This story mentions trans- and queerphobic slurs.
Gaia, a 20-year-old trans woman from Bengaluru, can pinpoint the exact moment when gender euphoria truly entered her life. “September 2024,” she said, showing me the photo gallery on her phone. She had eased into transitioning socially in the latter half of that year and had started experimenting with makeup and nail art to express herself. “It’s when I started keeping pictures of myself!”
Gaia believes language was an important part of this shift. While her family is still navigating her new pronouns, her friends were intensely supportive from day one. When they first used feminine pronouns to refer to her, “it used to be like little shocks of joy,” she said. It inspired her to experiment with her appearance more freely, which led to a feedback loop where she continued to be perceived as more and more feminine. With time, as strangers too instinctively affirmed her identity, the feeling of elation only deepened.“It’s super comforting to know that I’m being perceived as I want. People I don’t even know will call me ‘ma’am,’ and it’s like, hell yeah, I am.”
Gender euphoria has always been a footnote in the shadow of gender dysphoria—its louder, more overbearing cousin. Gender dysphoria is the distress caused by a mismatch between one’s actual gender identity and the gender they are assigned at birth. In recent times, however, gender euphoria has found its footing in the everyday jargon of queer communities and in academic literature.
The turning point of this shift came in 2019 when Florence Ashley, a trans person and law faculty member at the University of Alberta, published an influential paper critiquing the approach of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to gender-affirming treatment. The APA’s definition of gender dysphoria required trans persons to be experiencing “clinically significant distress or impairment” in order to qualify for medical care. Florence argued that this approach was dehumanising and suggested that “gender euphoria” and “creative transfiguration” were perfectly valid reasons to seek out gender-affirming care.
A snowball effect ensued, with researchers choosing to study gender through a euphoric lens and actively working to fill the gaping hole in academia when it comes to gender euphoria and trans experiences. In 2025, the Gender Euphoria Scale was developed, creating a consistent method of measuring and validating gender euphoria in clinical and research settings.
While there is no widely accepted definition of the term, a 2022 study published in the International Journal of Transgender Health described gender euphoria as “a joyful feeling of rightness in one’s gender.”
Joy and happiness are often the first emotions we associate with gender euphoria. But feeling truly comfortable in our gender identity brings so much more—confidence, self-assurance, a sense of attractiveness, and deep affirmation. A wave of studies all point to the conclusion that gender euphoria is linked to higher resilience, lower mental anguish, and overall better quality of life.
A 2022 Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies paper identifies at least two forms gender euphoria can take: “ecstatic joy,” which is linked to milestones like receiving a new name, and “[a] quiet sense of calmness,” arising from consistent gender affirmation over time. Some transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people also describe gender euphoria and dysphoria as existing on a spectrum, rather than as opposites. As with everything else that’s identity-related, gender euphoria is deeply personal.
This personal peace, however, is becoming harder to find as the world grows increasingly hostile to gender diversity. The US passed 126 anti-trans bills in 2025, according to data collated by the Trans Legislation Tracker, an independent research organisation. In 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court outlawed the “international LGBT movement,” labelling it an “extremist organisation.” In February 2025, the country issued its first prison sentence under the ban. In 2023, six African nations either passed new anti-LGBTQIA+ laws or strengthened existing ones—and more have since followed suit. In India, landmark legal judgements and legislation in the 2010s offered hope. But queer and trans Indians continue to face severe stigma and discrimination, which prevents them from accessing employment, healthcare, and justice in the face of violence.
In these turbulent times, accessing queer joy is as much about survival as it is about expression. And like Gaia, many TGNC people experience gender euphoria through language. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which surveyed 129 TGNC folks from the US, found that something as simple as the use of preferred names reduced suicidal ideation by 29 percent and suicidal behaviour by a whopping 56 percent.
Using language that respects people’s identities is good for them. Well, duh. Tigers eat meat. Pigs don’t fly. You get my point. Queer people have always known this to be true. There is now an increasing amount of research suggesting that the link between affirmative language and gender euphoria is as much fact as it is belief. Whether through neopronouns or reclaimed slurs, language offers queer people an avenue to go beyond the narrative of struggle and reach for joy and power instead.
As queerbeat examined academic research from around the world and spoke to TGNC folks who have been pushing linguistic boundaries on their gender journeys, the evidence was clear: affirming language and queer joy are inextricably linked. Using the words and labels people choose for themselves is not a matter of mere politeness—it is a vital, life-sustaining act of self-assertion and recognition.
Star/starself and the joy of creation
Ash, a high school student in New Delhi, uses the neopronouns star/starself online. Broadly, neopronouns are pronouns that express a gender identity that isn’t captured by conventional pronouns such as he, she, or they. For Ash, the pronoun star is not directly linked to star’s gender identity. “It’s not that I necessarily identify as a star. It’s more so what my gender feels like, at times,” Ash said. “When I use more conventional pronouns, it feels like I’m cosplaying a character. It’s like, when you read a book, and it’s in first person, but you know it’s not you in the story. Star is personal to me, and makes me feel connected to myself.”
Neopronoun users echoed this sentiment in various social media posts that queerbeat accessed. There are several subreddits where TGNC folks actively discuss neopronouns; a Tumblr blog compiles several lists of neopronouns, both themed and unthemed. The themed lists range from science niches (“myce/myceliself,” inspired by mycology, the study of fungi), to abstract feelings (“doze/dozeself,” inspired by tiredness), and even puppets (“wax/waxself”). Then there is Pronouny, an online platform dedicated entirely to sharing and discovering pronouns, neo and otherwise.
TGNC folks who use neopronouns are aware that they may be perceived as “extra”—but regardless, they are here to stay. “I tell people my favourite social media site is Pronouny to piss them off,” said Ash with a laugh.
A 2009 study published in the journal Developmental Psychology suggested that people become aware of linguistic gender-coding—or the usage of gendered words in their vocabulary—as infants. This might ring even truer for languages with gendered verbs—think Hindi, Nepali, French, and Spanish, among others.
While the singular they/them pronoun has now become fairly well known, it is widely perceived as gender-neutral. Gender-neutrality is not always the goal, however, and like Ash, people deserve to use terminology that is personal to them.
In the absence of such terminology, TGNC folks are often forced to pick a binary category to align with. For example, a 2024 study published in the International Journal of Transgender Health quotes an 18-year-old Hispanic non-binary participant: “With my family, we only speak in Spanish, so I use feminine pronouns with them ’cause there’s nothing else. And they wouldn’t be able to understand anything other than that.”
Ash, who speaks Hindi at home, resonated. “That’s well put. It’s a compromise that has no other option,” star said. In both cases, the languages that their families used could not accommodate their unique feelings. Their selfhood is quite literally “muted” by the lack of appropriate vocabulary.
In the 1970s, British anthropologists Edwin and Shirley Ardener coined “muted group theory” to explain a similar silence. The theory was born out of their observation that women’s perspectives were often underrepresented in anthropological studies. They argued that women faced an inherent disadvantage in communicating their thoughts to researchers because the language system used in ethnography was defined entirely by the dominant group—men.
Queer people, and TGNC communities in particular, encounter a comparable challenge since our linguistic systems have developed largely around the needs of cisgender people. For millennia, cis-het people have controlled both social norms and actual vocabulary across mass media, everyday conversations, and literature. Pronouns are a big part of this vocabulary. A major consensus among neopronoun users is the disconnect they feel from mainstream pronouns—including they/them—a sentiment echoed by TGNC people across multiple studies on the subject.
In the 2024 International Journal of Transgender Health study cited earlier, for example, non-binary participants who were surveyed said that conventional labels sometimes failed to capture the complicated nature of gender. “[I] think that they’re [they/them pronouns] easier for people to use,” said a 20-year-old genderfluid participant. “I don’t think they feel 100 percent right … I don’t think I ever will find pronouns that feel 100 percent right, but they feel the best out of … everything else I’ve tried.”
Another participant, an 18-year-old genderqueer person, described how they briefly tried to go through life with no pronouns at all. “It was really nice, but also it got really confusing for people … It’s not going to be easy for everyone else to assimilate to, which is always frustrating,” they said. For most TGNC folks, conventional pronouns are served with a mandatory side of compromise.
On the flip side, there is the instant “click” that people report when they identify with an existing neopronoun or create their own. In 2020, the Gay & Lesbian Review conducted a study of 200 users of a website frequented by the trans community, including neopronoun users. One participant said about their choice to go by “xi/xer,” “It makes me feel like I’m not regular, because I’m not! I feel like nothing, like I’m not supposed to have a gender. [It’s] just a little mix-up on nature’s part, and I feel xi/xer pronouns best suit me.” Another participant, who used xi/xir, noted that they/them felt “impersonal and ambiguous” and that they preferred neopronouns “because they’re strictly unrelated to binary genders.” For many TGNC folks, neopronouns simply fit better. They are the joy of creation in action.
And the joy is spreading. In 2013, the website Gender Census conducted its first-ever statistical survey of non-binary-identifying internet users. Of the 2,000 participants surveyed, 19 percent said they used pronouns beyond the he-she-they trinity. Fast forward to a decade later, and the 2025 Gender Census survey: 43,000 people participated, and 32.9 percent of participants selected neopronouns as their preferred pronouns. One in every 19 respondents submitted a new neopronoun as their preferred pronoun. That’s more unique neopronouns than there are days in a year.
This is a linguistic revolution in the making. And like any revolution, it isn’t without its naysayers. People generally tend to view pronouns as a “closed class,” a linguistic category of words that cannot be changed over time. So neopronouns face opposition—both from cis-het people as well as within the TGNC community. A 2022 Journal of Language and Sexuality study surveyed 1,000 cisgender and transgender people from Europe and the US on their attitudes towards English neopronouns. The group was largely composed of young, university-educated participants who identified as liberal and feminist. While 66 percent of participants viewed the non-binary usage of they/them as acceptable, only 36 percent believed neopronouns are acceptable. Interestingly, both proponents and critics of neopronouns consistently described them as “weird.” In the Gay & Lesbian Review article referenced earlier, trans folk expressed concern that neopronouns could backfire and put the trans community at risk of ridicule.
This scepticism endures even though neopronouns—literally, “new” pronouns—have, ironically, been around forever. University of Illinois linguistics professor Dennis Baron states in his book What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She that the first “non-they” neopronoun he could trace was “ou.” He traces multiple other pronouns that achieved limited popularity in literature, including “thon” and “he’er” (which actually appeared in Webster’s International Dictionary for a brief period of time, but was dropped starting from the 1961 edition).
According to Dennis, since the singular pronoun “they” has been repurposed from its original usage as a collective pronoun to fill a gap in gendered language and provide a gender-neutral option, it too counts as a neopronoun. This isn’t even a modern shift—they/them was already being used in this way back in the fourteenth century.
Any self-proclaimed members of the linguistic police reading this article will be glad to know that they’re not alone in their valiant efforts to reject the singular they/them—they share their frustrations with commentators in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1794, three women who wrote an anonymous newspaper article faced objections from a male writer over their use of the singular “them” pronoun to conceal their gender, recounts Dennis in a 2016 presentation titled Pronoun Showdown.
Today, the battle lines have shifted: the singular they/them has become more commonplace, but other neopronouns are still considered strange. Before you pick the hill you will die on in this debate, it might be worth considering that these words are really not as immutable and unchanging as they might seem. Back in the nineteenth century, under British law—and in common parlance— “he” was an acceptable substitute for “she” (but not the other way round, of course). In 1912, George Harvey, the then editor of Harper’s Weekly, wrote: “When ‘man’ ceases to include women we shall cease to need a language, and won’t care any more about pronouns.” That view seems antiquated today, of course—and the resistance to neopronouns might appear just as outdated in the years to come.
From slurs to shields
Noor, a 25-year-old trans woman pursuing her master’s degree in Bengaluru, was called a “tranny” for the first time in fifth grade. Today, this hateful slur sits proudly on her Instagram bio, right next to a cat emoji.
“It stung a lot in the beginning. Turns out, these people look ridiculous commenting the word when it’s literally in my bio,” Noor said. “Like yeah, I know I am.”
Gaia, too, uses queerphobic slurs in conversations with friends. She enjoys reclaiming ugly words—like faggot, which she uses quite liberally—until they lose all negative meaning for her and the people around her. “I only use words that apply to me, obviously,” she said.
Noor’s approach, which essentially acknowledges and defangs the slurs that have been weaponised against her, is “echoic,” according to philosopher Claudia Bianchi, professor at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University. In her 2014 paper “Slurs and Appropriation: An Echoic Account,” Claudia argues that using a slur in this way echoes its original derogatory force but intentionally distorts its impact—much like a cave’s echo.
Gaia’s view, on the other hand, aligns with polysemy, a theory proposed by another philosopher, Robin Jeshion, an associate professor at the University of Southern California. Robin suggests that when marginalised groups adopt a slur, the word develops a second, distinct meaning that is either neutral or positive. Here, the meaning of the word literally changes as a result of reclamation. A common example is how the word “cunt” is now used to describe something as impressive or attractive. Both of these methods are attempts to transform language from oppressive to self-affirming.
In 2014, a team led by Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky conducted a series of experiments to understand the impact of such attempts to reclaim derogatory words. They found that people who labelled themselves with slurs were perceived by observers as more powerful. The slurs were also evaluated less negatively by observers after this process, suggesting that self-labelling had weakened the stigma those words carried.
The reclamation of slurs has always been a prominent theme in the queer rights movement. Perhaps the most in-your-face example is the word “queer” itself. In 1990, participants in New York’s Gay Pride Day Parade handed out the Queer Nation Manifesto. It was a breathtaking call to action, with a section titled “Why Queer?” that made its intentions crystal clear: “… when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we’ve chosen to call ourselves queer. Using ‘queer’ is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It’s a way of telling ourselves we don’t have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world … queer can be a rough word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe’s hands and use against him.”
The widespread use of “queer” today may well signal the potential for once-derogatory words to be successfully reclaimed. Perhaps, one day, no one will flinch at these words—because by then, they will be nothing more than quaint reminders of a bygone era. To get there, we keep at it, taking back every word from the oppressor until we leave them speechless.
Boxes, not cages
Gender euphoria finds us in the most innocuous of times and places. For Sehaj, a genderfluid college student, it was when they were out shopping. While they tried on clothes in the women’s section, a store employee directed them towards the women’s changing room. “It was sweet, but a little embarrassing. He called me ‘ma’am’! I couldn’t look him in the eye and ran away smiling,” they said.
Another time, while Sehaj was greeting family members, the older women called them a good hugger. “They said I hugged like a woman,” they recalled. “It was a silly compliment, but I loved it.”
While Sehaj confesses that they still find gender labels confusing and limiting, they enjoy these little euphoric moments of being perceived as feminine and being addressed with feminine titles and pronouns.
To claim that TGNC identities can only be captured through language that is beyond the binary is to do a disservice to their uniqueness. There is power in identifying with a pre-existing label and finding joy in the vocabulary that comes with it. Participants in the previously mentioned 2024 International Journal of Transgender Health study discussed how pronouns gave them “permission” to identify and act in ways that aligned with their identities. Beyond pronouns, participants also spoke about other gendered labels—brother, son, sister, boyfriend—and how euphoric they could be when used correctly. When these participants were addressed with the right title or pronouns in social settings, they were far more likely to feel safe and respected.
While scholarly literature related to gender euphoria is growing, there are still many gaps in understanding and documenting TGNC experiences through the lens of joy. The qualitative nature of these studies can potentially raise academic eyebrows. On the flip side, many researchers still study genderqueer communities primarily through a dysphoric lens, shedding light on the painful, awkward, and often ugly underbelly of identity. This risks creating a narrative where the experience of gender exploration is inherently negative and characterised only by stress and the resilience required to endure it.
TGNC people, especially those newly exploring their identity, deserve to see possibilities beyond just struggle. And one very accessible method is to reframe stories from resilience to joy and fulfillment. Keeping in mind the importance of listening to trans voices in these matters, here is a 21-year-old non-binary person describing gender euphoria, as quoted in the 2022 International Journal of Transgender Health paper cited earlier: “It’s literally life saving. I wish I could describe it to those of you who haven’t had it before, but existing in a space, in a moment where your body and gender align [and] feel right with each other when so often that is not the case is ELECTRIC. It’s what keeps trans folks alive, those moments of feeling fully and euphorically ourselves.”