Miles Breckner was seventeen years old when they first heard the term “nonbinary”.
“We did a panel on all of the different genders outside the binary, when they came to the non-binary section everything they were saying was just hitting me. Like literally everything.”
Breckner identifies as nonbinary-- not a man, but not a woman either. Increasingly, people are identifying in ways outside of male and female, or outside of gay, bisexual, and straight. More and more people feel that the diversity of the human experience can’t be categorized as simply as two or three categories.
It’s hard to get a solid number on just how many people feel this way. Demographic statistics of any kind are tough to obtain for this sensitive topic, where people might feel reluctant to be open. And with the proliferation of “new terms”, it’s hard to say how many people would adopt them if more people knew they existed.
A census in the UK found that 0.4% selected neither male nor female. However, this figure includes everyone who did not want to share their sex, so it can’t be extrapolated to determine how many people identify as something other than a man or a woman.
Nailing down this number is likely near impossible, but the increasing legal recognition of a third gender indicates that the number of people identifying this way is growing. Vox journalist Annie Tritt reports that as of April 2018, four states legally recognize a third gender.
Professor Jeanine Skorinko, the director of WPI’s psychology program, says nonbinary “wasn’t part of the discussion when I first started teaching.” Referring to the difficulty in drawing conclusions about this population, she says “we haven’t gotten there yet with the research.”
People are also labeling their sexual orientation in ways other than the classic “gay, bisexual, straight” trichotomy. I conducted an informal survey of 37 people, mostly college students, who identify as part of the LGBT+ community. Nine of them did not identify as gay, bisexual, or straight.
Of the nine, two identified as pansexual (someone who is attracted to all genders) and two identified as asexual or aromantic (attracted to no genders). The remaining five chose “other”.
With the addition of identities not included in “LGBT”, new acronyms are popping up. LGBT+, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA, QUILTBAG, and LGBTQQIP2SAA have all begun showing up in various contexts, although the latter two are relatively uncommon. The term MOGAI, which stands for marginalized orientations, gender alignments, and intersex is frequently on used on tumblr. It’s often associated with radicalism, microlabels, and “outrage culture”-- many people who identify as part of the LGBT+ community have denounced and criticized “MOGAI tumblr”. GSM, gender and sexual minorities, is another acronym that’s gained traction recently.
The concept of “new identities” has met pushback, particularly from conservative-leaning people. On reddit, a subreddit called “r/TumblrInAction” exists mostly to mock the radical far left community on tumblr. One recent post describes a variety of “temperature genders”. Since it can be hard to identify satire over the internet and very little is known about nonbinary identities, it’s tough to say definitively if these have any legitimacy. However, the fact that identities like “temperature genders” have essentially no presence outside of tumblr suggests that there’s no true trend of this type of identity.
Even within tumblr-- maybe even especially within tumblr-- there’s a significant countermovement against “microlabels”. One can get lost in posts tagged “asexual discourse”, discussion revolving around the role of asexuals in the LGBT+ community. Many of the “microlabels” are related to asexuality, ostensibly because of the difficulty many people experience trying to define a lack of attraction. On an asexual advice blog on tumblr, some of the terms defined include “lithsexual”, “a person who experiences sexual attraction, but does not want it reciprocated, or the attraction fades when reciprocated”; “squish”, the platonic equivalent of a crush; and “zedsexual”, someone who is not asexual.
Once again, it’s tough to ascertain how widespread the usage of many of these are. Microlabels of this sort are much more widespread on tumblr than things like “temperature gender”, but actual prevalence in the “real world” is still tough to estimate. The Asexual Advice blog has fewer than ten posts since 2015, so if microlabels ever were a trend, it could be one that’s coming to an end.
The feeling that you’re not alone, that other people can relate, is a powerful one. A common theme on tumblr is the idea of “validation”. In general, many people find it validating to discover a group of people who share their experience. The internet is full of niche online communities, demonstrating this effect extends far beyond gender or sexual orientation or tumblr. “For some, it’s really enlightening,” Professor Skorinko says.
Although some may feel that normal human experiences are being excessively labeled, Skorinko describes the importance of language. “For all the people who have felt just not quite like they fit, now suddenly, or not so suddenly, there’s a space, there’s actual dialogue, there’s actual words that go along with it, and you can talk about it a little more concretely.”
Photo credits: Lindsey Fletcher
