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.

In fact, this American rush to pigeonhole began decades ago. Quasi-scientific and would-be scientific and non-scientific disciplines started emulating what botanists and other biologists started in the 18th and 19th centuries with their kingdoms, phyla, genera and millions of species. Over the last half century or so, we’ve gone taxonomically cuckoo — gradually, then suddenly.

Start with psychiatric diagnoses. In 1952 the new American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics published the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders, which officially certified 106 distinct mental disorders. Subsequent editions in 1968, 1987, 1994 and 2000 each increased the number of diagnosable disorders, up to a peak of 365, and made it easier for people to qualify — leading to what the prominent psychiatrist Allen Frances, chair of the 1994 DSM task force, derides as the “medicalization of normality.” (In the latest edition, published in 2013, the overall number of diagnoses was winnowed, but new…