Analyzing handedness revealed an often overlooked excluded middle: a sizable population who are neither strictly left- nor strictly right-handed. The survey questions about sex and gender follow the same methodology as the handedness questions, and similarly allow respondents to answer “yes” to both or neither of the questions “Do you identify as female?” and “Do you identify as male?” Here, ambiguous responses are represented by the “Both or neither female/male” curve.
As with handedness and sexual orientation, this is territory where biology, medicine, environment, language, and culture all intersect in complex ways. For handedness, though, the signs of stigma and discrimination are mostly fossilized remains encoded in language, whereas stigmatization based on sex, gender, and their excluded middles remains red-hot today. This volcano is active, with the eruption of major debates about reproductive rights, sexuality, sexual equity, non-binariness, and trans rights seemingly every week. As if in a lava flow, the cultural landscape is being shaped and reshaped before our eyes.
In addition to “both or neither,” the graph also shows the percentage of people who use the pronoun “they” exclusively, that is, who answer “yes” to “Is the right pronoun for you ‘they’?” and “no” to all of the other pronoun choices. Both percentages are much higher among the young, and unsurprisingly, these populations overlap—though the overlap, like the percentages themselves, falls off with age.
Although, at age 66, only 1 in 250 people do not identify as either strictly male or female, a number of comments from older respondents suggest that they might have responded differently had they been born a generation later:
I wish I had understood gender fluidity better when I was young. 1
I’m glad I was born when gender identity was much simpler. You have too many choices today and it would be too hard for me to decide what to be. 2
At age 18, among those who indeed have “many choices,” about 1 in 40 people do not identify as strictly male or female—that’s sixfold higher. In the same vein, fewer than 1 in 1,000 66-year-olds use “they” exclusively, but at age 20, about 1 in 70 do—more than a tenfold change.
These are dramatic shifts, and they’re likely accelerating, as evidenced by the steepness of the change by age, the increase from year to year, and the comments from younger respondents who are still figuring things out:
I mostly present as female—I’m not out as [nonbinary]/genderfluid/genderqueer. […] I’m generally somewhere in between genders, rarely being 100% male or female. I’m glad I was given a name with a gender-neutral nickname because it makes everything a bit more comfortable. I have never had the courage to reveal my gender identity in relationships. 3
This was a “hard” survey for me. The closest I’ve come to defining my gender identity is “cis by default.” It’s just easiest and most comfortable to present as a woman for me, but I don’t intrinsically feel like a woman or feminine. And I don’t feel comfortable saying I’m non-binary or using pronouns like “they” because I do present as a woman. So yeah, just the normal difficulties with society’s rigid gender structure, I guess! 4
The increasingly common use of “they” as a singular non-binary pronoun, and the cultural significance of this shift, inspired Merriam-Webster to make it the 2019 Word of the Year. Like many people of my generation, initially I found “they” odd, both impersonal and ungrammatical. Yet its use as a gender neutral pronoun isn’t a modern innovation; singular “they” appeared in English as early as the 1300s, only a century after the introduction of the plural “they.” 5
Grumpiness about the singular “they” by style commentators is a much more recent development, dating back only to the mid-18th century, though it has remained in common use anyway. Long before it became a pronoun non-binary people could apply to themselves, it served a useful grammatical function in situations where we need to refer to someone of unknown gender. Of course many other English usages, like the Southern “y’all,” have their purposes too (in this case, helpfully differentiating between the singular and plural forms of “you”). Although critics and style guides alike cloak their censure in arguments about utility, the real point is to stigmatize—that is, to reinforce linguistic in- and out-groups.
Human languages aren’t like computer languages, which are rigidly engineered and have a strict syntax, with objective “rights” and “wrongs.” Our languages are messier than that—and this is a good thing. Messiness allows language to adapt to the changing needs of various populations, and to evolve over time, as the word “queer” has (see the previous chapter). Like anything that propagates under selection, languages are the cumulative Darwinian sum of many generations of such tinkering.
Of course if languages didn’t evolve, nobody would be trying to regulate them. Those who do try tend to be arguing (or, when emboldened enough, mandating) from a position of privilege. By asserting that certain usages are right and others wrong, they’re policing a social boundary and enforcing a value gradient across it—a right and wrong side of the tracks. Often the boundary demarcates class, or race, or both.
A generation ago, gender-neutral “they” tended to be looked down on as colloquial, informal, or even uneducated, not unlike “y’all.” On the other hand, disallowing “they” in formal writing without falling back on “he” as a catchall required awkward constructions like “he or she,” which had trouble catching on. So, rising acknowledgement of male privilege, and the backlash against that acknowledgement, turned pronouns into a cultural skirmish long before most people were thinking about non-binary or trans identity. In a 2008 jeremiad entitled Feminism and the English Language, conservative computer scientist and self-appointed style authority David Gelernter wrote,
The fixed idea forced by language rapists upon a whole generation of students, that “he” can refer only to a male, is (in short) wrong. […] He-or-she’ing added so much ugly dead weight to the language that even the Establishment couldn’t help noticing. So feminist authorities went back to the drawing board. Unsatisfied with having rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English style, they proceeded to shoot the legs out from under grammar—which collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional. Can the damage to our mother tongue be undone? 6
Setting aside any critique of Gelernter’s own rather steroidal writing style and its mixed automotive-or-equestrian metaphors, this kind of policing follows a familiar pattern. It circles the wagons to protect a virtuous “us” from an invading “them,” positing “our way” as an unquestioned, it’s-always-been-this-way default and “their way” as radical, foreign, and threatening:
Why should I worry about anyone’s ideology? […] Who can afford to allow a virtual feminist to elbow her way like a noisy drunk into that inner mental circle where all your faculties (such as they are) are laboring to produce decent prose?
But language was already moving on, as it always does. The use of “he” in gender-neutral settings became archaic. By 2016, with the rising popularity of gender-neutral “they” for individuals, David Gelernter’s son Josh had taken up the cause of defending the sports-car-horse purity of the English language against those invading pronouns, writing with a familiar sense of righteous grievance:
Trying to depluralize “they” is an asinine effort, stemming from a stupid misunderstanding made by stupid people whom the [American Dialect Society] has chosen to indulge rather than to correct. […] You might ask why it matters one way or the other. Aside from being wrong, and sounding wrong, using “they” as a singular steals precision from the language. It is destructive. 7
It’s hard not to conclude that the concerns of the Gelernters, while couched in logical arguments, are more fundamentally political; they’re about identity. Hence, war. Where David’s beef was with feminists, Josh’s was with the new threat: trans and non-binary people. The desire for language to “stay as it is,” which is to say, return to the way it was, is hard to tease apart from the Gelernters’ broader wish for the world to return to the way it was, perhaps in the 1950s or ’60s. 8
Many modern style commentators harbor more moderate beliefs, and understand that language is always evolving to suit new needs. Steven Pinker, in his 2014 book The Sense of Style, wrote,
Only a minority [of the Usage Panel] accepts A person at that level should not have to keep track of the hours they put in—though the size of that minority has doubled in the past decade, from 20 percent to almost 40 percent, one of many signs that we are in the midst of a historical change that’s returning singular they to the acceptability it enjoyed before a purist crackdown in the nineteenth century. A slim majority of the panel accepts If anyone calls, tell them I can’t come to the phone and Everyone returned to their seats. The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it’s fine. 9
The hat tip to Jane Austen might be a bit embarrassing to David Gelernter, as Gelernter has held up Austen as a paragon of style—seemingly unaware of her frequent use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun! Still, in Austen’s day, “they” never would have been used for a specific, known person, or in referring to oneself, because that kind of gender ambiguity would have seemed strange, perhaps even freakish. While it certainly existed, it wasn’t acknowledged in polite society.
Clearly this is now changing, but the strict gender binary remains very much with us as a cultural default. “Boy or girl?” is still the first question a new parent is likely to get, and the genderedness of language, customs, bathrooms, and so on means that in our daily interactions we continually model each other’s gender in ways that are hard to avoid. Many survey respondents evince frustration at this, even when their responses to the questions about sex and gender are unambiguously masculine or feminine: “I hate gendered restrictions and enforcement of binary gender norms”; 10 “I wish we would eliminate gender from identifying ourselves”; 11 “gender is exhausting and most of my life trying to present as female in the US has been stressful and uncomfortable, I prefer to just exist without thinking about it and just [be] ME.” 12 These sentiments most often are expressed by women, for reasons that become clear when we consider who historically has gotten the short end of the stick.
While “they” is an increasingly popular way out of the binary, it’s by no means the only alternative brewing in our language’s evolutionary cauldron. A few years ago we saw something of a Cambrian explosion of gender neutral pronouns. “Ze,” “ey,” “hen,” “thon,” “xe,” and even, especially controversially, “it,” all have their partisans. Then, there are the nigh-infinite combinations and nuances of usage preferred by individuals. One 26-year-old from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, wrote,
I identify as both she and he pronouns, never they. They is too much like erasure to me, and sometimes I feel like both she and he, so I don’t mind either.
Another wrote,
I identify as gender queer and use she/they pronouns. I do not mind if someone uses “he” but I did not want to select that it was the “right” pronoun.
The responses include many, many more variations.
It may be that this is our new normal: a complex and ever-expanding maze of words between the old traditional neighborhoods of “he” and “she.” Future students of English as a second language may need to master such nuances in order to speak respectfully, much the way foreign students of Japanese must struggle through the many honorific forms of address that characterize that language. Or, over time, English usages may settle and “they” (or some alternative) may become commonly enough accepted to displace its competitors and simplify the excluded middle. Or maybe, in the end, “they” will simply become the default pronoun for everybody, with “he” and “she” becoming archaisms like “thee” and “thou.” This would certainly make life simpler. 13 With my engineering hat on, it’s probably the option I’d pick, if I could make up the rules. But of course that’s not anyone’s prerogative, because language is not engineered, but evolved. And for now, many people are rolling their own personal pronouns.
This can create a bit of a linguistic minefield. The older or more traditionally minded of us, even those not as ideologically opposed as the Gelernters, tend to be bemused, puzzled, or fearful about misstepping, and can be resentful about suddenly needing to deal with it all. This attitude is typified by a man from Sicklerville, New Jersey:
I think that there is so much political correctness in the current time period that it is a little absurd. If someone mistakes someone as a “guy” and they want to really be identified as a “she” how can someone be offended and angry at someone for this? It used to be so simple 50 years ago.
Ah, the good old late 20th century.
Avoiding such uncomfortable interactions can lead to differing presentations in different contexts; the truth is that most gender-nontraditional people don’t relish confrontation either. As a 20-year-old from Austin, Texas, put it, “I use multiple pronouns (she/they) and identify as nonbinary or female depending on who I’m talking to.” Complicating things even more (relative forms of address once more recall Japanese honorifics), this dependence on context makes older or more traditional people tend to dramatically underestimate the size of the excluded middle. They aren’t confronted with it, even if they are in contact with it. Just as in Jane Austen’s time, nuances in gender aren’t seen, so, in a self-fulfilling way, they remain invisible.
Linguistic shifts raise profound questions that have become highly charged in today’s political and cultural climate, such as: Does rising ambiguity in gender identification reflect an underlying reality that has been with us all along, but has been long suppressed? Or is it a social trend—even, as some have claimed, a fad? (Recall that for sexual orientation, there’s evidence of both long-suppressed realities emerging into the open and social transmission.) Can we draw a clear line between sex, which many authorities today define as purely biological, and gender, which is often considered purely cultural? Are either sex or gender innate properties, and are either of them inherently binary? Are they fixed for an individual, or can they change (or be changed) over time, or depending on context and environment? There are a variety of strongly held and opposing beliefs regarding all of these questions. If we set aside ideology as best we can, though, it’s possible to make headway in answering them by delving more deeply into what the data reveal about excluded middles, just as Chapter 2 described in the simpler domain of handedness.
To be clear, we cannot lean on the handedness analogy too hard. For instance, where “ambidexterity” is a generic catchall term for the excluded middle of handedness, a number of distinct terms map the excluded middle (or middles) of gender. “Non-binary” is the most common, but other variations in common use include “gender queer” and “gender fluid.” As with ambidexterity, I didn’t include any definitions in the survey, so for now, these terms are best thought of simply as labels for communities people identify with that suggest something nontraditional about their gender.
These populations overlap, but their overlap is far from complete, since like gender neutral pronouns, the terms all have their partisans. Hence the total—meaning, people who answer “yes” to any or all of the three questions “Are you non-binary?,” “Are you gender fluid?,” or “Are you gender queer?”—is larger than any individually, but smaller than the sum, ranging from 5% to 11% depending on age.
Breakdowns by age show the (by now familiar) rises in nontraditional or minority identities among the young. Some surprising things happen after middle age, though. This is most obvious for the non-binary curve, which is under 3% from ages 40–50, but rises above 5% for younger people, and to near 10% for older people! What’s going on here?
The mystery deepens upon further breaking down the non-binary population into three distinct sub-populations: non-binary women (here meaning those who answer “yes” to “Do you identify as female?” and “no” to “Do you identify as male?”), non-binary men (“yes” to “Do you identify as male?,” “no” to “Do you identify as female?”), and non-binary people who answer “yes” to neither or both of “Do you identify as female?” and “Do you identify as male?”
The curious U-shape of the non-binary curve turns out to be a sum of three very different components. First, let’s consider those who are both non-binary and respond ambiguously to the questions about their sex (“yes” to both or neither of “Do you identify as male?” and “Do you identify as female?”). Like exclusive users of “they,” this curve is high among the young, and low among the older population.
For people over 60, the sex binary reigns absolute: that is, even among older non-binary people, everyone answers “yes” to exactly one of “Do you identify as male?” or “Do you identify as female?” Among younger people, though, a rising number are both non-binary and answer “yes” to both or neither male/female. Among 19-year-olds, this applies to about 1 in 40 people. The “both” and “neither” populations appear to be roughly equivalent in other respects. As a 27-year-old non-binary person from Spokane, Washington, put it,
I consider myself non-binary, so that’s why I answered “yes” to both identification as male and female—but I feel equally correct saying “no” to both as well.
What are we to make of the other components, though—and especially that the number of people who answer “yes” to “Are you non-binary?” but also identify as male (and not female) climbs from about 1% at age 19 to 5% by age 74? This is the exact opposite of the usual age pattern for sexual minorities. Understanding what’s going on here requires delving into the complex topic of intersexuality. Intersex people are the biological excluded middle of sex—falling somewhere between male and female.
If the concept is new to you, you’re not alone. Many survey respondents noted that they had never heard of intersexuality, with some expressing surprise when they Googled it to learn more. 14 Your odds are somewhat higher of having encountered the word “hermaphrodite” at one point or another—a historical and still often-used term for intersex. Even if you are familiar with the concept, however, you likely think of it as a rare medical anomaly—perhaps even if you’re intersex yourself! The reason: our gender-binary society has rendered intersexuality taboo.
A 60-year-old woman from Grand Junction, Colorado.
A 66-year-old man from Canyon, Texas.
A 30-year-old from Concord, California.
A 36-year-old woman from Glendale, California.
“They, Pron., Adj., Adv., and N,” 2022; Baron, “A Brief History of Singular ‘They,’” 2018.
David Gelernter, “Feminism and the English Language: Can the Damage to Our Mother Tongue Be Undone?,” 2008.
Josh Gelernter, “The War on Grammar,” 2016.
Even the Gelernters would be unlikely to argue for a return to the 19th century.
Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, 260–61, 2014.
A 35-year-old woman from Philadelphia, PA.
A 56-year-old woman from Winterville, GA.
A 33-year-old woman from Winston-Salem, NC.
These shifts aren’t limited to English; similar debates are playing out in many other languages too.
It was especially interesting to find this term disproportionately singled out as obscure given the many other niche and in some cases far more recently coined terms on the survey.