Genderless

The dictionary sense and the identity sense are old and new respectively, which is why a search for the word turns up Finnish grammar and cosmetics marketing before it turns up anybody using it about themselves.

Why gendervoid is not quite agender

Agender and genderless are used interchangeably often enough that the LGBTQIA+ Wiki has to say so before it can draw the line. Agender is the broader term and can stretch to cover a neutral gender as well as none at all. Gendervoid is narrower, and the difference is experiential rather than logical: an agender person may report never having had a gender to begin with, while a gendervoid person reports an empty space where one would be, or treats the void itself as the gender.

The community wrote the distinction into its own flags. The design posted by the fandom user Fruitindividual in February 2021 sets a broken outer ring around a black core, and the wiki explains the break as marking an absence with a void put in its place, expressly to separate the identity from agender.

Where gendervoid was coined

Gendervoid was coined in 2014 by the Tumblr user baaphomett, through mogai-archive, and it was first used as a plain synonym for agender. The narrowing came afterwards and came from use, not from any single post announcing it.

The first flag came from the DeviantArt account Pride-Flags on 4 July 2015, in black, grey and dark blue, with no symbolism attached beyond the colours standing for the void. More followed: three from the Tumblr user eleiinium in May 2021, one from Felix.guchi that June, and a space-themed version from goldstargloww in March 2022. The sequence is worth noticing on its own, because a term with that many flags and no dictionary entry for its identity sense is a term whose entire record sits inside the community using it.

Who was genderless before the word existed

The adjective is much older than the identity, and the historical record holds people it fits. The Public Universal Friend, who emerged in 1776 in New England after a near-fatal illness, renounced a birth name and gendered pronouns and preached for decades afterwards; Wikipedia names the Friend as an early American instance of gender beyond the binary, and the Teaching LGBTQ History project gives the longer account.

In 1997 Jim Sinclair, an autism-rights activist and a founder of Autism Network International, declared a physical and social neuter status in an introduction written for the Intersex Society of North America. Neither case used the vocabulary catalogued here, and reading a modern label back onto either would misdescribe it. What the two establish is that the position is older than the word for it.

How often the word is chosen

The Gender Census recorded genderless at 15.8 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2022 and gendervoid at 6.8 per cent. Both are shares of a self-selected survey of gender-diverse people rather than of any population, and both are large by the standards of the terms around them.

The relationship between the two figures is the useful part. Gendervoid runs at well under half the rate of genderless, which is the shape of a narrower term sitting inside a broader one rather than of a synonym for it. Under the Non-binary umbrella, genderless is among the more frequently chosen answers and gendervoid is a specific reading of it.