It’s nearly time to run the annual NBGQ survey for 2017, and I need your help.
I’ve been using Google Forms for three years, because it lets me have as many responses and I can get for free, which seems to be 3,000+. However, Google Forms is quite basic. It has some limitations, and the way it presents your data means results can take a lot of time and energy to process. Collecting and processing pronouns, in particular, is extremely arduous!
It’s time to step it up a notch. I’d like to try using something more fit for purpose. SurveyMonkey will let me have over 1,000 respondents for £300. (The £50 extra in the title covers IndieGoGo fees.) This would mean a lot of really useful tools for me to process the results, and it means I can continue to use the survey software for more smaller surveys throughout the year.
Can you help me? The campaign ends on 3rd March 2017. Any amount however small helps cover this cost, which I just can’t afford on my own.
It’s nearly time to run the annual NBGQ survey for 2017, and I need your help.
I’ve been using Google Forms for three years, because it lets me have as many responses and I can get for free, which seems to be 3,000+. However, Google Forms is quite basic. It has some limitations, and the way it presents your data means results can take a lot of time and energy to process. Collecting and processing pronouns, in particular, is extremely arduous!
It’s time to step it up a notch. I’d like to try using something more fit for purpose. SurveyMonkey will let me have over 1,000 respondents for £300. (The £50 extra in the title covers IndieGoGo fees.) This would mean a lot of really useful tools for me to process the results, and it means I can continue to use the survey software for more smaller surveys throughout the year.
Can you help me? The campaign ends on 3rd March 2017. Any amount however small helps cover this cost, which I just can’t afford on my own.
We’re now at £61, which is 18% to the £330 we need to cover the SurveyMonkey fees! :) Thank you so much, every £1 and every reblog and every retweet is so helpful.
It’s nearly time to run the annual NBGQ survey for 2017, and I need your help.
I’ve been using Google Forms for three years, because it lets me have as many responses as I can get for free, which seems to be 3,000+. However, Google Forms is quite basic. It has some limitations, and the way it presents your data means results can take a lot of time and energy to process. Collecting and processing pronouns, in particular, is extremely arduous!
It’s time to step it up a notch. I’d like to try using something more fit for purpose. SurveyMonkey will let me have over 1,000 respondents for £300. (The £50 extra in the title covers IndieGoGo fees.) This would mean a lot of really useful tools for me to process the results, and it means I can continue to use the survey software for more smaller surveys throughout the year.
Can you help me? The campaign ends on 3rd March 2017. Any amount however small helps cover this cost, which I just can’t afford on my own.
In my online wanderings I read an article that spoke at length about the writer’s conviction that Mx was so obviously a gender-exclusive title, and all the binary people using it were just mistaken or appropriating. (I disagree, while I’m on the subject.)
One of the supporting arguments was some information the author had been given by the UK Deed Poll Service, which started offering Mx on its list of titles about five years ago. They gave details about the number of people who’d changed their title to Mx and whether they had changed their first name and whether the name had been changed to something gender-neutral.
There are a number of flaws with this line of thinking. Titles are not legally authorised or binding at all in the UK, and one can use whichever title one feels is most appropriate at any given time. One may use a different title on different records, and it’s legal to use the title Mrs even if you’re a man or have never been married, for example. As such, deed polls are not required for you to change your title. Titles are not required on deed polls for name changes, and are frequently omitted. So deed polls are primarily documents for people who want to change their names. If a nonbinary person is happy with their first name and they only want to change their title, they will probably not acquire a deed poll document - and if they did they’d be unlikely to buy one, since you can make one at home for free legally.
However, the idea I’d like to examine today is the common assumption that a person’s gender can be guessed from their name. The article assumed that anyone ordering a deed poll with Mx and a gendered and unchanged first name was binary, and anyone changing their first name to a gender-neutral name with the title Mx was nonbinary. I was initially very skeptical about this claim, because after singular they the most popular pronouns for nonbinary people (consistently since I started running the survey) are he/him and she/her. I know several nonbinary people with “gendered” names, and I know that names are differently gendered in different cultures and languages. (My own middle name is masculine in some languages and feminine in others.)
So I ran three Twitter polls to get an idea of the gendering of names, as well as how many nonbinary people have changed or will change their names.
The first two, I wanted to compare the names of binaryandnonbinarypeople:
It’s clear that binary people are far more likely to have a gendered name. And yes, nonbinary people are 5 times more likely to have a gender-neutral name. However, most nonbinary people have a binary gendered name. Almost half. It’s clear that you can’t guess someone’s gender based on their name.
And here, we see that about 1 in 5 nonbinary people are keeping the names they were given by their parents at birth. This isn’t accounted for by those 1 in 5 having been given gender-neutral names at birth. Along those lines, since 50% of nonbinary people surveyed have changed their name and only 38% have gender-neutral names, that leaves a respectable number of nonbinary people who changed their name to something binary-gendered.
A couple of afterthoughts. One nonbinary person told me that their gender identity clinic had pressured them to change their name to something more gender-ambiguous in order to access transition, which is an awful thing for someone who likes their first name but still needs medical treatment for gender dysphoria. I think it’s fair to say that a change of name is not proof of someone needing medical treatment. And several people told me about names that are technically or historically gender-neutral, but usually perceived as gendered, such as Marion or Vivian.
In summary, it’s clear that there is a trend here - nonbinary people are more likely to have gender-neutral names, and 69% of nonbinary people have changed or will change their name. However, plenty of nonbinary people will never change their name, and most of those people will probably have binary-gendered first names. And many nonbinary people change their names to something binary.
First I got to wondering about the tussle over Mx. There’s two camps:
People (like me!) who feel that Mx should be inclusive (anyone can use it regardless of gender), as it was originally intended.
People who feel that since the binary folks have titles that express their gender, nonbinary folks should be able to have one too - and it should be Mx, since that’s the only title functionally available to most nonbinary people right now.
So naturally, let’s do a Twitter poll. Here’s the tweet, and here are the results for that one:
The majority, a little over three quarters of participants, felt that Mx was an inclusive title.
I got curious about how that compared to which people would like for themselves, leaving out the title Mx altogether (tweet):
Fewer participants, but the trend looks like people feel Mx is inclusive, even when they would rather use an exclusively nonbinary title for themselves.
And then I wanted to find out how those figures on people’s ideal titles compared to what people think the title situation should be generally (tweet):
Even though only about 1 in 5 nonbinary people want an exclusively nonbinary title, over half feel that there should be one - even though most of those 56% wouldn’t use it for themselves.
TL;DR: Our followers mostly feel that Mx is inclusive, and most prefer an inclusive title - but plenty support the idea of an exclusively nonbinary title for the people who do want one.
In this post I’ll be summarising the results of a survey I ran for eight days, from 15th to 23rd April 2016.
The survey sought to find out how Mx is pronounced, splitting results by group. It asked people how they pronounced Mx, and it also asked whether the participant’s title was Mx, about gender identity, about location (UK and outside UK), where the participant identified on the trans/cis spectrum (if anywhere), and where the participant identified on the nonbinary/binary spectrum (if anywhere).
It was promoted mainly through Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit - and some participants told me that they would share with interested friends too. After removing 4 abusive responses there were 505 usable responses.
Here are two more visual summaries of the responses:
I recently blogged a link to someone else’s informal results analysis of their survey into neopronouns, and they rightly said that sometimes you have to prove things that everyone already knows. This survey is no exception.
We learned that:
Cis and binary people are far less likely to know how to pronounce Mx, topped only by people whose title is not Mx.
Trans and nonbinary people are more confident about its pronunciation, and people whose title is Mx are most confident.
My experience that UK folks like the schwa and non-UK folks prefer Mix was confirmed, but I was interested to find that people in the UK are far more confident of its pronunciation generally.
And finally, out of curiosity I put together a table to compare various groups.
[Note: “Are Mx” includes people whose title is sometimes or always Mx.]
These results appear to support the hypothesis that nonbinary and trans people are much more likely to use the title Mx for themselves, which is perhaps not surprising.
It is also worth noting that 20% of nonbinary people don’t use Mx as their title, and that number is likely to be higher outside of this survey - there will have been bias due to Mx being mentioned in promotion of the survey, resulting in a disproportionate number of people taking part who use Mx as their title.
There are other curious snippets to be gleaned from this table - such as:
Nonbinary participants were much more likely to feel that the cis/trans spectrum didn’t fit them. (3% of binary respondents identified as neither cis nor trans, whereas 29% of nonbinary respondents did.)
People whose title is Mx are apparently more likely to identify with the cis/trans spectrum. (18% of participants whose title was not Mx didn’t feel the cis/trans spectrum fit them, whereas only 16% of participants who were Mx didn’t fit that spectrum.)
The 9 binary people who use Mx do so “sometimes”, but of the 10 cis people who use Mx, 3 do so “always”. These numbers are not high enough to be representative, but I found them interesting anyway.
And finally, I was reassured that there were several responses in the feedback box telling me that they had never heard of Mx. It told me that the survey had made it out of the usual small circle of nonbinary and trans followers, which I think makes the data more useful.
Thank you everyone for your support, promotion and participation! These results are more useful and more detailed than the last set, and I am grateful for everyone’s efforts. I hope this summary has been helpful and/or interesting.
This list is from the spreadsheet for the 2016 worldwide results, where there were 3055 useable responses, and 179 unique identity words or phrases entered.
Most commonly entered at the top, with number of times entered and percentage in brackets.
Nonbinary (1975, 65%)
Genderqueer (1243, 41%)
Trans (1063, 35%)
Agender (944, 31%)
Transgender (943, 31%)
Fluid gender/genderfluid (942, 31%)
Enby (477, 16%)
Demigender (452, 15%)
Transmasculine (434, 14%)
Neutral (420, 14%)
Questioning or unknown (397, 13%)
Androgyne (380, 12%)
Woman (or girl if you are younger) (363, 12%)
Trans* (272, 9%)
None/I do not describe my gender (259, 8%)
Man (or boy if you are younger) (232, 8%)
Neutrois (207, 7%)
Transfeminine (200, 7%)
Bigender (123, 4%)
Third gender (84, 3%)
Intergender (47, 2%)
Cisgender (26, 1%)
Genderflux (25, 1%)
genderless (17, 1%)
Femme (14, 0%, so everything below here is 0%)
maverique (12)
gendervoid, voidgender, void (8)
gender non-conforming (8)
trigender (7)
two-spirit (7)
Polygender (7)
Agenderflux (6)
transfeminine (6)
Queer (6)
Butch (5)
gendervague (5)
aporagender (5)
Transsexual (5)
gender variant (4)
human/person (4)
genderfuck(ed) (4)
apogender (4)
Male (4)
boy (adult) (4)
femme nb, nb femme, etc. (3)
greygender (3)
pangender (3)
masculine of centre (3)
Mixed gender (2)
Demiagender (2)
non-gendered (2)
genderpunk (2)
boi (2)
Fluid agender/agenderfluid (2)
Female (2)
genderweird (2)
androgynous (specifically not androgyne) (2)
genderful (2)
Transwoman (2)
confused (2)
alexigender (2)
geek (2)
Transman (1)
null / no gender (1)
Other (1)
guy (1)
intersex(ed) (1)
FTM/female to male (1)
post-gender (1)
aliagender (1)
multi-gender(ed) (1)
fairy or faery (1)
transfemale (1)
videgender (1)
tomboy (1)
Mutogender (1)
plural (1)
ilyagender (1)
ambigender (1)
librafeminine (1)
witch (1)
FTMTX (1)
genderfree (1)
hybrid (1)
trans boi (1)
androgynous woman (1)
fluid centering just androgynous of female (1)
androgynous genderqueer transwoman (1)
nonbinary guy (1)
culturally female (1)
voidboy (1)
feminine genderflux (1)
fluidflux (1)
libramasculine (1)
nonbinary, but woman aligned (1)
woman-aligned (1)
blank (1)
bakla (1)
ladyboy (1)
a Literal Mess (1)
grey-agender boy (1)
Star Trek extra (1)
transqueer (1)
nonbinary boy (1)
neuter (1)
egogender (1)
nondual (1)
nerd (1)
boyflux (1)
demifluid (1)
kid (1)
not cisgender (1)
rejects gender (1)
demifemme (1)
androfem (1)
virgender (1)
eldrigender (1)
nb (1)
female fiction (1)
herm (1)
paragender (1)
nonbinary gendermeh (1)
magiboy (1)
genderchill (1)
pretty boy (1)
dandy (1)
bordergender (1)
demimasculine (1)
gender related to “girl” (1)
well, ‘woman’ seems simplest, let’s just go with that (1)
Lilapsogender:a gender of tornadoes and hurricanes. It’s like a tornado/hurricane’s strong winds, as they tend to be stronger towards a gender at one point, and then become more agender after the peak.
[Image: Flag with 3 stripes: Red, black, red. In the center is a simplified hurricane symbol which looks like a white circle with a black circle in the center and two “waves” coming off the top and bottom. The top pointing right and bottom pointing left].
[Image: Flag with 3 stripes: Red, black, red. In the center is a simplified tornado symbol which looks like a white, upside-down triangle that’s been cut into 4 sections].
Daegender: a gender that feels demonic or evil in nature, can be associated with a gender or be a gender all itself. someone could be Daeboy/daegirl/daenby or just daegender.
Term coined by: Unknown
[Image: Flag with 7 differently-sized vertical stripes: The outside stripes are thick and dark gray, the next two stripes are thinner and are brick red and then light gray, and the inside stripe is the thickest and white].
Malagender:A gender which is created or influenced by maladaptive daydreaming or fantasy prone personalities.
For example a malagender person might feel male usually but their gender may feel more nonbinary during a maladaptive daydreaming episode. A gender specific to people who experience maladaptive daydreaming due to a neurodivergence such as: schizotypal personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, schizophrenia or similar.
Term coined by: Unknown
[Image: Flag with 11 stripes, top and bottom 5 taking up 1/3 of the flag each and the center stripe taking up the final 1/3: Top 5: Fading from light blue to blue. Center is a medium gray. Bottom 5 is darkish pink fading into light pink].
[Image: a flag with three stripes. the middle stripe is much wider than the other two, which are both dark blue. the middle stripe is composed of four vertical stripes. the first and last are the same width, the second is very narrow, and the third is very wide. from left to right they are: dark blue, red, tan, white. the shrug emoji ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), in black, and with a thick white outline, is centered on the flag]
[Image: A flag whose upper half is white, and whose lower half is red. In the lower-right corner, there is a circle with large wings and a short tail, all yellow. The circle is filled in but the wings and tail are just outlines. It looks similar to a golden snitch from Harry Potter.]
Echogender: When you have trouble understanding/experiencing gender so you attempt to understand your gender by mimicking the genders of those you are closest to/most often around.
Term coined by: Unknown
[Image: Flag with 7 vertical stripes and a thick black horizontal stripe on the top and bottom. The vertical stripes are mirroring each other from outside to in: Light blue, pink, white, yellow. In the center is what looks like two black wifi symbols with one facing left and the other facing right towards each other].
Oxford English Dictionary Adds 15 new Transgender and Nonbinary Terms to its Online Dictionary!
Oxford Dictionary has just added a slew of important trans and nonbinary terminology to its online dictionary, OxfordDictionaries.com. The following terms are now officially defined in US English:
Life Outside The Binary does not necessarily endorse the particular definitions nor the wording therein. Many of these definitions may be overly simplistic or use outdated terminology. It is certainly more important to understand each individual’s understanding and relationship to a given term, and to understand their history and social context, rather than to differ to a broad general definition. There are also many other important words (such as transmisogyny, binarism and other identities such as neutrois and androgyne) that definitely deserve inclusion in dictionaries.
However, this is still a huge win for transgender and non-binary people! Especially words such as “cissexism,” “transphobia,” and “misgender,” (as well as several common transgender identities) being defined in a reputable online language resource may represent a huge step toward developing common understanding and acceptance of trans and nonbinary people and issues.
Is there any incorrect or iffy information?? If so please send me an ask to let me know!!
EDIT 5: MOST UPDATED AS OF MAY 9TH 2015!
It is important to note that these infographs do not have every gender or sexuality as I had to leave multiple out due to either not recalling what they were at the time or lack of space. Some that have been pointed out to me as being missing that I highly suggest you look up are:
Bigender
Pangender
Graysexual/Grayromantic
I may make another infograph at a later point to include more genders and sexualities but I’m not sure if I will. Please reblog from the source post as it will always be the most updated version of this post. Thank you.
great infographic! and I’d note that you can have different romantic and sexual attraction, like you can be asexual and homoromantic or you can be bisexual and heteromantix, etc. :)
