Glossary /
Bu nan bu nü (不男不女)
Derogatorybu nan bu nv · neither man nor woman
A note before reading
This word causes harm. This page exists to explain — to anyone who searched for it — why it hurts, where it came from, and what to say instead.
Say instead: address people by their own identity
"Neither man nor woman" — a verdict-style insult aimed at anyone who fails to perform gender "correctly."
Bu nan bu nü (不男不女) translates literally as “not male, not female.” It sounds like a description; it functions as a verdict: there are exactly two acceptable ways to be a person, and you have failed at both. It is one of the most common gender-policing insults in Chinese — heard on playgrounds, at family dinners, in comment sections — and its blast radius is wide: a boy with long hair, a woman with a buzz cut, a soft-spoken man, anyone androgynous, trans, or nonbinary.
Two things make it corrosive. First, it treats “how a man should be” and “how a woman should be” as self-evident standards, when gender expression has always been a spectrum whose rules shift by era and culture — Qing-dynasty men wore their hair in long braids. Second, it equates “off-template” with “defective.” People who grow up hearing it rarely learn to be “more manly” or “more womanly”; they learn to hide.
Register note: there is no neutral register for this phrase. Even delivered as a joke, what lands is “you are not acceptable.” To describe someone’s style, “androgynous” or “gender-neutral” works fine — or simpler still, don’t audit other people’s appearance. When addressing someone, follow their own identity.
Common misreading: applying it to nonbinary or genderqueer people as if it were “just accurate.” It isn’t — nonbinary is a name people choose for themselves; bu nan bu nü is a rejection issued from outside. One is self-naming, the other is a sentence. For the actual dimensions of gender, see Gender basics.