Agender & Neutral Genders
Agender & Neutral Genders · 4 entries
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 drew, not the cataloguer. Gendervoid names an absence experienced as a felt lack rather than a neutral blank. Quoigender, from the French quoi, claims that the framework does not apply at all, 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, because the checkbox changed and nothing else did.
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 first recognised in law by an Oregon court ruling in 2017.
- GenderlessAn absence rather than a neutral, and a void rather than a blank: the three 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, meaning what: a refusal of the gender question itself, coined on Tumblr in 2014 after quoiromantic and measured once, in 2022.
Keep going
The other categories
- Gender Around the WorldThis is the largest group in the catalogue, and the one most readers arrive at by searching for a third gender.
- Pronouns & Forms of AddressThe words in this group do not name a kind of person.
- Gender Expression & PresentationWhat these gender expression terms report is presentation, stance and the scene a person comes from, rather than an answer to the question of what their gender is. [[butch]] is the clearest case: Wikipedia files it inside the lesbian subculture, with its own traits, behaviours and styles, and the word grew out of working-class bar culture in the 1940s, not out of any theory of identity. [[genderpunk|Genderpunk]] and gender bending belong here for a related reason, since both describe an active stance against a norm.
- Trans & Binary IdentitiesMan, woman, trans and cis: every term for the relation between a person and the sex recorded for them at birth.
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, where plain agender is a neutral blank. The people using the word draw the distinction themselves, and it concerns how the absence feels, not 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.