Welcome back to our web series Inqueery, where we delve into the his, er, themstory of our favorite queer words. In this episode, in partnership with Google, singer-songwriter Shamir investigates the origin of the term "agender" from its digital emergence in the early aughts to its present-day usage.
While the label may be relatively new, genderless identity is not. Throughout history, many people have identified with the concept of lacking a gender entirely. Check out the full video — I hear there’s a cameo from one of our favorite nonbinary editors — and the script below.
Hello and welcome to Inqueery: the series where we take a mini-deep dive into the history of LGBTQI+ vocabulary. So, how much do you really know about the history of the word “agender”? Find out on this episode of Inqueery.
But before I tell you more about that, a quick refresher on the basic rules of gender using dessert! Gender is like ice cream: There are many, many flavors, you can mix and match, or you can decide not to have any if it's not for you.
Being agender, which literally translates to “without gender,” is most often used to mean deciding not to go for the ice cream.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "agender" refers to people who don’t identify themselves with any particular gender. This can mean being genderless, lacking gender, or having a null gender. However, people also use "agender" to mean identifying as gender-neutral or having an undefinable gender.
Like many words we use to describe gender, "agender" is a relatively new word. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the identity is new, or that agender people didn’t exist before we had the language we do now to identify them.
The first documented use of the word "agender" was actually on the Internet! It was born in the year 2000, on an Internet forum called UseNet. In a chat room discussion entitled alt.messianic, a user posted the following: “God is amorphous, agender, [...] so image can’t be a physical or gender or sexual thing.”
It’s true! Many religions consider God to be agender, including Islam, Sikhism, and Hinduism. But there are plenty of regular flesh and blood humans who fit this description, too.
The next time the word "agender" was used, again according to our friend the OED, was in 2005, also on UseNet. But this time, the word was clearly used in reference to people — although it was in another discussion about faith. In the alt.politics.democrats chat, someone wrote that “cultures can have transgender, agender, and hypergender individuals.”
From there, the usage of the word really took off. By 2013, the word "agender" was used in a New York Times profile of “Generation LGBTQIA” in which several gender-nonconforming youth were featured discussing their changing understanding of themselves and their genders: “... She first heard the term [...] from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as agender and used the singular pronoun 'they.' She now sees her gender as an 'amorphous blob.'”
Go ahead, Kate! For many young people, the Internet was a formative space for discovering new gender language.
Today, "agender" is a recognized and celebrated identity in queer spaces. In March 2017, an Oregon judge granted a 27-year-old video game designer from Portland named Patch permission to legally identify as agender.
There are plenty of role models in the agender community too! The rapper Angel Haze, academics like sj Miller, and writers like our very own Tyler Ford are helping agender folks recognize and celebrate themselves, all while working to make the world a better place for agender people everywhere.
So look out, world! The agender future is a bright one.
Check out past Inqueery episodes on the history of the words queer, twink, and femme.
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