is back with another episode of TGIF at The Free Press. I look forward to her column every Friday. She recaps the news quite well, along with plenty of links and humor. This week she mentioned the decline of non-binary designations:
Nonbinary identification is collapsing: The number of young people identifying as neither male nor female has fallen through the floor, which is crazy because I thought they were all born that way. An analysis of data from surveys by Brown University, Andover, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) shows a massive drop-off among nonbinary students from the 2022–2023 peak. Maybe nonbinary was just another boarding school fad that has started to fade—pronouns are out, trust funds are back in (good thing polo shirts work for both vibes).
[Emphasis not in the original]
To me and most other people who don’t cling to the corporate media, it was always clear that declaring oneself “non-binary” was a cheap-signalling fad fueled by social contagion and that it would eventually fade because it was not anchored to any reality in the physical or biological world. It will continue to fall the same way as bell-bottoms, pet rocks, disco music and the ice bucket challenge. I predict that “queerness” will soon follow suit.
[Supp Oct 21, 2025]
