Okay, fellow clueless adults, first things first. Definitions. 

Gender: the set of roles and behaviors society has agreed are either male or female. It’s not the same as sex: a person’s classification as male or female based on DNA, hormones, and sex organs. Trans (short for transgender): the term for a person whose gender identity does not match the one associated with their sex. None of which has the first thing to do with sexual orientation.

If you are, say, a cisgender parent who is now madly looking up cisgender (here you go: the term for a person whose gender identity does match the one associated with their sex)—you might be confused. But here’s the thing: Your kids aren’t. 

As the mom of a high schooler I hear kids throwing these terms around all the time. I almost never hear adults doing so. It’s not that we aren’t progressive—ours are the generations who crusaded for gay rights, who applauded when a paragon of male athleticism located her authentic identity as Caitlyn Jenner. It’s just that what the zeitgeist is serving up now feels really new, and it’s rocking something really fundamental.

 “We used to 100 percent believe there was a line; it was fixed, male and female,” explains Aidan Key, director of the Seattle support organization Gender Diversity. Maybe you expressed yourself via the gender that didn’t match your sex—but there were still two points, a binary, on that line. “Now the younger generations, 20 and under especially, they’re discarding the binary altogether,” says Key. “Because it doesn’t account for anyone who might feel themselves to be a blend of genders.” 

Key, an insightful and endlessly patient educator who himself transitioned female to male almost two decades ago, admits that even he is challenged by the postbinary world. “It’s completely changing the landscape we exist in,” he marvels. A decade ago his clients tended to reflect versions of his own experience: children who grow into a certainty that they are not the gender they appear to be; “a visceral experience of ‘This is so wrong,’ ” as Key explains it. 

Key has made a career of assisting trans kids and their families, going into the elementary school classrooms of transitioning students to help their classmates understand, gently walking them through the what-does-the-color-pink-have-to-do-with-being-a-girl-anyway enlightenments that bring acceptance. 

These are stories we’ve all heard, and they align with a building body of scientific evidence that gender identity, like sexual orientation, can’t be manipulated or instilled. They’re also stories that are beginning to seem almost quaint. At high school training sessions, Key hears much more complicated realities. “Older kids are creating a new language for themselves, rejecting the boxes,” he explains, noting that the ubiquity of the Internet is broadly acquainting kids with terms like genderfluid and genderqueer, both denoting a gender identity not quite male and not quite female. “Kids are saying, ‘I don’t want he or she, I want to be called they or another alternative pronoun,’ ” Key says. “That’s where heads start to spin.”

And it’s where institutional policies are quietly beginning to evolve. Two years ago the 30-year-old director of youth ministries at my church, a progressive Protestant congregation in the U District, added an explicit invitation to transgender kids on the flyer for the middle and high school weekend Girls’ Retreat. She did the same for the Boys’ Retreat. Now, she told me recently, that doesn’t feel like enough. “The whole idea of a Girls’ Retreat and a Boys’ Retreat is itself binary,” she said. 

Earlier this year the University of Vermont became the first college in the country to allow students to officially identify as a third gender, with their name of choice and the pronoun “they.” (The singular they has overwhelmed the resistance of strict grammarians for lack of consensus around other alternatives, like ze and hir.) In high school, it’s not unusual on field trips or in clubs to be asked for a preferred pronoun. 

One 15-year-old from a high school just outside Seattle, who came out sooner than he expected after he accidentally left out a camp name tag with his male name and preferred pronoun, transitioned female to male last year. Thanks to accepting parents and an open-minded community, he’s enjoyed a charmed transition. He came out to a teacher via the getting-to-know-you sheet that teacher passed around—name, interests, goals for the class—which also included a space for preferred pronoun. He’s just begun puberty-blocking hormones—standard practice for trans kids these days, as it buys critical time for all parties to adjust while delaying the pubescent development that typically triggers distress, even self-loathing, in transgender kids—and plans to start male hormones. As for surgery—it doesn’t feel urgent. “I identify as asexual,” he confides. 

“I have a friend who came out as nonbinary; they don’t identify as a guy,” he tells me. “They’re actually on the masculine side of nonbinary. They said they might be a demiboy.” Demiboy? He laughs and reels off the spectrum of identifiers—agender, bigender, gender neutral—now in common currency. “It’s amazing to think I have all these options…but it’s scary.”