College students are increasingly identifying beyond ‘she’ and ‘he’

  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.

How your race, class and gender influence your dreams for the future

  In Disney’s “Pinocchio,” Jiminy Cricket famously sings, “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are. Anything your heart desires will come to you.”

  But Jiminy Cricket got it wrong.

  We’re often taught that we are free to dream – to imagine our future possibilities.

Not everyone is male or female – the growing controversy over sex designation

  Check out your birth certificate and surely you’ll see a designation for sex. When you were born, a doctor or clinician assigned you the “male” or “female” label based on a look at your genitalia. In the U.S., this has been standard practice for more than a century.

  But sex designation is not as simple as a glance and then a check of one box or another. Instead, the overwhelming evidence shows that sex is not binary. To put it another way, the terms “male” and “female” don’t fully capture the complex biological, anatomical, and chromosomal variations that occur in the human body.