Agender

A term like Genderqueer answers the question of what somebody's gender is with an unusual answer. Agender declines the question, and people who use it often report that the question itself does not connect to anything. Wikipedia lists genderless, gender-free, non-gendered and ungendered as synonyms, and the A in LGBTQIA+ stands for agender alongside asexual and aromantic.

What agender claims and what it declines

The sources separate several positions that all end up under the word, and it is the people using it who draw the distinctions.

• Having no gender. The plain reading, and the most common.
• Being neutrally gendered, which Neutrois names more precisely and which some experience as a positive neutral rather than an absence.
• Finding the concept inapplicable, where the objection is not to having a gender but to the framework. Quoigender is the term for that, from the French quoi.
• Gendervoid, an absence experienced as a felt lack rather than a neutral blank. Its first known appearance is a Tumblr post in 2015.

Wikipedia's account allows for degrees inside the label. Some agender people associate partially with other genders and some reject gender outright, and demiagender names the first of those, a partial connection to one gender held alongside a partial connection to none. Someone whose gender fluctuates down to nothing may pass through agender without being agender, which is where the overlap with Genderflux sits. Gender nonconformity is a separate axis again, describing a person who does not meet the expectations attached to a gender, which a great many people who do have one also fail to meet.

Merriam-Webster carries the word as an adjective and gives it two readings in a single sense: an internal sense of being neither male nor female nor any combination of the two, and a gender identity that is genderless or neutral. Wiktionary's headword is wider still, glossing agender as lacking gender in any sense at all, and its usage example is grammatical, with no person in it.

No pronoun set follows from the label. Singular they is the most common choice, and a large share of agender people accept any pronouns, so the word predicts very little about how a particular person asks to be referred to. Wikipedia also records the term agender euphoria for the experience some people report in spaces or activities where gender is not in play, and names video games as one place those spaces reliably exist.

The agender flag, seven stripes of black, grey, white and green, was made in 2014 by the Tumblr user Salom X. Black and white stand for the absence of gender, grey for semi-genderlessness and green for non-binary genders.

The label is much newer than anything it describes, a point them. makes in its Inqueery series on the history of queer vocabulary. The Public Universal Friend is the illustration that recurs: an American preacher who founded the Society of Universal Friends and who, after a severe illness, said they had been returned to life as a genderless evangelist.

Which labels crowd the same ground

Around the edges sit labels that almost nobody uses, and the Gender Census counts them precisely enough to say so. Of 43,096 responses in 2025, 248 people chose gender apathetic or one of its synonyms, 152 chose gendervoid, 130 chose neutrois, eight chose apogender and five chose demiagender.

Each of those makes a different claim. Neutrois was coined by H.A. Burnham in 1995, thought to be from the French neutre and trois, and it sits closer to expression and physical appearance than agender does; it was among the fifty gender options Facebook added in 2014, and its heaviest use was in the 2010s. Apogender takes the Greek apo, meaning away or separate, and names a distance from the concept of gender rather than an absence of gender within it; people who use it often describe themselves as gender-distanced as well. Gender apathetic, also written apagender, names indifference, and it has collected an unusual number of alternative names: gender apathy, cassgender, inersgender, anvisgender and greygender, plus cis apathetic and trans apathetic. Katie Seaborn, Shano Liang, Rua Mae Williams and Phoebe O. Toups Dugas treated gender apathetic in 2026 as an agender-adjacent identity beside genderless and gender-free, while Medical News Today and Gayety had filed it under the non-binary umbrella in 2022.

Where agender first appears in print

The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use as A-gender, in The Independent, in 1996, which puts it earlier than most of the vocabulary in this catalogue and gives it a dictionary of record with a date and a publication attached, which almost nothing here has. A paper in the International Journal of Transgenderism the following year described a person of any genetic sex who might regard themself as "an ungendered person, who does not or will not identify with any conventional gender", which is the same idea reaching print without the label.

The unhyphenated spelling arrives on Usenet, and its earliest uses are theological. Wiktionary's first citation is dated 28 July 2000, from a messianic newsgroup: "All I understand is that G-d is amorphous, agender, etc. so 'image' can't be a physical or gender or sexual thing." A second, from 21 November of the same year in a Quaker newsgroup, complains that there is no agender equivalent to he or she, since it is normally reserved for something without life. The OED's 2005 citation, from the newsgroup alt.politics.democrats, is the first that is plainly about people: "cultures can have transgender, agender, and hypergender individuals."

From there the word moves quickly into mainstream reporting. A New York Times feature on Generation LGBTQIA in 2013 described a student who had found the term on Tumblr, used the singular they, and later described her gender as an amorphous blob. Amy Harmon used it in the same paper in 2019, in a report on states offering a non-binary option on identity documents, glossing it in passing as the absence of gender beside androgyne and gender-fluid. By 2020 it was carrying a scene in the webcomic El Goonish Shive. Wiktionary now lists translations in fourteen languages, among them the French agenre, the Spanish agénero, the German geschlechtlos and the Japanese 無性.

How Oregon recognised agender

In March 2017 a Portland resident named Patch, a video game designer then aged twenty-seven, was granted permission by Judge Amy Holmes Hehn to be legally identified as agender, and became the first person in the United States recognised that way. Hehn was the same judge who had made the first American legal recognition of a non-binary person the year before. Agender Pride Day, on 19 May, dates from that ruling and has been held annually since.

In 2021 the Court of Justice of São Paulo allowed a non-binary applicant to be legally recognised as agender. These are single cases decided on their own facts. No general provision exists, and the two rulings are the whole of the legal record on file here.

Why a third gender box misses agender

A Cambridge University study, reported by Wikipedia, sets out the objection agender people make to the X markers and third-gender categories now available in many jurisdictions. A third box implies a third gender, and a person who has no gender is being asked to claim one instead of declining the question, which is the same move the word was chosen to refuse.

The same study found agender respondents were nonetheless fairly positive about the option existing. The disagreement runs inside the group, and nobody outside it is a party to it.

What the surveys on agender have counted

Five sets of figures are on file, and each measures a different population. Only one of them is drawn from a general census. The other four sampled people already filtered as gender-diverse or trans.

The 2015 United States Transgender Survey is the one that says most about how the label is held. Agender respondents had a median age of twenty-three and 77.3 per cent of them were assigned female at birth. The survey let people tick more than one term and they did: 79.9 per cent of those who selected agender also selected non-binary, 52.6 per cent genderqueer, 48.6 per cent Transgender, 36 per cent androgynous and 35.6 per cent Genderfluid. Agender is rarely the only word somebody uses.

Canada's 2022 census was the first anywhere to publish census data on non-binary people, and it is the one row above that is not a community survey. It recorded 5.1 per cent of non-binary people aged over fifteen, and 0.015 per cent of the population as a whole, describing themselves as agender. That last figure is the closest thing to a prevalence estimate on file, and it still depends on a person knowing the word well enough to write it down.

None of the community surveys measures prevalence at all. Each counts what people already inside a gender-diverse sample call themselves.