Non-binary

As an umbrella it takes in people who are neither man nor woman, people who are both, people who are partly one and partly something else, people whose gender moves, and people who have no gender at all. As an identity it is what a great many people call themselves and nothing further. GLAAD's guidance reaches the same point from the other direction and advises asking what the word means to the person using it, since some use it of their gender identity, some of their gender expression, and some to object to binary gender roles.

How genderqueer came first

The older word is genderqueer. It surfaced in queer zines through the 1980s and early 1990s and reached a wider readership through the activist Riki Anne Wilchins, who wrote in a 1995 newsletter from The Transexual Menace that the fight against gender oppression was a political one, and that it took in "all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersexed, transexuals, transvestites, transgendered". Genderqueer carried the anti-assimilationist charge of the recently reclaimed word queer, and genderfuck and gender bender had preceded it. Wilchins spread it further through the 2002 anthology GenderQueer, subtitled voices from beyond the sexual binary.

The changeover happened in the early 2010s, when non-binary overtook genderqueer as the most-used umbrella for people who are not exclusively women or men. The shift is usually credited to its flatter and less political sound, and the objection to it rests on the same feature: critics inside the community point out that a term built on binary keeps the binary at the centre of the description.

Where the word was first written down

Surya Monro, introducing a 2019 special issue of the International Journal of Transgenderism, puts the earliest use of terms referring directly to non-binary at around 2000 and names Haynes and McKenna's 2001 collection Unseen Genders: Beyond the Binaries as an early instance. Monro traces the idea to trans and transsexual writers who had already refused the binary, quoting Kate Bornstein's line from 1994 that gender fluidity recognises no borders or rules of gender. The inclusive use of transgender to cover people now called non-binary is older, dating to at least 1992, with Leslie Feinberg and Bornstein the writers usually named for it.

The record of the thing runs well ahead of the record of the word. It reaches back to the Public Universal Friend, a genderless evangelist who gave up a birth name and gendered pronouns in 1776, and to Jens Andersson, tried in Norway in 1781 after marrying a woman, who told the court that he believed he belonged to both parts.

What the umbrella actually holds

Almost every term in this catalogue outside the binary sits under it. Agender is the absence of gender, Genderfluid a gender that moves, Genderflux one that changes in strength, and the demi- cluster, Demigirl and Demiboy among it, a partial connection to a gender. X-gender has been recognised in Japan since the late 1990s and English sources describe its speakers as non-binary, which is a comparison rather than a translation.

Neighbouring umbrellas have different edges. Gender nonconforming usually describes expression, gender expansive is the institutional term used by the Human Rights Campaign and by Gender Spectrum, and gender diverse the one preferred by Australian and British organisations.

The umbrella is not Intersex, and the two are confused in both directions. A United Kingdom survey in 2017 asked 1,980 intersex respondents and found 38 per cent identifying as women, 32 per cent as men and 25 per cent as non-binary. It is also not a description of culture-specific categories, however often outsiders reach for it to explain one. Hijra names membership of an organised community with a lineage system and a ritual economy, and Two-Spirit is a pan-Indigenous English coinage from 1990.

Why the headline figures are not comparable

The Williams Institute estimated about 1.2 million non-binary adults in the United States in 2021, roughly 11 per cent of LGBTQ adults, and found that 42 per cent of them also called themselves transgender while 58 per cent did not. That is the one figure here scaled to a population.

The rest are shares of groups already selected. The Trevor Project surveyed 35,000 LGBTQ young people aged 13 to 24 in July 2021, and 26 per cent described themselves as non-binary. A United Kingdom Government Equalities Office survey with 14,320 trans respondents put the share at almost 52 per cent in 2018, while Nieder and colleagues, reviewing the literature that same year, concluded that about 80 per cent of trans people identify exclusively as male or female. A Canadian study of 839 trans young people reported 41 per cent. The Gender Census 2025 records 61.7 per cent of its gender-diverse respondents choosing the word.

The figures do not converge because they count different rooms, and the community share and the population estimate are routinely quoted side by side as though one confirmed the other.

How the law has treated non-binary people

Documents changed through the courts first. An Oregon court granted a resident a non-binary gender change in 2016, the first known instance of a United States court allowing a marker other than male or female, and Elisa Rae Shupe was the first in the country to hold one on official papers. By December 2021 at least 21 states and Washington, DC issued an X marker, and in October 2021 the State Department issued the first federal passport carrying one, after a court order in a case brought by the Colorado resident Dana Zzyym.

The direction reversed in 2025. On 20 January an executive order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" established that the federal government would recognise male and female only, as determined at birth, and set aside gender identity as a ground for legal recognition.

What enby means

Enby, spelled out from the letters NB, is the noun form, since non-binary is an adjective and English wanted a noun for the person. GLAAD advises against the bare initials, which already stand for non-Black. Enbian names attraction between non-binary people and diamoric a relationship with at least one non-binary person in it. Both spellings, hyphenated and closed, are in wide use and neither is more correct. Merriam-Webster carries the closed one and files the gender sense third, behind the ordinary senses of not restricted to two parts and of a number system that does not use two as its base.