color in the ball scene especially, “gay” meant pushing gender and sexual rules and questioned norms around class and race.
In the early 1990s, “genderqueer” emerged via word of mouth in activist circles.
Through the 1970s and 80s, the word “transgender” was mostly being used very specifically by folks who were assigned male at birth, didn’t want any medical intervention, and were mostly white and middle class — the kind of people who went to cross-dressing resorts.
But, with Leslie Feinberg’s 1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, “transgender” took on a new meaning as a wider, political term for all different kinds of gender variation.
As queer activism and political organizing grew in the early ‘90s, “genderqueer” became a way for transgender people to be part of the broader movement.
If you were a gay person who was political, you were an “orientation queer,” and if you were a transgender person who was political — unlike the folks who identified with the term in earlier years — you were a “genderqueer.”
At around the same time, “gender outlaws” were a spectrum of folks who existed outside of male or female, and encompassed transgender, gender-nonconforming, and fluid people.
The performer Kate Bornstein wrote in a 1994 book that “All the categories of transgender find a common ground in that they each break one or more of the rules of gender: What we have in common is that we are gender outlaws, every one of us.”
By 1995, “genderqueer” appeared in print. The activist Riki Anne Wilchins wrote in the newsletter “In Your Face” that the the fight against gender oppression was political and:
“...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.”
That same year, the word appeared in a newspaper. Wilchins was quoted in The Washington Times imploring LGBTQ+ folks to come out.
“It's high time ‘genderqueers’ came out of the closets, out of the shadows and out of the margins.”
From there, the term proliferated in zines, activist flyers, and in publications.
Then came the Internet. The Web allowed the term “genderqueer” to spread faster than handing out flyers or mailing a zine.
In 1997, the listserv SPHERE was created, specifically for “people who identify as both genders, or no gender, or third-gendered,” while support groups like the “Genderqueer Boyzzz” emerged to support an array folks with different genders.
The net spread such information to a wider audience. Rapidly, too.
And, since the 1990s, the term evolved from including simple categories like agender and androgynous to more complex terms like demigender and amalgagender.
In the early 2000s, “genderqueer” became more visible when it was published in places like Time Out New York and when Wilchins put together a collection of writings from voices “beyond the sexual binary.”
It wasn’t until 2008, though, that the paper of record published the term. In an article about transgender students at American colleges, The New York Times said of being “genderqueer”:
“...today many students who identify as trans are seeking not simply to change their sex but to create an identity outside or between established genders.”
The 2010s really introduced the word “genderqueer” to the mainstream, thanks to celebrities who identify under the genderqueer umbrella.
Once a squeaky clean Disney star, Miley Cyrus told Out Magazine that she didn’t “relate to what people would say defines a girl or a boy.”
Actor Ruby Rose came out as genderfluid, performer Jaden Smith wore gender-neutral fashion, and rapper Angel Haze identified as agender and used the pronoun “they” — all falling under the genderqueer spectrum.
As the term became more mainstream, so did the fight for legal and political recognition. In 2012, the organization the Intersex & Genderqueer Recognition Project was created to expand gender options beyond the binary on official documentation.
In 2016, Jamie Shupe became the first U.S. citizen with a legally classified nonbinary gender, setting off a greater push for a third gender option that the Intersex & Genderqueer Recognition Project’s leader said is “exploding.”
Nowadays, “genderqueer” has solidified itself as part of a larger gender expansive movement that include similar terms, like “nonbinary” and pronouns like “they.”
True to its history, “genderqueer” still pushes back on having just one story and meaning.
As gender identities under the genderqueer spectrum change and grow, something’s stay the same. Wilchins’ words from over two decades ago are still a rallying cry:
“We're not well behaved. And we're not going away....the gendeRevolution has begun, and we're going to win.”
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