Non-binary man

Wikipedia records both compounds directly, noting that among Intersex people some identify as non-binary men or non-binary women, alongside those who identify as men, as women, as non-binary alone, or as non-binary and Genderfluid. A national United Kingdom survey in 2017 found that of 1,980 intersex respondents, 38 per cent identified as women, 32 per cent as men and 25 per cent as non-binary. Most intersex people, Wikipedia adds, identify as men or women, and being intersex is not the same as being non-binary.

What the compound actually claims

Non-binary is the umbrella for genders that are not exclusively male or female, and the compound uses the word exclusively. Healthline's account separates two experiences that both land under the umbrella: some non-binary people experience their gender as both man and woman, others as neither. The compound belongs to the first of those, and it files with the partial-connection terms because the question it answers is one of degree rather than of which category. A Demiboy is partly a boy; a non-binary man holds manhood and non-binary status at once.

That is not the same move as claiming a whole gender that sits beside a familiar one, which is what Juxera does. Nor is it a claim about presentation. Wikipedia notes the related habit of reaching for descriptors such as masculine woman or feminine man, and Healthline is blunter: the assumption that non-binary people all dress and behave androgynously is wrong, some have a typically masculine expression and some a typically feminine one, and identity cannot be read off appearance in either direction. A compound label says which genders a person holds, not how they look.

The vocabulary around the word has grown its own compounds too. Wikipedia records enby, from the English pronunciation of the abbreviation NB, along with enbian for attraction between non-binary people and diamoric for attraction involving at least one non-binary person.

The compound also has to survive translation between the umbrella words that surround it, and Wikipedia sets those out side by side.

Only the first of those makes a compound anybody writes down. Non-binary man and non-binary woman appear in the sources; gender expansive man does not.

Why a non-binary man is not a contradiction

Philosophical work on the category makes room for the pairing. The norm-relevancy account developed by Katharine Jenkins defines a person's gender by which gendered norms they experience as relevant to them, such as how they should dress or behave in a social situation, whether or not they comply with those norms. On that account somebody in a society with dominant male and female genders is non-binary if elements of both sets feel relevant, or if neither set does. The first of those two cases is precisely what the compound describes, and Jenkins treats the norms as varying across places and periods.

A second account runs the other way. Robin Dembroff, writing about genderqueer with no mention of the compound, defines it as a critical gender kind: a gender whose members collectively destabilise core elements of the dominant gender ideology, as against an uncritical kind that aligns with and reproduces binary norms. On a norm-relevancy reading a non-binary man is a description; on a critical-kind reading the same label carries a claim about what it does to the categories it borrows from.

How the compound resists a date

Nothing on file dates the phrase. What can be dated is the vocabulary underneath it. Genderqueer appeared in queer zines in the 1980s and early 1990s, preceded by genderfuck and gender-bender, and gained ground in the mid-1990s through activists including Riki Anne Wilchins, who used it in a 1995 Transexual Menace newsletter for a list that ran from diesel dykes and stone butches to people whose gender expressions had not yet been named. It spread further through the 2002 anthology GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary, and reached general awareness in the late 2000s and early 2010s through the internet and public identification by celebrities. Non-binary itself was not in widespread use until the early 2010s, when it overtook genderqueer as the usual umbrella, credited by Wikipedia to a more neutral and less political connotation. A compound built on it is necessarily later, and nobody has recorded a first use.

The idea behind the compound is much older than the words. Wikipedia's history section carries the case of Jens Andersson, tried in Norway in 1781 after marrying a woman, who said under questioning that he believed he belonged to both parts. It is the closest thing on file to a dated statement of holding two categories at once, and neither the phrase itself nor a claim of continuity.

Wikipedia records an objection to the umbrella word on the ground that naming a binary reinforces it, which is an argument about the term that says nothing of the people using it, and it applies to the compound with the same force.

Why the pronouns do not follow the label

A non-binary man may use he and him, a non-binary woman she and her, and neither choice unsays the compound. Pronouns and gender labels are separate systems in English, and the acceptability research on file shows how separate.

Ell Rose, Max Winig, Jasper Nash, Kyra Roepke and Kirby Conrod surveyed English speakers on neopronouns including xe, fae, ey and ze, and found them rated as less grammatical than she, he and singular they without being fully ungrammatical for most speakers. Age, gender and sexual orientation all correlated with the ratings, the forms that look like existing pronouns scored highest, and the participants' own written comments identified analogy as the reason. They report that neopronouns are used most by people who are non-binary or genderqueer, following Miltersen in 2016, and that Hekanaho found in 2020 a split running between cisgender men on one side and cisgender women and transgender people of any gender on the other.

The pattern is old. Blended coinages such as hiser and hesh, and thon from this one, were proposed through the nineteenth century as gender-neutral alternatives to a generic he, in debates the same authors trace back to eighteenth-century prescriptive grammarians. None took hold, while singular they, in use since Middle English, did, and the authors read the whole episode as a reminder that engineering language from the top down usually fails. Somebody holding a compound label is therefore not obliged to hold an unusual pronoun with it.

Where the pair overlaps with transgender

Wikipedia puts non-binary identities under the Transgender umbrella on the reasoning that non-binary people typically identify with a gender other than the sex assigned at birth, while noting that some do not consider themselves transgender. It dates that inclusive usage to at least 1992, crediting Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein with pressing the shared experience of gender outlaws. Healthline gives one of the reasons people decline the word: distance from binary transgender communities where they have met hostility.

That friction is documented as well as reported. Amy Stone, Elizabeth Nimmons, Robert Salcido and Phillip Schnarrs, working from 107 open survey answers and 26 interviews collected in a Latino-majority United States city for the Strengthening Colors of Pride study and publishing in 2019, list transgender people being hostile to non-binary people among the ways a community built on sameness fails the people at its edges, alongside the absence of Black participants from major transgender organisations. Their broader finding is that support ran along racial lines: Anglo participants reported more transphobia within the wider queer community and turned to hobby and interest groups drawn from white networks, while Black and American Indian participants found their community among queer people of colour.

What has and has not been counted

The Gender Census counts the halves and not the join. It carries man, woman, boy and girl among its identity words and reports each separately, so somebody holding a binary word and a non-binary one at the same time is recorded twice, and no total for the compound falls out of it. The survey is built for exactly those people: everyone taking it first confirms that they do not fit solely into one of the two boxes of always, solely and completely a woman or girl, or always, solely and completely a man or boy. Its 2022 round drew 39,765 usable responses, and any share it publishes describes the gender-diverse people who answered and no population beyond them.

One compound did surface that year, and it surfaced in the textboxes, where respondents type what the checkbox list lacks. Boygirl was typed in by 1.02 per cent of respondents aged thirty and under, enough to qualify for the checkbox list under the survey's own one per cent rule, and girlboy qualified beside it. Neither is the phrase this entry describes, and both point the same way: the people a compound is for are answering, and the instrument records them a word at a time.

Other figures nearby measure something adjacent. The 2017 United Kingdom intersex survey counted 1,980 respondents and split them across women, men and non-binary without recording anyone in two categories at once, which is a limit of the instrument: a form offering one box per person cannot record a compound. Healthline's own frequency claim counts bodies, putting intersex conditions at one birth in every 2,000.

The Stone study is explicit about what its numbers will not carry. Its non-binary sample was, in the authors' own words, too small and too varied to support a conclusion, and they publish the observation that Black and Latinx non-binary participants struggled to find groups in person where they met people like themselves as a question for further research, and not as a result.