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Danny looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize what he saw. “I saw breasts, and I would just press them down.” That’s not me in the mirror, he thought to himself. He was 12 years old.
In high school, Danny discovered a new word: nonbinary. Sophomore year he cut his hair really short. “That’s when it felt right,” he said.
Danny’s story isn’t one of living in the “wrong” body. His is a story of the search for the right words to describe his experience of gender authentically. It’s a story of alignment between what he feels inside and what he can express on the outside—with language, with clothes, with a haircut.
Sue noticed something interesting about her crushes in middle school: They didn’t seem to have much to do with the person’s gender. In fact, she found herself not just attracted to boys and other girls but also to nonbinary kids like Danny. When she was 12, she discovered a new word: pansexual. It clicked. “Gender wasn’t the thing I cared about,” she said.
Danny and Sue are part of a new generation leading a revolution in how we think about gender and sexuality. And as their stories reveal, this is a different revolution than the one led by prior generations.
The last revolution in gender and sexuality occurred in what I call the era of identity. It started in the late 19th century with the first wave of feminist activism and naming of homosexuality (and heterosexuality), which paved the way for the 20th-century gay rights movement. It’s thanks to the success of that revolution that sexism and homophobia became taboo at a quicker pace than many expected and that achievements like voting rights for women and marriage equality for same-sex couples were realized.
But there was a big problem with the first revolution: Instead of challenging the binary basis of identity categories like “man” or “woman,” it pretty much entrenched them. The whole new taxonomy of sexual orientation created in that era—gay/bi/straight—depended on a binary concept of gender.
The 21st-century revolution in gender and sexuality is occurring amid a different historical backdrop—what I call the era of radical authenticity. This era is characterized especially by a challenge in binary thinking.
How did this happen? How did our century become so fundamentally different than the last—so much so that a different kind of revolution emerged?
Danny’s discovery of the language of nonbinary gender didn’t occur in his high school hallways. Nor did Sue’s discovery of pansexual identity. Their discovery of the new language of gender and sexuality occurred on the internet and social media sites like Twitter.
The game changer between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries is the shift in how information processing occurs at the cultural level. In the twentieth century, Danny or Sue might have turned to a teacher, a counselor, or a doctor to make meaning of their experience of gender or sexuality. They might have looked for the right words in the dictionary or encyclopedia. Today, the sources of authority on gender and sexual diversity have flipped: Most adults are playing catch-up as young people turn to one another as sources of authority.
The idea of radical authenticity isn’t about the ability to live some “real” underlying truth about yourself. Rather, it’s about having the opportunity to tell a life story that provides a coherent sense of meaning and social value. It’s about flipping the historic top-down relationship between language and experience: If the right words don’t exist to describe how you feel on the inside, you make them up. And then the traditional sources of authority catch up. Cases in point: “Pansexual” was updated in 2005 in the Oxford English Dictionary to reflect its current meaning; “they/them” was added to Merriam-Webster as a singular gender pronoun in 2019.
What’s radical here is the bravery to challenge some of society’s most historically regulated concepts—man, woman, gay, straight. But for young people like Danny or Sue, it’s not about challenging the system. It’s about experiencing the possibility of authentic self-expression through words that are increasingly intelligible.
Naming our new era is important. It explains what’s happening today and why. Calling it a revolution honors the courage young people like Sue and Danny are showing to write stories of integrity and meaning—stories of radical authenticity.
Young people may be leading this revolution, but we all benefit from the new possibilities of the era. Now more than ever, we can look into the mirror and see reflected back what we feel on the inside. We can recognize ourselves, and we can be recognized. It’s a revolution, and it’s only just beginning.
