Opposite arithmetic. Ask an agender person what their gender is and the line stays open. Nothing arrives, and for a lot of people the blank is not a wound. Ask a bigender person and two answers arrive, both complete, either one at a time or both switched on.
It is rarely a hard call from inside. Nobody mistakes nothing for two. The confusion is usually a bigender person who has agender as one of their two, and wonders which page is theirs. The honest answer is this one, with both words.
How to tell them apart
- Check before your feet are on the floor. If information gets handed to you, today it is this one, that is bigender. If the check returns nothing, and it has always returned nothing, that is agender.
- Someone calls you sir on Tuesday and again on Thursday. Bigender: one lands and one is a slap, and nothing about your body changed in between. Agender: neither lands anywhere, on either day.
- Picture yourself in ten years. Two versions, and losing either one reads as a bereavement: bigender. One version, and asking what gender it is feels like asking whether it is Dutch: agender.
More likely Agender
- Descriptions of what it feels like to be a woman, or a man, read like someone else's mail.
- You freeze at the gender field on a form, not because two boxes is one too few but because none of them applies.
- Your worst nights are the ones with nothing to point at, no feeling to hold up as proof.
More likely Bigender
- You keep both halves of the wardrobe for a reason that is not fashion.
- Forms make you pick one, and it feels like signing something you know to be half false.
- People who have only met one of you describe a stranger to your face.
When both words are honestly available
- Some bigender people have agender as one of their two: a man and nothing, a woman and a blank, taking turns or stacked. That is bigender, and the agender word is honestly in use for one half of it.
- Otherwise, rarely both. A blank that comes and goes without a second gender arriving is closer to genderfluid or genderflux than to either of these words.
What people get wrong
Agender means you do not care about gender, and bigender means you cannot make up your mind.
Absence is not indifference: plenty of agender people care enormously about how they get read and are worn down by getting it wrong all day. And bigender has nothing to choose between. It is like asking which of your hands you have decided on.
Both would look androgynous.
Neither specifies a haircut. There are agender people with beards and agender people in full makeup, and bigender people read as an unremarkable man or an unremarkable woman every day of their lives. Presentation is not evidence.
Questions people ask
- Can you be agender and bigender at the same time?
- Yes, in one specific shape. Bigender means two genders, and any two qualify, including agender as one of the pair. So a person can be a man some weeks and nothing at all other weeks, both complete, and use both words. What does not fit is being only the blank: if nothing is ever there and nothing ever arrives, that is agender on its own.
- Is agender just bigender with the volume turned down?
- No. Halfway implies two ends and a road between them. Most agender people describe themselves as off that road entirely, not parked in the middle of it. Bigender has two whole ends and stands on both. One is no answer; the other is two answers. Neither is a quieter version of the other.