First thing's first: consider gender a language that you have to learn to be fluent in. Like with any language, the older you get, the harder it is to understand, which is why some adults find it too daunting to learn. The truth is, it's really not so complicated, and we should really all be fluent in gender, because it helps all of us understand our own identities better. Sometimes people confuse gender with sex, and while the two words are related, they are not synonyms. Sex is the biological sum of your parts: physical anatomy, hormones, and your chromosomes. All of these can be individually changed to the point of legally altering your sex from something other than the sex you were assigned at birth. Gender is totally different.

If sex is your biology, then your gender identity is how you perceive yourself. Your gender identity can align with your biological sex, or it can be in opposition to it. Most people are familiar with the gender binary system, meaning there are two opposite, distinct, and fixed options: masculine/male/men and feminine/female/women. In the gender binary system, the classification is usually based on a person's physical anatomy, and is set in stone at birth or before birth.

To figure out what non-binary gender means, we talk to Dr. Meredith R. Chapman, who is a psychiatrist at the Children’s Health GENECIS Program in Dallas.

"Non-binary gender is any gender that isn’t exclusively male or female. Non-binary people may feel some mix of both male and female, somewhere in between, or something completely different. Other terms that are similar to 'non-binary' are gender-queer, gender expansive, gender nonconforming, and gender awesome."

One of the coolest things about non-binary gender is that it celebrates individuality, meaning there are as many possibilities for gender identity as there are people. We spoke with three people who identify somewhere on the non-binary spectrum about gender.

Steph, 26, says, "I would say I am somewhere between agender and female-to-male (FTM) transgender. While I have a strong dissonance to being female and an attraction to being male, I don't fully desire the reproductive organs of being male. I am somewhere in the middle; somewhere that is androgynous. The roughness of a male but with the kindness of a female. Parts of my body feel like they should be male, others feel like nothing just neutral. Parts of my soul feel male, others more female. I would say I don't fully know my gender identity at this point."

Jordan, who primarily identifies as transgender, explains their gender identity, "I primarily identify as transgender. Specifically, I identify as somewhere between agender and demiboy. While maleness and masculinity tends to resonate more for me than femaleness and femininity, I feel most comfortable not putting my gender identity in a box. Neither man or woman resonates fully, so my identity falls outside the binary."

Andii Viveros, 22, says, "I do not necessarily define my gender identity with specific labels, but it is definitely gender non-binary, as I feel I am on both male and female ends of the gender spectrum. I like to say that I came twirling out of the womb — I have been expressing the feminine side of myself since I can remember. I started heavily expressing this during high school and eventually was crowned Prom Queen at my school, catapulting me into labeling myself as transgender at that time — I now know I can be whatever I want to be!"

This is where it gets fun. "Transgender is a big umbrella term that means lots of things to lots of people," explains Rebecca Kling, a transgender performance artist and educator. "The way transgender is usually defined is 'having a gender identity that is different than your sex assigned at birth.'