Neutrois
A neutral gender — not a man, not a woman, and not a mix of the two. For many people it comes with wanting a body that gives nothing away.
- One of seventeen Agender identities
- Settled stripes · origin not on record
- 16 min read
What it is
Neutrois is a neutral gender. Not male, not female, and not both at once. Where some people describe a gender they have, most neutrois people describe something closer to a setting of zero — a blank where the answer is supposed to go.
The word is older than people assume. It was coined in the mid-1990s by H. A. Lindsay, who ran a site under that name, long before the current wave of gender vocabulary. It spread through personal sites and blogs — Neutrois Nonsense was one of the best known — written by people documenting their own moves towards neutral, in detail, over years.
So there is real lived material behind this one. Not a huge amount, and much of it written by a small number of people, but it is not invented. What you will find is first-person writing rather than research.
Keep reading
The community has never agreed where neutrois ends and agender begins. Some use the two interchangeably. Others hold that neutrois specifically means a neutral gender plus a wish for a neutral body — removing sexed characteristics rather than swapping one set for the other. Both usages are in genuine circulation. Nobody is going to hand you a ruling.
It is also a word in decline. Plenty of people who would have said neutrois in 2014 now just say nonbinary or agender. If it fits you, expect to meet fewer people using it out loud than you would like.
One thing to say early: distress is not the entrance fee. Some people arrive at neutral through years of dysphoria. Some arrive calmly, notice it fits, and get on with their week.
Pronouns
They/them is the most common, but there is no neutrois pronoun. Some people use it/its on purpose — chosen, not thrown at them. Some use neopronouns like ey/em, xe/xem, ze/hir. Some keep he or she because it is safer where they live, or because pronouns simply do not carry much weight for them. Some ask for their name every time and accept the friction. None of this makes anyone more or less neutrois. Ask the person, not the label.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
The first few minutes of the morning are often the easiest part of it. You have not been looked at yet.
Then dressing, which is not fashion but arithmetic. Which top does the least. Which trousers say the least. Binder or three layers or tuck or give up and wear the coat indoors.
At the café someone says "ladies" or "lads" to your table. You let it go, because correcting it costs more than absorbing it. You will absorb about nine of these before lunch and remember two.
Work email: a new client opens with "Dear Ms". You decide, again, whether this is a reply-and-correct day.
The toilets. Two doors, both wrong, and a calculation about which one gets you the least trouble today — which depends on the building, the city, your face and how tired you are.
Someone asks whether you are a boy or a girl, as though the sentence has an answer inside it.
Home, alone, the volume drops. Nobody is assigning you anything. For a few hours your body is just the thing that carries you around. That is the part you would like more of.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
Say the word early or say it late. Both are common, and neither is cowardice.
The awkward part is rarely the word. It is the second question: so what does that make me. Someone whose sense of who they fancy is built out of men and women has to work out where you sit. Some people can do that. Some cannot. You find out which.
Being wanted feels different when it is aimed at a gender rather than at you. A partner calling you beautiful in a way that means woman, or handsome in a way that means man, can be doing something loving and still land badly. Better said out loud than flinched at quietly for two years.
Relationships that started before you had the word can survive it. Many do. Some do not, and it is not always because anyone behaved badly. Someone signed up for something and the something changed shape.
Practical arrangements help more than declarations. A word your partner uses for you in front of others. Something that is not girlfriend or boyfriend. An agreement about what you are called at their mother's house.
And if you are single: this does not make you unlovable or hard work. It makes the first three conversations longer.
Desire
Sex is where the body stops being an abstract problem.
Common: wanting closeness, wanting touch, and having two or three specific places that switch the whole thing off when they become the point. Not because you dislike the act — because that part is doing the wrong job, announcing something about you.
Common: renaming things. People find their own words for their own parts, and it sounds silly right up until it is the difference between being present and being somewhere else.
Common: fine when the framing is neutral — nobody being "the man", nobody being "the woman", no roles in the room — and struggling the moment it slides into that shape.
Common: clothes staying on. A shirt is not a failure.
Also common: no trouble whatsoever. Some neutrois people have straightforward, greedy, uncomplicated sex lives. There is no neutral sexuality that arrives with the label.
Whatever your version is, you can ask for it in advance. Detailed instructions are less awkward than the alternative, which is going silent halfway through and having to explain it then.
The body
For a lot of people this is the centre of it, and the reason the word exists at all.
The wish is usually subtractive. Not a chest of the other kind — no chest. Not a different voice — a voice that gives nothing away. Not the other hormone at full dose — as little sexed signal as can be managed.
What people actually do varies enormously. Some take low-dose testosterone or oestrogen deliberately, aiming for the flattening effect rather than the full masculinising or feminising one, and stop when they get there. Some take nothing at all.
Others: chest surgery with no hormones. A hysterectomy mainly to end periods. Electrolysis until the face reads as nothing. Voice work aimed at the middle rather than either end. Some want genital surgery towards nothing, and discover that very few surgeons anywhere will even discuss it.
The medical system is the hard part. Most pathways were built around a binary story, and many neutrois people learn to tell a slightly simplified version of themselves to get through the door. That is a rationing system doing what rationing systems do. It still costs something to do it.
None of it is compulsory. If you want nothing medical, that is a full stop and not an asterisk. Money, safety, family and the country you live in decide most of this anyway. The word is a description, not a treatment plan.
Work
Whether you say anything at work is a cost calculation, and nobody else gets to grade it.
The reality of most workplaces: the HR form has two boxes. The uniform has two versions. The toilets have two doors. The customer says sir. The rota is written up as the girls and the lads. Most of that is not malice — it is a building designed on an assumption.
If you do come out, the tiring part is repetition. Not one conversation but one per new starter, forever, plus a slow drift back to the old pronouns whenever things get busy.
Small levers that genuinely work: pronouns in your email signature, so it is stated without a speech. A name you actually answer to. One colleague who corrects other people so that you do not have to. The third is worth more than any policy.
If you decide to say nothing, that is a strategy, not a failure. Plenty of people are out in three places and nowhere else, and that is a working life.
Family
Families tend to hear "neutral" as "nothing", and "nothing" as loss. Expect grief-shaped reactions to news that is not a death.
The standard line is "you will always be my daughter" or "always my son". Said with love. Lands like a door closing.
Some parents can learn one thing but not three. If that is what you have, choose the one thing — usually the name, sometimes the pronoun — and spend your capital there.
Religious and traditional families vary far more than the internet suggests. Some of the calmest reactions come from households nobody would have bet on. Some of the worst come from liberal ones who assumed they had already done this.
Siblings are often the easiest and the most useful. One person at the table who says the right word without ceremony changes the whole meal.
If you have children: mum and dad are job titles, not gender exams. People use Baba, Nini, Zaza, their first name, whatever the toddler produced first. Children adjust in about a fortnight. Adults take longer.
If your family is not safe, staying quiet is not a compromise of anything. Nobody is owed your gender.
Coming out
There is no clean sentence for this one. "I'm trans" invites the wrong follow-up. "I'm nonbinary" is understood but broad. "I'm neutrois" will get a blank face nine times out of ten.
What works for most people is short and plain: "I'm not a man or a woman. I'm not both either — I'm neither. Please use they."
Then the part nobody warns you about. They accept it, and then they ask you to explain it, and you find you cannot, because it is not an argument. It is a fact about you that arrived without a footnote.
You will do this repeatedly. New job, new doctor, new group chat, new pharmacy. Many people come out in layers: pronouns first, the word maybe never.
You are allowed to skip the word entirely. It can be private vocabulary that helps you think, with "nonbinary" as the public version. Plenty of people run it exactly that way for years.
And if you are somewhere this is not survivable — legally, at home, at work — knowing what you are is not less real for going unsaid.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part.
The closest relative and the most argued-over line. Agender is usually described as having no gender; neutrois as having one that is neutral. In practice the two blur, and many people use both about themselves. The working difference, when there is one: neutrois more often comes with a claim about the body, agender often makes none.
Compare Neutrois and Agender →Both, not neither. Androgyne is a mix or a middle, with masculine and feminine both switched on. Neutrois is the absence of both. If your ideal is a bit of each at once, that is androgyne.
Compare Neutrois and Androgyne →The umbrella, not a rival. Almost every neutrois person is also nonbinary. Neutrois is the specific shape; nonbinary is the shelf it sits on.
Compare Neutrois and Non-Binary →Near-synonyms in most usage with different flavours. Nullgender leans on void and absence; neutrois leans on neutrality. Pick by which word sounds like the inside of your head.
Genderless → · Null Gender →Coined specifically to say 'not neutral'. A maverique person has a gender with real content that simply is not male, female or neutral. If the answer to 'is it a blank?' is 'no, it is a something, it just has no name', look there.
Compare Neutrois and Maverique →Also a distinct gender apart from male and female, but with strength and direction to it. Neutrois has no direction. That is the split.
Compare Neutrois and Aporagender →Movement. If neutral is where you sit some weeks and not others, or the intensity dials up and down, fluid or flux describes that better than a fixed neutral.
Genderfluid → · Genderflux →A partial connection to one side, kept. Neutrois keeps no partial connection to either.
Demiboy → · Demigirl →A different destination — pull towards one side rather than away from both. Some people pass through neutral on the way, which does not make the words interchangeable.
Transgender Female →It might not be you if…
- Your picture of yourself has both switched on — masculine and feminine at the same time, deliberately. That is androgyne.
- You have a definite gender with texture and content to it, just not one of the standard ones. Look at maverique or aporagender.
- What grates is the roles and the expectations, not being called a woman or a man. You may be a gender-nonconforming woman or man, and there is nothing small about that.
- You would take being read as the other one, and it would be a relief. That is binary trans, and it is a different word with a different set of problems.
- You like androgynous clothes and short hair and are otherwise content with she or he. That is a style, and styles do not need a gender label under them.
- You genuinely have never cared what anyone calls you. Some people call that gender apathetic. Neutrois people usually do care — neither is the point, and man or woman still lands wrong.
- It moves. Neutral on Tuesday, something else by Friday. That is fluid or flux.
- Nothing in the body section rang true and 'neutral' is only about pronouns for you. That does not disqualify you — but agender or plain nonbinary may sit more easily than a word most people use with the body attached.
- You are mainly looking for a word that gets you out of a category you are being punished for. Understandable, and worth saying honestly to yourself first, because a label will not do that job.
On the hard days
The particular hard thing about this one is that there is often no route.
Binary transition has a map. Gatekept, slow, imperfect, but a map. Wanting a body that reads as nothing has almost none. Few surgeons, fewer who will say yes, hormone plans you are half inventing alongside a doctor who has never done it, and endless forms with two boxes.
The second hard thing is being rare in the rooms that were supposed to be yours. Trans spaces often run on a binary story. Nonbinary spaces often run on androgyny and a bit of both. You can end up the only person present who wants less rather than different.
Then the days when nobody has read you right in weeks and you start wondering whether you made the word up to explain being uncomfortable. That thought is not evidence. It is what tiredness sounds like.
What helps is smaller than it should be. A garment that flattens the outline. One person who uses the right word without being reminded. The fifteen minutes before anyone has looked at you. Text-only conversations where you are a voice with no shape.
If it turns dark in a way that frightens you, tell someone — a friend, a helpline, a doctor you half trust. Being unusual is not the same as being alone, and the practical things (a name, a binder that fits, a GP who does not flinch) do more for a bad month than any amount of arguing about definitions.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between neutrois and agender?
The line most people draw: agender is no gender, neutrois is a neutral gender. A blank versus a zero. In practice they overlap heavily, plenty of people use both about themselves, and the community has never settled it. The most useful working difference is that neutrois is more often tied up with wanting a neutral body, while agender often makes no claim about the body at all. If neither definition sorts you cleanly, you are in the same position as most people who use these words.
Do I have to want surgery or hormones to be neutrois?
No. The word grew up around people who did want physical steps towards neutral, which is precisely why it filled a gap — there was no other term for wanting sexed characteristics removed rather than swapped. But there is no threshold. Some take low-dose hormones, some have chest surgery, some want nothing, and some want things they cannot get where they live. The word describes a gender, not a procedure list.
Is neutrois a real term, or was it invented online recently?
Real, and old by internet standards. It was coined in the mid-1990s by H. A. Lindsay and spread through personal sites and blogs long before the current gender vocabulary existed. It is used less now than around 2014 — many people who would have said neutrois then say nonbinary or agender today. A word going quiet is not the same as a word being made up.
What pronouns should I use if I am neutrois?
Whichever ones you can stand hearing. They/them is the most common. Some people use it/its on purpose and mean it kindly about themselves. Some use neopronouns like ey/em or xe/xem. Some keep he or she for safety, or because pronouns carry little weight for them. You can test one for a fortnight somewhere low-stakes — a game, a new group chat, one friend — before telling anyone it is permanent.
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