if you look at subreddit growth for r/nonbinary, r/feminineboys, and r/femboy(not to be confused with r/femboys which is a porn subreddit rather than a sfw one), they all started rapidly expanding in the latter half of 2019 and have been just Explosively Schmoovin ever since.
google trends shows a somewhat similar story where there's some large spike for Nonbinary in mid 2019 which caused a new plateau and then increased growth, and a more explosive spike for femboy after the femboy hooters meme lol. i wonder what that moderate spike for 'nonbinary' was in like june 10th ish 2019...
but yeah i thought it was interesting because i used to assume that any growth of 'nonbinary' was just consistent starting with when trans people started being more noticed in 2012 etc. but it was moderate growth followed by a large growth rate increase in the last 3 years, and femboy follows the same pattern(which i guess is less surprising since femme gnc men had largely not noticed the term until like 2018ish, there was not a generally known "flare" term. maybe i overestimate the extent to which nonbinary was generally known as a term prior to 2019 just because i ran into it more earlier?)
edit: oh, the june 2019 nb spike may've been because Van Ness from Queer Eye came out as NB right then. also maybe i should try to see patterns for other identities and see if theres similar patterns
growth in 2020 doesnt surprise me much because "oh, covid" but 2019 is difficult to pinpoint some major common cause
i'm really curious about the mechanics of this. why did these growth increases coincide, and why 2019? if anyone has any insight i'd love to hear.
I think it's fascinating how terms related to gender and gender identity differ between different cultures and have evolved over time. Here's my own addition to what @Mightfo posted re subreddit growth; the graphs above show the increase in use of the term "nonbinary" in books in English over the past 60 years (1960 to 2019), based on the Google Ngram Viewer. (I tried this with "femboy" as well, but Ngram doesn't return any references at all. Also note that 2019 is the last year for which the Ngram Viewer has data.)
The left graph is "nonbinary" by itself, and the right is "nonbinary" followed by other terms. Note that the bump around 1970 is spurious, due to other uses of "nonbinary"; present-day usage in the context of gender ("nonbinary people", "nonbinary gender", "nonbinary person", etc.) takes off around 2012.
Thank you, that's really interesting! It being present in books since 2012 coincides with when i thought the term started a consistent rate of growth, hm.
I think the platforms matter a lot here. Generally, written books reflect certain demographics like the literati being aware of something moreso than necessarily a broad spread. And I think theres likely a distinction in terms of "spread" between "knowledge of a term" vs "actually considering identifying with a term, and doing so". That's part of why I emphasized the subreddits- more indicative of identification than, say, only discussion.
Of course, it's also possible there are major distortions with referencing subreddit growth, like specific migrations from tumblr or something.
Its a shame the book data stops at 2019, would be interesting to see if theres any similarities in the subsequent years...
Also, 'pansexual' also had a big subreddit growth increase at the same time, which is interesting. Maybe an lgbt subreddit started pointing people to specific other subreddits around that time or something...?
I wonder if there's any other good statistics we could look at besides subreddits/google trends/ngram... I couldnt find anything for tracking word usage on twitter besides things that cost money(and may not do what we want anyway)...
