Greygenre & gendervoid

Both sit near agender, and both were named because "no gender" was not quite what people meant.

Greygender describes low-intensity gender. Something is there, but it is faint, blurry, or hard to get a fix on. Greygender people often describe knowing they are not cisgender, not feeling strongly non-binary either, and finding that questions about gender produce a shrug rather than an answer. The key point is that this is a settled state, not a stage of confusion.

Gendervoid describes something more specific: not the absence of gender but the presence of an absence. People who use it often distinguish between "I do not have a gender", which is agender, and "there is a hole where my gender should be", which is what void names. Some describe it as a felt lack rather than a neutral fact, and for some it is accompanied by grief.

The two are not opposites and many people use both, or move between them.

How they differ from agender

• Agender. Gender present: no. How it feels: neutral. Gender is simply not a category that applies.
• Greygender. Gender present: partly. How it feels: faint, ambiguous, low-intensity.
• Gendervoid. Gender present: no. How it feels: an actively felt emptiness or absence, sometimes with a sense of loss.
• Neutrois. Gender present: neutral. How it feels: a specific neutral gender rather than an absence.

Flags

The greygender flag in circulation is a five-stripe community design from around 2015, running white, grey, dark grey, purple, black. The gendervoid flag in circulation is a five-stripe design from around 2014, running black, dark blue, dark purple, dark blue, black. Neither has a documented single designer.

Greygender is built on the same "grey area" metaphor as the ace-spectrum gray terms, applied to gender rather than attraction. Gendervoid is a straightforward compound of gender and void. Both emerged from online non-binary communities in the 2010s, and neither has a reliably documented individual coiner.

• « Greygenre, c'est juste de l'incertitude sur son genre. » Greygenre décrit une expérience constante et installée d'un genre de faible intensité ou ambigu, pas une incertitude passagère ni un questionnement.
• « Gendervoid, c'est pareil qu'agenre. » Les deux sont proches, mais gendervoid décrit un vide activement ressenti ; agenre décrit simplement le fait de n'avoir aucun genre. La différence est d'ordre vécu.