Gendervariantplurid

Gender variant is an umbrella term that describes anybody whose experience with gender is considered non-normative or non-conforming. This includes transgender and non-binary people, but also GNC people, intersex people, people who transitioned and are not trans (either anymore or who never were), people who use pronouns that are not typical for their gender, and any other experience with gender that would be considered not typical by society's standards.

Bodily, our system is intersex, and our gender is such that we feel we have grounds to call ourselves transgender and cisgender, bodily, at the same time. However, we are also GNC and genderqueer, and this applies to many headmates in our system who are not individually transgender or intersex in headspace.

We like the term "gender variant" because it describes experiences that transgender people and intersex people have in common, without equating these two groups with each other. It lumps trans people, intersex people, and GNC people in with each other and acknowledges the similarities between different aspects of their identity and experience.

We like that you can be more than one type of gender variant at once, and you can use the same term to categorize all those aspects of your experience, while not erasing the individual terms for different aspects of your identity. We like that, since you don't have to specify what kind of gender variant you are, you can still use the term if your identity changes, e.g. you started out as a GNC cis person but found out you were a gender-conforming trans person.

We like that "gender variant", by all appearances, includes people for whom there isn't necessarily a single term. For example, some AMAB people are raised as girls early on following a botched circumcision, and they discover this later and start identifying as men when they know the truth. They wouldn't be strictly and neatly cisgender, transgender, genderqueer, or (necessarily) intersex, but they would have cause to consider themselves gender variant.

Because the term "gender variant" represents so many experiences and identities, it comfortably covers virtually all identities contained within the system, even moreso than genderqueer does. It gives different identities room for shared community without equating them to each other or putting people into categories they don't want to be in, as most anyone who would know they would count as gender variant would already know they have an identity that is considered non-normative. It's probably the good faith equivalent of what some people have meant when they told us that intersex is inherently transgender (which it isn't). We encourage the use of the term and feel more represented by it than any other terms for gender or sex.