Non-Binary and Getting Older: Where Are the Elders?
Think of the last queer space you were in: a club, a group chat, a Discord server, a Pride march. Now count the grey hairs. If you’re Gen Z, you probably ran out of fingers before you ran out of people under 25.
Older non-binary people exist. Most of our language, platforms and spaces were built by and for whoever is coming out right now, and almost nobody built the version for who we’ll be at 55. That gap shapes who we think we’re allowed to become.
The word is new. We aren’t.
Pew Research’s 2022 survey found that 5.1% of US adults under 30 are trans or non-binary, compared with 1.6% of 30-to-49-year-olds and just 0.3% of people 50 and older.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s 2023 Census, the first in the country’s history to ask about gender and sexual identity, found that the transgender people it counted skewed young too, with a median age of 24.8 against 38.1 for the general population.
Read that as a story about language and safety, not about who “really” is non-binary. Someone who was 19 in 1985 didn’t get a menu that included “non-binary.” Some found other words and used them quietly. Some are now in their 60s and 70s and are finally meeting a term that fits. Many came out, or were outed, in eras when it cost them jobs, families and physical safety. Others never let anyone see it at all.
Census data has its own limits here. Stats NZ’s census doesn’t use “non-binary”. It codes people outside the binary as “another gender,” a category some respondents may not recognise themselves in. Counting is only as good as the form's vocabulary.
So when a movement’s visible face skews young, don’t conclude that being non-binary is a young person’s thing. Our language and our safety (not without challenge) just reached some generations faster than others.
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What disappears when elders do
The effects are measurable. SAGE, the US advocacy group for LGBTQ+ elders, reports that older LGBTQ+ people are twice as likely to live alone and three to four times less likely to have kids than their peers. That means fewer built-in caregivers when you need one. SAGE also cites 53% of LGBTQ+ elders reporting isolation. AARP’s Dignity 2024 survey found that a third of trans and non-binary respondents said their quality of care had been compromised.
Part of this is systemic. SAGE ties higher poverty among LGBTQ+ elders to a lifetime of workplace discrimination and denied benefits, which means less in retirement savings right when care costs spike. If you’re also dealing with racism, disability or immigration precarity, those pressures stack. Systems built for “older adults” mostly weren’t built with the 70-year-old non-binary person in mind.
And some of it is us. Plenty of older queer people say the bars, apps and group chats that shaped their lives stopped having room for them. If you’ve felt that your worth in queer spaces rode on how young and wanted you looked, our piece on The Currency of Youth and the Grief of Unlearning goes deep on that dynamic (content warning: sexual coercion and grooming).
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The youth premium has an expiry date
Queer culture, and gay male culture especially, runs on a youth premium. A young body gets read as desirable, free, and full of possibility, quietly coding an older one as the loss of all three. If you’re 19 or 22, that attention feels like proof you matter. It can also be the exact mechanism that leaves you isolated later, or exploited now by people who understand the currency better than you do.
Plenty of us hit this without warning: being pursued by someone a decade or two older and mistaking the attention for worth. Dating My Own Generation (And Finding My Footing) is about what it takes to unlearn that.
Then what?
Nobody hands you a map for what happens when you’re no longer the youngest person in the room. At 30, 40, or 60, you may find the spaces that built your identity weren’t designed with you in mind at that age.
Part of it is relationships: building with peers instead of chasing validation from people far ahead of you. Part of it is bigger than dating. A lot of the traditional markers of “growing up” (marriage, kids, a mortgage, a settled sense of what your thirties are for) come from a cisheteronormative timeline, and plenty of us are still working out how to translate it, or whether we want it. And when the economy already makes that timeline hard for anyone under 35, “just buy a house” lands differently. If you’re feeling that pressure, The Queer Biological Clock and the Geography of Guilt sits in that uncertainty at 29 without pretending there’s a tidy answer.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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In surveys, yes. Pew found that 0.3% of US adults 50+ identify as trans or non-binary, versus 5.1% under 30. That mostly reflects language and safety arriving at different times for different generations, not fewer older people being non-binary.
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SAGE estimates that there are about 3 million adults over 50 today, a number that will grow to around 7 million by 2030.
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It counted people outside the binary, but coded them as “another gender” rather than “non-binary.”
The numbers are changing
SAGE estimates about 3 million LGBTQ+ adults over 50 live in the US today, and projects roughly 7 million by 2030. A generation that came out young, in a world where “non-binary” was already a word, is heading into midlife in numbers nobody can wave off.
The question isn’t whether visible non-binary elders will exist. There will be, and soon. The question is what we’ve built for them by the time they get there, and for ourselves later: spaces, language and an archive that can hold a whole life, not just the loud, photogenic first act.
That’s what this series is for. It documents what it’s like to be young and non-binary now, and it starts building the “read more” for every stage after, so a 45-year-old version of you, or someone coming out for the first time at 45, finds something written by someone who’s already walked that stretch.
If this found you at a stage of your own (youth, dating, family, or somewhere we haven’t named yet), subscribe, and we’ll keep mapping it together.
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