#nonbinary

Hello!

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.

[TO THE INDIEGOGO CAMPAIGN]

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.

In the past few days I ran three polls about Mx.

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.

greenskyoverme:

I used to spell it non-binary with a hyphen but then @cassolotl made a survey and apparently three quarter of nonbinary people prefer the spelling without the hyphen.

That is totally the kind of thing I do. :D (I’m @cassolotl.)

At the moment this Twitter poll is running, and the results are pretty close. It closes at 15/07/2016 16:47 BST (about 22 hours from now).

But I know @uktransinfo did a survey about this thing too, and I think the results landed in favour of non-binary!

A day or two I ran a few 24-hour Twitter polls on age. Two asking for people’s ages, and one asking how they felt about me asking for age in the next annual survey.

First let’s directly compare the ages of nonbinaryandgenderqueer people to see how much overlap that is. I chose nonbinary and genderqueer because they’re the two more popular umbrella terms.

Genderqueer folks are more likely to be older and younger, and nonbinary people are more likely to fit into the 18-40 range.

I’d also like to compare to data on the ages of Twitter users in general, just so we can mentally adjust for that bias - but there’s not much reliable out there, because Twitter doesn’t require your age or date of birth. Some followers found a few relevant pages for me, but in the end the most reliable data I could find that included people under 18 was comScore, who included 15-24 year olds. Pew Research Center had more recent data, but it was less complete. I put that data into two comparable graphs:

I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea how reliable this data is. But that’s kind of okay, because the Twitter polls I run are probably not reliable either, right? *winces*

These two sources seem to roughly agree that most users are in their 20s, and people are less likely to use Twitter as age increases.

The results of our Twitter polls match this very closely. The only thing we can really guess from these graphs is that the proportion of over-40s who are genderqueer and/or nonbinary and use Twitter is lower than the proportion of over-40s on Twitter. We can’t make any guesses about how genderqueer and/or nonbinary folks compare to the average population of the world, or even the Western world.

However, since the age trends of nonbinary and/or genderqueer folk does overall match the age trend of Twitter users, it might be fair to guess that the proportion of people who’re nonbinary and/or genderqueer is roughly the same over all age groups. But that is highly dubious.

~

In summary, there’s not a lot we can draw from this. But it was interesting and fun. And I’ll probably be including an age question in the next annual survey, because…

This probably means I’ll need to collect more specific information about country of residence too, since age demographics vary so much by location. No more “UK or not UK” question!

Definitions are important. Not for all of us individually, but for how we fit into the world and how we relate to each other.

Every time I run the annual survey, I get people asking me if they’re allowed to take part in the survey. Perhaps they’re not sure whether they fit my idea of “nonbinary”, or they’re not sure whether they’re nonbinary at all. Perhaps they reject all of the common umbrella terms, and they’re not sure if they’re welcome.

One of my goals is to help get nonbinary people included in national and legal recognitions like the UK census and the Equality Act, and it’s very hard to get people behind a goal like that (binary and nonbinary alike) until we’re mostly sure that we’re fighting for the same people’s rights.

I also personally get asked a lot what nonbinary means, when I tell people about my gender face-to-face. I can tell them what it means for me, but not what it means for everyone.

And that’s kind of how it should be - there’s no satisfying definition for “man” or “woman” that I’ve found either, and gender words mean something different to everyone that holds them. If we are too strict, we risk restricting people and putting them in boxes - or kicking them out of boxes.

So, curious to see whether logic would help me, I threw together a definition that I’ve been working with for a while. It is very logical - what could possibly go wrong? Here’s my thinking:

• If you’re a man (all the time, and nothing else) you’re binary. To put that another way, if you’re always entirely male, you’re binary.
  
• If you’re a woman (all the time, and nothing else) you’re binary. So: always entirely female is binary, too.
  
• People who don’t fit into those two categories are nonbinary.
  

So if you’re always entirely a man or always entirely a woman, you’re binary.

And it logically follows that if you’re neither always entirely a man nor always entirely a woman, you’re nonbinary.

This definition of nonbinary would include agender people (who are neither), genderfluid people (who are not always binary but might be sometimes), and demigender people (who may be binary all the time, partially).

I thought I was being very inclusive! Nonbinary people have been rejected by the gender binary, so defining by that characteristic very specifically would include everyone possible who doesn’t fit into one of those two boxes.

However, when I ran the Twitter poll, less than a third of people said they felt included.

I invited people to reply with more detail, and this poll prompted a lot of discussion. Here are some (paraphrased) critical responses:

• I couldn’t grasp the meaning from this definition / I misread it.
  
• “Not always” implies “sometimes”; I feel it implies that I should sometimes identify as male or female.
• I feel it implies that nonbinary is “something in between” male and female.
• It is very difficult for anyone to be “always” or “entirely” a gender.
• It is defining nonbinary by what it isn’t, and doesn’t actually acknowledge nonbinary genders.
• It is defining nonbinary by referring to the binary; this makes nonbinary genders seem lesser, others us, and alienates those of us who don’t relate to words like “male” and “female”.
• It doesn’t include genders outside of the binary.
• There are nonbinary male and female genders.
• Since there are genders other than man and woman, gender is inherently nonbinary, and therefore all genders are nonbinary.

Some of these comments are things I was specifically trying to avoid with my definition, and I thought I had successfully done so! And some of the mentioned implied meanings are not anything that I can see in my definition. But that doesn’t really matter - if that’s what people see and understand when they read my definition, then my definition doesn’t work.

A couple of people mentioned the phrase “fails to describe” as quite useful, but any definition using that phrase, eg: people the gender binary fails to describe or include, is also defining people by the binary, and defining genders by what they are not.

~

I then moved on to a new definition, and the only one I know of that is acknowledged by the UK MPs: “non-gendered and bi-gendered”, as mentioned in EDM 11, which was recently retabled. It’s not a definition exactly, but the words are fairly self-explanatory:

• non-gendered = without gender
  
• bi-gendered = more than one gender
  

I have a very strong sense of my lack of gender. I definitely have a gender identity - and it’s a non-identity. So I was very unclear about whether I fell under non-gendered. I was curious to know whether I was the only one - and at first glance these two words fail to cover demigender and third gender folks, anyway. So I ran another Twitter poll:

That covers even fewer people than my attempt - a little under one in five nonbinary-identifying people.

In my curiosity I emailed Christie Elan-Cane, who works with MPs to keep this EDM tabled, and to get the wording of the EDM representative. I recalled per assertion in the trans inquiry that per didn’t recognise the term nonbinary for perself, and adding that there have been a number of terms for people like per over the years. Christie also very clearly states that per defines such genders in relation to the binary.

I asked per whether per felt “non-gendered and bi-gendered” was inclusive of all genders that are not included in the binary, and I asked if per would consider “nonbinary” a legitimate label if it stuck around for long enough.

Christie sent me a very thorough email in reply, which I found very interesting. The key relevant points were that Christie feels that people who are neither male nor female are covered by “non-gendered”, and per added “bi-gendered” when per heard from people who identify as both male and female. Per failed to acknowledge any other variation or way of having a gender at all. Per also added that per does not support the use of an over-arching umbrella term for people who are non-conforming within traditional gendered roles, which I assume per meant to mean words like nonbinary and genderqueer.

So it is clear from Christie’s description that only non-gendered and bi-gendered people are intended to be covered by Christie’s idea of people who might want X on passports. I feel that this is far too limited; in the UK in 2016, out of 890 people surveyed, one person identified as non-gendered and 34 people, about 4%, identified as bigender. I can find no indication in the wording of the EDM that it is intended to include, for example, demigender people, third gender people, genderfluid people, or people who have a distinct yet neutral identity. In fact, the last annual survey indicates that Christie’s terms cover only 4% of nonbinary people. 17% of people who took part in the Twitter poll felt included, but this sample was much smaller - only 77 respondents.

This is not to say that I don’t support this EDM. I would love if it moved forward to debate and was made law. Even if only 4% of nonbinary people get the option of X on passports, that is still a good step forward.

~

So, I have no solid conclusions. If I specify what nonbinary is, I will automatically exclude people. And if I define nonbinary by what it isn’t, I alienate and delegitimise nonbinary identities.

Perhaps we’re not ready for a definition yet. Perhaps we will always defy description.

But I’d still love to know where we are now. How do you define nonbinary? That’s a link to an anonymous and very short survey, and if I get a few responses I’ll make it into a bigger survey asking people how they feel about each of the definitions.

UK nonbinary folks who were or are out to and seeking treatment from the NHS, are you getting the treatments you need?

Non-UK nonbinary folks who were or are out to and seeking treatment from your doctor(s), are you getting the treatments you need?

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.

You can see the full results here on Google Sheets.

~

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)
• winkte (two spirit) (1)
• tunte (german) (1)
• x-jender (1)
• nonhuman (1)
• transgender androgyne (1)
• ambi-binary (1)
• angenital (1)
• dual gender (1)
• alien (1)
• gender non-compliant (1)
• autistic (1)
• gender-abolitionist (1)
• of trans experience (1)
• androgyne of centre (1)
• juxera neutroisflux (1)
• differently gendered (1)
• bear (1)
• demigal (1)
• queer trans person of colour (qtpoc) (1)
• stargender (1)
• mahu (1)
• non-male (1)
• afraid (1)
• butch/femme/mix (1)
• not defined (1)
• all genders (1)
• i caucus with women (1)
• [angry profanity] (1)
• [blank panic] (1)
• transgender female (1)
• cassgender (1)
• somewhat feminine most of the time (1)
• girlfing (1)
• None Of Your Business (1)
• gender disobedient (1)
• divigender (1)
• ladydude (1)
• transfemme (1)
• girl aligned (1)
• nth gender (1)
• monstrous (1)
• nonbinary girl (1)
• demiflux (1)
• femme boy (1)
• autisgender (1)
• traumagender (1)
• faegender (1)
• xenogender (1)
• queer who don’t care (1)

Anyway Trans Fem Scootaloo and Nonbinary Rainbow Dash thank you for your time

nb blake belladonna icons for @musing-from-mars