Speccie reader Terry writes to ask when and where did ‘non-binary’ come into the language – and who applied it to gender? Well, ‘non-binary’ started out, in 1941, as meaning quite simply ‘not part of two’ – as in ‘our Sun is a non-binary star’.
In 1995 it was applied to human sexuality – which we all thought was binary (either XX or XY).
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