Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Sandy Stone’s The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto, are credited to lay the groundwork to access self-determinant terms like genderqueer in the late 1980s–90s.

For trans folks,”to generate a true, effective and representational counterdiscourse is to speak from outside the boundaries of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible,” Stone wrote.

There seemed to be a need for a term coining shared common ground outside gender while simultaneously finding words that came close to describing individual lived realities.

Leslie Feinberg wrote in 1992: “There are other words used to express the wide range of ‘gender outlaws’: transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and drag kings, cross-dressers, bulldaggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes... We didn’t choose these words. They don’t fit all of us. It’s hard to fight an oppression without a name connoting pride, a language that honors us..”

Kate Bornstein, wrote in 1994: “All the categories of transgender find a common ground in that they each break one or more of the rules of gender: what we have in common is that we are gender outlaws, every one of us. To attempt to divide us into rigid categories…is like trying to apply the laws of solids to the state of fluids: it’s our fluidity that keeps us in touch with each other..”

‘Genderqueer’ started gaining a footing through activist circles and political organizing as queer and trans folks engaged, deconstructed and created vocabulary that could more fully express their identities.

Jacob Tobia says in a video, “If you were a gay person who was political, you were an orientation queer, and if you were a transgender person who was political… you were a gender queer.”

In 1995, activist Riki Anne Wilchins catalyzed its wide use through print: ‘It’s about all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersex, transsexuals, transvestites, transgendered, transgressively gendered, and those of us whose gender expressions are so complex they haven’t even been named yet.’

With the internet, ‘Genderqueer’ manifested exponentially.