This vocabulary is ever-evolving. For some speakers it may feel hard to keep up, but it’s important to understand that these labels aren’t surfacing just because it’s suddenly trendy to have an identity that will perplex and/or piss off all our great-aunts and -uncles at Thanksgiving.* Sociolinguists agree the creation of these different categories is connected to a deeper human desire to typologize species—to identify groups of living things, sort them, and try to figure out what their relationship is to one another. It’s a form of taxonomy: we create these labels to help make sense of the
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