By Ariel Paul
According to Madison Smith, a research assistant professor at the Northwestern Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing, more people now identify as nonbinary than ever before.
“I’m not sure necessarily to what extent that’s a function of just more people in the population identifying as non-binary in general, or research studies more recently involving the option for people to mark their gender as non-binary,” Smith said.
Eli Kean, assistant professor of instruction in the gender studies and sexuality program at Northwestern University professor, has openly identified as nonbinary since 2012, when “very few people in academia had ever even heard the term ‘non-binary’, and most had never encountered someone who used ‘they/them’ pronouns.”
“When I came out to my first PhD adviser, he proclaimed that if I wasn’t ‘she’ or ‘he,’ I must be an ‘it.’ I felt so dehumanized by that. And I promptly found another adviser,” Kean said in an email.
These experiences prompted Kean to be a better educator to their trans students.
Kean described how more efforts are now being made to include nonbinary people in academic spaces. These include universities incorporating pronoun fields in forms, all-gender bathrooms and preferred name designations.
“However, I think one space where there’s still a lot of work to do is in educational research,” Kean said.
They said that researchers still often treat gender as dichotomous, with the only options being “man” and “woman.”
“There’s often so little thought into how researchers can adequately and accurately capture the complexity of gendered experiences, which is a shame because I think it would enrich their findings and lead to improved educational practice,” Kean said.
According to Smith, the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing combats this by including options for nonbinary people to report their gender. She also said there is “more of an effort” to measure non-binary gender.
The inclusion of nonbinary individuals in research and healthcare, along with public awareness of nonbinary identities, is rising. However, anti-LGBT legislation and attacks are also on the rise.
There have been numerous efforts to suppress transgender and nonbinary people’s existence in public life through anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the past year. According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign, nearly 500 gender identity-motivated hate crimes were recorded in 2022.
Statistics for transgender and nonbinary people often get lumped together. According to Smith, many people believe that being nonbinary and transgender are mutually exclusive. On the flip side, some believe that the two identities are synonymous.
“It very much depends on how somebody understands and defines their gender,” Smith said.
In Chicago, various organizations have taken strides to include nonbinary individuals. Healing to Action, an organization committed to ending gender-based violence, includes nonbinary and other LGBTQ+ identities by building that education into their programming.
Dorothy, a lesbian bar in West Town, also supports nonbinary and gender non-conforming individuals by creating space for them. According to an article in Eater Chicago, they host “Dorothy Enby Night” to make these individuals feel more welcome.
Smith said that nonbinary awareness week, which took place this year from July 8-14, is helpful “if the people who have the power to make decisions about health and wellbeing are committed to making those types of weeks helpful.”
“I can see that these visibility weeks raise awareness for things like health care systems administrators and health care systems and lead them to have a greater awareness of the health care needs, for instance, of non-binary folks,” she said.
Nonbinary awareness week can be a time for nonbinary individuals to confidently express their pride and identity.
“Once you realize there’s no right way to experience gender, you also realize that so many other life milestones or definitions of personal success that we’ve been taught to idealize and prioritize are just made up,” said Kean. “As a non-binary person, I’m able to notice in more detail how gender operates in our society, and this enables me to teach gender in more nuanced ways than other professors might. It has allowed me to more deeply understand oppressions that I don’t experience myself, to see how it’s all connected, and to act in solidarity with those communities.”