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How do people in your circles react to them coming out? Is there an outpour of love, applause and validation?
Being nonbinary in gender or bi-curious in sexuality are cheap ways to become LGBTQIA2S+. No need to transition. You suddenly become an interesting person. It's basically the next level of "ally". There was some leaflet I saw on the Motte how the gender spectrum goes from Barbie to GI Joe. If conceptualized like this, it's not even a lie for them to say they don't feel fully female, as they are not some plastic barbie doll or stereotypical extremely girly girl. They see the female role as too weak, too patriarchy-defined, to male-gaze-defined.
Call it fashion, peer-pressure or whatever. People want to belong. And today, especially online, you can belong, be interesting and validated by showing that you are "diverse". Identify as mixed-race, discover your 1/32 indigenous roots, be nonbinary with 'they' pronouns, have "mental health struggles" etc.
There's also this gender hobbyist/enthusiast community who like to catalogue all the genders, like stamp collectors. They are the same sort of people who made Tokio Hotel fan club websites in 2003 on Geocities. The sort of people who make the Aesthetics Wiki. I think this hobby community (who debate the fine differences between demigirls and whatever else) is also really just a small subset of the whole progressive pro-gender crowd, a kind of autistic/aspie subset probably. They also probably don't quite understand it so they obsess about systematizing it, and probably a lot of them are wannabes. The rest probably just go about their lives, or go to weird quirky bars and have nontraditional sex and so on, instead of arguing online.
This is not to say that it's all based on nothing. There certainly are some rather androgynous people, tomboyish girls. But now it's hard to distinguish because it's become a fashion too.
It's certainly more healthy to do this, than to go full HRT+surgery. It seems to me to be an alternative path towards becoming LGBT instead of just a step on a slippery slope. It might be a memetic evolution to allow teen (which nowadays extends to the 20s) girls to do their teen girl stuff without also destroying their bodies and their ability to have kids once they grow out of this.
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