Hello!
So back in May 2013 I set up a survey about nonbinary-gender people and asked four statistic-gathering questions. None of them were about gender assigned at birth, bodily configuration, names, etc. It was just pronouns and titles and gender-description.
I got just over 2 000 responses, and three were blank or repeats and one was a “OmG nooo gender is binary you all SUK” sort of thing. So I removed those, and here’s the results. (Link to Google Docs spreadsheet of statistics only.)
Please note: This post has been heavily edited because Google Forms did unexpected calculations and I didn’t check them. I have gone over them and updated them.
Question 1: How do you describe your gender?
In this answer, I put everything mentioned on the nonbinary.org main page under “Nonbinary identities”, and added “unknown” and “other”. You could choose as many as you wanted. The 236 “other” options were either left blank or were words that only came up once or twice, such as “ambigender” and “femme” and “transmasculine”.
Here’s the results:
- Genderqueer, 58%
- Nonbinary, 39%
- Trans*, 33%
- Fluid gender, 31%
- Transgender, 24%
- Agender, 22%
- Neutral, 17%
- Androgyne, 17%
- Other, 11%
- Unknown, 8%
- Neutrois, 7%
- Bigender, 7%
- Third Gender, 4%
- Intergender, 2%
And here’s the graph:
Question 2: Do you prefer not to have a title/honorific?
I am basically ignoring this one, because so many people said in the comments section at the end that they found the wording really confusing, and suggested many ways of wording it that were far superior. However, for the curious:
- Yes, 63%
- No, 29%
- Other, 8%
Question 3: When a title is mandatory, what do you choose?
Again, there were complaints in the comments about this one. Lots of people said they had answered according to titles that are often available on forms, and that titles such as Mx and Per are rarely available on said forms. But the results are nevertheless quite interesting. Respondents could choose as many as they wanted. I kicked myself for leaving out “Dr” and “I don’t care”, and for not including Miss when I’d included Ms and Mrs.
- Ms, 47%
- Mx, 37%
- Mr, 28%
- Other, 11%
- Misc/Msc, 7%
- Ser, 4%
- Mrs, 3%
- Per, 2%
Question 4: What are your preferred pronouns?
There were some I learned about as a result of the survey, but most were only mentioned once or twice throughout, like the person who wished she was Swedish so that people could use “hen”. Again, people could choose as many as they wanted. Again, I wish I had included “I don’t care”.
- Singular they, 63%
- She, 40%
- Just my name, 36%
- He, 34%
- Zie/hir, 13%
- Other, 9%
- Ey (Spivak), 5%
- It, 3%
- Co, 1%
Question 5: Anything else you’d like to say?
So much useful information! So many sad, moving, funny and happy stories! So much gratitude for acceptance and recognition, and a fair bit of “I’m sorry that…”
There was a lot of “let’s show the world we exist”, but there was also a fair chunk of “I have no hope of ever being accepted for who I am.”
It was an eye-opener for me. I don’t want to quote any specific phrases, since this is all private and someone might be somehow identifiable. But I read every single one, and I loved them all, and I hope publishing these statistics makes a difference for you all.
2013-07-06
email: hello@gendercensus.com