metagender

Noun

metagender (countable and uncountable, plural metagenders)

1. The use of categories to conceive of gender; the possible ways in which gender can manifest itself.
   • The realities of "being or doing" the "differences of being either female, feminine, woman or male, masculine, man" (Coates 1998, 295-296), the socially assigned sequestered private spaces and public roles we encounter in our daily lives, are not to be confounded with metagender. There should...2007, Catherine M. Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, Stephan Miescher, Africa After Gender?, →ISBN, page 292
   • When I write of someone being a Woman or a Man, I mean to indicate the metagender assumption that they have, so to speak, all their gender building blocks incontestably in one metagender box, i.e. if you are l-, f-, p-, and j-female, then (and only then) are you a Woman. Deviation from the...2009, Clare Beckett, Owen Heathcote, Marie Macey, Negotiating Boundaries? Identities, Sexualities, Diversities, →ISBN, page 48
2. A gender identification that is neither male nor female.
   • Metagenders can have any body type, genital configuration, or chromosome type.2003, Tracie O'Keefe, Katrina Fox, Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity, page 76
   • But note also Rhonda McDaniel, in this volume, who traces another possibility–that of a “metagender” that transcends male and female and is available to saints of both sexes who pursue virginity – in the writings of Ambrose.2013, Paul Szarmach, Writing Women Saints in Anglo-Saxon England, →ISBN