Today is day 16, which is officially halfway through this year's big annual survey on identity words, pronouns, titles and family/relationship terms for people whose experience of their gender(s) or lack thereof defy or fall outside of the binary model of gender.
Usually at this point we'd be 80-90% of the way to the eventual total number of participants, because the responses come in very fast at the beginning and then slow down a lot after the first week, and continue to slow more gradually until the end. This year looks like this so far, with the red line being 2026:
[Those of you using screen readers may have an easier time on the original Google Sheets table of data here.]
So I would guess that we're heading for about 30,000 participants in total. This is pretty low compared to the last couple of years, so I got curious and added a few more years of data:
[Those of you using screen readers may have an easier time on the original Google Sheets table of data here.]
Yeah, it's low! The lowest since 2020. (The three lines below the 2026 lines are 2018, 2019 and 2020. All the more recent lines are way higher up.) And I think I've figured it out.
2020 is when SmartSurvey (the previous survey provider) changed their premium plan so that I would have to pay a lot more to be able to edit the "thank you" page that people see after they've submitted the form.
Before 2020, when I could edit the "thanks for taking part" page, that's where I put the "hey can you also share this survey?" social media links. So, in 2021 when SmartSurvey wouldn't let me edit it without paying extra, I put a page right after the consent checkboxes like, "before we get started, can you share the survey please?" I.e. I was asking people to share the survey right at the beginning, before they had entered any information.
I remember at the time being concerned that having the survey sharing links at the start of the survey would make people click away and I would lose participants, but it seems to have basically doubled participation for 2021 and onwards, presumably through extra sharing. Numbers got so high that it was a good idea to limit the survey to one month, even.
At the time it wasn't really possible to know for sure whether the huge jump in participation was down to the sharing page being at the start of the survey or just some other thing, like a critical mass of social media followers/mailing list subscribers. I left it there at the start because SmartSurvey didn't change that rule for several years. And this year I twitched to Trello, who do let you edit the "thank you" page, so since I was remaking the survey from scratch I figured I may as well put the sharing links at the end where people expect to see them.
Participation has been wayyyyy down. For the first few days I couldn't tell by looking at social media/emails/anon asks, because the volume is always too high to deal with and this year was no exception. But I was distracted by the aforementioned technical difficulties, and other life stuff. However, by the end of day 2 it was clear that participation was very low, and I just blamed myself for not having time to do as much promotion as usual.
A couple of days ago (survey day 14) I remembered about my suspicion several years back re: the sharing page being near the beginning causing the jump in participation. I put a "please share the survey" links page right after the consent checkboxes again just to see what happened, and I know we're in the final stretch now but participation does seem to have been bolstered. I feel like it's taking less promotional work from me to keep the numbers up.
Thus concludes my interesting discovery of the year! But while I've got your attention...
If you had to return your gender due to a manufacturing fault, please click here to participate in our annual gender language survey!
It closes on 13th August 2026. :)
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
snowghoul
