Agender & Neutral Genders · 4 entries
Agender & Neutral Genders
The genders defined by absence, and the ones defined by neutrality, which are not the same claim. Agender means having no gender: the a- prefix is the Greek privative, as in amoral, and the people who use it often describe the question of their gender as not connecting to anything rather than as having a hard answer. Neutrois means a neutral or null gender, frequently with a wish to neutralise gendered physical features, and that relationship to the body is what separates the two words for the people who distinguish them.
Two further positions sit here and both are distinctions the users made rather than the cataloguer. Gendervoid names an absence experienced as a felt lack rather than a neutral blank. Quoigender, from the French quoi, is not a claim about having no gender but about finding the framework inapplicable, which is a refusal of the question rather than an answer to it. This is also the part of the catalogue where the numbers behave worst: neutrois fell from 2.6 per cent to about 0.4 per cent between two survey years, not because anything changed but because the checkbox did.
Emblem of the category
In this category
All 4 agender & neutral genders
4 entries
- AgenderAbsence rather than an unusual answer, dated by the OED to a 1996 newspaper article, and legally recognised once, in Oregon in 2017.
- GenderlessAn absence rather than a neutral, and a void rather than a blank: the four ordinary dictionary senses, and the 2014 Tumblr coinage of gendervoid.
- NeutroisA neutral gender coined by one named person in 1995, and the clearest proof on this whole site that changing a checkbox changes the answer sixfold.
- QuoigenderFrom the French quoi: not a gender of none but a refusal of the question itself, coined on Tumblr in 2014 after quoiromantic, and measured once, in 2022.
Keep going
The other categories
- Gender Around the WorldThe largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender.
- Trans & Binary IdentitiesMan, woman, trans and cis: every term for the relation between a person and the sex recorded for them at birth.
- Distinct Nonbinary GendersThe microlabels here share one insistence, and their sources make it in almost the same words every time: this is not a partial gender, not a blend, and not a point between two poles.
- Fluid & Changing GendersGenders that move.
Common questions
Questions about agender & neutral genders
Does having no gender mean being androgynous?
No, and the two are independent. Androgyny describes presentation, which is a statement about how somebody looks. Agender describes identity, which is a statement about what they are. An agender person may present in any way at all, including in ways that read as strongly masculine or feminine.
Is agender part of being non-binary?
Yes, in almost all usage. Non-binary covers everything not exclusively male or female, and having no gender at all falls inside that. Agender is a specific answer where non-binary is the category the answer belongs to.
What is gendervoid?
An absence of gender experienced as a felt lack rather than as a neutral blank. The distinction from plain agender is made by the people using the word rather than imposed from outside, and it is about how the absence feels rather than about whether it is there.
Why do the figures for these terms vary so much?
Because survey design moves them more than anything else does. Neutrois was chosen by 2.6 per cent of Gender Census respondents when it appeared as a checkbox in 2021 and by about 0.4 per cent when it had to be written in the following year. The same effect applies to every community percentage on this site.