Agender: Difference between revisions

There is little agreement about the difference between terms such as agender, genderless, non-gender, gender neutral, and [[neutrois]]. These terms are often used interchangeably, or defined differently by individual writers in ways that don't necessarily match the self-definitions of others using those terms.

It is often said that non-gender or genderlessness is the experience of having ''no'' gender identity at all, whereas gender neutral or neutrois is the experience of ''having'' a gender identity, a gender identity which is not male or female, but neutral. However, these statements don't match the experiences of everyone who has taken up these identities as their own. This is a result of a disagreement between word definitions that are ''prescriptivist'' (telling everyone how they ''should'' use a word, and saying that many people use it wrong) and ''descriptivist'' (describing how people have actually been ''using'' a word, without telling them to change).

Some activists, such as [[Christie Elan-Cane]], use '''non-gendered''' to mean all gender outside of the [[gender binary]]. This use comes from several years before the term '''nonbinary''', but is seen as problematic because it gives the idea that nonbinary gender identities don't exist, or that all nonbinary people are genderless. Nonetheless this usage is in some official organisations' documents and resources as the term to cover all nonbinary people. This is most common in the United Kingdom, for example throughout the recent [[UK Government Transgender Action Plan]].