Living in A Word Cloud

I wonder how many agender people with DMRD listen to Red and Anarchist black metal while eating Birthday Cake Pebbles?

I’m all for complexity and nuance and shades of gray. One reason I’m not much of a sports fan is the fierce binary tribalism it always seemed to require; I never really cared whether or not the Warriors or Cornhuskers or Crimson beat their opponents. I once wrote an essay for Rolling Stone celebrating ambivalence, which they amusingly published in their annual Hot issue, declaring ambivalence the “hot” sensibility of nineteen-ninety-whatever-it-was.

In this spirit, the migration in this century of the term nonbinary from mathematics to gender and sexuality was fine by me. In my most recent book, Evil Geniuses, I encouraged progressives to entertain nonbinary ideological approaches, since they “properly insist that we move beyond rigid binary categories concerning gender and sexuality.”

But: there’s granting that individuals and cultures and their cultural creations and tastes all exist on continuums, that everyone deserves to be seen if they want…and then there’s going wildly overboard by inventing and naming scores or hundreds of new niches and categories in every domain.