Neutrois

That second half is what separates it from Agender, close enough that a great many people use the two interchangeably. 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 Holly Burnham coined neutrois

Unusually for this catalogue, the coinage has a name and a date attached to it. Holly A. Burnham coined neutrois in 1995 as a self-description, and circulated it in public posts to Usenet newsgroups for transgender people. The earliest quotation Wiktionary carries is not a definition but a signature: a message to soc.support.transgendered on 3 December 1996 signs off with Gender Punk, Gender Anarchy, Gender Terrorism, Neutrois Revolution, over a line attributed to Burnham. A word arriving in a signature block is a fair picture of how the term spread.

The construction is a blend of French neutre, neuter, and trois, three, for the third gender, which makes the French root an outlier among terms mostly built from Greek and Latin. Wiktionary allows the Latin neuter as an alternative first element and marks the whole derivation as apparent, which is a lexicographer's way of saying the coiner did not leave a note.

The pronunciation never settled either, because the French vowel does not anglicise cleanly. The Nonbinary Wiki lists seven readings in use, among them new-TWA, new-TRAW, new-TROY, new-TROSS and new-TROYZ.

Why the neutrois definitions have not settled

Neutrois.com records two definitions in current circulation and they are not compatible. On the first, a neutrois person has a gender identity that is neither male nor female but neutral. On the second, a neutrois person has no internal sense of gender at all, which makes the word a synonym for agender or Genderless. Whether those are one word or two is argued inside the community, and the Nonbinary Wiki keeps a separate article on the disagreement.

The neighbouring boundary is drawn more sharply. Neutrois Outpost, the first site devoted to the word, held that a neutrois is not an Androgyne, and put the difference in dysphoria: androgynes need have no difficulty with their gender identities, and neutrois, on that account, do. Neutrois Nonsense put the same contrast in terms of arithmetic, calling androgyny a combination of feminine and masculine characteristics and neutrois an elimination of them. That is why some neutrois people decline the word androgyne outright, since its Greek root names a mixture of male and female and their claim is an absence of both.

Laid out side by side, the readings on file divide on two questions: what neutrois claims about gender, and whether it claims anything about the body.

Where the first Neutrois.com reading is the one in use, the Nonbinary Wiki notes that Aporagender and Maverique land close by, each with its own nuance. Nothing in the material settles which of the readings is dominant, and the entries in the general dictionaries do not choose either.

How neutrois transition was originally defined

The early definitions made physical transition part of the meaning rather than an option within it. In November 2000 Neutrois Outpost defined a neutrois as somebody who identifies as non-gendered and seeks to lose the major physical signifiers that indicate gender to others, adding that neutrois people pursue an androgynous appearance without being androgynes, and that transitioning to either a male or a female identity is not an acceptable solution for them. The closing line of that definition is the clearest sentence in the whole record of the word: neutrois are trying to lose gender traits, not gain new ones.

Micah of Neutrois Nonsense described the same process as subtraction, in which the aim is a body as neutral as possible, and noted even then that not all neutrois people had undergone surgery or seriously wanted to. The abbreviations followed the existing pattern, giving female-to-neutrois and male-to-neutrois, and a person using the first appears in a newsgroup post in January 1997, writing about dysphoria and transition plans.

Current usage has dropped the requirement. Neutrois.com states plainly that not all neutrois people have transitioned or wish to, and describes transition as covering an ambiguously gendered name, gender-neutral pronouns, and changes to clothing, hairstyle or mannerisms as readily as anything hormonal or surgical. The Simple English Wikipedia article keeps the association without the obligation, saying the term is often used by people who experience gender dysphoria or gender euphoria and who may seek a more neutral or androgynous appearance. Between the 2000 definition and the present one the word lost a condition and kept an emphasis.

Which symbols neutrois people use

No single glyph has won. The Nonbinary Wiki records four in use or proposed, and three of them are borrowed from existing character sets: the neuter symbol at Unicode U+26B2, a circle without prongs at U+26AA, and the empty set at U+2205, which reads the null gender literally. The fourth is the Neutrois Outpost symbol, a pair of circles standing for a null gender as a variation on the Venus and Mars symbols, with a lavender triangle added for pride in an LGBT identity.

The flag carries the same reading in colour. Its white is for a neutral, unidentified or questioning gender, its dark chartreuse green is the inverse of lavender and stands for a non-binary gender that is neither female nor male, and its black is for an agender or genderless one. Lavender is the mix of pink and blue, so its inverse is chosen precisely because it is not a blend of the two binary colours.

What the neutrois record holds

The word has been written down in places that matter and has never entered a dictionary of record. Matt Kailey listed it beside genderqueer and genderless in Just Add Hormones in 2005; a clinical handbook, Sexuality and Gender for Mental Health Professionals, named it among non-binary identities in 2013; Facebook made it one of fifty gender options in February 2014. Ian McEwan put it first in a list of gender options in Nutshell in 2016, and Ashley Mardell defined it in The ABC's of LGBT+ the same year as a gender exactly in the middle of the spectrum with no femaleness or maleness in it, adding that the writer is honoured by they/them pronouns and prefers gender-neutral words such as person and sibling. In fiction it names the protagonist of the comic Unity and a character in Benjanun Sriduangkaew's short story Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade, published in 2013.

The most solid attestation is legal. Washington state began allowing an X gender marker in 2018, and the administrative rule naming the genders that qualify lists neutrois among them, alongside amalgagender, bigender, demigender, genderfluid, pangender and third sex. That is the word appearing in a statutory list, which is a different order of evidence from a glossary.

Wiktionary ran it as word of the day on 8 November 2025 and offers translations into Finnish and Japanese, which is more foreign-language uptake than most terms of this age carry. Against that, no academic literature covers the term, the Nonbinary Wiki's infobox gives a frequency of 0.5 per cent without naming the survey behind it, and the Gender Census recorded it at 2.6 per cent of gender-diverse respondents when it appeared as a checkbox in 2021, falling to about 0.4 per cent as a write-in in 2022. The population did not change by a factor of six in a year; the question did. Every community figure of this kind reports how visible a word was on a form as well as how many people hold it, and neutrois is where the mechanism is plainly visible, because the same survey ran it both ways.