There's some recent post about how Boomers and older don't have a "gender neutral script for interacting with another human" program in their head, they only have scripts for interacting with men versus women, and that's why they have trouble with nonbinary identities and the like. But most Millennials and younger do have something resembling a "gender neutral script." The post attributes this shift to the rise of women in the workplace and other changing social norms around the feminist revolution.
I think there's something to the "gendered versus gender neutral scripts" idea but I'd attribute it less to the feminist revolution of the sixties and seventies. After all, women in the workplace are still recognizably women, and women having jobs is not a recent feminist invention. Rather, I attribute the shift to recent generations growing up with the internet...and specifically, the text-based early internet.
Pre-internet, having a "penpal," was a rare novelty; most actual human interaction was face to face or at least over the phone. The internet introduced the idea of having people who you talk to day after day, week after week, month after month, without ever seeing their face or hearing their voice. All you had was text and a pfp, so there was no way to reliably know whether these people in forums and chatrooms and message boards, who had become a real presence in your life, were male or female. I mean, sometimes they told you outright, but not always. You could make guesses, but you were frequently wrong. Asking directly was kind of awkward...and of course, even then, you had no proof that someone was telling the truth. And most of us internet young'uns also had the experience online of being mistaken for a different sex, and then when it came out, realizing, "Oh, huh. This person was interacting with me for the last few weeks wrongly assuming I was a boy/girl." And also realizing that maybe you had a better rapport with them when they were working under that mistaken assumption about you.
So Millennials, the first generation to really grow up with the internet, developed a gender neutral mental model for interacting with people. They developed a mindset where you waited and looked for clues to someone's sex or gender rather than just knowing based on their face or voice.
Probably not surprising that Millennials are the first generation to have a relatively mainstream concept of genderqueer or nonbinary identities. And yes, obviously they didn't invent these identities, there have always been people who didn't fit neatly into one box or another and queer communities have always had some way of describing these people. But pre-internet, this awareness was always kind of a niche thing.
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