Gender-Diverse

'Gender-diverse' is an umbrella term for variation in gender experience, expression and identity — anything that differs from the conventional cisgender male/female categories. Governments, healthcare organisations and researchers use it to refer to the group as a whole without having to list every individual term.

What does it mean?

Gender-diverse people include transgender people, non-binary people, people with a fluid gender experience, intersex people (insofar as they identify with the broader category), and in some definitions anyone who presents outside conventional gender norms. It is a statistical and organisational collective term, not an identity label that people often use for themselves.

Distinction and overlap

Gender-diverse overlaps with terms such as 'LGBT+', 'transgender' and 'non-binary', but is broader and used primarily in official documents and policy papers. The term is sometimes also used for young people exploring their gender, regardless of whether they have a clearly defined identity. Based on the Seks onder je 25e study, media sociologist Peter Vasterman arrives at 92,500 Dutch young people who describe themselves as trans or gender-diverse. The way the word transgender itself evolved into an umbrella term is described on letterbrij.nl.

Social and practical context

In healthcare guidelines, research and policy documents, 'gender-diverse' (or the English equivalents 'gender diverse' and 'TGD' — transgender and gender diverse) has become a common collective term; it appears in the title of the WPATH Standards of Care Version 8 and the AAP guideline for transgender youth. It makes it possible to discuss different groups together, but sometimes obscures substantive differences between them.

Critical perspectives

The broad umbrella term 'gender-diverse' can combine groups that in reality have very different needs and outcomes. A 50-year-old trans woman, a 14-year-old girl who suddenly calls herself 'non-binary', and an intersex person have little in common apart from not fitting into a conventional cisgender category. Policies that treat them as one group often fail to do justice to the individual situation. Careful differentiation remains necessary. genderpropaganda.nl demonstrates how broad definitions inflate the figures using the CBS estimate of 2.7 million LGBTQIA+ people in the Netherlands.