Everything You Need To Know About The 2022 Non-Binary Awareness Week

When asked about why raising Non-Binary Awareness was important, activist Jacob Tobia told Equity that they felt, "having days where you get to talk about your community and honor the experience of everybody that's part of the community is wonderful." But in order to be able to talk openly and honor or celebrate people of the non-binary community, Tobia feels there is still a lot of work to do.

For starters, there's a non-binary stereotype that erases the experiences of those non-white, non-skinny, non-female at birth people who identify as non-binary. "That's the idea of what a non-binary person is," Tobias says, "and that is not all of us and we have to transform that ideal we have to get visibility for non-binary folks aside, for assigned female folks who are non-binary... we have to have visibility for hairy transfeminine non-binary ladies like me, we need visibility for non-binary older folks as well as younger folks."

A 2021 study released by the UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute found there are around 1.2 million LGBTQIA adults in the United States who identify as non-binary. Additionally, a 2018 study found more teenagers than ever are identifying as transgender or gender-fluid, which according to Daniel Shumer, a specialist in trans medicine at the University of Michigan, suggests that "previous estimates of the size of the transgender and gender-non conforming (TGNC) population have been underestimated by orders of magnitude," via American Academy of Pediatrics.