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 before non-binary

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. The two words now overlap broadly in meaning, and still carry different connotations for many of the people who choose between them.

Where non-binary 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.

What the older record shows

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. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble of 1990 argued against a fixed male and female binary long before Butler came out as non-binary in 2019. The autism-rights activist Jim Sinclair, a founder of Autism Network International, publicly declared a physical and social neuter status in 1997, in an introduction written for the Intersex Society of North America.

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.

Two philosophical accounts have tried to give the umbrella an edge rather than a list. Katharine Jenkins proposes a norm-relevancy account, in which a person's gender is fixed by which gendered norms they experience as applying to them, whether or not they comply with those norms; on that reading someone is non-binary if elements of both sets feel relevant, or if neither set does. Robin Dembroff, writing about genderqueer in particular, defines it as a critical gender kind, one whose members collectively destabilise core elements of the dominant gender ideology of their society, as against an uncritical kind that reproduces it.

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. Every other number in circulation is a share of a group that was already selected, and the selection is what the number is mostly measuring.

The spread runs from a fifth to almost two thirds, and it is six different questions put to six different rooms rather than a disagreement about people. Monro adds the further point that academic production has not kept pace with the number of people using the word, and that non-binary respondents are routinely erased inside a broader transgender category before anyone counts them. The same 2018 United Kingdom survey found that 76 per cent of its non-binary respondents avoided expressing their gender identity for fear of the reaction.

Opinion data moves in a different direction from the counts. A Pew Research Center survey in 2019 found 50 per cent of Generation Z and 47 per cent of Millennials saying society is not accepting enough of people who are neither men nor women, and 59 per cent of Generation Z and 50 per cent of Millennials saying that a form asking about gender should offer an option beyond man and woman.

How the law has treated non-binary people

Documents changed through the courts first. The Intersex and Genderqueer Recognition Project began pressing for wider options on official papers in 2012, and 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. Elisa Rae Shupe was the first person in the country to hold one on official documents. 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. In Canada the Alberta legislator Estefan Cortes-Vargas came out as non-binary during a sitting in 2015.

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 and how it is written

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, last revised its entry on 15 August 2026, 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.

Pronouns are a separate question from the label, and the answer is not uniform. Singular they is the commonest choice and has been adopted by every leading style guide, the Associated Press, the American Psychological Association, the Modern Language Association and Chicago among them. Some non-binary people use neopronouns such as ze/zim or xe/xir, sometimes alongside they, sometimes only in writing. Some use a gendered set together with they, as in he/they. The gender-neutral honorific Mx. stands in for Mr., Mrs. and Ms., and some people ask for no honorific at all. GLAAD notes that the phrase preferred pronouns has fallen out of use in the community, on the ground that a pronoun is not a preference.