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characteristics, you can much easier arrive at reductive criteria to the absolute essentials of being a person who does consume animal byproducts. whereas gender is already such a grab-bag of messy characteristics and there is constantly room for boundary nudging
anyway i dont feel like writing out of the middle material to draw all the connections but tl;dr queer ppl are already doing funky gender stuff and so incorporating new material into their already shifting identity on that dimension can be a lot more natural, and depending on the context it can
either be something to stand out or assimilate into a new social context (sometimes both, i don't really feel like laying it all out). anyway, this is all very easily understood.
but then you'll also see things seeping into more mainstream consciousness, like the idea of a "golden retriever boyfriend" where its very similar, you're taking personality similarities and applying the metaphor (notably with a gender component!)
most of the time this is an external ascription but as we see more of those metaphors pop up i think we'll start to see more positive identifications with the metaphors to the extent that they'll start being assertions. what i don't know is if it'll be a casual seeping in for someone
where they'll just increasingly reference it slowly over time or if it will be a more "all at once" thing. obvi thats kinda on the level of the individual and that can happen all sorts of ways, so maybe not as important as the sociological phenomenon.
i do think it'll be fairly similar to trans people's identity shifts online, where content they see on social media will be an easy exposure method and way to explore safely. and for that matter, a lot of it will probably be limited to online interaction anyway, same as existing neogender experience