If you are of a certain age (born in the late ’70s to early ’80s), your social media feeds have likely filled with a range of articles over the past week—MSN, Daily Mail, Did You Know?, Huffington Post, Bustle, The Sacramento Bee, and Mental Floss, among others—all broadcasting that an Australian professor has announced a new classification for your micro-generation: Xennial. The term, they say, is used to describe those whose childhoods were analog (think landlines and Trapper Keepers), but who have transitioned smoothly to adulthood and smartphones and cloud-stored data. Given the traction and viral nature of these articles and posts, it’s evidently a very welcome, very recent discovery. Or it would be, if it were true.
Professor Dan Woodman, the man referenced in these posts, did not make a grand announcement in the past week, nor does he claim to have originated the term Xennial. I know this because I emailed him after seeing a series of posts that made it seem as though he had. Xennial is a term that I first used in a 2014 story for GOOD magazine, following on the heels of writers like Doree Shafrir, who in 2011 called this cusp generation’s pop-cultural misfit status Generation Catalano, after crowdsourcing the My So-Called Life–inspired term from Danielle Nussbaum on Twitter. It was later called Generation Oregon Trail by Anna Garvey in 2015. But back when I was pitching the story to GOOD, I wanted a word that wasn’t couched in a pop-cultural touchstone—something broader, which could encapsulate all of us who bridge the two generations.
In 2014, it struck me that my slim cohort of older millennials (or young Gen Xers) were in some ways more fortunate than those who fit more solidly into the traditional generational boundaries. There is something freeing about having come of age before digital everything. My group was never cynical enough to be truly grunge, but not nearly as cheerfully helicopter-parented as millennial participation-trophy kids. Those of us who came of age and were out on the job market before the recession were old enough to have been at work for years before the first-hired, first-fired mandates took hold (a policy that stripped many younger millennials of their first jobs). We also were not as far along as most Gen Xers, so we didn’t yet have retirement savings or homes to lose. The piece for GOOD became a debate between a staff writer, Jed Oelbaum, and myself about whether or not Xennials benefited from their timing. I described this micro-generation not as a sociologist or demographer, but as someone looking for a word for the subtle differences I saw in the lives of people I know. It was a philosophical exercise.
That story has had a strange shelf life, and pops up on my feed every few months, having fed a sense that Xennials—or whatever name you’d like to apply—really do not see themselves within the traditional stereotypes of I-don’t-care Gen Xers or navel-gazing millennials (as unfair as those stereotypes may be). I sensed, the way the story kept periodically emerging, that there was a cohort of people who wanted to fit somewhere, and simply didn’t.
But in the past week, as the term has taken on a global reach, it’s been hard not to feel like the woman in a meeting who shares an idea and watches credit evaporate. Consider what is likely to be a familiar scenario to women in the workplace: A male colleague, we’ll call him Chad, hears your idea in a meeting and responds positively or thoughtfully. Somehow, all of a sudden, Chad is being credited with your idea. To his credit, Professor Woodman keeps insisting that he didn’t come up with Xennial, and graciously references the article Oelbaum and I wrote as the first instance he can find of the word—which Oelbaum also attributes to me—though no one seems to care. The news continues to spin on without me, or attribution, or fact-checking. (Woodman wrote me to say that he has experienced a “mortifying new media week.”) And admittedly, I am torn even bringing it up today. The Xennial thing has gone so rapidly viral that in just one week, it’s already deeply annoying. The energy it would take to reclaim it at this point hardly seems worth it. It was one story I wrote years ago, a notion that struck me as interesting at the time.
Today, I spotted a man on Twitter decrying the fact that he’s not getting enough credit for the Xennial meme he made up. He bought his domain, Xennial.co.uk in April 2017; his “about” page notes that he saw the term Xennial in the story in GOOD, but adds that “that article and subsequent articles in The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Mashable, Maxim, MSN, and The Huffington Post have brought Xennials into the mainstream, so I feel somewhat relieved that I launched my website, bought my domain name, and grabbed by [sic] social media handles before everyone else knew about it. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to convert a viral meme I invented into a broader narrative of what it means to be a Xennial. Watch this space!”
And here I am, carrying old-school expectations for reporting and sourcing in an era of click-baiting and soft reworking of content. How Xennial of me.
I’m attempting to be patient, to wait for the Internet to unwind the misattributions. Each morning I wake up and another local paper, TV chat show, or website has a new piece posted online about the Australian professor discovering Xennials. Friends and writers I know have been tweeting publications asking for corrections, with mixed results. I’m ambivalent about causing a fuss—no one wants to be the woman in the meeting shouting, “That’s not Chad’s idea! It was mine!” Being put in a position to claim your idea as your own inevitably makes you feel small. Yet it dawns on me now that that’s why, too often, women let these things go. It’s also why I shouldn’t. Because the alternative to being made to feel small is to watch your contribution be erased entirely. Call me a product of my generation, but that’s something I just won’t do.