Though they are in the minority, our city boasts a number of inhabitants belonging to the "neuter" gender and the "spivak" gender. These are easily confused as you can see by their official descriptions.
Neuter: Partakes of neither polar gender.
Spivak: The absence of gender in the common sense.
My theory is that the difference lies not in their actual gender characteristics. After all, to the extent that these genders are largely defined in contrast to "male" and "female" they seem to amount to the same thing: not male and not female. But there must be some difference, and indeed I believe I've surmised what it is. One hears of "neutering" as a sort of procedure performed to prevent animals from breeding. So perhaps the difference between neuter and spivak lies in their *potential*. A neuter could have been male or female but is neither (maybe some neuters were male or female at one point in their lives). A spivak, by contrast, did not even have the potential to be male or female.
What do you think? Is this the right explanation of neuters v. spivaks?
I think it's more like a neuter is a being that literally has no gender, like a robot or a strange asexual being (a microbe?), an inanimate object, etc.
A Spivak, as I understand the term, is actually simply a gender neutral way of referring to a gendered entity. We can interpret this to mean that a spivak is actually either male or female, but prefers that this not be known.
I interpret a Spivak, by default, as an androgynous person whose gender is impossible to determine by looking at them.
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