Quoigender
The prefix is the French quoi, meaning what, and it reached gender vocabulary from the asexual and aromantic communities, where quoiromantic had been in circulation since 2012 as a less flippant replacement for wtfromantic. Quoigender describes finding the concept of gender inapplicable to oneself, or not meaningfully definable at all. The claim is about the question rather than about the answer, and that is the whole of what separates it from Agender.
The blunter names are still in use. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki files WTFgender and whatgender as the same identity, and quoigender is the polite form of both.
What quoigender refuses to answer
Agender answers the question of what somebody's gender is, and the answer is none. Quoigender declines the question as badly formed. The two community wikis that carry the term set out the readings under it, and they are variations on a refusal rather than on an absence: not understanding what gender is and so not knowing whether it has been experienced, finding gender identity personally inaccessible or nonsensical, disidentifying with gender as a construct or as something applicable to oneself, and having questioned for so long that the questioning has become the answer.
That last reading is why the word doubles as an alternative to questioning. Both wikis are explicit that it can carry exhaustion or frustration with the search for a better term, which is an unusually candid thing for a definition to contain.
Where the quoi prefix came from
The Tumblr user epochryphal, who also writes as Cor, coined quoigender in 2014 as the gender counterpart to quoiromantic and quoisexual. The Nonbinary Wiki cites the coining post to that year, the earliest use traced for this entry is that post, and no dictionary carries the word at all.
Cor proposed a flag for the quoi identities together in 2015: four lavender question marks rotated into a ring around a single shared dot, set on a house-shaped grey field instead of a rectangle. The question mark is doing the definitional work, and later triangular redesigns kept it while dropping a mark to make the shape easier to reproduce. One version stays lavender specifically, in the wiki's account, to honour the intentional vagueness of the label.
Why the coinage reads as a paradox
The objection that arrives first is that naming an indifference to gender is not indifferent, and it was made inside the community rather than outside it. On a 2016 thread on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, one poster called the word "almost a one-word paradox", on the grounds that coining, defining and using a term to signal apathy is the opposite of apathy. The poster who had brought the word to the thread agreed, and answered that having a word for the feeling is what makes it communicable to anybody else.
From outside, the reception in the material is thinner and sharper. Andrew Sullivan's newsletter of February 2021 lists quoigender among coinages he calls "more than a bit silly", and does not engage with the definition.
How the Quoi Identity Survey counted it
The one dedicated measurement is the Quoi Identity Survey run by the blog The Ace Theist, published in 2022 with 428 respondents, four in ten of them recruited through Tumblr. Of the 427 who answered the recognition question, 58.5 per cent had heard of quoigender; of the 417 who answered the identification question, 12.2 per cent used it for themselves.
The Nonbinary Wiki's own infobox puts the frequency at 0.1 per cent without saying which sample that is drawn from. The two figures are not in conflict. One counts people who sought out a survey about quoi identities, the other counts the word across a much wider Non-binary population, and the distance between them is what a microlabel looks like measured from two different ranges.
Told apart
Often confused with Quoigender
- AgenderAgender answers the question with none. Quoigender declines the question as inapplicable or unanswerable, which is a different move and the reason the word exists separately.
- Gender questioningQuoigender is sometimes used instead of questioning, and the wikis say why: it can signal that the search itself has become the position rather than a stage on the way somewhere.
- GenderlessGenderless describes an absence where a gender would be. Quoigender makes no claim about presence or absence, because it treats the frame the question assumes as the problem.
Common questions
Questions about Quoigender
- What does the quoi in quoigender mean?
- It is the French word for what. The prefix arrived from quoiromantic, which had been in use since 2012 as a milder replacement for wtfromantic, and quoigender was built on the same pattern.
- How is quoigender different from agender?
- Agender is an answer: the person has no gender. Quoigender is a refusal of the question: the concept is inaccessible, nonsensical or not definable for that person, so answering with none would already concede more than they mean. The two overlap in practice and a good many people have used both at different times.
- Who coined quoigender?
- The Tumblr user epochryphal, also known as Cor, in 2014, as the gender counterpart to the existing quoiromantic and quoisexual. Cor also proposed the first flag for the quoi identities in 2015, built from question marks rotated into a ring.
- Is quoigender the same as questioning?
- Not the same, though it is deliberately usable in the same place. The wikis record that it can be chosen to convey exhaustion with searching for a better term, or to say that the questioning has itself become the identity rather than a route to some other one.
- How many people use the label?
- Very few, and the two available figures measure different things. The Quoi Identity Survey published by The Ace Theist in 2022, with 428 respondents drawn largely from Tumblr, found 58.5 per cent had heard of the term and 12.2 per cent used it. The Nonbinary Wiki puts the frequency at 0.1 per cent across a much broader sample. Both are self-selected.
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.
- Gender questioningA state rather than a stage: the dictionary sense, why the sources refuse the youth-only framing, and how English schools guidance turned it into a category.
- GenderlessAn absence rather than a neutral, and a void rather than a blank: the four ordinary dictionary senses, and the 2014 Tumblr coinage of gendervoid.
- GraygenderA weak or ambivalent connection to gender and its expression, coined by the Tumblr user invernom in March 2014 on the model of graysexuality.