Capturing mixed social identities through categorical data presents significant challenges. Nonbinarity provides a conceptual, computational, and visual framework for reimagining social identities beyond binary oppositions. When applied beyond gender to domains such as language, culture, or ethnicity, nonbinarity reveals the complex and sometimes contradictory ways individuals experience social belonging. In this way, it complements intersectionality by expanding the analytical lenses available for operationalising identities into data and spot patterns of discrimination.
Belonging Diamond, 2025.
Bicultural individuals, second-generation migrants, nonbinary genders, mixed-race people, and hybrid language speakers are identities that fail normative categorisations systems. These identities cannot be easily datafied and such a digital failure is usually conceived as an opportunity for antisystemic exploration. Athough aware that data representation is not always necessary and desired by minoritised groups, this article proposes nonbinarity as a feminist analytical lens that overcomes the rigidity of opposite identity categories. Nonbinarity challenges the concept of residuality—the idea that certain identities cannot be neatly categorised within systems based on exclusive nominal distinctions, due to their inherently mixed or overlapping nature. Rather than enforcing dichotomies, nonbinarity turns categories into coexisting continuous variables that generate a spectrum of nuances, thus welcoming both unitary and mixed identities. This systematisation derives from merging gender pluralism with social identity theory, viewing gender as one among many social identities constructed through group affiliations, and recognizing that individuals may simultaneously relate to seemingly opposite identity groups.
The Gender Diamond
To be clear with terminology, this article is rooted on gender, which is the psychological, social, and behavioural aspects of a person’s sexuality (e.g., woman, nonbinary, man). Consequently, it dismisses sex—the more physiological and bodily counterpart (e.g., female, intersex, male)—orientation—the kind of people the individual is attracted to (e.g., gynophile, androphile, pansexual, demisexual)—and the combinations of these dimensions (e.g., gay, transgender, genderfluid).
Gender pluralism defines gender as a social construct built performatively through a semantic layering of meanings that define gender groups. This layering is not necessarily coherent but may mix meanings attributed to different genders and change over time, moving around a nuanced semiotic structure known as the gender spectrum. The gender spectrum is thus a continuous plane of meanings on which Abrahamic traditions have imposed the binary categories of women and men by assuming that the reproductive schema of the human species could also be a gender schema. However, nonbinary genders such as androgynes, demimen, genderqueer, or agender people, exist in the cracks between these binary categories.
According to the dual identity approach, the gender spectrum is understood as a bidimensional space defined by two independent continuous variables: femininity and masculinity. For instance, a binary woman typically scores high in femininity and low in masculinity; an agender person scores low on both; and an androgyne expresses varying degrees of both traits without fully aligning with either. Importantly, femininity and masculinity are not objective or fixed qualities—they are intersubjective, shaped through social interpretation and context.
Based on the dual identity approach, the Gender Diamond is a visualisation of the gender spectrum designed to describe gender identity in computational terms—which are data. Thanks to the two gender scales, nonbinary and binary genders live together in the same space. Furthermore, multigender identities (i.e., those identities that shift between genders according to contexts, e.g., bigender people) can be represented in the Gender Diamond as the user can select multiple locations. This visualisation emerged from a codesign approach that valued the contributions of both gender-diverse individuals and experts. Furthermore, it has been recently improved through an extensive literature review of various psychometric instruments for the assessment of gender identity as well as a quantitative study involving more than 450 Italian-speaking individuals (article coming soon).
Designing new Identity Diamonds
Social identity theory posits that individuals define themselves through their affiliations with social groups, such as those based on nationality, religion, social class, or gender. When combined with the insights of gender pluralism, it becomes clear that these social identities are not static or inherent, but performative: they are configured through the layering of the meanings that define each social group. Then, this layering of meanings often fails perfect coherence, performing behaviours of opposite groups, thus creating mixed identities. As androgynes challenge the woman/man antinomy, second-generation migrants cannot be reduced to the local/foreigner binary and commuters do not fit the urban/rural dichotomy. Going back to categorisation systems, mixed identities constitute a social residuality because they do not univocally fit a single box, as clearly emerged in the South African apartheid system.
This article proposes nonbinarity as a conceptual key for framing—and thus datafy—not only the gender spectrum, but also other identity spectra defined by the coexistence of opposing references. As gender nonbinarity subverted the two nominal categories of women and men into the continuous variables of femininity and masculinity, the USA-Mexican mestisa can be mapped in an Identity Diamond framed by Mexicanness and Americanness. Similar semantic operations can be envisioned in other borderlands or, more broadly, in any context shaped by the blending of two cultural, linguistic, or national populations.
Language Diamond for South Tyrol (Italy), 2025.
To illustrate this point, this article presents a Language Diamond of South Tyrol, a region on the Alps with tensions between German and Italian affiliations because, although its Germanic history, it was assigned from Austria-Hungary to Italy after the First World War. Additionally, this article also introduces a more general Belonging Diamond, which represents the simultaneous experience of feeling both local and stranger in relation to a place. These models aim to capture the layered and nonexclusive nature of identity as it unfolds across social, cultural, and geographic boundaries. It is important to notice that the labels on such visualisations are not incompatible nominal categories—each referring to a different construct—but placeholders that refer to varying intensities of the same idea. Also, these placeholders are not fixed to a precise value but rather suggest a predominant association, thereby acknowledging a field of alternative interpretations around them. Their point is not to enforce rigid boundaries, but to orientate the navigation of the spectrum as the identity evolves through time.
Nonbinarity and intersectionality
The relevance of such nonbinary datafication becomes especially clear in discussions of data violence—the structural erasure of identities that don’t fit into neat categories, making them unintelligible to our digital, political, legal, and scientific infrastructure. As data feminism argues, in our data-driven society, only what is properly categorised and quantified actually counts. Therefore, developing feminist lenses to frame identities is crucial to spot patterns of discrimination.
In particular, intersectionality means recognising such discriminations across different types of social identity by combining their traditional categories. For example, intersectionality understands the conditions of black women (i.e., gender: woman/man + race: black/white) or disabled Muslim people in western countries (i.e., ability: able/disable + religion: Christian/Muslim). Intersectionality is therefore an intersemantic lens: it analyses how different types of identity intersect. In contrast, nonbinarity has an intrasemantic approach: it operates within a single identity type to challenge the binary logics of its taken-for-granted categories. Together, these two approaches provide complementary strategies for exposing and addressing structural inequalities.
To conclude, the data that can collected through our instruments reflect—and inevitably simplify—specific aspects of a person’s inner experience, which is itself fluid and hard to grasp. While such datafications can offer valuable insights, it should not be used extensively and uncritically. Data should be used not as a means of control, but with the deliberate intent to respect, protect, and, where possible, empower those it seeks to represent.
Fe Simeoni is an information designer. They are currently pursuing a PhD in computer science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, while collaborating with the Institute for Minority Rights and the Centre for Autonomy Experience at Eurac Research (Bozen-Bolzano, Italy).
- Fe Simeonihttps://nightingaledvs.com/author/fe-simeoni/
- Fe Simeonihttps://nightingaledvs.com/author/fe-simeoni/
