Agender

The a- in agender means “without.” Agender people describe their relationship to gender in a few recurring ways: having no gender; having a gender that feels neutral or blank; or finding the whole category inapplicable — a multiple-choice question where the honest answer is “none of the above.” Agender identities usually sit under the nonbinary umbrella. The Chinese rendering is 无性别 (wuxingbie, “without gender”).

Register note: community vocabulary in both languages.

Common misuse: the distinction that matters most — agender is not asexual. The former is a gender identity (who I am), the latter a sexual orientation (whom I’m attracted to): agender people can have any orientation, and asexual people any gender identity. The words look alike in English, and in Chinese 无性别 (“no gender”) and 无性恋 (“no sexual attraction”) differ by a single character — both pairs get mixed up constantly, yet they describe entirely different things. The other frequent misreading is “agender = hasn’t figured it out yet.” Quite the opposite: for many people, “none” is precisely the answer that arrived after figuring it out. For the fundamentals, see Gender basics.