Genderfae describes gender fluidity that moves among feminine, neutral and agender experiences but never includes masculine ones. Genderfaun is the counterpart: fluidity that never includes feminine ones.
Definition
Both are genderfluid identities with one binary pole permanently outside the range.
Start with genderfluid: a gender that moves. For most genderfluid people the movement is open-ended and can pass through anything.
Genderfae and genderfaun describe fluidity with a fixed boundary. A genderfae person's gender may shift between woman, girl, neutral, agender, and any number of non-binary experiences, and it never goes to masculine. A genderfaun person's gender shifts across a similarly wide range and never goes to feminine.
The boundary is the defining feature. It is not a preference or an avoidance, it is a description of where the fluidity actually reaches. Genderfae is sometimes also written genderfaer.
Flag
Community flags exist for both, generally pastel-striped designs adapted from the genderfluid flag, with genderfae leaning pink and green and genderfaun leaning blue and yellow. Neither has a single documented designer or an agreed set of hex values, so we do not publish colour codes for them. If you have documentation of an original design post for either flag, we would like to see it: see our sources page.
Etymology
Both come from folklore rather than Latin or Greek, which makes them unusual among gender terms. Fae is the fairy folk. Faun is the Roman woodland spirit, half goat and half man. The pairing was chosen for the sense of something untamed and shifting rather than for any claim about femininity or masculinity in the creatures themselves.
Both were coined in online non-binary communities in the mid-2010s, principally on Tumblr, in the same wave of vocabulary-building that produced genderflux and the demigender terms. As with most microlabels of that period, no single coiner is reliably documented, and we would rather say that than invent one.
History
Emerged from Tumblr genderfluid communities as people sought language for fluidity with a fixed exclusion - the recognition that some genderfluid people's range simply never includes one binary pole. Related: librafeminine/libramasculine describe a different, static partial experience.
Both terms circulated on Tumblr in the mid 2010s and no single coining post has been reliably identified for either. The dates given in community glossaries are secondhand.
Common myths
Myth: genderfae is just a complicated way of saying demigirl
They describe different structures. Demigirl is a stable partial identification with womanhood: it does not move. Genderfae moves constantly across a range of genders and simply never reaches masculinity. One is a fixed fraction, the other is a bounded motion.
Myth: it is the same as being a genderfluid woman
Not necessarily. A genderfae person's range can include agender, neutrois and various non-binary genders that have nothing to do with womanhood. The only claim being made is about what the range excludes.
Myth: these labels are too specific to be useful
For a person whose fluidity has a consistent wall in it, the wall is one of the most important facts about their experience, and being able to say it in one word saves a paragraph every time. That is what identity vocabulary is for. Nobody is required to adopt a term that does not describe them.
