The 2026 gender grid: thirty colours for who you are and who you want

What the grid is

The 1970s code had a colour for almost everything two people might do. It had nothing for who they were. When the code was built, most of the words on this page did not exist yet, or existed only in rooms you had to know how to find.

So in 2026 we added thirty colours. They sit on exactly the same grammar as the old code — one colour, two pockets — but the pockets mean something new. Left pocket is who you are. Right pocket is who you are drawn to. Same colour, both pockets: identity and attraction line up.

Nothing about the grid is a test, a category you have to pick, or a claim about what any of these words should mean to you. It is thirty colours you can hold up against yourself and see which one feels like home. If none do, that is information too.

The thirty

Some of the colours name a gender: non-binary is lavender, agender is soft mint, genderfluid is a sunset gradient because it will not sit still, demigirl is pale grey-blue and demiboy pale grey-green, neutrois is seafoam, bigender is dusk purple. Transfeminine is soft gold and transmasculine is teal green. Cis man is deep blue and cis woman crimson, because the grid is for everyone, not only for people who have had to think about it.

Some name a stage rather than a destination: assigned and exploring is soft beige; gender questioning is a muted teal; shifting identity is an aurora gradient; in transition is violet; social transition is warm copper; stealth or low-disclosure is dusty rose; trans and visible is ink black. These are not steps on a ladder. They are places people actually are.

And some name expression rather than identity — the way you carry yourself, which is not the same thing: high femme, soft femme, soft masc, butch/stud/masc-of-centre, androgyne, rugged, queer maximalist, and classic. You can be a non-binary high femme or a cis man in soft masc. Wear both.

Reading your colour

Say you find yourself in demigirl. Pale grey-blue in your left pocket says: this is me. The same colour in your right pocket says: this is who I am drawn to. Two prints, hung left and right, are the pair — you and the person who reads you.

The words on each print are deliberately short and deliberately plain. We used the terms as Stonewall’s list of LGBTQ+ terms sets them out, in the words people use for themselves. Where a word has more than one meaning in the community, we chose the most common and said so on the print’s own page.

If you are still working it out

Most people are. Questioning has its own colour on this grid for exactly that reason, and “assigned and exploring” is there for people who are comfortable where they are and curious anyway. There is no deadline and nobody is keeping score.

We are an art studio, not a service. We can tell you what a colour means and where it comes from; we cannot tell you who you are, and we would not try. If the feeling is bigger than a colour can hold — or if home, school or work is not a safe place to have it — the Support page lists people who will listen, for free, without telling anyone.