Kingender
Your gender is tangled up with your kintype — pull one out and the other comes with it.
- One of twenty-seven Xenogender identities
- No settled flag
- 13 min read
What it is
Kingender means your gender is bound up with your kintype. You are otherkin or therian, and when you try to answer the gender question honestly, the nonhuman part keeps turning up in the answer. Not as flavour. As the thing itself.
Here is the honest part first, because you deserve it before anything else. The word is small. It was coined on Tumblr in July 2014 by a user called sadvaporwavebabe and posted to the MOGAI-Archive blog. Most of what exists for it since is wiki entries copied from other wiki entries.
So you will find far more definitions of kingender than accounts of anyone living as one. This page keeps to what is actually known, and stays short where the record is thin, rather than inventing a history for you.
Keep reading
The experience underneath the word is older than the word. Alterhuman communities argued about how nonhumanity and gender interact long before 2014. The label is new and lightly used. The thing it points at is not new at all.
One point the community is unusually firm on: kingender is for otherkin. Not for people who love wolves, or who find dragons a useful metaphor. If the nonhuman identity is not there, the gender that grows out of it is not there either.
Also check the spelling. Kinggender, with two Gs, is an entirely different term — a grand, regal, male-aligned gender with nothing to do with otherkin. If you searched for the royal one, you want that page instead.
Pronouns
There is no kingender pronoun set. People use he, she, they, one set, several sets, or different sets depending on which part of themselves is nearest the surface that week.
Two things come up more here than elsewhere. Neopronouns get used a lot, sometimes built out of the kintype itself. And it/its is deliberately chosen by many nonhuman-identifying people — asked for, not inflicted. If someone tells you those are their pronouns, that is a request, and using them is a courtesy.
If your pronouns move with your shifts, most people will not track that in real time. A default set for everyday life, plus a small circle who follow the changes, is where most people land.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
Most of it is unremarkable. You get up, you answer to a name, you let the person at the counter call you whatever they call you.
The kingender part shows up in gaps. The form with two boxes and an 'other' that wants an explanation. The colleague who says 'ladies' and your shoulders do something before your brain catches up.
Some days a shift is close and everything is slightly off at once — gender, gait, the length of your arms, the sound of your own voice. Other days go by and none of it crosses your mind.
You are not walking around in a state of profound nonhuman gender. You are queueing for a bus with a thing about yourself that nobody in the queue would ever guess.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
Telling a partner is two conversations, not one, and most people only pass the first.
The tell comes after they say they are fine with it. Do they use the words unprompted, in an ordinary sentence, on a Wednesday — or does the subject quietly never come up again. Being humoured is warmer than being rejected and colder than being believed.
If your gender moves with your shifts, someone who fell for one version of you will have feelings about that. That is not bigotry. Say it early, in a calm week, rather than halfway through a bad one.
Some people find partners inside alterhuman spaces and never have to translate anything. Some marry someone who finds the whole thing odd but says 'he' without flinching because they were asked to. Both of those are real relationships.
Desire
Orientation words assume a fixed human vantage point. Yours may not be fixed and may not feel entirely human, so the usual labels can sit badly. Some people use them anyway because they are convenient shorthand. Some use nothing.
For plenty of kingender people the kintype has nothing to do with sex at all. Gender is entangled with it, desire simply is not, and that is an ordinary arrangement rather than a contradiction.
For others, being seen correctly is the precondition for wanting anything. Right word, right pronoun, or the whole thing goes flat regardless of who is in the room.
One thing said plainly, because it gets thrown at you: being kin is not about attraction to animals, and alterhuman spaces are consistently clear about that. Anyone reaching for that accusation is not arguing in good faith and you are not obliged to stay in the conversation.
The body
Species dysphoria and gender dysphoria often arrive as one feeling wearing two names.
Phantom limbs come up constantly in therian and otherkin spaces — a tail you can feel the weight of, wings that ache in the cold, a jaw the wrong shape. When your gender lives inside that body-sense, it does not detach cleanly from the rest of it.
Medical transition helps the parts it can reach. Hormones and surgery move a human body towards a human target, and many kingender people transition and are glad they did. Very few report that it settled the nonhuman part. Expect it to fix one problem, not two.
Not everyone has access to any of that, and access is not a measure of how real this is. Plenty of people carry it their whole lives with no clinic involved.
In an assessment room you are under no obligation to bring the kin part in. In many places it will cost you care rather than get you better care. That is a judgement about the clinician in front of you, not a compromise on honesty.
Work
Nearly everyone keeps this one at work. Not out of shame — because there is no version of the sentence that survives an open-plan office.
So you pick the human word that costs least and wear it Monday to Friday. Then you notice how tiring nine hours of an approximation is, and how much lighter 18:30 feels.
It leaks in small ways. The avatar. The username you have had since you were fifteen. The pronouns in the email footer that you either add or pointedly do not.
Remote work, night shifts and uniforms are genuinely easier, and choosing them is not a failure of nerve. It is just less friction, and less friction is worth something.
Family
The problem is arithmetic. Coming out as trans is one unfamiliar idea. This is two, and for most audiences the second one damages the credibility of the first.
So most people split it. Family get the gender in human words — a name, a pronoun, a request — and the kintype stays out of it, sometimes permanently.
That is not dishonesty. Your relatives do not have a right to every layer of you. Giving them a version they can actually use is a decision, not a defeat.
If your household is religious, or your housing or safety depends on the people in it, the sum is different again, and the answer is often 'not this year'. That is a real answer, not a postponed one.
Coming out
There is no obligation to come out as this at all. Many people who fit the description never say the word aloud to another human being and are perfectly all right.
If you do, sequence it. Pronouns and a name first, on their own, with no explanation attached. People can act on those. Give it months. Only take the kin part to someone who has already proved they will do the small things without being reminded.
Keep a short version ready: 'My gender doesn't work in the usual categories. Use [x] for me.' That is a complete sentence. It asks nobody to believe anything about species.
Choose the first person carefully. Someone with no authority over you and nothing to lose — not the parent, not the manager, not the partner you cannot afford to lose. The first telling always goes worst, so spend it cheaply.
And if you are somewhere where being visibly queer is dangerous, none of this is owed. Staying quiet is a strategy, not a character flaw.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part. Names without a link don’t have a page yet.
The spelling trap. Two Gs. A lofty, regal, male-aligned xenogender about feeling grand and commanding. No otherkin involvement whatsoever. Different word, different page.
An identity, not a gender. You can be otherkin and have a completely ordinary, stable gender that your kintype never touches. Kingender only applies when the two are wound together.
Otherkin specifically for earthly animals. A therian whose gender is inseparable from that fits kingender's shape exactly; which word gets used often depends on which community someone grew up in.
The wider umbrella — gender described through concepts that most people do not think of as gendered. It requires no kin claim. Someone can be catgender because catness describes the feeling, without identifying as a cat.
Compare Kingender and Xenogender →The umbrella directly above kingender. Covers gender tied to any alterhuman identity, not only to a kintype.
The arrangement runs the other way. Genderkin means being kin with a gender or with the concept of one. Kingender means a gender that comes out of your kintype.
Same structure, different cause. Gender that cannot be separated from another part of you — but there the other part is neurodivergence, not nonhumanity. Some people fit both descriptions.
If your gender moves when you shift, fluid describes the motion accurately. Kingender names what is driving it. People often use both, and kingenderfluid exists for exactly this.
Compare Kingender and Genderfluid →Kintype is a fictional character rather than an animal or creature. Whether fiction-based kin sits under kingender is contested in some spaces and assumed in others.
It might not be you if…
- You love wolves, or dragons, or the sea, and it feels close to identity but is not one. That is worth a word — probably a xenogender one — and this is not it.
- You are otherkin, and your gender is sitting perfectly still beside it, unaffected. That makes you otherkin with a gender, not kingender.
- Your gender feels regal, imposing, grand. That is kinggender. Two Gs. Go there.
- You have a fursona or an original character whose gender differs from yours. Characters are allowed to be different from you. That is authorship, not identity.
- You use 'kin' the joking way — 'I kin that character' meaning you relate hard to them. That usage is common and it is not the same claim.
- You want the flag, or the community, or a word that finally sounds like something. Communities can be joined without a label, and this one in particular is not the door in.
- You are working through unusual gender words hoping one explains the pain. Many people cycle through several and land on plain trans language, and that is not a failure. Rule this out and keep going.
On the hard days
The specific loneliness here is that you can search your own gender and find a definition, a flag, and no people. Everyone else gets a paragraph too, but theirs comes with strangers describing a Tuesday. Yours is the same paragraph copied across four wikis.
You will be a punchline. The attack-helicopter joke was written about people like you. It stings worse inside queer spaces than outside them, because being pushed out by the ones who were meant to be safe costs more.
On those days, do not argue. Arguing to be believed hands the verdict to whoever you are arguing with. Say what you need people to call you, and leave the rest unresolved.
Keep something in your life that has nothing to do with any of this — a job, a game, a dog, a friend who only wants to talk about football. People whose whole self hangs on a contested word have nowhere to stand when the word gets attacked.
Separately, and this is not the same point: if the nonhuman feeling comes with losing hours, or not being able to keep yourself safe, or a distress you cannot put down, tell a doctor. Not because being kin is an illness. Because the part that hurts deserves help.
Questions people ask
Can I be kingender if I'm not otherkin?
Every source that documents the term says no, and the community holds that line firmly. The gender is defined by its entanglement with a kintype, so with no kintype there is nothing for it to be entangled with. If the concept appeals but the kin part is not there, look at xenogender instead — it describes gender through non-gender concepts and has no such requirement.
Is kingender just being a furry?
No, though the two get confused constantly. A fursona is a character you create and can change. A kintype is a claim about what you are, which most people describe as arriving rather than being chosen. Some people are both furry and kin. Plenty are one and not the other.
What is the kingender flag?
There isn't one settled version. The 2014 original, posted by a Tumblr user called aroacehawkeye, has four stripes — yellow, blue, purple, pink — with a seven-pointed elven star and the theta-delta therianthropy symbol. A paler 2015 redesign credited to Pastelmemer, posted by the Pride-Flags account, keeps the four colours and one black star. Other variants circulate. No source states what the colours mean, and no reliable shade codes exist, so anyone quoting exact ones is guessing.
Is kingender real, or was it made up on Tumblr?
Both, in a way that is worth sitting with. The word was made on Tumblr in July 2014 by one user, and it has never been widely used. Every gender word was made up by somebody at some point, which does not make them equal in weight — some describe common experiences and some describe rare ones. The honest position: this word is small and lightly documented, and the experience of otherkin whose gender will not detach from their nonhumanity is much older than the word for it.
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