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Ollie Parks's avatar

Reading this piece, I was struck by how often the “nonbinary” label seems to emerge from confusion, distress, or a desire to escape judgment—not a stable or coherent sense of self. That resonates with my own experience of trying to make a modest, deeply personal change—reverting to the childhood name I was once known by. It was my given middle name, after all. I assumed it would be simple. It wasn’t. A close friend refused outright, and my husband could not unlearn the old one. That taught me a lasting lesson: identity isn’t something we assert in isolation—it’s something that’s negotiated, remembered, and affirmed (or not) by others.

That’s why the current orthodoxy around pronouns and nonbinary identity rings false to me. We're told that "respect" means instant and unquestioning acceptance—but often, that demand feels less like a plea for dignity and more like a demand for compliance. When “respect” becomes a cudgel, something has gone wrong.

The podcast rightly notes that many of these identities function symbolically—as face-saving devices, performative acts, or political signals—not as reflections of inner truth. And if identity is no longer grounded in reality or relationship, but instead in unilateral assertion backed by social pressure, then perhaps we’re not watching the evolution of gender—but its unraveling.

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Russell Peachman's avatar

It's not just the nonbinary search term that peaked in 2022. The terms "am i trans", "am i trans quiz", "transgender quiz" and "trans quiz" also peaked around the same time and has seen steady declines since then. This is the biggest indicator to me thus far that the contagion has started to subside.

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