What Is Bigenderism?

By Andreea Nica

Mark, 61, first recognized his “preference for his inner feminine side” when he was 4 years-old. “I loved playing with dolls, [hosting] tea parties, and pretending to cook,” he recalls. “When we played house, I was just as comfortable being the wife as the husband.” Other times, he remembers, “I was all boy, playing with a GI Joe in the mud in the backyard.”

This is how Mark began expressing an identity that we are just now beginning to study and understand. While campaigns and activist work have helped to foster a growing acceptance of transgender persons, very little is understood, let alone accepted, about those like Mark who identify as both male and female genders.

This may because the identity is seemingly quite rare; surveys exploring this identity are also quite rare, but one 1997 survey of the transgender community by the San Francisco Department of Public Health found that about 3% of trans individuals assigned male at birth and 8% of trans individuals assigned female at birth identified as bigender.

Yet it’s worth questioning if a lack of research and support has led to the identity being underreported. And common or not, it’s an identity that deserves to be understood.

Being bigender, it should be clarified, is not the same as being transgender. Nor is it the same as being…