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When students today fill out their college applications, they are not just identifying as “she” or “he.” More than 3% of incoming college students use a different set of pronouns. That’s according to my analysis of the more than 1.2 million applications submitted for the 2022-23 school year through the Common App, an online application platform used by more than 900 colleges.
While 3% may not seem like a lot, it represents nearly 37,000 students. It is also indicative of a growing number of young people who identify outside of a gender binary – that is, they do not identify as female or male. For example, the percentage of college students who indicated that they are nonbinary on one national survey has nearly tripled from 1.4% in 2016 to 4.1% in 2021.
Beyond the binary
In analyzing the data from the Common App, I found that 2.2% of students – more than 26,000 individuals – who applied to college for this fall identified as transgender or nonbinary. This figure is likely an undercount because some students may be reluctant to indicate their gender identity on an admissions form. For instance, students often complete their college applications with their families and are unlikely to state that they are trans or nonbinary if they are not out to them.
The leaders of the Common App provided me with data from the college applications for the 2022-23 school year so that I could analyze how students today identify their gender and what pronouns they use. Students’ names and other identifying information were withheld.
In looking at how students named their gender and pronouns on the Common App, two contrasting trends stood out to me.
One is the number of ways that nonbinary students have developed to describe their gender. Whereas trans people used relatively few gender identity labels for themselves when I came out as nonbinary in the late 1990s, these students provided approximately 130 different genders and about 78 different pronoun sets
Read more: https://theconversation.com/college-students-are-increasingly-identifying-beyond-she-and-he-187338