Various thoughts:
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Around 20 people weren’t properly covered by the gender categories, obviously we’re trying to be as inclusive as possible and a different approach will be tried next time
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There were about 600 respondents, which gives us a accurate sampling of the active userbase. If you multiply any number by 3, you’ll get a fairly accurate representation of the full userbase each week. This means there are around 800-900 people who don’t identify fully as cis each week on this site.
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Nearly 300 trans/gender diverse/questioning people unanimously agree that hexbear is an inclusive space
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There was so much data on gender that I was really struggling to find a way to convey the data that wasnt a pie chart, graph, or an incomprehensible kalaeidoscope. If you have an idea on how to beautify the data, you can download the raw data here: https://pad.artemislena.eu/file/#/2/file/xzy4pck8on+oZp9yGRUIezR+/ - I further anonymized this data by removing time of response and any specific comments, I don’t think it would be easy for anyone to figure out who is who.
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There were a couple of text responses that really needed further elaboration, I noted hexbear’s rules next to these comments
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I’ll probably be doing a demographics survey sometime in the future, including basic fairly anonymous stuff like “what region were you born in” “where do the languages you speak originate” “would you describe yourself as a POC” “what age range are you in”.
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The percentage of people answering they were cisgender increased by 8% than the previous survey. This could be for a myriad of reasons, such as cis people being afraid trans people will hunt them down in the public thread and assassinate them. Anonymity may have made them feel safer to respond. Regardless, way more people responded this time, which signifies that people felt safer responding to the cryptpad or it was easier to do. The leading question was a bit more inclusive than last time, but I think I’ll include both questions (are you transgender / gender diverse and are you cisgender) to see how people respond.
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We have a lot of people that aren’t binary trans on this site.
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Some of the questions were pretty funky and we got a lot of fuzzy responses on them as a result. In particular “After you realized you were trans/gender diverse, how long did it take for you to begin to act on it?” and “At what age did you begin transition?” caused a lot of friction, I think I will ask more vague questions in the future that lead to a path of more specific questions to capture better data, and to save people time. Questions like “Do you feel your gender transition had a defined starting point?” and some further ones.
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Around 20 people each week on this site are cis she/hers, which is very low and roughly the same as last time. I feel like if hexbear ever starts hosting other federated stuff (like a federated tiktok or something) and can hook into it natively with lemmy, we’d see a better ratio.
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I tried to be very sure any data with >2 people on it was clearly legible, I think some people might find it fun that there are others with their same fairly specific classifications per this survey lurking around on the site.
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Overall I feel like the survey was a success despite some bumps.
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You can find the other surveys/links here: https://hexbear.net/post/3016455
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I made these graphs on company time
I’m sorry to have to bring this up again, but your survery had no instruments to accurately measure that. It once more had no option to say if you’re a woman (i noticed, because that meant that i couldn’t accurately state my gender until i picked “other” and used the free text field). Only “are you cis or trans” and “which pronouns do you use”, which does not enable you to accurately assess people’s genders. PRONOUNS =/= GENDER. Cis women could go with none / use name, comrade or they / them for opsec reasons or because they do not want to be targeted by the many misogynist weirdos on this site or because they want to normalize gender neutral language. I know several cis women IRL who at least sometimes do this in online communities. In this survery, you wouldn’t know if they’re women. Or she / her may simply not be the pronouns that fit them. There was at least one cis woman with hy / hym pronouns in the replies to the survey.
In future surverys, i’d abandon the approach to infer gender from pronouns, stick with the option to tick multiple boxes, but just add man and woman to the list.
good point tbh, true, edited that. i try to avoid specifics generally because people seem to hate specifics on these forms, gender is a fickle creature
Ah, i see. I think the option to tick multiple boxes does a lot to mitigate that, though. When i look at problematic examples i can think of, it’s usually forms that have either “woman” or “transgender - MtF” or some shit like that as different options, where unconditional womanhood is implied to only be available to cis women. But if you have cis and trans, nonbinary and binary, inter, agender etc. all as seperate, not mutually exclusive, combinable categories, you avoid that. Like, if i want to answer truthfully, i absolutely have to pick woman because womanhood is such a core part of how my gender works, but i also can’t possibly seperate it from being trans, or from existing outside of a binarist system. And with a “pick any that apply” kind of wording, you include all that. Having options that exactly describe just one specific gender identity do not really work when you’re surveying a gender-diverse crowd because there’s so many identities and so much potential overlap between them. So i think it’s best to break this down into possible components.
but yeah i’m very keen of the idea that pronouns =/= gender, but that seems kind of hard for most people offline (even in many lgbt spaces) to get their head around. or the idea of neopronouns. god forbid you do both lmao
ngl i got wayyyyyyy more upbears and responses to that comment than i expected from a stream of consiousness/vent about misogyny and gender stereotypes and my Situation™ and i got kind of scared lol. shoutout to the encouraging replies and reading recommendations tho
EDIT: the thread is locked now but i typed a response to the person who asked why i still ID as a woman despite being masc (although, again, being masc or using different pronouns doesn't have anything to do with being a woman) before i realised that. may as well put it here i guess
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Gender exists to be restrictive in such a way that is designed to facilitate the exploitation of women
You’re right, it is about solidarity and tbh about organising around shared concerns and dangers. When i complain about getting shit for not wearing makeup at work and such, the women in my life are fucking outraged while men i’ve mention it to tell me it can’t be that serious. If i ever need reproductive healthcare, it can be denied to me based on the fact that i am afab, and the vast majority of people who particularly care about that are other afab people. When i go out at night i keep a very close eye on my friends and we make sure we all know where everyone is and to get home together, because, due to the fact that we’re women, we are much more likely to be put in danger in that situation – and when I have been in that kind of danger, the people (even strangers) that have helped me have always been women, the people far more likely to know how it feels and how it happens. When my manager harassed a girl at work, it was women who organised a response while the men on the team said shit about overreactions and “the benefit of the doubt” and so on.
There are a lot of situations where women and/or afab people look out for each other, either at large or individually. I have no reason to move away from the people with whom i have shared class interest due to shared oppression.
reply to your spoiler
As a transmasc I very much relate to that and it’s one of the reasons why it took me so long to realise I was trans and why I’m still struggling with my current selfidentification. I use he/him because right now it’s gender affirming to me but I think in the future when I’m more comfortable with how I look that might change. No transmasc around me uses he/him because they do not want to have that in common with the people that used to oppress and harass them before they transitioned. I also feel much more connection to women and people afab than cis men because cis men just do not understand and often belittle the oppression that plays a huge role in most women’s lives.
Is the opsec reason that valid in an anonymous survey? Unless they think the admins would use that info to target them if they left any specific comments or they thought IP might be used to identify them. Seems like it would be pretty uncommon and might catch as many eggs as it does cis people lying for opsec reasons.
Still, certainly better not to make such assumption than to make those assumptions. Especially with options like comrade that can be appealing regardless of gender identity.
The survery asked for the pronouns used on hexbear.
You can always lie
To clarify, by opsec i meant “avoiding personal information in publicly visible posts”, not “being afraid to get tracked through the survey”. And when i look at the breakdown of cis pronouns in the results, there’s a lot of he /hims, but also a bunch of different ones. Sure, cis women are extremely rare here, and they’d still be if all of the cis people with gender neutral pronouns where women, but i can’t help being nitpicky because i’m an awful nerd about surveying.
sounds good tbh, feel free to hit me up when you do something like this again
There’s no way to view IP on the Cryptpad AFAIK, and the website its on doesn’t log IP, its only in ram long enough to finish downloading a request, and even then its anonymized. Owner of the site is trans I’m in one of her group chats. I also edited out timestamps and comments in the raw data.
If you did the survey through VPN or tor browser there is essentially no risk
That doesn’t mean a paranoid user would trust such claims. Also, if you use the same VPN IP to access hexbear and the survey, a paranoid person could worry about the linking of the two. Of course if you are worried enough about that, it seems like an easy thing to avoid.
Either way, I personally wouldn’t have been worried about anonymization. I just didn’t take it because my accounts aren’t on hexbear, even though it’s the community I post on the most, so I wasn’t sure if I was welcomed or not. Guess a question about whether you have a hexbear account or not could be included alongside the demographic?
Yeah if you’re that paranoid you probably shouldn’t be on the internet or should just use tor for everything. Everyone knows I’m a filthy queer pinko in my town and nothings really come of it
Even my boss knows I’m a commie, which is funny
This is true. I know of at least one cis woman on the site that doesn’t use she/her, though I don’t think they answered the survey.