Maverique
There is definitely a gender there. It just isn't male, isn't female, isn't a blend of the two, and isn't neutral — it's its own thing, and the language for it doesn't exist yet.
- One of twenty-eight Non-Binary identities
- Verified flag
- 14 min read
What it is
Start with the part that gets missed. This is not an absence. You have a gender. You can feel it sitting in the room with you. It is simply not made of the materials everyone else's seems to be made of.
It is not male. Not female. Not a blend, not a halfway point, not a bit of both, and not neutral. Those are all positions on one map. Maverique is the claim that you are not on that map at all — and that you still have somewhere specific to stand.
The person who coined it used colour to explain it. Yellow is a primary colour. You cannot mix it out of anything else. That is the claim being made here: not a combination, not a dilution, not a gap. Its own ingredient.
Keep reading
Some honesty about the word itself. It was coined in June 2014 by a Tumblr blogger, Vesper H., who also designed the flag. It is a small term. Nearly everything written about it is first-person blog posts, wiki entries and conversation — no research, no long history, no settled agreement about its edges. People still argue about where maverique ends and aporagender begins. The word is young. What it points at may be much older.
You don't have to use it to be described by it. Plenty of people read a page like this, recognise themselves, and go on saying 'non-binary' out loud because that is the word that travels. That is a translation, not a demotion.
Pronouns
Nothing about pronouns follows from this. There is no set that comes with the word.
They/them is the most common, mostly because it is the one strangers can manage. Some people use it/its on purpose and mean it warmly. Some use neopronouns — ey/em, xe/xem, ze/hir. Some use he or she, either the one they grew up with or the other one, because a pronoun is a handle and doesn't carry their gender either way.
Some use several sets. Some use none and ask for their name every time.
If you speak a language where adjectives and past participles are gendered — Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese and many others — you already know English has the easy version of this problem. People use the -e or schwa endings, mix forms deliberately, or rebuild the sentence to dodge the ending. None of it is settled, and what works in one country's community often doesn't in another's.
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 isn't dramatic. It's a queue in a coffee shop and a cheerful 'what can I get you, ladies'. You don't correct it. You are thinking about the coffee.
The dentist's form has two boxes. You tick the usual one and feel nothing much beyond a flat, familiar tiredness.
At work your pronouns are in your signature or they aren't. Either way nobody has asked what your gender actually is, and if they did you would say non-binary, because the meeting starts in four minutes.
Then something small lands. A jacket that sits right. A line in a song. Your reflection in a shop window at an angle you don't usually see yourself from. Gender, present, clearly yours, and still with no name on it.
That is the shape of most days. Long stretches of translation, and short private moments where nothing needs translating at all.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
Dating starts as an admin problem. Apps give you three boxes and a text field, and the text field is where you decide how much to explain.
Most people you meet will have heard 'non-binary'. Almost none will have heard this. You will work out, over and over, whether the longer version is worth it tonight.
Orientation labels break around you. A man who wants you isn't straight and isn't gay. Some people find that interesting. Some find it intolerable and go, and you tend to find out early.
Watch what happens after the conversation, not during it. People nod, and then quietly refile you as basically a woman or basically a bloke. You hear it in the small words: girlfriend, mate, good lad, one of the girls.
The version that works isn't grand. It is someone who treats your gender as a thing you have rather than a thing you're missing, and who stops needing it re-explained after a while.
If you have been with someone since before you had any of this language, there is a slower version of all this. Pet names to renegotiate, their family, the word they use for you at parties. Months, not one conversation.
And none of this assumes you want a partner. Plenty of people read this and want none of it.
Desire
Being wanted is a separate question from being loved, and it gets less airtime.
Being desired specifically as a woman, or specifically as a man, can quietly empty out an encounter that was going well. Not offensive. Just suddenly about somebody who isn't in the room.
Being desired as nothing in particular doesn't fix it either. Genderless misses in the other direction. What you want is to be wanted as this, and there is no word to hand a partner.
So it comes down to nouns. What you get called. What your body parts get called. What is said in the dark. Some people want all of it neutral. Some want private words that exist nowhere else. Some genuinely don't care, because those words never carried gender for them in the first place.
Asking out loud takes ten seconds and is awkward every single time. It is still faster than the alternative.
Some people reading this are asexual, or have no connection at all between their gender and sex. That is ordinary too, and nothing here is a requirement.
The body
Dysphoria isn't required, and plenty of people who use this word have none.
For those who do, there is a particular problem: no target. Binary transition has a picture at the end of it. There is no body that reads as this to a stranger, because strangers have no category to read it into.
So the goals get specific and odd from the outside. Flat chest, keep the hips. Voice down four notes and no further. Hormones for a year, then stop. Or nothing physical at all, because the whole weight of it is in what people call you.
'Androgynous' is the closest most strangers will ever get. Some people take that as a decent approximation and move on. Some find it its own kind of wrong, because it still describes you using the two things you aren't.
If you go looking for medical care, you may find the pathway wants a tidier story than the one you have. Some people simplify to get through the door. Some refuse to. Both cost something, and only you can weigh which cost you can carry.
In a lot of places there is no care to seek, or it is unaffordable, or asking is dangerous. None of that changes what your gender is.
Work
Non-binary is your work word. Almost nobody in a workplace has heard this one, and using the shorter word is not a small betrayal. It is a sensible tool.
Most of the friction is systems. Two options in the HR dropdown. Software that derives a title from a gender field. A rota split into the girls and the lads.
Customer-facing work is harder, because the gendered script arrives all day from strangers and none of it is correctable.
You will do the maths constantly: is this one worth a correction. Most days it isn't, and letting it go isn't weakness. It's a limited budget being spent carefully.
In many countries and many industries, being out at work risks the job, the visa, or your safety. Saying nothing is a plan. Keep it in place as long as you need it, and don't let anyone online tell you that's cowardice.
Family
The word will not travel. Assume that from the start. What can travel is one sentence: don't call me a woman. Or: don't call me a man.
Expect a category attempt. 'So you're a lesbian.' 'So you want to be a boy.' 'So you're having the surgery.' They are reaching for the nearest thing they already know.
You will end up as the teacher, which is unfair, and you are allowed to teach badly and stop halfway through.
Older relatives often keep the old words until the end and mean nothing by it. You get to decide whether that is a wound or just weather.
If the language spoken at home isn't English, this can be flatly untranslatable. There may be no word at all, and the nearest one may be an insult.
Some people reading this will never tell their family, and will be called the wrong thing at every dinner for years. That is common, it is survivable, and it doesn't make it less real inside you.
Some families are fine about it. That happens more often than the internet suggests.
Coming out
You can come out without ever using the word. Most people do.
Order it by usefulness. Name first if it changed. Pronouns next. The explanation last, or never — plenty of people stop after pronouns and are understood perfectly well.
Have one sentence ready, because you will be asked. Something like: I have a gender, it isn't male or female, and it isn't a mix of the two. That is enough for most people. The ones who want more will ask properly, and those are the ones worth the long version.
Expect to be asked why you need such a specific word. You don't owe a defence. 'Because it's accurate' is a complete answer.
Do the safety maths first, every time. Housing, work, visa, custody, the people you live with, the country you're in. Coming out to one friend and nobody else is a real decision and it can stay that way for years.
Being out proves nothing. Neither does the word. You are the same either way.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part.
No gender, or gender as absence. If the honest answer to 'what is your gender doing right now' is 'nothing, and that's fine', that's agender. Here the answer is 'something, and I can't name it'.
Compare Maverique and Agender →A neutral or null gender, often with a strong pull toward a neutral body. Neutral is still a position on the same scale — the midpoint. This isn't neutral, it's other.
Compare Maverique and Neutrois →Between masculine and feminine, or both at once. Made out of those two ingredients. This one isn't made of them at all.
Compare Maverique and Androgyne →The closest cousin, coined around the same time in 2014. A gender apart from male, female and neutral that still feels strongly gendered. It's usually treated as an umbrella, with maverique as one specific gender under it. Some people say they're the same word twice. That argument has never been settled.
Compare Maverique and Aporagender →The umbrella, not a rival. Nearly everyone using this word is also non-binary. Maverique is the more specific claim underneath it.
Compare Maverique and Non-Binary →Wider and older, and often carrying a political or aesthetic charge as much as a description of an internal gender.
Compare Maverique and Genderqueer →A gender that moves. This one is usually steady. You can be both — fluid between maverique and other things — but movement isn't part of the definition.
Compare Maverique and Genderfluid →Partly a woman or partly a man, plus something else. This isn't partly anything binary.
Demigirl → · Demiboy →Gender described through references outside human gender — an animal, a texture, a season. People describe maverique that way often, but there the metaphor is the explanation, not the definition. Plenty of people use both words.
Compare Maverique and Xenogender →An umbrella for genders wholly outside the binary rather than in between. Maverique sits comfortably under it.
Compare Maverique and Abinary →These belong to particular peoples and communities, with their own histories, obligations and rules about who they apply to. They are not open labels. If you are not of that community, they are not yours to take, and maverique is not a claim on any of them.
Hijra → · Māhū → · Fa’afafine →It might not be you if…
- Your gender feels like a mix, or a point somewhere between man and woman. That is closer to androgyne.
- The honest answer to 'what is your gender doing' is 'nothing, and that's fine'. That's agender.
- Neutral is exactly the right word. That's neutrois, and neutral is a real thing to be.
- It moves — one thing some weeks, something else other weeks. That's genderfluid, which this isn't.
- You're mostly a woman or mostly a man with something else at the edges. Look at demigirl and demiboy first.
- What you actually want is for strangers to stop clocking you. That's a wish about being perceived. Many identities share it, and on its own it doesn't point here.
- Your reason is intellectual — you think the binary is nonsense and won't participate. That's a position. It can sit alongside a gender, but it isn't one by itself.
- The feeling is there while you're reading lists of labels at 2am and gone by Tuesday lunchtime. Wait. Words don't expire.
- You want a word other people will recognise. This is not that word and it isn't going to become it.
- The appeal is that it's rare. That wears off in about a month and leaves you holding a bad fit.
On the hard days
The hard part usually isn't rejection. It's that nobody can picture you — including people who accept you completely, including other queer people.
At 3am that turns into one specific doubt: if I can't describe it, maybe I made it up. Look at what that argument actually rests on. You're treating a shortage of words as evidence about a feeling. Those are two different things.
Then there's the tiredness. Constant translation down to a shorter word, and the low ache of being understood approximately by everyone you know.
You will also meet people on your own side who think words like this are what's wrong with the community. That one stings more than the strangers do.
There's grief in it, and it's worth naming plainly. Most people will never see this accurately. What is actually on offer is a handful who do, which turns out to be enough more often than it sounds like it would be.
On the bad days, lower the bar. You don't have to explain anything to anyone today. The word is a tool for you, not a case you have to win in public.
And if it goes past tired into something darker, say it out loud to one person. It doesn't have to be about gender to be worth saying.
Questions people ask
How do I know if I'm maverique and not just non-binary?
Non-binary is the umbrella. This is a specific claim underneath it, and you can hold both. The test is what happens after 'not a man, not a woman'. If that sentence feels complete, non-binary may be all you need. If it feels like the first half — if there's something present that the sentence hasn't described yet, and it isn't neutral or absent — that's the gap this word was made for.
Is it the same as agender or neutrois?
No, and the difference is the whole point. Agender is gender as absence. Neutrois is a neutral or null gender. Maverique is presence — something with its own character that simply isn't male, female or the neutral point between them. If 'nothing' or 'neutral' lands as the right word for you, one of those two fits better, and neither is a lesser answer.
Is it a real gender, or just a Tumblr word from 2014?
Both halves are true and they don't contradict each other. The word was coined on Tumblr in June 2014 by one person, the community using it is small, and there's no research behind it. Every word for a gender or an orientation was invented by somebody, usually recently, usually by a handful of people first. What the word's age can't tell you is whether the experience it describes existed before anyone named it. You will meet people, some of them queer, who don't take it seriously. That is worth knowing before you use it out loud.
Do I need dysphoria, or to medically transition, for this to apply?
No. Some people who use this word have significant dysphoria and pursue medical transition. Some have none and want nothing changed. There's no body that reads as this to strangers anyway, so there's no standard destination to measure yourself against. Access matters too: in much of the world that care doesn't exist, isn't affordable, or isn't safe to ask for. None of it is a requirement.
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