Hello! We are researchers at the University of Washington Human-Centered Data Science Lab investigating people’s participation in online fan communities like Fanfiction.net to better understand how people form communities in online environments. We’d love to have you participate in our new survey.
We’re looking for Fanfiction.net users aged 13 and above. We’re interested in hearing from anyone who has used Fanfiction.net to read, review, or post fanfiction stories. You don’t need to be a current user of Fanfiction.net - we’re also interested in hearing from people who used the site in the past. The survey contains 14 questions and you are not required to answer every question.
All parts of this survey were approved by the University of Washington Human Subjects Division Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure the protection of your rights and welfare as you take this survey. Your responses will be kept confidential, although we may publish aggregated results. You may exit the survey at any time.
For questions about our research, contact Niamh Froelich at [email protected].
The first is the analysis above showing characters who have canonical tags on AO3 for both “Trans Male [name]” and “Trans Female [name]” – or, in a few cases, “FTM [name]” and “MTF [name].” (Obviously, this has a lot to do with which tags the AO3 wranglers have currently wrangled, and not just with which fanworks get written; see my full writeup for more thoughts/details.)
Has anyone noticed any interesting patterns in the direction(s) of trans headcanons about characters? And which characters, in particular, are likely to get written about a lot as both trans men and trans women? I am particularly interested to hear from people who read or write any of the above characters, but anyone should feel free to chip in.
Also worth noting – sometimes characters get tagged in multiple gender-diverse ways, but they’re not limited to trans tags:
And here we see, for instance, that Pidge, who gets written about a lot as both a trans man and a trans woman (though much more often as a trans woman), is also tagged often as nonbinary. However, TommyInnit showed a somewhat similar pattern of trans tagging, doesn’t get tagged nonbinary very often. I have no further insights, especially as I don’t read/write in either of those fandoms, but I find this fascinating and am interested to hear others’ reflections.
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If you want to see which characters have the highest percentages of gender-diverse fanworks, plus lots of other breakdowns, please read my writeup on AO3. (Lots of readers have left thoughtful comments there, too! But I’d still welcome more insights/comments/hypotheses.) Please also check there for corrections & clarifications.
