Agenderfluid

What agenderfluid keeps constant

The base is the whole of the definition, and the sources on file put it in several noticeably different ways. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki's main reading is the strongest: agender is the resting state, and everything else is a departure from it that ends where it started. The same page then offers a narrower alternative in which the fluidity never leaves the agender spectrum at all, moving only between agender and agender-aligned genders, which is a materially smaller claim about what an agenderfluid person experiences.

The Nonbinary Wiki does not use the base metaphor. Its article says an agenderfluid person identifies as both agender and genderfluid, and adds that such a person may be constantly agender while also holding another fluid identity, so the two components run in parallel rather than one sitting under the other. The British charity akt, which lists the term under the agender umbrella in its resources for agender people, gives the same formulation in a single clause.

None of the six is a definition of record, and no dictionary carries the word. What the column shows is a term whose sources agree on the ingredients and not on how they combine.

How agenderfluid differs from agenderflux

The distinction is whether the identity itself moves. An Agenderflux person is agender throughout, and only the strength of a gendered feeling changes. An agenderfluid person's identity does change: the LGBTQIA+ Wiki gives the example of somebody who is sometimes a girl, sometimes a Demiboy and sometimes libranonbinary or Maverique, and who comes back to agender each time. Read against that example, the narrower definition on the same page rules much of it out, since a girl is not an agender-aligned gender.

There is a compound for holding both at once. The Nonbinary Wiki's agender page records agenderfluix, described as a cross between agenderfluid and agenderflux, for a gender identity that is predominantly agender while being fluid in nature and fluctuating in intensity over time. It carries four further names on that page, gxnderfluix, agxnderfluix, afluidflux and flxidflux, and no coiner for any of them.

Why agenderfluid is often read as cancegender

The two words are used interchangeably in places, and the wikis disagree about whether they should be. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki separates them: in cancegender the changes are tied to the person's emotions, which agenderfluid does not require. The Nonbinary Wiki's agender page files each as a synonym of the other, in both directions, and marks both entries as needing a citation.

Where the merged reading is clearest is on the DeviantArt account Pride-Flags, whose agenderfluid entry, published on 14 February 2021, is headed cancegender or agenderfluid and treats them as one identity: mainly agender, with fluid or fluctuating gender feelings that correlate with the emotions, feelings the description says can be deeply upsetting and can destabilise the emotional state, which causes further gender changes. The same page supplies the fact that explains where cancegender came from and why its definition looks the way it does. Cancegender is a zodiacgender, one of a set built on the signs, and it is named for the constellation Cancer.

One term arrives from a naming system built on the zodiac and carries an account of emotions with it; the other is a compound of two existing gender words and carries no such account.

Who agenderfluid is credited to

The attributions cross over each other. The Nonbinary Wiki's agender page credits agenderfluid to the Tumblr user pleurocarpus and cancegender to prideful-concerto, marking both attributions as uncited. Pride-Flags credits cancegender instead to the Tumblr user pleurocarpous, on or before 8 August 2014, posted through MOGAI-Archive.

So the same name, in two spellings, is attached to agenderfluid on one page and to cancegender on another, while a third attribution names somebody else for cancegender entirely. Nothing on file dates the coinage of agenderfluid. The only firm date in the tangle belongs to the word it is confused with, and it is the earliest date recorded for either word.

Where the agenderfluid flags came from

Flag design followed the position that the two words are separate. Several agenderfluid flags were drawn on 25 December 2018 by the Tumblr user thelihgtfluxtastic, all of them combinations of the agender and genderfluid flags, and all built with the agender flag as the base because agender is the base identity. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki records the stated purpose without hedging it: the flags were made so that agenderfluid would have a flag of its own that did not also stand for cancegender.

The Pride-Flags entry from 2021 runs the other way. It carries a flag for the merged term with the designer given as unknown.

Where agenderfluid has actually been counted

Once, in a survey that was not asking about it. The published analysis of the 2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey worked through 3,083 responses, of which 156, or 6.48 per cent, chose the other option on the gender question and wrote something in. The analyst tallied those 156 by hand, warning in the same paragraph that the option is often used by people writing in criticism of the question rather than an answer to it, and reached 90 to 96 answers that could be counted as genuine, which is under three per cent of the survey.

Within the tally, agender took 35 of the 156 and non-binary took 55. Six answers were classified as esoteric, and agenderfluid is one of the five the analysis names, listed alongside Blackstar, spiderman and two further write-ins the analysis prints without comment. That is the whole of its appearance. The classification records what one analyst made of one write-in in 2016; it establishes that somebody typed the word into a survey box that year, and it establishes nothing about the answer's seriousness in either direction.

Elsewhere the record is thinner still. The Nonbinary Wiki's article on the term carries a notability warning asking for reliable sources and stating that an administrator may delete the page. The akt listing is a one-line gloss inside a resource page whose historical section dates the parent word, agender, to a Usenet forum in 2000, which puts sixteen years between the base term's first documented use and the compound's first dated appearance. No academic literature covers agenderfluid, and no survey has counted it as an option people could select.