Neutrois

Neutrois describes a gender that is neutral or null. It is one of very few terms in this vertical whose coinage can be dated to a person and a year, and one of the fewest that any survey has attempted to count — a combination that makes it a useful test of how much of the modern gender vocabulary rests on measurement and how much on community usage alone.

Definition & scope

The classical definition has two parts, and the second is what distinguishes it from everything nearby. Wiktionary's entry, following the term's own community usage, defines it as "having a neutral gender (being neither male nor female), and having or seeking to have no or reduced physical sexual characteristics", and expressly contrasts it with agender. Agender is a claim about identity alone; neutrois, in its original sense, couples that with a claim about the body.

Contemporary usage has blurred the line. Many people now treat neutrois and agender as near-synonyms, and Dictionary.com's entry gives the identity sense — "a neutral gender identity" or the lack of a specific one — without the physical component. Both usages are current, and a reader meeting the word cannot safely assume which is meant.

It sits under non-binary. Its relationship to transgender is closer than that of most terms in the umbrella, because the classical definition implies a wish to change the body — but a neutrois person who does not pursue medical treatment is not using the word incorrectly, and nothing about the identity requires a diagnosis or a procedure.

History & origins

• 1995: H. A. Burnham, a nongendered person active in online transgender communities, forms neutrois to name their own position and that of others describing an absence of gender. Both Wiktionary and Dictionary.com record the coiner and the year, which is unusually firm provenance for a word of this kind.
• Late 1990s–2000s: the term spreads slowly through online transgender communities. The usage of this period — neutral identity together with the reduction of visible sexed characteristics — is what the dictionary definitions later record.
• February 2014: Neutrois appears on Facebook's custom gender list, reconstructed by Slate, which put the word in front of a general audience for the first time.
• 2010s–2020s: general dictionaries add it, while survey instruments do not. It is absent from the Trevor Project's list of labels used inside the non-binary umbrella and from the reported results of the Gender Census.

In practice

Pronouns follow no convention specific to the term: singular they is commonest, neopronouns are used by some, and the choice is generally made on grounds of safety and tiredness rather than principle.

The distinctive practical feature is that the word usually has to be explained before it can be used. Many neutrois people therefore say agender or non-binary in ordinary conversation and reserve neutrois for contexts where the physical dimension is the point — clinical appointments above all, where the difference between wanting a neutral body and wanting a differently sexed one changes what is being asked for. Clinical pathways are organised around movement from one binary destination to the other, and the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, with 92,329 respondents, records wide variation in the transition steps people actually take — variation those pathways were not designed to hold.

Psychology

There is no research literature on neutrois identity specifically. Studies recruit non-binary or transgender samples and do not break the term out, and the honest summary is that nothing can be said about this group that is not really being said about a much larger one.

The clinical position is the vertical's standard one. The DSM-5 diagnoses gender dysphoria — distress — rather than identity, so a neutrois person without distress has no diagnosis, and the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019, re-siting it under conditions related to sexual health specifically to preserve access to care without pathologising the identity. That second point matters more here than for most terms in the umbrella, because the classical sense of neutrois involves seeking care.

Prevalence & culture

How common is neutrois identity?

No survey measures it, and the honest statement is that the figure below is a ceiling reasoned from absences rather than an estimate built from a count.

Two of the largest instruments that ask about non-binary identity in detail both fail to record it. The Trevor Project's 2021 research brief, covering 34,759 LGBTQ youth and an 8,998-person non-binary subsample, lists the labels those respondents used down to 4% — genderflux and bigender — and neutrois does not appear at all. The Gender Census 2025, with 43,096 self-selected respondents and 11,924 distinct write-in terms, reports its leading write-ins down to about 1%, with bigender and butch at 2.5%, demigirl at 1.5% and xenogender at 1.1%; neutrois is not among them either.

Taking under 1% of the Williams Institute's 1.2 million non-binary LGBTQ US adults — roughly 0.46% of the adult population — puts the ceiling near 0.005%, and the figure recorded on this entry, 0.004%, sits just below it. A bound derived from absences is the weakest kind of evidence there is, and the confidence is low accordingly.

The term's cultural position is peculiar and worth naming: it has a documented coiner, a dictionary entry, and a place on a list offered to billions of people, and almost no measurable population. That combination — high formal recognition, negligible measured use — is common across the newer gender vocabulary and is rarely stated plainly, which is how a word can look far more established than the evidence for it is.