as small as a world and as large as alone

3:56pm June 18, 2014

unculturedlittleshit:

Can someone explain the difference between agender, genderless, and nongender? Whenever I attempt to google, it just takes me to stuff about the difference between sex and gender.

All three can mean the same thing.  They can also mean different things.  And each one can mean different things to different people.  I think that’s where the confusion comes in.

The two biggest things that any of these words is likely to mean is:

* Totally lacking in having a gender at all.  Not male.  Not female.  Not in between.  Not some other gender.  No gender at all.

* Having a specific gender, like a ‘neuter’ gender, but still definitely a gender.

I don’t quite understand the second one, but there are people who say they’re agender or neutrois and that for them it “definitely is a gender” so I’m just going by what they say.  I don’t have that experience so I can’t understand it any better than I can understand having any other gender.

Also, some people use 'neutrois’ to mean more specifically, people who are genderless or neuter-gendered who have strong body dysphoria and want to have their body changed to match a gender-neutral appearance in some way.

For some reason, I find it really hard to identify as neutrois despite being genderless (without any gender at all) and having body dysphoria.  I don’t know what’s up with that.  So a lot of which term people choose, comes down to personal comfort.

I’m comfortable with genderless and nongendered, less comfortable with agender just because it feels awkward, not very comfortable at all with neutrois.  And each genderless person is going to have a different comfort level with different words.

One reason there’s so many words is because different people have come up with them over and over again.  Like I came up with nongendered and I thought I was the only person using that word, but I likely wasn’t.  Other people come up with genderless on their own, but lots of different people independently discovering it.  Same with agender.  I imagine that neutrois was coined by one specific person and spread to other people, because it’s not the sort of word that just pops into your head.  So that’s why there’s so many words.

And the reason there’s two main meanings, is the same thing – the people who come up with or apply these words to ourselves, have somewhat different experiences from each other.  The main difference is that some of us feel like we have no gender at all, and some of us feel like we have a gender, but it’s outside all the other genders, kind of a neuter gender.  And we use the same words to describe both experiences because nobody exactly owns a copyright on language.  Which is probably as it should be, but it can be confusing to people.

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