misgender

present singular third person misgenders · participle present misgendering · participle past misgendered · past misgendered

1. transitiveTo refer to (someone) using terms that express the wrong gender, either unknowingly or intentionally.

   Misnamed (and misgendered) was Patricia Glass Schuman, of Neal-Schuman Publishers.

   1990, Library Journal, page 9

   5 more examples

   Gendering is the process of classifying and identifying the gender of other people, quickly and usually unconsciously, based on just a few visual and/or audio clues. This process of gendering privileges cisgendered people as few cisgendered people have had the experience of being misgendered. The experience of being misgendered is common for all transgendered people before they transition and for many transgendered people after they transition.

   2013, Kelby Harrison, “Introduction: Many Have Passed; Some Have Failed”, in Sexual Deceit: The Ethics of Passing, Lexington Books, →ISBN, page 12

   With a few notable exceptions[…]reports from the mainstream press willfully misgendered Manning while reporting this news.

   2013 August 22, Katie McDonough, “Media willfully misgender Chelsea Manning”, in Salon, archived from the original on 15 Jul 2013

   Their results showed that cisgenderist language is commonplace in professional communications between psychologists about children who self-defined their gender, that the most pathologizing language is found in literature by mental health professionals, and that those most closely tied to the most prolific author in the field through publication are most likely to use language that pathologizes and misgenders children.

   2014, Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber, Feminist Research Practice: A Primer, 2nd edition, Los Angeles, C.A. […]: SAGE, →ISBN, page 63

   Occasionally, of course, we misgender people by accident. As a child is transitioning from presenting as a boy to presenting as a girl, for example, it may take time for friends and adults around that child to remember to use the pronoun "she," no matter how loving, accepting, and well meaning they are.

   2016, Michele Angello, Ali Bowman, Raising the Transgender Child

   Such assumptions can motivate expressions of cisgenderism such as retroactive misgendering (in which a person's past is described using language that disregards or contrasts with their current designation of their gender) […]

   2016, Abbie E. Goldberg, The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies, page 232

2. transitivegrammarTo use the wrong grammatical gender with a word.

   Leonie was always, in fact, the first to point out a misconjugated verb, a misgendered noun, […]

   2017, Rebecca Schuman, Schadenfreude, A Love Story

   2 more examples

   Our first demonstration at the Canadian border—where we’d planned to test rumors about PWAs being denied entry into Canada by announcing we all had AIDS—fizzled when our bus entered the country without incident, save the late realization that our bilingual T-shirts had misgendered the virus—it's “le SIDA,” not “la SIDA”—causing a frantic scramble for sharpies and eyebrow pencils to correct the offending vowel.

   2022, Ron Goldberg, “Storming the Ivory Tower”, in Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York, Fordham University Press, →ISBN

   Next is a list of misgendered words between the two languages: Similar words with different genders […]

   2022, John Whitlam, Agripino S. Silveira, Modern Brazilian Portuguese Grammar: A Practical Guide