Bigender

Bigender describes a person with two genders. The pair is most often man and woman, but need not be. What makes the term specific is the number, and the fact that both states are defined rather than points somewhere on a continuum.

Definition & scope

Two patterns fall under the word and they are not the same thing. Some bigender people alternate: one gender is to the fore at a time, and the switch may be involuntary, frequent, and unrelated to circumstance. Others hold both at once, with no alternation at all. Community usage covers both, and a questionnaire that offers only one of the readings collects the wrong population without noticing.

The neighbouring terms mark the boundaries precisely. Genderfluid describes movement across a range rather than between two fixed states — the difference is shape, not degree, and people who could honestly use either word usually choose on that basis. Androgyne is a single gender compounded of both, which is a different claim from two genders in one person. Agender is none at all.

It is filed under non-binary, since the gender described is not exclusively man or woman — although a bigender person's gender is, part of the time, exactly one of those two. That is a good illustration of how the umbrella actually works: it covers the whole arrangement, not each moment of it.

History & origins

The early history is poorly documented, and saying so is more useful than filling it in. The word circulated in North American trans-community glossaries and newsletters well before it reached any dictionary, and no reliable first attestation is on record.

• 1990s: bigender and the older bigenderist appear in trans-community publications and, as the communities move online, on Usenet and early web forums, at a time when the vocabulary for identities outside the binary was being assembled ad hoc.
• 2000s: the term settles alongside genderqueer, agender and genderfluid as that online vocabulary differentiates and the distinctions between the four harden.
• 2012: the first and still the only sustained research attention, in a speculative proposal on "alternating gender incongruity" discussed below.
• February 2014: Bigender appears on Facebook's custom gender list (reconstructed by Slate), its largest single jump in visibility.
• 2020s: surveys carry it as a write-in rather than a checkbox — the Gender Census 2025 records it among the most-written-in terms at 2.5%, joint first with butch.

In practice

For people who alternate, the practical crux is that the switch is not scheduled. Some change pronouns with the state and tell people when it moves; most settle on one set — often singular they — precisely to avoid a daily negotiation, and neither choice is more authentic than the other.

Institutions handle the identity badly for a structural reason rather than a hostile one: their records hold one value per field, and two genders will not fit in a field designed for one. The 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, with 92,329 respondents, documents how poorly documentation tracks identity even for people whose gender is stable; a gender that alternates compounds that at every counter.

Psychology

There is one identifiable research literature on bigender identity, it consists of essentially one line of work, and its status needs stating precisely.

In 2012 Laura Case and V. S. Ramachandran proposed alternating gender incongruity in Medical Hypotheses, reporting from a community survey that bigender respondents described switching between gender states without amnesia for either, that many reported phantom breasts or genitalia corresponding to the gender their body did not match, and that the sample showed decreased lateralisation of handedness and an elevated rate of bipolar disorder. They hypothesised unusual hemispheric switching as a mechanism.

The paper is cited far more often than its evidential weight warrants. Medical Hypotheses exists to publish speculative proposals rather than tested findings; the sample was self-selected; and the hypothesis has not been replicated. It is worth knowing about because it is the only research most readers will ever encounter on the subject, and worth discounting for exactly the same reason.

The diagnostic position is the vertical's standard one. The DSM-5 diagnoses gender dysphoria — distress — rather than identity, and the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019. Having two genders is not a disorder under either system, and — a point the 2012 framing tends to obscure — it is not a dissociative condition either: the alternation bigender people describe involves no break in continuity and no loss of memory.

Prevalence & culture

How common is bigender identity?

No population survey isolates the term, and the figure here is derived from the umbrella above it.

The Trevor Project's 2021 research brief — 34,759 LGBTQ youth aged 13–24, with an 8,998-person non-binary subsample — found 4% using bigender, the lowest share it reports and level with genderflux, against 72% for non-binary and 24% for genderfluid. Applied to the Williams Institute's 1.2 million non-binary LGBTQ US adults, about 0.46% of the adult population, that gives roughly 0.018% of adults.

A second instrument agrees. The Gender Census 2025 records bigender as a write-in for 2.5% of its 43,096 self-selected respondents — the joint most common term people typed rather than ticked. Two independent, differently biased samples landing within a factor of two is about as much corroboration as any term in this part of the vertical gets, though neither is a population survey and the confidence here remains low.

Culturally the term is one of the least visible in the vertical relative to how long it has been in use, and its public profile is shaped almost entirely by the 2012 paper — an unusual and not especially fortunate position for an identity whose ordinary meaning has nothing to do with neurology.