Neutrois
Neutrois describes a gender that is neutral or null: neither man nor woman, and frequently accompanied by a desire to neutralise gendered physical characteristics rather than to move towards the other pole.
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That second half is what separates it from Agender, which the two words are otherwise close enough to be used interchangeably by many people. Agender claims an absence of gender. Neutrois claims a neutral one, and for a substantial number of people using it the word carries a specific relationship to the body that agender does not.
Where it came from
Unusually for this catalogue, the coinage has a name and a date attached. Holly A. Burnham coined neutrois in 1995 as a description of herself, before there was any vocabulary for what she meant.
The construction is a blend. Wiktionary gives French neutre, neuter, joined to trois, three, referring to the third gender, and the French rather than Greek or Latin root makes it an outlier among the terms around it.
An independent site at neutrois.com carried the word through the years when nothing else did, and Facebook included Neutrois among its fifty gender options in February 2014, which for a term of this size is a real event in its documentation rather than a footnote.
What its numbers actually show
Neutrois carries the most instructive figure in this catalogue, and it is not about neutrois.
The Gender Census recorded it at 2.6 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2021, when it appeared as a checkbox. In 2022, when it had to be written in, it fell to about 0.4 per cent. The population did not change by a factor of six in a year. The question did.
Every community figure quoted anywhere on this site is subject to that effect, and the entries that carry checkbox-derived percentages are reporting how visible a word was on a form as much as how many people hold it. Neutrois is where the mechanism is visible because the same survey ran it both ways.
What the record holds
Wiktionary carries it and Simple English Wikipedia has an article, but no dictionary of record does, and there is no academic literature under the name. For a term with a named coiner and a thirty-year history that is a thinner record than it sounds.
Told apart
Often confused with Neutrois
Common questions
Questions about Neutrois
- What is the difference between neutrois and agender?
- Agender claims the absence of a gender. Neutrois claims a neutral one, and for many people using it the word also carries a wish to neutralise gendered physical features. The two overlap enough that a great many people use both, and the distinction matters most when the body is part of what is being described.
- Who coined neutrois?
- Holly A. Burnham, in 1995, as a description of herself. It is one of the few terms in this catalogue whose coinage has both a name and a date attached.
- Where does the word neutrois come from?
- It is a blend of the French neutre, meaning neuter, and trois, three, referring to the third gender. The French root makes it unusual among terms that mostly draw on Greek and Latin.
- Why did the neutrois figure drop so sharply?
- Because the question changed. The Gender Census offered neutrois as a checkbox in 2021 and recorded 2.6 per cent; in 2022 it had to be written in and fell to about 0.4 per cent. The same effect applies to every community percentage on this site, and neutrois is where it is plainly visible.
Added 2026-08-28 · Revised 2026-08-28
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- AgenderAbsence rather than an unusual answer, dated by the OED to a 1996 newspaper article, and legally recognised once, in Oregon in 2017.
- Non-binaryAn umbrella term and an identity at the very same time, and the reason its two headline figures are not remotely comparable with one another.
- AndrogyneA gender blending or falling between male and female, in English since at least the sixteenth century, and the outlier among terms that reject the binary.
- AporagenderA gender separate from male, female and anything between them, coined on Tumblr in 2014 to replace aliagender and used as one gender and as an umbrella.