Polls on gender and abortion

I'm running some polls to gather information on gender and views on abortion. They will run for 7 days, ending on Monday 16th May 2022.

Please click here for the Twitter thread, or here for the Mastodon thread.

The demographic that's currently least represented is trans women, so if you know any trans women who like polls on social media please feel free to tag them in or DM the link to them!

The polls are getting a lot of votes, so I'll make a little post with some graphs afterwards.

Thanks, folks! :)

A couple of Twitter polls

Nonbinary Celts, click here!

Nonbinary pagans, click here!

~

Edit: Read the report here.

Some polls

... just to help me get an idea of how people feel about various words that are or might be on the Gender Census!

All open for at least 5 more days, i.e. until at least 7th March 2020.

~

[ The 2020 Gender Census is open until 12th March 2020 ]

A couple of Twitter polls on the language of sex vs. gender

People whose genders aren't described by the "male or female" binary (including nonbinary people), when you personally use "male" and "female", what can you intend those words to describe?

People whose genders differ from those they were assigned at birth (including trans people), when you personally use "male" and "female", what can you intend those words to describe?

For each poll, these are your options:

I understand that many nonbinary people are also trans, so if you feel you are both binary-defying and transgender please do feel free to take part in both! The polls will be open for 3 days, and you don’t need to follow to vote, though you do need a Twitter account. The results will be blogged.

Retweets and reblogs very much appreciated!

NB: If you’ve not seen it yet, there’s also a much bigger survey of binary-defying people going on - almost 6,000 participants so far and it closes on 1st March 2018. Please do take a look if you haven’t already!

A trio of Twitter polls aimed at trans and nonbinary people

Over a day left on each of them. You’ll need to be logged into a Twitter account to participate. Retweets are very much appreciated - the more votes, the merrier!

The Transgender Agenda and public toilets

I read something by someone who said that trans people just want to make all toilets gender-inclusive and that would be terrible, etc. I wanted to test that assumption, so I made some Twitter polls for fun.

And then, curious to see if nonbinary and binary people felt differently from each other...

Feel free to retweet if you know you’ve got followers who might be interested to take part and/or see the results. :)

~

Progress report: I’ve made a spreadsheet to track my progress with the spreadsheet to process the responses. As you can see, I’ve completed the titles and identities, so the next step is the pronouns question. This is always the hardest, so it’s going to be tough. Again, it will probably take a while, and while I work on it I see no harm in keeping the survey open. But yeah, things are ticking along!

xe/xem - is it inclusive or exclusive?

Something I’d like to ask about in a future survey is how people are using their pronouns - specifically, if you accept that society views “he” as a pronoun for men and boys and “she” as a pronoun for women and girls, are the pronouns that you use that aren’t he or she gender-inclusive (anyone can use them regardless of gender) or exclusive (only nonbinary people or people of a particular gender can use them)?

I was curious to casually test this, so I asked on Twitter with a poll about the most popular pronoun after he, she and they:

I got a couple of responses from people saying that xe/xem couldn’t be gender-exclusive because anyone is allowed to use any pronoun, pronouns don’t dictate gender. While I do accept that this is true, and you can’t guess a person’s gender based on their pronouns, it is also true that people express their genders sometimes in ways like pronouns, gendered (or ungendered) names, etc. And it’s the latter that I’m interested to see. Is xe/xem widely considered to be an expression of a particular gender?

It wasn’t until partway through the 24-hour period of the survey being open that I realised I might be getting responses from people who don’t use xe/xem at all. I ran another poll to see how the results of the first poll compared to people whose pronouns are xe/xem. Understandably this got fewer responses, though I ran it for longer in the hope that it would help get more votes. I included an “all pronouns are inclusive” option this time, since that was a popular opinion during the first poll.

The samples are small, but the difference is significant. Compared to nonbinary people in general, people whose pronouns are xe/xem were more likely to consider xe/xem to be expressing a particular nonbinary gender.

I’d love to gather information in the annual survey alongside all pronouns. Perhaps a page after the pronoun question, listing all the pronouns you chose (which for most people is only one), and asking for each, “inclusive or exclusive, inasmuch as any pronoun can be considered exclusive?”

I’d also love to collect information about whether the pronoun is used with singular or plural verbs - like, he/him is used with singular verbs (”he is”) but they/them is used with plural verbs even when talking about one person (”they are”).

Two Twitter polls for the LGBT community

I'm curious to know your feelings about two words that are used by people in the LGBT+ community to describe themselves and that are also used as slurs.

They both require you to be logged into a Twitter account to take part, RTs are very much appreciated, and they’re both running for 7 days, ending on Saturday 3rd September 2016.

The results of a few polls about Mx and titles generally

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:

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.

Twitter polls: definitions

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:

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:

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:

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.

Two current Twitter polls for nonbinary folks:

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?

Current Twitter polls: a world without gender

Clicking here will take you to a page that shows you all the polls, plus, a few tweets’ context. They end at 11am BST (UK time) tomorrow, Sunday 3rd April 2016.