You've cleanly identified the central uncertainty behind a hell of a lot of "gender binary" discourse, but you're also brushing against a flamewar about something called "transmedicalism."
(Thankfully, neither one needs to be answered to get to the correct public policy outcomes of "let people be people" and "don't be a sexist fart.")
Transmedicalism can be defined as a belief that only those who medically transition are transgender, with anything short of full HRT and surgery as merely a compromise state and anyone not transitioning full time dismissed as a cisgender person playing pretend indulging in something less than.
Needless to say, there are strong opinions on both sides. Just as there are LGB cis people who dismiss T as a class needing respect and protection, there are T people who dismiss Q+ as a class needing protection or respect.
What makes the argument especially infuriating is the dearth of good statistics on non-cisgender folk at all. Between low sample sizes, huge variance between state law and ethnic acceptance, and often-insulting definitions, precise data is harder to come by for trans sexuality than f-on-m sexual assault.
For your specifics;
Social expectations are a huge part of gender identity. If I had been born decades later I very well might have come out as non-binary in high school, or might have instead been a full-time trans girl. And if I lived in a redder state, or had a more right-wing partner, I might still identify as entirely cis.
Maybe? Like I said, it's really hard to know.
Data point worth noting : the cis folk who are closest to me are definitely cis.
With the.huge caveat about data noted above, my understanding is that trans men and women are about even on their split between which sexes or genders they are attracted to. The most prominent single group may be MtF trans women who were in a cishet marriage before they transitioned, but my impression is that about 25% are "gay", 25% "straight", 25% "queer", and 25% "confused by terms."
No apologies necessary*. I certainly wasn't trying to offend, just be accurate in model setting.
A more accurate umbrella term for "affair tolerant monogamy" would probably be "non-monogamous", with the dividing line between that and "polyamory" being exactly what you said : all persons in the relationship cluster knowing the stances of all other participants.
Accurate and non-offensive terminology can be hard.
It does circle us back to OP, though. The answer to "what happens when one couple breaks up in a polucule" is a loud and emphatic that depends on what type of polucule you're in.
(*: no apologies needed from you. To the extent that I caused you any distress I sincerely apologize. Causing pain was not at all my intent.)
While this is certainly a valid form of romance, it's more accurately described as "non-exclusive simultaneous relationships" than a single "polyamorous relationship".
Some people really do live in multi-partner committed households, but those seem most often to be dominated by a single person, such as fringe Mormon polygamy. And the most common form of "polyamory' is probably "affair-tolerant monogamy."
It's a big complicated world, and variations of how humans with form intimate relationships fills all possibilities when there is no enforced legal prohibition. (And,.sometimes, even then.)
In modern usage, the word "family" does not mean a group of people who share s common ancestor.
Instead, it refers to one or more children and those adults who take full legal responsibility for raising and caring for them.
If all Musk does is chuck money at his "baby mamas" but never actually spends any time caring for or speaking with or being a role model for his descendants, he's not their father. He's just a sperm donor with some money.
(I don't know if "carry them around as assassin deterrent" is enough to qualify. The only real people qualified to judge anyone's parenting are the adults their children grow up to be.)
Scaling small things up is always a logistics and repeatability issue. Always.
We had.technology to put a capsule of three men on the moon for a week before most humans alive today were born, and yet we haven't gone back because while both "number of humans" and "length of stay" are fairly simple ideas to scale up, we never had the logistics to create and fuel the one.saturn V launch every other day that a permanent moon base would need.
Heck, the Internet is full of ground breaking improvements that were "buried" by the challenge of scaling up out of a lab.
It was done as a matter of course by essentially every president before Trump. I think the tradition stretches back to Truman, after FDR died in office.
Biden, Obama, W, Clinton, and HW all did so. Not sure about Regan, whose Alzheimer's was hidden at the end.
It's hard to say without knowing what country you're in now. PRC is an undemocratic system to be embraced, escaped, or endured, but so are PRK, Iran, and a bunch others
OTOH, Canada or the USA were designed on the assumption that you'd agitate for the form of government. If you're in either one, especially if you're a citizen, you should definitely argue for the government you want.
The rest of the world is an interesting mix of "started undemocratic, embraced democracy" to "started democratic, embraced autocracy."
I would guess that it's actually a jargonification of extant words.
Merriam Webster includes a neat etymology section on the definitions I linked, that traces both words to the Renaissance (ish). The entry for "maze" does note an alternate definition as a neurological test with at least one dead end, but (1) that doesn't match the claim OP's article headline makes and (2) scientific jargon is not common English.
(If jargon WERE common English, we'd have an entirely different argument about tomatoes being fruits or vegetables.)
If you want to test how well someone's fancy cleaning detergent works on stains, or if their claim that a new knife shape makes spreading easier, you want a very standard peanut butter.
IBM has never stopped selling mainframes. One of the big reasons why finance transactions are still COBOL is IBM consultants insisting that a centralized mainframe is better than a private cloud.
Assume that, for the first time in his life, Donald meant what he said. Pretend that he won't change his mind or panic, and assume that the same GOP which keeps missing Speaker of the House election layups won't break and let the Democrats take the tariff power away
The midterm congressional elections are always a swing to the other party. The Democrats are more likely to take at least one chamber of Congress than Trump is to say something dumb. But let's assume that for some reason they only take one, and you get gridlock enough to preserve the tarrifs until the next POTUS takes office in January 2029.
A factory would need to break even by that time to be worth a quick investment. And not just break even, but leave you with more wealth than if you just bought a bunch of crypto and stayed home until this all passes. And if you signed an deal today, your break even points might be as soon as only 45 months away.
You can't even get a car loan with a team that short.
If you do want to draw a sharp distinction in modern usage, you could posit that a labyrinth is a type of maze that was made intentionally and can be walked through.
As I understand it, switch 1 digital games are console-bound, but you can migrate your whole console to a new device (such as if your switch breaks.). This was terrible and unfriendly, and why almost all of my family's switch games are physical.
I doubt "share once and let everyone play but the owner" was an intentional promise from Nintendo, but I'd have no trouble believing a tale about their DRM checks leaving open a hole like that.
If we still need to buy one copy of a gamer per simultaneous player,.then the rest of the differences are just ceremony.
Nothing indicates that moving a Nintendo digital card requires uninstalling the game locally. It just, like steam, does a DRM check to see if it's being played elsewhere.
Mostly closeted late-identified MtF non-binary here:
You've cleanly identified the central uncertainty behind a hell of a lot of "gender binary" discourse, but you're also brushing against a flamewar about something called "transmedicalism."
(Thankfully, neither one needs to be answered to get to the correct public policy outcomes of "let people be people" and "don't be a sexist fart.")
Transmedicalism can be defined as a belief that only those who medically transition are transgender, with anything short of full HRT and surgery as merely a compromise state and anyone not transitioning full time dismissed as a cisgender person
playing pretendindulging in something less than.Needless to say, there are strong opinions on both sides. Just as there are LGB cis people who dismiss T as a class needing respect and protection, there are T people who dismiss Q+ as a class needing protection or respect.
What makes the argument especially infuriating is the dearth of good statistics on non-cisgender folk at all. Between low sample sizes, huge variance between state law and ethnic acceptance, and often-insulting definitions, precise data is harder to come by for trans sexuality than f-on-m sexual assault.
For your specifics;