(2023)
I’ve been keeping tabs on the pronunciation of the title Mx (as a gender-neutral alternative to Mr, Ms, etc.) for a few years now. This is a report based on a survey that I ran from 7th until 19th August 2023 (just under 2 weeks), and there were 6,038 usable responses.
The survey was promoted on Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, and /r/samplesize on Reddit. The promotional text that I wrote didn’t mention the title Mx at all, in an attempt to get more diverse points of view into the results.
Ultimately my goal was to find out how people are pronouncing Mx these days and to find out whether a consensus is forming, with the secondary goal of finding out whether Mx is becoming more well-known and how people are using it. The survey was open to all regardless of gender or cis/trans status, and I collected a lot of the same data in the same way as I collected it in 2019 so that I could make comparisons.
You can see the spreadsheet of responses and the associated tables and graphs here.
Pronunciation
For this section, I considered responses only from people whose title is sometimes or always Mx (n = 2,426). Here’s how the pronunciations ranked:
- Mix – 68.2% (up 9.1% compared to 2019)
- Məx, with a schwa (ə, toneless vowel) – 24.3% (down 1.4%)
- Em Ecks, spelling out M-X – 9.8% (up 2.6%)
- Mex – 7.6% (up 2.6%)
- I don’t know – 6.3% (down 2.8%)
- Mux – 5.0% (down 2.1%)
- Mixter – 3.4% (down 0.4%)
- Mixture – 0.7% (up 0.1%)
- [Blank] – 0.1% (down 0.03%)
The main takeaway here is that “mix” is way up.
Here’s how that looks as a graph:
I should mention that these results are mostly representative of the USA, as 54% of respondents entered that as their country of residence. Because this was bothering me, I also made a table comparing pronunciation to country:
I used conditional formatting to create a heatmap-like effect – the darker the yellow, the higher the percentage. So you can see that the US and Canada generally prefer “mix”, whereas the UK and Australia prefer “məx”, with a schwa (“ə” = toneless vowel). And for some reason, Norway is really not into “mix” at all compared to everyone else, which I find very curious! (Hello Norway, please explain yourselves, I am nosy: hello AT gendercensus DOT com.)
So yeah, as I mentioned earlier, “mix” is way up, and I wanted to check out whether that was because we had a much higher proportion of US residents participating this time. There was a slightly higher proportion of people from the USA, it’s only up by 4.4%, which doesn’t fully explain the 9.1% jump in “mix”. I think it’s not unlikely that “mix” is just becoming a more common way to pronounce Mx, as usage spreads and settles.
Participants were able to choose more than one pronunciation each; the average was 1.1 overall, and slightly higher at 1.3 among people whose title is sometimes or always Mx.
Gender and Mx
There’s two aspects of gender that I wanted to investigate regarding Mx:
- Whether people who use it consider it inclusive (anyone can use it) or exclusive (it expresses a nonbinary gender);
- The patterns of gender (or lack thereof) among the people who sometimes or always prefer Mx.
Here’s a bar graph breaking down whether Mx is inclusive (anyone can claim it) or exclusive (“nonbinary-only”):
So, like in 2019, people whose title is Mx are much more likely to see it as inclusive, whereas people whose title is not Mx are much more likely to see it as a “nonbinary title”, reflecting a nonbinary experience of gender. The main thing I notice is that, compared to 2019, everyone was more likely to say that Mx was an inclusive title that anyone can use.
Having said that, of the people who said that their title was sometimes or always Mx, about 6% only said that they were “a woman/girl pretty much all the time”, and another 6% only said that they were “a man/boy pretty much all the time”. (So evenly distributed!) Going by the way people categorised themselves in this survey, this means that over 1 in 10 people using Mx (12.2%) are what we might for convenience call “binary”.
Familiarity with Mx
For countries that had reliable-ish sample sizes in 2019, everywhere except Norway was more familiar with Mx in 2023, in almost all cases increasing by over 10% – and often 20% or more.
Here’s the top 10:
- Ireland – 100.0% (up 34.5%)
- United Kingdom – 97.3% (up 11.8%)
- United States – 96.0% (up 30.2%)
- Canada – 95.7% (up 34.8%)
- Australia – 95.5% (up 24.0%)
- Finland – 94.4% (up 24.1%)
- Sweden – 93.3% (up 31.6%)
- Poland – 93.2% (up 38.6%)
- Belgium – 92.6% (up 46.4%)
- New Zealand – 91.4% (up 8.1%)
I kept waiting for Ireland to dip below 100%, but nope – 56 participants from the Republic of Ireland, country number 13 on a list of 82 total countries participating (and number 12 of 32 countries with over 10 participants), and they all knew about Mx!
I also threw together a table that I won’t put here because it’s not very pretty or intuitive, but you can click through to see it here. I took responses from questions asking how often people have seen Mx on forms, sorted it by country, and compared it to the 2019 survey. For every country that we had reliable-ish 2019 data for, this year they all had lower percentages in the “I have never seen Mx on a form in the wild” category. All but three had dropped by over 20%, which is huge.
The UK are ahead in this area, as only 19% of participants who knew about the title Mx had never seen it on a form, and 17% had seen it as often as “about half the time” on forms. New Zealand were next, with 27% having never seen it and 11% seeing it about half the time.
To summarise: everyone everywhere is a lot more familiar with Mx compared to 2019, and it’s on a lot more forms everywhere – but it’s still not on enough forms.
Conclusion
Mx is pronounced “mix” in the USA and Canada. It’s pronounced “məx” (with a schwa/toneless vowel) in the UK and Australia. It’s most well-known and “officially” used in the UK, but even in the UK it’s not ubiquitous.
More nonbinary people use it than men or women, but there are binary men and women using Mx in a gender-inclusive way and most people whose titles are Mx are pretty okay with that actually. Overall, people are increasingly seeing Mx as a gender-inclusive or genderless title – but while it is trending in that direction and it is technically a majority, there’s not a clear consensus.
Next time…?
This survey went pretty smoothly, the feedback was overall very positive.
There is one thing I will change based on feedback: the spelling of some pronunciation examples. So, when I gave the list of pronunciations as checkboxes, they were like: mix, mux, mex, etc. And people in general but especially people whose first language was something other than English said they were unsure on how to pronounce the x sometimes.
So in future, for pronunciation examples, I won’t go full IPA because that’s probably a bit too technical/advanced for the average survey taker (and I’m not confident in it myself), but I will instead use “cks” for the x sound. E.g. micks, mucks, mecks. Feedback comments seem to suggest that that would be clearer, words ending in “-ck” are very common in English compared to “-x”, and it’s also congruent with IPA.
Links
- Spreadsheet of results
- See also:
Support
If you’re into this, you can follow Gender Census on the Fediverse (Mastodon), automatically send a micro-pledge once per year on Patreon, or subscribe to the mailing list to get notified about the big annual survey. Alternatively, if you want to do something one-off and a bit more personal, my friends and I are in the process of setting up a non-profit makerspace in my town – you can donate some money to our crowdfunder here. 😁🛠️
2023-08-23
email: hello@gendercensus.com