Next week on May 19th, we celebrate Agender Pride Day. So today we want to recognize Agender Visibility and discuss the spectrum that is gender. We’ve had a lot of people reach out and ask us questions about gender and requested an episode on what it’s like if you fall in the middle of the gender spectrum and not on the ends. While we have touched upon this subject numerous times in our episodes – check out Billy Porter, The Public Univeral Friend, Chao Xiaomi, and our many episodes on transgender icons – today we want to delve further. Agender is defined as “a person who has an internal sense of being neither male nor female nor some combination of male and female” according to Webster’s Dictionary. In the word’s deconstructed form it means “without gender”. Agender is often used as an umbrella term for those who don’t identify with a gender. And in fact, Agender is often classified under the larger umbrella of non-binary which is a subcategory of transgender. Think of Agender as the town you live in, Non-Binary as the state, Transgender as the country, and your body as the world. Often people need to further explain and this is due to perceptions and stereotypes attached to words. For instance, ALL transgender people are not alike and many trans people see their genders as vastly different from one another. Even with a smaller category like Agender, many folks will further identify or prefer another terminology. Some people who identify as agender may also use the terms Neutral gender, gender-neutral, genderless, null gender, lacking gender, and a variety of other terms that they feel best identifies who they are. There’s actually a great, short YouTube video and article on Them.Us media where Shamir explains the word Agender. We’ve linked the video in our script so you can check it out. The term itself is relatively new in respect to other terminologies around sex and gender. Agender first appeared in a 2000 UseNet forum when a user wrote the following “God is amorphous, agender, […] so image can’t be a physical or gender or sexual thing.[4]” This may or may not have been a reference to a bible verse, Genesis 1:27 which states, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them;” Whatever the background behind the post, people began to discuss the word and many found that it better fit their sense of gender or lack thereof. In 2005 the word was presented as a standard identity when a UseNet writer stated: “cultures can have transgender, agender, and hypergender individuals.” By 2013, the term was being used in the New York Times profile piece “Generation LGBTQIA” [6]. And in 2017 the first individual was granted the right to place Agender on a state I.D. In fact, throughout the 2000’s the queer community has morphed and expanded to mean so much more than the LGBT labels of it’s past. And this is due to our understanding of sex, identity, orientation, and expression. These four pieces don’t always align with the standards and boxes of the day. In the past, folks who challenged these social norms were either locked away, banished from society, or forced to comply. It’s not that people haven’t always defied standards, it’s just that many lost their lives or were forcibly silenced. And as we well know, while many places do currently enjoy a freedom that hasn’t been seen in centuries, there is still a lot of danger for queer people. This is especially true for those who are still consistently othered by society and even their own communities. The less that people understand about expression, identity, and sex, the more likely those people will create biased and bigoted beliefs against others. In reality, we ALL benefit when we allow ourselves to be more open-minded about our ability to be fluid in these standards. Here’s a way to explain the 4 concepts of personal identity. Imagine you walked into an ice cream shop and they had an assortme...