Quoigender

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 filed under it, and they are variations on a refusal: being unsure what gender is and therefore unsure whether it has ever been experienced, finding gender identity personally inaccessible or nonsensical or inapplicable, finding the experience of gender confusing, and disidentifying with gender either as a social construct or as something that could apply to oneself.

Two further readings are about the search. Both wikis record that the word can be used in place of questioning, to convey exhaustion or frustration with looking for a better term, which is an unusually candid thing for a definition to contain. The LGBTQIA+ Wiki adds the version of that reading which has stopped being provisional: questioning one's gender for so long that the questioning itself becomes the identity rather than a route toward a more stable one. The Nonbinary Wiki carries one reading the other does not, and it is the flattest of them, describing somebody who is done with gender and does not care much for it as a concept.

The neighbours the Nonbinary Wiki names are useful for placing all of this. Graygender describes somebody who has a gender but feels less invested in it or less connected to it than other people seem to be. Exgender, which this catalogue does not yet carry, describes a rejection of gender as a concept and a refusal to answer or even acknowledge the question. Quoigender sits between the two, reporting the question as unanswerable without refusing it outright.

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.

The parent term is slightly older and was built for the same reason. Quoiromantic was introduced in 2012 as an alternative to wtfromantic, which had been meant humorously, and the French quoi was chosen to do the same work in a register somebody could use about themselves without the joke attached. A poster on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network in 2016 described quoigender in exactly those terms, calling it the more polite, French version of wtfgender.

Why the quoi flags use question marks

There is no universally accepted flag, and the Nonbinary Wiki says so before listing the proposals. Cor put forward a design in 2015 for the quoi identities together, quoigender, quoisexual and quoiromantic alike: four lavender question marks rotated into a ring so that they share a single dot, as if spinning, set on a cool grey field cut into a house shape rather than a rectangle. The question mark is doing the definitional work, and every later design has kept it.

The alternatives vary the shape and keep the symbol. A design posted to the DeviantArt account Pride-Flags, whose original source is unknown, uses horizontal stripes in black, lime green and pale blue. More recent proposals keep the ring of question marks but drop one of them and use a triangular flag, on the reasoning that a simpler shape is easier to reproduce physically; these exist in a green version and a lavender one, and the lavender is meant for the quoi identities as a whole, in the LGBTQIA+ Wiki's phrase, "to honor its intentional vagueness". A further flag by the Tumblr user hghrules, which the wiki marks as needing a citation, is built from two lines that read as an optical illusion, and is purple because there are so many names for purple that the colour becomes hard to identify at all.

Why the coinage reads as a paradox

The objection that arrives first is that naming an indifference to gender is not indifferent, and in the material it was made inside the community. On a thread opened on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network on 11 June 2016, 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 with the reading and answered that having a word for the feeling is what makes it communicable to anybody else. A third poster said that identifying as quoigender seemed nonsensical to them, and was answered that not understanding a label is not a reason to tell the people using it that it means nothing.

The thread is also a small record of how the vocabulary travels. Its author found the word through a friend, who had found it in a long list of gender identities, and the title of the thread has the wrong word in it, because the poster wrote quoisexual where they meant quoigender and could not edit the heading afterwards.

From outside the community the reception in the material is thinner and sharper. Andrew Sullivan's newsletter of 26 February 2021 lists quoigender among coinages he calls "more than a bit silly", and engages with none of the definitions.

How the Quoi Identity Survey counted it

The one dedicated measurement is the Quoi Identity Survey, run by the blog The Ace Theist and published on 6 May 2022 with 428 respondents. 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 survey asked the same pair of questions about six neighbouring labels, which is what makes the figures readable.

Quoigender is the second least recognised label on the list and the fourth most used, which is a pattern the survey does not comment on. 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.

Who the Quoi Identity Survey reached

A sample recruited from the places the word lives, which is the caveat that governs everything above. Respondents found the survey on Tumblr (40.7 per cent), Reddit (20.1 per cent), Discord (13.3 per cent), Pillowfort (7.5 per cent) and the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (6.1 per cent). Of those who answered the demographic questions, 47.2 per cent were aged 18 to 25 and 21.2 per cent were under 18; 80.9 per cent identified as white, 68.7 per cent lived in North America and 21.6 per cent in Europe.

On gender the sample skews the way its recruitment predicts: 54.9 per cent answered nonbinary, 43.8 per cent transgender and 25.5 per cent cisgender. Asked which statements applied comfortably, 58.9 per cent chose the one saying gender is subjective and arbitrary, 35.2 per cent were not sure what gender feelings are, and 15.9 per cent said they have no gender identity at all. The middle figure is the closest thing on the survey to a measurement of the quoigender position stated without the label attached, and it is more than twice the share who used the word.

One result cuts against the picture of a settled community. Although 67.3 per cent of respondents connect with people online through Discord and 54.9 per cent through Tumblr, 40.8 per cent said they connect with quoiromantic, quoisexual or quoigender people on none of the platforms listed. Recognition of the label and contact with the people using it are measured separately here, and they come out at very different levels.