Polygender
poly-gender · polygendered · multigender · trigender
Added 28 Jul 2026
A gender made up of several distinct genders, usually more than two and usually ones the person can name. Polygender sits in the multigender family between bigender, which specifies two, and pangender, which specifies none.
- Prevalence
- Very rare
- Type
- Gender identity
- Also known as
- poly-gender, polygendered, multigender, trigender
- Confidence
- Low confidence
- Sources
- 7 cited
- Added
- 28 Jul 2026
Overview
Polygender describes a gender composed of several distinct genders — more than two, and usually a set the person can enumerate. It sits in the multigender family between bigender, which fixes the count at two, and pangender, which declines to fix it at all.
The word has an unusual history for this vocabulary: it appears in professional literature about gender diversity earlier and more often than it appears as a self-description, which is part of why it is one of the least-used labels in the family it belongs to.
Definition & scope
The distinguishing feature is enumeration. A polygender person is typically describing a particular combination — three genders, or four, standing in some stated relation to each other — rather than an open set. Whether those genders are held simultaneously or in rotation varies from person to person, and the term itself does not settle it.
That places polygender close to two neighbours it is regularly collapsed into. Genderfluid names movement between genders over time; polygender names plurality, which may or may not involve movement. Pangender names breadth without a count. In practice many people reach for whichever of the three is likeliest to be understood by whoever they are talking to, which is one reason data on the family as a whole is thin.
Multigender circulates as the umbrella over all of these, and omnigender as a rarer near-synonym for pangender. None of the three is a claim about attraction; orientation is a separate axis, catalogued in the orientations vertical.
History & origins
The paper trail runs through textbooks rather than through manifestos.
- 2012: the word appears in a gerontology text — the citation record shows Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Ageing (Ward, Rivers and Sutherland) listing "gender-neutral, polygender or genderqueer" among identities at odds with dichotomous categories.
- February 2014: Facebook's 56 custom gender options include pangender, bigender, neutrois and agender, but not polygender — a useful marker of where the term stood at the moment several of its siblings crossed into general use.
- 2014: it reaches a counselling textbook; the same record cites Ratts and Pedersen's Counseling for Multiculturalism and Social Justice noting that androgynous individuals describe themselves as "ambigender, polygender, or genderless".
- 2021 onward: the word is absent from the large identity inventories. It appears in neither the Trevor Project's list of labels used by non-binary youth nor the published term lists of the Gender Census.
In practice
The lived difficulty is recognition rather than explanation. Because the word is rare, a polygender person is generally explaining the concept from scratch each time, and most default to non-binary or multigender in settings where a longer conversation is not on offer.
Documentation compounds the problem in the way it does for every plural gender term: records hold one value per field. The 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, with 92,329 respondents, sets out how badly documents track identity even in the simple cases.
Psychology
No research addresses polygender identity on its own. The relevant literature is the general clinical writing on non-binary genders, which describes rather than diagnoses: Richards and colleagues (2016) record that people outside the binary may identify as more than one gender at a time or as different genders at different times, and treat that as a description to be worked with rather than a pathology.
Formal placement is settled and applies here without modification. The DSM-5 diagnoses gender dysphoria, meaning distress, not identity; the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019. Holding several genders is not a diagnosis under either.
Prevalence & culture
How common is polygender identity?
The figure here is a bounded derivation and is the least certain in this group of entries.
The base is again the non-binary umbrella: the Williams Institute counts 1.2 million non-binary LGBTQ adults, on the order of 0.46% of US adults. Two independent ceilings sit on top of it. The Trevor Project's 2021 survey of 34,759 LGBTQ youth reported the labels used by its 8,998 non-binary respondents down to 4% — genderflux and bigender — and polygender does not appear. The Gender Census 2025, with 43,096 responses, publishes write-in words down to 1.0%, and polygender does not appear there either.
| Ceiling | Source | Implication |
|---|---|---|
| Below 4% of non-binary youth | Trevor Project (2021) | rarer than genderflux and bigender |
| Below 1.0% of write-ins | Gender Census 2025 | outside the ten commonest typed-in words |
| 1.2M non-binary adults | Williams Institute | the base those ceilings apply to |
Culturally the term's position is the mirror image of pangender's. It is well attested in the professional literature that describes gender diversity and thinly attested in the speech of people describing themselves — a word that entered the reference books more easily than it entered the vocabulary.
Common questions
What does Polygender mean?
A gender made up of several distinct genders, usually more than two and usually ones the person can name. Polygender sits in the multigender family between bigender, which specifies two, and pangender, which specifies none.
What else is Polygender called?
Polygender is also known as poly-gender, polygendered, multigender and trigender.
- PangenderA gender made up of many genders, or of all of them, held at once or in turn. The pan- is a claim about breadth rather than movement, which is what separates pangender from a gender that changes over time.
- BigenderHaving two genders — usually man and woman, sometimes another pair — either alternating between them or holding both at once. It differs from genderfluid in shape rather than degree: two defined states, not continuous movement across a range.
- Non-BinaryUmbrella term for genders that are not exclusively man or woman. It is not a point midway between the two: the category includes both genders, neither, something else entirely, or a gender that changes.
- GenderfluidA gender that changes over time rather than settling on one description. The movement is the identity: a genderfluid person is not undecided between two fixed points, and the shifts are not a stage on the way to one.
From Greek poly-, "many", prefixed to gender, on the model of polygon and polyglot — several, where bi- is two and pan- is all. The adjective polygendered is the older recorded form and remains in use. Both are attested in professional literature from 2012–2014, in works on LGBT ageing and on multicultural counselling, before either became common as a self-description. Multigender serves as the umbrella term for the family and omnigender as a rarer synonym for the pangender end of it.
Prevalence is computed from the entry's cited population estimate. Rows marked ESTare indicative editorial estimates scored against a fixed anchor rubric — not measured quantities. Method & anchors: methodology.
Very rare · fewer than 1 in 10,000
Basis: DERIVED, not measured: no survey isolates polygender identity. Start from the Williams Institute's 1.2 million non-binary LGBTQ US adults (on the order of 0.46% of adults), then apply two published ceilings — the Trevor Project's 2021 survey lists labels used by its 8,998 non-binary respondents down to 4% without reaching polygender, and the Gender Census 2025 (43,096 responses) publishes write-in words down to 1.0% without reaching it either. Under 1% of 0.46% is under 0.005%, and the term's absence from both lists places it at the low end of that. Low confidence.
- 01Research Brief: Diversity of Nonbinary Youth (July 2021) — The Trevor Projectthe labels used by 8,998 non-binary respondents within a survey of 34,759 LGBTQ youth, reported down to 4% (genderflux, bigender) without polygender appearing — one of the two ceilings on the derived estimate
- 02Gender Census 2025: Worldwide Report43,096 usable responses; write-in identity words published down to 1.0% without polygender appearing — the second ceiling on the derived estimate
- 03Nonbinary LGBTQ Adults in the United States — Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law1.2 million non-binary LGBTQ adults in the US, about 11% of the adult LGBTQ population — the population base the ceilings are applied to
- 04Here Are All 56 Custom Gender Options on Facebook — Slate (13 February 2014)the February 2014 Facebook list of 56 custom gender options, which included pangender, bigender, neutrois and agender but not polygender
- 05Richards, Bouman, Seal, Barker, Nieder & T'Sjoen (2016), Non-binary or genderqueer genders, International Review of Psychiatry 28(1):95–102the clinical literature's description of people identifying as more than one gender at a time or as different genders at different times
- 06Early Insights: A Report of the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey — Advocates for Trans Equality92,329 respondents; the mismatch between identity and identity documents that single-value records impose on any plural gender term
- 07ICD-11, gender incongruence — World Health Organizationthe 2019 removal of gender incongruence from the mental-disorders chapter; holding several genders is not a diagnosis