Unscientific intersex, otherkin and plural stats
I'm putting this on my personal blog (as opposed to the @gendercensus Tumblr or website) because it's not at all scientifically robust. My goal was to collect some data that, while not fully reliable, might at least point me in the right direction - and it did meet my needs.
I wanted to find out more about three things:
- Are intersex people more likely than non-intersex people to be nonbinary (or otherwise not-just-men-or-women)?
- Do plural/multiple people and systems widely consider being plural/multiple/a system to be a gender identity in itself?
- Do otherkin people widely consider being otherkin to be a gender identity in itself?
Context
The wording of the gender identity question in the Gender Census very carefully avoids saying the word gender, to make sure that people who don't experience gender at all aren't immediately short-circuited into leaving the survey. It was guided by the EHRC's "Technical note: Measuring Gender Identity" (2012).
Which of the following best describe(s) in English how you think of yourself?
This intentionally open wording means that I can absolutely understand people responding in the textboxes with terms that refer to aspects of their identity that aren't gender-related, like white or Buddhist or adult. Even if 103% of participants said they were Jedi, I wouldn't add it to the checkbox list because it's not typically a term reflecting a gender identity/experience/presentation. The exception would be if it was clear from their textbox entries somehow that these words were gender-related for a significant proportion of respondents.
Checkboxes are based on popularity within age groups. A few years ago in the Gender Census, enough people were typing in words like lesbian and dyke and queer, and specifying that they were intended as gender identities, that I started to consider them fair game for the checkbox list of identities.
Alongside this, it has been common for participants to tell me to add intersex and plural and (to a lesser extent) otherkin to the identities checkbox list because being these things strongly affects their experience of their gender. This is fine, and my standard response would be to wait until these terms get entered frequently enough and then consider it. However, some went further and said that the majority of intersex/plural/otherkin people are nonbinary or that these are inherently gendered/gendering experiences, and I'm somehow missing that information and omitting these terms from the checkbox list inaccurately.
It's pretty exhausting to respond to these people individually, for three reasons.
- I have an FAQ on the Gender Census website for this, but these people often insist that theirs is a special case because their identity is marginalised. (There is no precedent for me adding terms to the checkbox list due to their marginalisation so I don't know why people think that argument might work.)
- I ask for research to back up their claims. No one has ever provided any, sometimes saying that there is none, but they somehow know it's universally true.
- Even if somehow they were right and 100% of the people identifying this way considered it a gender, the percentages are still not high enough to get these terms into the checkbox list.
So what I wanted was something, anything, that is more than zero information about the gender identities of the people in these groups, as independently of the nonbinary community as possible. I strongly suspect that there is no resource I could cite that would change their minds, but I will feel better knowing I did my due diligence in looking into it and I've got something to back up my instincts. Also, I like the idea of these people finding out that their experience isn't universal, you know?
So, here's what I did and what I learned.
