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.

Where the dictionary and the identity part company

The dictionary entry shows how much work the word was already doing before anyone used it as a label. Merriam-Webster splits its three senses into six, and the examples it prints for them come from arguments about labour, theology, poetry, power and shampoo. Letty Cottin Pogrebin is quoted on work being genderless while the jobs mostly done by men are better paid; John Boswell on whether the compilers of the Torah, meaning to portray a nonanthropomorphic God, had to pick the less obtrusive of the two genders Hebrew offers, a language with no neuter. Alicia Ostriker is quoted on the belief that true poetry is genderless being a disguised form of believing it masculine. Dawn Reiss supplies the marketing sense, on the rise of clean beauty lines using genderless language to play up how inclusive their products are, and Jennifer L. Prewitt-Freilino the grammatical one, on languages with no gender distinction in the noun system, of which Finnish is the example, its hän covering he and she alike.

None of that is a person describing themselves, and the dictionary carries no sense in which it is. The identity sense is not in Merriam-Webster at all, which is unusual for a word this widely used inside the community, and it is the reason the entry a reader lands on first will be about grammar.

One quotation in the dictionary does come close, and it lands on exactly the confusion this entry has to sort out. Under the first sense, Merriam-Webster prints Vera Papisova quoting Dr Meredith Chapman: there is a lot of overlap in the terminology, and agender typically means being genderless, without a gender identity or gender neutral. A dictionary example chosen to illustrate the adjective happens to record the community's own habit of treating the two words as one.

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.

A second line runs beside that one and is drawn less firmly. The same wiki records that gendervoid is often used synonymously with voidgender, a gender coming from or associated with the void, and then states that the two are not the same thing without saying how they differ. Where the distinction from agender is argued in detail, this one is asserted.

The community wrote the first 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 without any single post announcing it, so the LGBTQIA+ Wiki can date the coinage but not the distinction that now carries the term.

Genderless itself has no coinage to report, because it was not coined. It is an ordinary English adjective that a community began applying to people, and the adjective's own history is the dictionary's business. The older word has senses and no origin story; the younger one has an origin story and no dictionary.

What the gendervoid flags were drawn to say

Where the written record is thin the flags carry the argument, and gendervoid has more of them than most terms of its age. Read in order, they show a community working out what it wants the word to mean.

The Fruitindividual design is the most argued of them. Its rings are described as mirroring the circular structure of a black hole, and the wiki's account of the broken third ring is a definition: absence of gender, with a void put in its place, in order to differentiate the identity from agender and terms like it. A further alternate by the Miraheze user Pronounful and a gendervoid symbol sit in the same gallery with no stated meaning at all, and the wiki marks the source for the 2022 space flag as missing. A term with this many flags and no dictionary entry for its identity sense is a term whose entire documentary 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 Quaker christened Jemima Wilkinson nearly died of typhus at twenty-three in colonial New England, and held afterwards that a genderless spirit had risen from that body: the Public Universal Friend, who from 1776 preached across New England, gathered a following, dressed in clothing coded both male and female, and refused a birth name and gendered pronouns. Wikipedia names the Friend as an early American instance of gender beyond the binary, and the Teaching LGBTQ History project gives the longer account, including that the Friend became something of a religious celebrity.

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. The Teaching LGBTQ History project states the caution directly: modern identity categories cannot be imposed on people of the past, though a history can be read as trans without labelling the person in it.

What the pronoun surveys can and cannot show

A person with no gender still has to be referred to, and English offers no clean answer. Genderless people report using they and them, it and its, any pronoun, or none at all, with the last of those meaning a name repeated wherever a pronoun would ordinarily go.

The largest study on file is not about genderless people specifically, but it sets the background. Working from an Australian equity and diversity survey of 41,157 people, published in Sex Roles on 7 April 2025, its authors found roughly 88 per cent of non-binary respondents using some form of they pronouns, against 29 per cent in the 2015 United States Transgender Survey as reported by James and colleagues in 2016. They attribute the gap partly to that earlier survey mixing binary and non-binary trans respondents together, partly to eight years between the two data collections, and partly to a difference in national climate. Around 12 per cent of non-binary respondents used he or she instead, for reasons the literature gives as ranging from avoiding harassment, keeping a job or using a binarily designed space, after Barbee and Schrock in 2019, to simple preference, after Moeder and colleagues in 2024.

The same study found about 16 per cent of binary trans respondents and just over 1 per cent of cisgender respondents using they. Since cisgender people are 98 to 99 per cent of the population, the authors point out that more cisgender than non-binary people use the pronoun in absolute numbers, and that the pronoun is therefore poor evidence of anybody's gender. That conclusion applies with more force to a word like genderless, which sits well below Non-binary in the material.

Nor is the pronoun new. The Teaching LGBTQ History project dates the earliest recorded gender-neutral they to Chaucer in 1386 and finds Shakespeare using the singular form in Hamlet in 1599, with the first documented neopronoun following in 1789. The same project puts non-binary identification among LGBTQ adults in the United States at approximately 11 per cent, about 1.2 million people.

The word itself is counted somewhere narrower, and counted differently. The Gender Census, an annual self-selected survey open to people who say they do not fit solely into one of the two binary categories, drew 39,765 usable responses in 2022 and offered 31 identity checkboxes with five boxes to type into,. Where a word sits in that instrument changes what it collects: the survey's own comparison of terms before and after they joined the checkbox list puts the increase at a factor of 12.4 for genderless and 5.4 for gendervoid, which was added to the list in 2022. A figure for either word therefore records how many of those respondents picked it out of a list, which is not the same quantity as how many people have no gender.